And as it is of speech, so of all other our behaviours.
—George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy
One cannot, I suspect, build either a happy family or a just polity on the foundations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, even if one interpreted the sonnet sequence as a negative example—“Whatever you do, do not love like that”—but then neither the family nor the polity will satisfy all of the soul’s longings.
The identity of the Speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets is a famously vexed question, and I suspect we will never know whether he is the earnest autobiographical William Shakespeare himself, or the rhetorical ethos of William Shakespeare, or the fictional character “Will.”1 Whatever the case, our Speaker recognizes that time ultimately destroys all human beings and is, therefore, a danger to the honor paid to beauty—both the honored beautiful one and his honoring admirer. After all, one’s beloved will age and die: Time is not providential in the sonnet sequence; it is destructive. Human beings are the most linguistic of creatures, and they are also the most conscious of mortality, so Davidic lamentation comes naturally to us, as we see early in the sequence in Sonnet 5’s octave:
Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there;
Sap cheque’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere. (5.1–8)2
Both beloved and his honor, then, must be transvalued to be redeemed from time, but that raises the following question: How? Through either the sexual procreation argued for in Sonnets 1–17 or the poetic recreation argued for and enacted in 18–126 (the two parts constituting the Fair Youth subsequence), both forms of which new life he figures in Sonnet 5’s sestet:
Then, were not summer’s distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. (5.9–14)
The distilled flower here is the perfumed rose-water outliving the flower itself, and it is not difficult to see here a figure for both child and poem. Our Speaker recognizes that love must be secured against metamorphosis, not only from the beloved’s changes in body through age and death, but also eventually even from those in soul through vice and betrayal; otherwise, the poet’s act of praise will be undone by blame since the Speaker eventually discovers that his beloved is beautiful, but not true—a cankered rose without sweet smell, whose “sensual fault” (35.9) threatens to destroy the Speaker’s love and poetry: “O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem / By that sweet ornament which truth doth give” (54.1–2), he pleads with his untrue friend.
Honor too must be transvalued, expanding the honoring audience across time to renew audiences, and the transhistorical character of that audience—readers of the book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, who dwell with him in the republic of letters—will alter the nature of the honor itself.3 The double securing of love and honor takes place in and through the lyric form of the sonnet sequence itself. The speaker does not understand such lyric flourishing from the beginning; rather, he discovers it within the Fair Youth subsequence (1–126), then forgets it in the Dark Lady one (127–54).4 Allow me to examine one moment of such discovery in Sonnet 25 in order to trace this transvaluation of love and honor by seeing them both in relation to beauty, an important term in the sequence’s thesis, provided in the sequence’s opening: “From fairest creatures, we desire increase / That thereby beauty’s Rose might never die” (1.1–2). For Shakespeare’s Speaker, human beings are not primarily rational animals; they are first and foremost beauty-desiring ones. Beauty’s lyric flower here marries love and honor, but this is decidedly not Dante’s Rose of salvific virtue from the Paradiso.
Sonnet 25 is less well-known than many others, but it explicitly addresses our volume’s two topics together:
Let those / who are / in fa/vor with / their stars >
Of pub/lic ho/nor and / proud ti/tles boast,
Whilst I, / whom for/tune of / such tri/umph bars,
Unlook’d / for // joy / in that / I ho/nor most. (25.1–4)5
The Speaker allows those favored by public honor and proud title to enjoy and celebrate their favor, taking their orientation from the simple constellation of the stars of honor and title. The poem’s first metrical substitutions emphasize the hypallage—“Of pub/lic ho/nor and / proud ti/ tle boast”—so that we know that the title itself is not proud; the favored ones are. The coordination of prepositional objects—“stars of honor and titles”—leaves their relationship ambiguous: Are they honored because titled, or titled because honored? (This will be important in the second and third quatrains.) What we do yet know, though, is that the Speaker is somehow barred by fortune from “such triumph,” lacking recognition and status since he is “unlook’d for.” If he is denied both, what, then, is the source of his happiness? He does “joy in that [he] honor[s] most.” His happiness is not that he is honored, but that he honors. Discussions of honor have a tendency, especially when oriented by ancient conceptions of honor, to neglect the good of honoring in their desire to elevate being honored. There is here an ambiguity so far, to my knowledge, unnoticed.6 “[I]n that” may be a prepositional phrase, the “that” a demonstrative pronoun whose antecedent is his beloved; even so, it may be a conjunctive phrase specifying not what, but why: “I joy [since] I honor most.” This ambiguity allows for diversity of scansion, as well: If one wishes to stress the former reading, the foot is iambic (“in that”); if the latter, pyrrhic (“in that”). That is, the joy may be due to the object of honor, but it may be due to the act of honoring itself. Honor as a human good may change after the advent of Christianity since honoring is a form of regard for the other that is at least proximate to love. Even after Christianity, I would suggest, a trace of charity remains in the regard of honor.
Interestingly, though, honoring may also better fulfill the ancient desire for self-sufficiency. Being honored is not as self-sufficient as honoring, for honoring itself may be free of the honored object’s response. What is the tone of the Speaker’s attitude toward this ordinary triumph over the mortal rage that destroys the honored beloved? The next two stanzas provide a clue:
Great prin/ces’ fa/vorites / their fair / leaves spread
But as / the ma/rigold / at the / sun’s eye,
And in / themselves / their pride / lies bu/riéd,
For at / a frown // they in / their glo/ry die.
The pain/ful war/rior famoused / for worth,
After / a thous/and vic/tories / once foil’d,
Is from / the book / of ho/nor ra/zéd quite,
And all / the rest / forgot / for which / he toil’d[.] (25.5–12)
The courtier relies on princely favoritism; the warrior, on a record of victory. Of course, honor as renown (as opposed to honor as integrity) depends on others to honor one, so it lacks what John Alvis designates as a necessary condition of happiness, “the complete self-knowledge which enables ordinate love of honor which, in turn, sustains self-sufficiency,” the complex of which is Shakespearean “integrity.”7 Let me take up the courtier first. As the sun helps the marigold to open in display, the prince honors his favorites; so too, as the marigold collapses when the sun does not shine, the courtiers die when the prince frowns. The Speaker figures the favorite as a languid flower whose “fair / leaves spread,” a spondaic flourishing dependant upon the prince, figured as the “sun’s eye.” Yet night will come and the courtier’s flourishing “die.” There is a natural inevitability to the caprice of the prince. The warrior is handicapped, though, not by the natural inevitability of princely caprice, but by the human impossibility of a perfect martial history. Though Katherine Duncan-Jones does not, editors have emended the text since Theobald, changing 1609 Quarto’s “worth” to some other word that actually rhymes with “quite” (such as “might” or “fight”), but such emendation may miss the point. First, the stress in the poem is not what the honored one is honored for, but instead either that he is honored or that he is honored: the warrior is “famoused for worth.” Honor has a dual character—the act of honoring and the standard by which and to what degree one honors, one’s estimation of worth. As well, the loss of the rhyme word’s sonic completion is jarring when the warrior is “from the book of honor razéd quite,” the quite-ness of his razing shocking when denied rhyme’s almost teleological completion.
Why are the quatrains in this order; why, that is, does the Speaker take up the courtier first, then the warrior? I would argue that they are ordered from the lesser to the greater, relative perhaps to self-sufficiency and certainly to justice. Their honorings are different: Both are dependent upon others for honor, but the courtier is more so since he has an audience of only one, and the prince’s favor is less within his control, even if his art of the courtier were perfectly refined. The warrior has greater control. As well, even though there may be injustice in the prince’s darkening, the Speaker does not emphasize it, whereas the fact that a warrior, even after a thousand victories, will lose fame with one loss is disturbingly unjust. The Speaker figures the loss of fame with the poem’s most significant metaphor: the warrior’s loss of fame is his razing or erasure from “the book of honor,” a book written by others. His defense against oblivion—his own talent—is powerless to signify his worth, to write himself, or anyone else, into immortality. That requires another since the figure of self-praiser is the braggart, hardly an honorable figure. (Think only of Pistol.) The Speaker has a number of metaphors for his poetry, but he sometimes employs those from early modern manuscript and print culture. To cite only one example, the medium of the Fair Youth’s miraculous immortality is ink: “in black ink my love shall still shine bright” (65.14). The Fair Youth’s existence beyond death will be housed in that black ink, a book of honor.
The poem’s volta comes with the couplet:
Then hap/py I / that love / and am / beloved >
Where I / may not / remove, / nor be / removed. (25.13–14)
Unlike the favored of court and battlefield, the Speaker depends upon a surer foundation for his flourishing: not the art of the courtier or warrior, but, surprisingly, that of the lover. Love has two characteristics, one of which will be exposed later as unreliable, while the other is sure—if anything in this life can be sure: love’s reciprocity and its fixedness. The parallel instances of polyptoton of “love/beloved” and “remove/removed” indicate that the Speaker’s happiness starts with him and ends with his beloved. Although there is dependency here—and we know that the Speaker will, eventually, no longer be beloved by the Fair Youth, and will indeed be “removed” from him—there is also a powerful element of self-sufficiency; after all, it is the Speaker who decides whether he himself loves or removes. Notice that the lover self-sufficiently submits to dependency. There is here a kind of lyric Augustinianism without God. The character of that submission is crucial: Does the self-knowledge John Alvis demands attend this submission, or not? As the Speaker explains in Sonnet 116 (perhaps the most famous sonnet in our language) after the Fair Youth has rejected him,
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (116.1–14)
I have elsewhere argued that this poem’s defense of the will to lyric bearing surpasses even Virgilian heroism.8 Yet, as early as Sonnet 25, the Speaker recognizes that his flourishing is here, in part, contingent upon his own will to constancy, what John Alvis calls “integrity,” though I wonder if Alvis has anything like our Speaker’s love in mind given that he isolates the Speaker of Sonnet 94, during an especially Stoic moment, and The Tempest’s Prospero as exemplars of Shakespearean integrity (1990, 27–32, 251–61).
All of which brings me back to the question of the Speaker’s tone in Sonnet 25 toward the fortunate courtier and warrior. Helen Vendler sees the couplet as “a private boast …, countering the public boasts of the stars’ triumphant favorites” (1997, 145). I would suggest, though, that the tone is not the bitter boast of frustrated rivalry which results in proud confidence, but the sympathy of shared fragility which results in hesitant hope. By now in the sequence, we know enough of the Fair Youth to suspect that the Speaker’s reliance on him is a dubious way to achieve happiness. Yet there is a self-sufficiency within the Speaker’s own constant love since it is free of fortune’s favoritism. Vendler argues that Shakespeare ironizes the Speaker’s boast: “The implicit irony in the fact that the speaker-lover does not expect a reversal of fortune in his own case suggests that he thinks he can hide from the stars, which is the most foolish boast of all” (1997, 145). This is a helpful point, but it requires refinement, for, while it is true that half of his claim is ironized, the other half is not: he loses the Fair Youth’s love, but the Fair Youth does not lose his, as we see as late as Sonnet 116, where the stars of honor and title yield before the star of constancy, “the star to every wandering bark / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.” Notice that the lover cannot know the essence of love, only orient his or her life by it. Hence, he “defines” love only by means of its activity of “bearing.” After all, only with Sonnet 126 does the Speaker “remove” himself from the Fair Youth to write of another beloved, the devastatingly empty parentheses which close the poem’s Fair Youth sub-sequence and remind all of what the Fair Youth will be without his poet:
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
( )
( ). (126.11–14)
Until then, the poet maintains his integrity by still loving his friend and may do so throughout both sub-sequences. The fact that the sub-sequence ends does not prove that the Speaker’s will to constancy is a “foolish boast”; it proves that human beings are fragile and their loves incurable. The poet’s love for the Fair Youth does not end; only the sub-sequence does. Though Shakespeare’s later plays transform tragedy into romance, his sonnet sequence (published in 1609 during the period of romances) locates tragedy after romance, without, however, ever diminishing the romance. The ugly dispraise of the ugly does not undo the beautiful praise of the beautiful, even if it qualifies the soul’s admirable longings with the body’s foolish carnality: “Poor soul, center of my sinful earth” (146.1).
For 126 sonnets, the Speaker testifies to fidelity by doing what the warrior as warrior cannot do, writing, not merely being written; that is, the Speaker writes his own book of honor, love’s book of honor, the sub-sequence of the sonnets themselves. While the Fair Youth, like the warrior, is written into immortality, the Speaker writes his beloved, himself and their love into it. Of course, some wag may point out that we do not even know the name of the beloved, but that only qualifies the exact character of immortality. Even when there is no caption for a photo and the subjects remain “unknown,” they have a form of immortality. The Speaker joys in that he honors most, and what he honors most will shift from his beautiful beloved to his own attempt through lyric bearing to save that beautiful beloved from the mortal rage of age and death. Even so, it must be conceded that, with Sonnet 127, our Speaker abandons the Fair Youth to himself and takes up with the Dark Lady in an “expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (129.1), wherein the qualified, Petrarchan idealism of his friendship with the Fair Youth (qualified by the beloved’s vice) becomes the anti-Petrarchan misogyny of “lust in action” with the Dark Lady (misogynistic since the Speaker scapegoats her for his own vice).9 The Speaker acknowledges his “sinful loving” (142.2) only in the Dark Lady sequence. And, whatever failures one reads into the sequence’s final antimetabole, the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—“Love’s fire heats water; water cools not love” (154.14)—the Speaker believes those failures due only to his venereal lust for the Dark Lady, not to his lyric love for the Fair Youth. Shakespeare himself may see honor and shame in both sub-sequences, but the Speaker sees honor in one and shame in the other. Either way, Shakespeare’s Sonnets is love’s book of honor and shame—the flourishing and suffering of love.
Allow me to conclude by recognizing qualified Shakespearean wisdom in Sonnet 25 concerning honor and love in his Speaker’s recognition that, if there is one foundation for human flourishing, it is this: the lyric will to constancy in love. That is why, only four sonnets later, we come upon a greater poem, one which we may, I hope, understand better when it is understood in relation to its lesser:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (29.1–14)
Arising from sullen earth, the Speaker sings a hymn of love’s honor, an immortally lyric state bringing such wealth that he would disdain to rule an actual ship of state or to fight in its defense, preferring instead to pilot his ship of lyric on the sea of being, bearing it out unto the edge of human comprehension, to a point where no one other than he may remove his love.
Whatever the family and the city require, the soul requires something other. If for Dante and Petrarch that other is the beautiful lady incarnating divine love, for Shakespeare’s Speaker that other is only the humanly lyric remnant of beauty’s “increase” in the lyric love for untrue beauty, one which does not transfigure carnal love (nor is it corrupted by it): lyric love simply lives alongside carnal. This is neither pagan, nor Christian love, for neither the Platonic nor the Pauline conceptions of proper love “cure” human desire of its honor and shame.10 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, love’s book of honor and shame, enacts a modern love.11
1. Both rhetoric and poetics recognize that the speaking subject—rhetor or character—is not strictly identifiable with the actual person speaking, whether public figure or actor. Because lyric is such apparently intimate discourse, it is difficult not to identify “Will” with William Shakespeare, but the urge should be resisted. Lyric allows for a discourse of lived experience without, however, reducing it to autobiography. For rhetorical poetics in the Renaissance and Shakespeare, see Heinrich Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Walter de Gruyter, 2004), and my review, with reference to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, especially Sonnet 1, in The Ben Jonson Journal 14/2 (2007) 268–84.
2. All citations from Shakespeare’s Sonnets are from Katherine Duncan-Jones’ edition (Arden, 1997).
3. Discussions of honor would do well to attend to the rhetorical genre of praise and blame. On epideictic rhetoric, see O. Hardison Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (University of North Carolina Press, 1962). On the subversive possibility that all praise is self-praise, see J. Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (University of California Press, 1986).
4. That these episodes are episodes is debated in Shakespeare Studies. For a critique of identifying and distinguishing the Fair Youth and Dark Lady sonnets as episodes of an emplotted whole, see Heather Dubrow, “‘Incertainties now crown themselves assured’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996) 291–305.
5. The sonnets are in iambic pentameter (usually): Stressed syllables are here in bold and unstressed ones not so, while debatable syllables are underlined; feet are divided (/), caesuras indicated (//), and enjambments suggested (>). On Shakespearean metrics in the plays and the poems, see George Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (University of California Press, 1988).
6. I am indebted to the editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with commentaries on this sonnet, by Carl D. Atkins (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), Stephen Booth (Yale University Press, 1977), Hyder Edward Rollins (J. P. Lippincott Company, 1944), Helen Vendler (Harvard University Press, 1997), and David West (Duckworth, 2007). There is, to my knowledge, only one, somewhat extended discussion of this sonnet in the secondary literature on Shakespeare’s Sonnets: David Weiser, Mind in Character: Shakespeare’s Speaker in the Sonnets (University of Missouri Press, 1987) 55–58.
7. John Alvis, Shakespeare’s Understanding of Honor (Carolina Academic Press, 1990) 31 (hereafter, cited internally). I am indebted to the book throughout this chapter. For John Alvis’ most recent reflections on honor in Shakespeare, see chapter 1 of this volume.
8. Scott Crider, “Lyric Bearing: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Ship of Metaphor,” in The Garden of Lyric, ed. Bainard Cowan (Dallas Institute for Culture and the Humanities Press, forthcoming).
9. On Petrarchanism in Shakespearean comedy, see Paul Cantor’s discussion in chapter 3 of this volume. On anti-Petrarchanism in the sonnet sequence, see Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchanism and its Counterdiscourses (Cornell University Press, 1995).
10. There is no evidence that Shakespeare read Plato, but we do know that he read Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier in Thomas Hoby’s translation, especially Bembo’s speech on love in Book 4, a reworking of Plato’s Symposium. On Shakespeare’s engagement with Platonism, see J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Harper and Row, 1963), esp. 149–77. For his engagement with Pauline theology, see Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (Columbia University Press, 2002).
11. I would like to thank all the participants of the stimulating, collegial conference that was the origin of this volume’s chapters, but especially its organizers and hosts, the editors of this volume: B. J. Dobski and Dustin Gish. This chapter is dedicated to my colleague, fellow-Shakespearean and friend, Gerard Wegemer.