6. Shakespeare’s Rotten Weeds, Shakespeare’s Deep Trenches

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 2

When fortie Winters shall beseige thy brow,

And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field,

Thy youthes proud liuery so gaz’d on now,

Wil be a totter’d weed of smal worth held:

Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies;

To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise.

How much more praise deseru’d thy beauties vse,

If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine

Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse

Proouing his beautie by succession thine.

This were to be new made when thou art ould,

And see thy blood warme when thou feel’st it could.1

About the early history of the sonnets, we know almost nothing. The first reference comes in 1598, when Shakespeare already had a reputation on the stage—the plays behind him included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, Richard III, and The Merchant of Venice. That year Francis Meres praised him in Palladis Tamia as the “most excellent” English playwright, like Plautus and Seneca the master of comedy and tragedy.2 Shakespeare had first come to attention as the author of a popular pillow-book, Venus and Adonis (1593), in whose dedication he looked forward to “some graver labour,” probably The Rape of Lucrece (1594).3 Meres remarked that the “sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous & hony-tongued Shakespeare, witnes his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends, &c.”4 (There’s an unwritten history in that “&c.”) The sugared sonnets were eventually published in quarto as Shake-speares Sonnets (1609).5

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 2 (1609 Quarto).

Source: STC 22353, Shake-speares sonnets: Neuer before imprinted. Leaf B1, recto and verso. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Who those private friends were and what they possessed has been subject of speculation ever since. If not an outright liar, Meres was close enough to that circle to have heard of these private verses. Perhaps he had seen a few—“sugared” sounds like firsthand acquaintance, not gossip. In the surviving manuscripts over the next century, there are almost 250 copies of Sidney’s poems, nearly 800 of Jonson’s, and over 4,000 of Donne’s.6 Of Shakespeare’s sonnets there are only twenty-six, almost all dating to the 1630s or later, none probably earlier than 1620.7 Either Shakespeare’s private circle was very small, or its members guarded the sonnets closely.

We can’t appreciate what it would have been like to receive one, written in secretary hand perhaps on an octavo leaf, folded and sealed, delivered by messenger or slipped from a pocket (“I think I haue his Letter in my pocket,” All’s Well That Ends Well).8 The poems were probably untitled and for the most part unpunctuated, like Shakespeare’s contribution to The Book of Sir Thomas More.9 Seeing the manuscript sonnets scattered through miscellanies is probably as close as we can come.

In 1599, possibly late the year before, two sonnets appeared in The Passionate Pilgrime. By W. Shakespeare.10 Of the score of poems included in this slight octavo volume, probably only five were his—three from the 1598 quarto of Love’s Labour’s Lost and two of the Dark Lady sonnets, 138 and 144.11 (The attribution and sham piecing-out suggest public interest.) Differences between these and the versions published in the Quarto (Q) imply that Shakespeare later revised the poems. Revision and rearrangement of sonnet sequences—for instance, by Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton—were not unusual.12 Though a good number of Shakespeare’s surviving manuscript sonnets derive from printed versions, those for sonnet 2 contain marked variants.13 Of the thirteen manuscripts, twelve appear closely related.14

Heminge and Condell, in their preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio, claimed that “wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers.”15 Ben Jonson replied in Timber: or, Discoveries (1640), “Would he had blotted a thousand.”16 In his prefatory poem to the Folio, as John Kerrigan has observed,17 Jonson offered a more reasonable judgment about his “gentle Shakespeare”: “he, / Who casts to write a living line, must sweat / … and strike the second heat.”18 That would mean revision. (Jonson also wrote that Shakespeare outshone the tragic and comic playwrights of ancient Greece and Rome—the remarks are lavish, even for elegy.) We know from various passages in the plays that Shakespeare must have revised his work; and his additions to Sir Thomas More, however fluent, have blots enough.19 Such changes give us a glimpse of Shakespeare in the workshop. Do the dozen manuscripts preserve sonnet 2 in an early form? Since Gary Taylor’s closely argued article “Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” published in 1985,20 reactions among editors of the sonnets have been mixed: Duncan-Jones against; Kerrigan and G. Blakemore Evans in favor; Burrow, though skeptical, not prepared to dismiss the idea.21

It’s impossible to tell beyond doubt whether the manuscripts preserve the rewriting of cloth-eared copyists, the improvements of some smart aleck, or an older version of lines Shakespeare later revisited. The conservative meter and echoes from plays of the 1590s tell us the sonnets were started early in his career; but, however sophisticated modern stylometric analysis, which suggests that many were written or revised in the following decade, how much he touched them up, if at all, is a question almost beyond answer. Sonnet 2 may be the rare case where something hidden is revealed. I have nothing to add to the historical arguments; but I wish to compare the two versions poetically, judging the gains and losses.

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow

And trench deepe furrowes in yt louely feild

Thy youthes faire Liu’rie so accounted now

Shall bee like rotten weeds of no worth held

Then beeing askt where all thy bewty lyes

Where all ye lustre of thy youthfull dayes

To say within these hollow suncken eyes

Were an all-eaten truth, & worthless prayse

O how much better were thy bewtyes vse

If thou coudst say this pretty child of mine

Saues my account & makes my old excuse

Making his bewty by succession thine

This were to bee new borne when thou art old

And see thy bloud warme when thou feelst it cold.22

(Westminster Abbey, MS.41, f. 49)

I have used Taylor’s transcription of what is apparently the best copy,23 dropping only his title, “Spes Altera,” which he borrowed from a different group of manuscripts.24 (The Westminster manuscript was given the title “To one yt would dye a Mayd.”) He has made an interesting but not convincing case that the title is Shakespearean: the phrase, from the Aeneid, means “another hope,” or, if you will, “another chance,” appropriate for the subject here. The differences in the manuscript text (hereafter, W) have been highlighted in bold.

The argument of sonnet 2 in Q goes something like this: “At forty your fair skin will be wrinkled, your once-fine clothes ragged. If someone asks where all that beauty has gone, you’ll answer that there’s a little left in your eyes—but you’ll feel ashamed. Use your beauty, have a boy, be able to say he’s inherited your good looks. Then you’ll feel young again.”

Manuscript version of William Shakespeare, Sonnet 2.

Source: Ms. 41, f.49, courtesy of the Library, Westminster Abbey. Copyright: Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

STANZA 1

The sonnet opens with a long prospect of the future, the destruction of beauty over forty winters, a phrase more dirgelike and elegiac than a hopeful “forty springs.” Duncan-Jones objects that the manuscript’s “trench deep furrows” (instead of “dig deep trenches”) “substitutes a clod-hopping metaphor of ploughing furrows in a field” for an image of siege war and “introduces associations with seed-sowing and eventual harvest which are wholly inappropriate.”25 Perhaps it’s not so simple. Though furrows derive from the art of farming, not the art of war, “trench” is a violent verb: in its earliest uses, “to cut; to divide by cutting, slice, cut in pieces; … to cut one’s way,” as the OED has it. You can see it doing military service for Caxton in 1485—“[He] gaf hym a stroke vpon his helme so sharply that he trenched moo than vc maylles,” that is, more than ninety-five rings of mail (OED).

Trenching, in its oldest meaning, required sword or blade. Shakespeare used a boar’s tusk for the task (“The wide wound, that the Boare had trencht / In his soft flanke,” Venus and Adonis)26 but employed it of love in The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “This weake impresse of Loue, is as a figure / Trenched in ice” (a drawing scratched or cut into ice, presumably not figure skating).27 Despite its domestication early in the sixteenth century for digging up ground, the verb remained slightly brutish: “The place … so broken dygged or trenched” (OED, 1541). “Trench” was a military noun from the first, but never just that—its uses for war lie uneasily against uses in peace. The swords were also plowshares.

By Shakespeare’s day, “trenches” could be merely a synonym for “furrows” (“Thy garden plot lately, wel trenched & muckt” [OED, 1573]), so “digge deep trenches” was little more than “trench deepe furrowes”—little more, except that Q conjures up age’s long siege against the face, while the manuscript looks across beauty’s furrowed fields (“Witnes these trenches made by greefe and care” can be found in Titus Andronicus).28 We still speak of someone “furrowing” his brow. If the line alluded to old ridge-and-furrow plowing, furrows would have been much deeper than on modern farms. Shakespeare saw that loss of beauty wasn’t just farm husbandry; it was a war only age could win.

Why alter one phrase for the other? By the middle of the fifteenth century, a trench was a “long, narrow ditch dug by troops to provide a place of shelter from enemy fire and observation.” Trenches would have caused more damage to beauty, retaining associations with wounding or scarring. The trenches in Q reinforce the metaphor of war, but “besiege” doesn’t have to overwhelm the poem with violence—it was already modulating toward more ironic or comic uses: in Foole upon Foole (1600), by Robert Armin (Shakespeare’s fool after Will Kempe), a man “snatcht the Hawke, and hauing wrong off her necke begins to besiedge that good morsell.”29

War’s trenches savagely mimic plowed fields. Still, the manuscript version cruelly undermines the very purpose of farming—sowing and harvest. The furrows are prepared year by year but never seeded. The implications of “seed” (child, semen), a word implied though never invoked, go back centuries earlier. Duncan-Jones prefers a field scarred by military trenches;30 the first thoughts of the manuscript have the field cut by furrows that never bear a crop, insulting in its mockery of husbandry (a buried pun is not impossible—note the appearance of “husbandry” in sonnets 3 and 13). The deeper sense is that the furrows of age are destructive only if we do not seed a new generation, our ruined brows reborn as their smooth, unmarked ones.

It’s tempting to dismiss the manuscript’s “louely feild” as unimaginative, though for Shakespeare “louely” wasn’t a watered-down synonym for “beautiful” or “attractive” but a word that could rise to something more robust: “Lovable; deserving of love or admiration” (OED). If the Quarto version is an improvement, the advantage lies partly in the shift to “thy beauties field,” the Fair Youth becoming landowner of beauty, a characterization more dramatic than just calling the brow lovely. The manuscript, however, cannot easily be dismissed as incompetent rewriting. Those trenched furrows are a visual effect. Beauty’s face, beauty’s field—yet “field” in heraldry is the surface or background of a shield. Here it might seem part of a coat of arms, something else inherited—an inheritance that for a noble youth would have, like beauty, duties and responsibilities.

To a modern ear, “faire Liu’rie” seems pallid compared to Q’s “proud liuery”; but our ears need a slight adjustment to hear what the Elizabethans heard. Modern usage has been denatured. In Old English, “fair” meant beautiful or pleasing to the eye, a sense retained in phrases like “fair weather.” Meanings exclusive to women (“fair sex,” for instance) come only in the fifteenth century. The sense of beautiful language or speech (“polished, elegant; eloquent”) is very early, again Old English, and gave rise to the distinction between fair copy and foul papers. The main modern definition, “free from bias, fraud, or injustice” or “honest, just; reasonable,” was applied to conduct in the late fourteenth century and to people only in Shakespeare’s day; but we’re mistaken to let uses dominant now overwhelm the earlier meanings embedded in “fair livery.” “From fairest creatures we desire increase,” Shakespeare wrote in sonnet 1, and it might not have been accidental that “fair” was still in mind. That the sonnets in Q were arranged in the order composed is unlikely, but poems intimately tied may have been written about the same time.

Kerrigan has privately made the point that, if we accept the manuscript as an earlier version, the revisions would have been conditioned by sonnets written later.31 However the Quarto came to be, it’s not likely to have begun as a sequence—the order, apart from the marriage sonnets (1–17), is too haphazard. (It’s little wonder that so many critics have wasted time trying to reorder the sonnets or defend their received order.) Any revisions would have been affected by the unfolding relation between the two men and by whatever occurred between them in the years between inspiration and revision.

To take one instance, the shift from “faire Liu’rie” to “proud liuery,” stronger poetically, seems even stronger if we read the change in light of the difficulties between the men that enter into what seem later sonnets. Had there been some estrangement, the revisions might have mirrored this alienation of affection by slight alienations of language. The tone does seem to cool between W and Q, and it should be remembered that by 1609 whatever passions had once existed had perhaps long been exhausted.

The phrase “faire Liu’rie,” then, is not mere filler, not merely equivalent to “nice clothes,” though it doesn’t have the reach and implication of Q’s “proud liuery.” There the transferred epithet creates a tiny vignette of a youth proud of his clothes (or the clothes are the source of pride—“Of publike [public] honour and proud titles bost [boast],” sonnet 25.) No one is threatening to disinherit the boy, but his failure to continue the bloodline is itself a disinheritance. The appeal is to his vanity—when his beauty is as ruined as his old clothes, he’ll have nothing to show for it if he doesn’t have a child. The livery stands metaphorically for the young man’s outer figure. (Though “livery” at this period had the specific sense of the “characteristic uniform or insignia worn by a household’s retainers or servants” or the “distinctive dress worn by the liverymen of a Guild or City of London livery company” [OED], the more general sense was a “characteristic garb or covering; a distinctive guise, marking, or outward appearance.”) What is beauty but skin deep? “Proud” at base suggests the clothes are “stately, magnificent, imposing, or splendid”—and perhaps, as poetically used of animals, “spirited, fearlessly vigorous; moving with force and dignity.” (Hence, a pride of lions, originally a medieval term.) Clothes are a person’s skin or hide.

The dense layering of ideas is not entirely absent from “faire Liu’rie,” especially when drawn near “accounted.” A man’s clothing was listed in any inventory, especially one made after death. (“Account” meant “audit” from the early sixteenth century—note “What acceptable audit canst thou leave?” [sonnet 4].) You might say, if the revision was Shakespeare’s, that in the draft he courted the eye in “faire,” in revision shifting the gaze to “gaz’d on.” “Thy youthes faire Liu’rie so accounted now” would imply, not just reckoned (“told,” in the bank teller’s sense), but explained or justified—“so accounted now” might mean clothes often remarked on, judged beautiful, subject of tales told by telltales; but it looks toward the reckoning that age shall make. Through the metaphor of keeping books, “so accounted now” prepares “of no worth held”—its reversal in the following line—while in Q “so gaz’d on now” and “of smal worth held” have smaller claim on each other. When he softened the accounting, Shakespeare was almost required to give more weight to the livery.

A “totter’d” reed (Q) is tattered or tottering. Weeds were of course clothing, a usage that survives only in “widow’s weeds” (survivals are often found in case-hardened phrases). The use of “rotten” (W) began in decomposition of man or beast—beneath the idea of rotten clothing lies rotten flesh (“The sweete War-man is dead and rotten,” Love’s Labour’s Lost).32 The poet associated the ideas often enough, using “dead and rotten” three times, “rotten death” once. Death is always at the edges of the sonnet but never grasped. The “hollow suncken” eyes, the truth “all-eaten”—these are marks of corpses as well as old age.

The idea of rotten haberdashery was not new (silk is particularly prone to dry rot). A sermon of 1388, possibly by Wycliffe, argues that “mo clothes be rotten with the rych then with the poore.”33 The idea reeks of decay (Shakespeare used it comically in As You Like It: “You’l be rotten ere you bee halfe ripe”).34 A weed whether tottered or tattered, rather than rotten, might seem merely to trade like for like—but perhaps in revision Shakespeare was determined not to let death overplay its role. “Fortie Winters” keeps the luxury of hope—if the youth died young, his only memorial would be his child. John Dover Wilson in his edition of the sonnets noted that mourners wept at the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney because he had not produced a son.35

Shakespeare exploited here the ambiguity of “weed.” Some flowers in gardens are weeds in the wild; or, put another way, a weed is only an unappreciated flower. Q’s “totter’d” is usually corrected to “tattered.” Tattered clothing is familiar, but to allow the alternate spelling brings the senses into tension. (Just because the clothes have become ragged doesn’t mean the youth is still wearing them.) Kerrigan has the mixed richness right: the submerged sense of unwanted plant is “drawn out by beauty’s field (with its echo of beauty’s rose in Sonnet 1, as though that flower became, after forty winters, an aged and torn hedgerow pest).” The original spelling “implies not just ragged disorder but the slumped unsteadiness of a plant past its prime.”36 That would be a flower perhaps rotting on the stalk. There is also, from the original sense of “totter” as swinging to and fro, a specific use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—to be hanged on the gallows. The spectral idea drifts back toward the underlying presence of death. We have here, not Shakespeare correcting, but Shakespeare rethinking. It’s hard to imagine a writer of such coiled and instantaneous invention not looking over old lines and finding new weights and measures. The early version is coarser and dramatic, the later subtler; but it has lost little and gained more in translation.

STANZA 2

The second quatrain is a mean bit of wit. The youth, grown old, when asked where his beauty lies, because he’s childless could say only, “In my deep sunken eyes” (Q). Kerrigan is probably right that “all the treasure of thy lusty days” quietly invokes the parable in Matthew 25, where a lord who must travel “into a far country” entrusts his wealth to his three servants, wealth in the form of talents.37 (A talent could be gold or silver. The royal Babylonian talent, according to the OED, weighed about sixty-five pounds.) The senior servants both invest the money and double it; but the lowliest, given a single talent, buries it in the earth to keep it safe. He is cast “into outer darkness” on the lord’s return. The Fair Youth, if he has no children, will eventually bury his beauty in the grave. (Compare sonnet 6, “thou art much too faire, / To be deaths conquest and make wormes thine heire.”) The “deepe sunken eyes” also seem buried—in the face.

“Thy beauties vse” must cast the pearls of beauty before the next generation (some early notion of genetics did not escape the Elizabethans). The very idea of “treasure” is something stored up—hence, “treasure hunting,” “treasure trove.” Duncan-Jones sees “treasure” and thinks “semen,”38 but her ear is too keenly tuned to sexual innuendo. She has probably gotten the idea from Eric Partridge’s Shakespeare’s Bawdy, but Partridge is catch as catch can. His sole example, from Othello (Emilia speaks: “It is their Husbands faults, / If Wiues do fall: [Say, that they … powre (pour) our Treasures into forraigne laps]”), is not wholly persuasive.39 “Lap” could on rare occasion mean “embrace” (the use is most often verbal) as well as “pudendum” (OED). Emilia could be talking about jewelry. The suggestiveness (not just of “treasure,” but of “use”) is hard to pin down, as in sonnet 20: “But since she [Nature] prickt thee out for womens pleasure, / Mine be thy loue and thy loues vse their treasure.” Say that Shakespeare’s filigree of teasing play is the delight of frustration, or that the evasion of impropriety is the acknowledgment of impropriety.

The manuscript variant, “all ye lustre of thy youthfull dayes,” seems to have influenced Shakespeare’s choice of Q’s “lusty,” containing much the revision does not—“lustre,” as the OED has it, means “shining by reflected light; sheen, refulgence; gloss.” Early uses are associated with the radiance of gems (which might have suggested “treasure” in revision), thence eyes—in the plays, the word compliments lips or eyes. Taylor notes that, when Gloucester is blinded in Lear, Cornwall asks, “Where is thy luster now?”40 Perhaps the use in the manuscript suggests that the quality could refer to young skin, moist with newness, while the aged are lucky still to have luster in the faint glisten of their eyes.

The example is typical of Shakespeare’s impaction, meanings not collaborating so much as crushed together, laid down leaf by leaf like coal. Again, the earlier version of the line seems more vivid. “Treasure” is vaguer, though tied to deeper meanings in the new-made sonnet—the use of one’s inheritance, beauty now bound more firmly to things (talents, say) that must be accounted for, not just in the sense of tales told but of sums brought to judgment. One generation’s treasure must be tallied before it can be inherited by the next—and one way of accounting is to admit such things exist to be passed on. Beauty would be a kind of treasure.

In this fantasy of interrogation, the manuscript allows the youth to speak directly twice, the Quarto only once, the first exchange reported as indirect discourse. The shift is not large, the loss of immediacy considerable compared to the manuscript, where the exchange has been jotted down like testimony in a legal deposition. The force of argument here is telling—the friend has turned inquisitor, or dramatized the inquisition the youth must one day undergo. Linked to the speech in the next stanza, this exchange is like a fragment of a play, with commentary, the sort directors sometimes give actors who want motivation.

Probably the words in manuscript should be read, not as a compound, “hollow[-]suncken,” but as coordinate adjectives, “hollow[,] sunken eyes,” though here Shakespeare’s usual underpointing (if it is his) allows the readings to strain at each other. “Sunken” suggests depth, the way the eyes of the elderly seem to recede into the skull; but “hollow” draws in emptiness, blankness—perhaps not actual blindness, since that would be too ruefully comic. (The idea that eyes grow hollow with age was a commonplace.) It’s no doubt accidental that “hollow” follows “lustre” so neatly; but, had Shakespeare known the word’s old meaning as “cave,” “hollow” might have suggested itself, at least subconsciously. “Hollow” is resonant and terrifying, with death at the edges, “deepe” merely descriptive—the revision has lost some of the bitter edge of the manuscript.

It’s possible that “sunken” suggested “treasure” in Q, a reference to well-known tales of sunken galleons. Shakespeare wrote in Henry V, “As rich … / As is the Owze [ooze] and bottome of the Sea / With sunken Wrack, and sum-less Treasuries”41 (the first quarto has “shiplesse treasurie”), and, in The Rape of Lucrece, “Who feares sinking where such treasure lies?”,42 so he had the association in mind, as least by the time he revised the sonnet. Perhaps he was guilty of a little self-plagiarism. The phrase “sunken treasure” may be owed to such quotations.

An “all-eaten truth” (W) is presumably a truth devoured, eaten up like wool by moth larvae, truth once beautiful, now just a rag (perhaps carrying forward the metaphor of rotten clothes)—that, or merely a truth all must eat eventually, however galling. The line renews the “glutton” image in sonnet 1. Everyone loses his beauty, and for the youth in age to say there’s still a bit of the old luster in his eyes is “worthless” (the undercurrent of money and accounts surfaces again)—that is, unprofitable, of no value. The shift from manuscript to Q—let me continue to call these changes revisions, for ease—is often subtle even when radical. Truth is judged by manners or mores outside oneself (“Time devours all,” as Duncan-Jones reminds us),43 but shame something felt within. Instead of suggesting that the Fair Youth will come to know a truth all must know, a truth worse for wear, Q holds out the unlovely portrait of the youth in age, ashamed at not having taken advantage of early gifts. As manipulative psychology it’s masterful, if we take the sonnet as having real motive.

Q’s “All-eating” may seem difficult to parse, but Colin Burrow suggests it merely a synonym for “all-consuming,” a phrase that comes into English about the time of the sonnets. (The implication, he proposes, is “universally destructive.”) “All-eating shame” is no doubt the cousin of our contemporary idiom, in a guilt culture, “eaten up with guilt.” Shakespeare wrote a similar idea into Othello: “I see sir, you are eaten vp with passion.”44

“Worthless prayse” (W) is clear enough—Shakespeare had already used the phrase in Titus Andronicus.45 Those who think the manuscript not an early version are forced to believe that some reader of the sonnets who possessed a nearly eidetic memory for the plays (probably read rather than heard) decided to improve sonnet 2 by translating “thriftlesse praise” into something more comprehensible. (“Worthless” appears in sonnets 80 and 100.) The manuscript line is not deaf, however, to other uses of “worthless”—“destitute of moral character, contemptible” (when used of people) and “unworthy.” These trouble the simple meaning, especially when linked so firmly to the metaphorical strain of money, gemlike things, accounts. It’s not a great distance from calling someone “of non acompte” (as John Gower had)46 to calling praise worthless, when the person bestowing it on himself is bankrupt of sensibility. Perhaps Shakespeare didn’t calculate what happens when you bring the subject of sex close to that of payment—or perhaps he did.

Q’s “Thriftlesse praise” would be praise, as the OED makes it, “not thriving or prosperous; unsuccessful; unfortunate”; maybe better, “unprofitable, worthless, useless” (there are “thriftlesse sighes” in Twelfth Night)47 or “wasteful, improvident, spendthrift.” Already in Richard II Shakespeare had compounded ideas of shame and money related to fathers and sons (“He shall spend mine honour, with his shame, / As thriftles sonnes, their scraping Fathers gold”).48 The unworthy son in the play becomes the unworthy son in the sonnet, since failure to pass on your own beauty is a slap against your parents. The various forms of “thriftless” may seem subtler as it drifts through these opening sonnets—“vnthrifty louelinesse [loveliness]” (sonnet 4), “an vnthrift” (9), “none but vnthrifts” (13). They secure the sense of selfish prodigality.

“Shame” in Q shifts the line from a sad acknowledgment of truth to disgrace. This sort of deepening is typical of Shakespeare’s second thoughts. As in the parable of the talents, the Fair Youth conceals that vanishing beauty in his own aging flesh, eventually to be buried in wrinkles—beauty’s furrowed fields (“wrinkles” are picked up again in sonnet 3)—rather than let the bounty renew itself and blossom once more. “To sow wild oats,” already a well-known phrase in the 1570s (“That wilfull and vnruly age, which … [as wee saye] hath not sowed all theyr wyeld Oates,” OED), seems early to have suggested sexual profligacy. The OED citations come from Thomas Watson’s Passionate Centurie of Loue (1582) and Middleton’s and Dekker’s play The Honest Whore (1604). The idea would be cold comfort to anyone wanting the Fair Youth to marry, but it testifies to the nearness of bearing crops and bearing children. Wild oats are anyone’s crop—only marriage lets you claim the harvest. The Earl of Pembroke, one of the main candidates for the Fair Youth, knew this when he refused to marry the pregnant Mary Fitton, one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honor.

STANZA 3

On his return from the far country, the lord in Matthew 25 “reckoneth” with his servants, scolding the one who hid the single talent—“Thou oughtest therefore to haue put my money to the exchangers, and then at my comming I should haue receiued mine owne with vsurie.” If you don’t use beauty—as you’d use money, employing it to make more—you won’t increase it and deserve no praise. “Beauties vse”/“bewtyes vse” (W/Q) must be beauty’s usury (both derive from the Latin usus) because beauty has only declining value. The Fair Youth is called a “profitles vserer [usurer]” in sonnet 4; but in sonnet 6 the poet argues, “That vse is not forbidden vsery [usury],” that is, the use of beauty to make beauty. (No longer illegal, usury at this period was still considered a sin.) Sex also lurks there—“use” was synonymous with copulation (OED).

The manuscript’s worthless praise prepares this notion more keenly—the other meaning of thriftless, that is, want of thrift, which sits ill at ease with Matthew 25, implies overspending rather than failure of investment. “Cast yee the vnprofitable seruant into outer darkenesse,” says the lord. We use “talent” now for a gift from the Lord, which we must use, lest we make Him angry—Shakespeare has not dragged theology into the waste of beauty; but the idea lies beneath the surface, simply assumed, as duty to God often was.

“O how much better were” (W) has the directness of a first draft; but Q is an improvement, repeating “praise” emphatically from the previous line. In tone this is reasoned, but either line would allow an unreasoned or frustrated reading like “Isn’t it blindingly obvious that …?” At this point the speaker has exhausted all his forceful rhetoric—the likeness of the Fair Youth ravaged by age, almost begging him to compare his older friends to portraits or miniatures made in youth; the shame of being asked why he’s now so ugly, when he must answer pathetically that what little beauty remains lies in his eyes. Surely no one would be so impolite—Shakespeare is only suggesting what people will be thinking. This might be a moment when the speaker has had enough. What youth ever listened to rational argument? The turn of the sonnet offers the way out, but the speaker could be forgiven for allowing himself a hint of desperation: “Can’t you see, looking around, the best use of beauty is letting a child inherit it?” Perhaps, though the poet does not say, the best use of a man’s beauty and wealth would be to marry a beautiful woman, making beauty a double inheritance.

We should not discount the possibility that the argument is mendacious. Dover Wilson suggested that sonnets 1–17 might have been commissioned by lord or lady for a wayward son—and that the seventeen sonnets might have been presented on the young lord’s seventeenth birthday in 1597.49 The idea is intriguing, if no more than that. Had Shakespeare been approached to write these sonnets, the Fair Youth’s parents would not have worried about the waste of beauty, just what would happen to their estate if he died without issue. Using beauty would have been merely the rationalization. Though any parent might want to be a grandparent, one with estates has deeper worries. Inheritance is a question scarcely less fraught now. The identity of the Fair Youth might be found in an only child or eldest son—Southampton was one, Pembroke the other.

The Q reading seems more wheedling than the manuscript, more artistically deployed, argument without the same tremor of feeling. It’s the choice of an artist who no longer feels the same passion. The manuscript sonnet could of course have been touched up in the 1620s or 1630s50 by someone steeped thoroughly in the sonnets—the manuscript line is sober, more homely, perhaps inferior—but the difference in intensity, the falling away of emotion into rhetoric, seems more likely the product of revision when passions have cooled.

The possibility that some years elapsed between writing the original and revising it for publication might also explain the shift from the familiar “this pretty child” to the more ornamental “this fair child,” from the plain “say” to the more rhetorical “answer.” “Pretty” originally meant “cunning,” then “clever, skilful” (OED), which would be far from the meaning; but not quite so far is “artful, well-conceived,” which might even be a buried pun. From the fifteenth century, however, the word also meant what we mostly mean now, “good-looking, esp. in a delicate or diminutive way,” usually used of women or children. “Pretty” suggests intimacy, not with the child, who is only imagined, but with the Fair Youth. Perhaps it was only the poet’s desire to use “fair” here that led him to change “fair livery” to “proud livery” in line 3—it’s one thing to reuse a word for emphasis, another to betray a niggardly vocabulary.

The lines given to the Fair Youth continue, so we should imagine him prospectively saying, in the manuscript, “This pretty child of mine / Saues my account & makes my old excuse.” This too would be a richer and more spirited presentation of what might happen—though the subjunctive is used in both versions, in the manuscript the youth grown old tells us what this future child actually does (“Saues my account”), Q what the child shall do. Perhaps this difference is much of a muchness; but the manuscript seems more personal, more a concerned friend making an argument than a Cicero pursuing his cause. The first has the controlled urgency of a man with a private stake, the second the demeanor of a man before a public audience.

Long ago the scholar T. W. Baldwin heard echoes in these opening sonnets of a letter by Erasmus printed in Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), a standard grammar-school text Shakespeare seems to have known. Particularly marked are the lines, “You shall haue a pretie litle boye, runnyng up and doune youre house.… You shall seme, to bee newe borne.… What man can be greued [grieved], that he is old, when he seeth his awne countenaūce … to appere liuely [lively] in his sonne.”51 “Pretty” and “to bee new borne” in the manuscript lie closer than Q to the original, as Gary Taylor pointed out.52 This is the most compelling argument that the manuscript is Shakespeare’s draft. Kerrigan notes the resemblance of sonnet 3 to another line in the letter (“What punishement is he worthy to suffer, that refuseth to Plough that lande, whiche beyng tilled, yeldeth childrē”),53 but the line may also lie beneath the plowed ground here.

Both “account” and “count” were synonyms for financial reckoning, so the shift must have been for meter or for the words’ different nuances. Q’s “Shall sum my count” is fairly obvious. (“Count” means “account” here—“And summ’d the accompt of Chance,” Henry IV, Part II.)54 When the Fair Youth must provide the reckoning of his days, his fair child balances the books, wiping out any deficit—the gradual debt, for example, incurred as beauty is depleted over time. In sonnet 1, the “glutton” youth was accused of eating the “worlds due,” namely, offspring, like a Cronus. The loss of children would be another liability of his selfishness.

“Sum” might mean to total a column of figures or to “sum up,” to provide a narrative summary—here, of a life. (Perhaps Gabriel Harvey in Pierces Supererogation [1593] comes close: “He summed all in a briefe, but materiall Summe; that called the old Asse.”)55 “Account” and “count” could both mean (though the latter was somewhat old-fashioned in this sense) a narrative, the story of a life. Surely this reading is at least as important—the money and accounting metaphors are mere figures, as it were. What a man often leaves behind as his accidental bequest is not the tally of his sums and sins, his getting and spending, but the tale of his days—and of course his children.

As for the manuscript, Christian theology defined “account” (W) as the “final reckoning at the judgement seat of God” (OED). Hence, “to go to one’s account.” “Saues [saves]” (W), too, is theological: “to redeem from sin, bring salvation to,” that is, to save from Hell. The words smuggle in religion; but the revision has pushed it out, leaving the meaning—perhaps regrettably—limited to accountancy and tale-telling. (Possibly the revision gives insight into Shakespeare’s developing feelings about Christianity.) The manuscript retains the Shakespearean habit of letting meaning grow weedlike—the version in Q shows a more considered but more limited approach, which suggests, not that Shakespeare had lost his touch, but that he was calculating his effects.

“Make(s) my old excuse” is difficult. The line may be read as “justify, when I am old, the consumption of the beauty expended during my life” (Stephen Booth),56 or less likely as the “excuse I make when I am old” (Colin Burrow).57 Booth admits the problem forthrightly, suggesting that we take “old as an ellipsis for ‘when I am old’; the context demands that the phrase be understood by synesis, i.e. as meaning what it must mean rather than what its syntax would otherwise indicate (‘make my usual excuse’).” Though Shakespeare’s language often confounds the reader, the phrase was altered in a number of manuscripts to ease the sense—indeed, it’s the phrase most varied. That the W reading survived in Q (except for “makes” becoming “make”) suggests that Shakespeare was happy with the wording. Accusations of simplification in the manuscript founder here.

The shift from “Making” (W) to “Proouing [proving]” (Q) in the last line of the quatrain secures the legal metaphor in “succession,” linked to the metaphor of the accounting necessary to settle an estate. If it’s a second thought, it’s chosen to turn aside the religious undercurrent of the quatrain. (The echo of “makes”/“Making” in W is similar to repetitions in other sonnets and would not by itself have asked for revision.) To “prove” at this period meant, not just “to demonstrate the truth of by evidence or argument,” but “to establish the genuineness and validity of ” (OED)—we still prove a will. “Succession” in both versions works well enough for the normal replacement of parent by child, but in Q beauty provides the legal proof for the boy to inherit his father’s estate. This stronger sense is the “occupation or possession of an estate, a throne, or the like” or the “act or fact of succeeding according to custom or law to the rights and liabilities of a predecessor.” “Making” (W) is more constricted—there succession has no obstacles to overcome. The general thought in Q is clear: the boy is both “proving his beauty” (demonstrating it by his face, more metaphorically through some legal procedure in which resemblance—genetics, again—clinches the argument) and “proving his beauty by succession thine” (showing his beauty is the rightful successor to the father’s own).

COUPLET

The couplet in many Shakespearean sonnets is almost superfluous—and the same couplet, probably repeated through mishap, works perfectly well in sonnets 36 and 96. Here the couplet makes a difference. It’s cast in conditional language, so the benefits cannot accrue if the Fair Youth fails to take the advice. Should he marry, the pretty child of the manuscript will make him “new borne.” It’s hard to avoid the pun on “newborn” here. The first use in the OED is of a child (early fourteenth century), the second of Christ; but already by the date of the sonnets Sidney had used it for sighs and Spenser in the sense of being regenerated, probably the primary meaning here, though still leaning toward the original, literal sense. Perhaps that’s the sense Shakespeare wished to avoid in Q (“new made” is a feeble phrase), because though it’s a radical leap—the father is the child of the child—it does confuse matters. Still, the sense of Christian resurrection, elsewhere alluded to, is plain, and plainly banished in Q.

The poem ends in a probable allusion to the story of David in 1 Kings, when he had become “olde, and striken in yeeres, and they couered him with clothes, but hee gate no heate.” His servants brought him the young damsel Abishag. The Fair Youth needs a wife, then a son. Shakespeare’s point might be that, with a beautiful child to inherit all else you possess, the feeling will so warm you no Abishag will be necessary.

The sonnets bear the marks of poems written obsessively, probably in gouts—singly, by pairs, perhaps little runs, but not all at once with the focus of arrangement. When he came to collect them (Duncan-Jones suggests he was impelled by the closure of the theaters in 1603–1604 and 1608–1609),58 many may have been a decade or more old, written during the sonnet craze of the nineties. Perhaps he had written some after, as whim or feeling dictated. How thoroughly he revised we cannot say; but the evidence of the plays, like the evidence of the stray pages in Sir Thomas More, argues that he couldn’t keep his hands off a text when it lay before him. If he did revise, the original might have looked like the manuscript of sonnet 2. Taylor has a convincing list of Shakespearean echoes in the manuscript, especially from plays of the 1590s, particularly those before 1596–1597.59

Burrow notes the signs of confusion in Q that might have been caused by manuscript copy, either through misreading (as in the three sonnets with an unrhymed line—26, 69, and 113—and in the many where “their” ought to be “thy”), mistakes or failures of revision (perhaps the repeated couplet in 36 and 96), or revisions tentative or poorly marked (sonnet 99, with fifteen lines).60

A poet may make a poem worse in revision, may soften effects that give it the wrong conviction and finish when required for a chain of sonnets. Shakespeare likely had written the poems from immediate impulse, as his friendship with the Fair Youth developed, stumbled, had consequences. There was no need to polish them—they were private. He passed a few to friends, which tells us little more than that he had friends. The Earls of Pembroke and Southampton, the main rivals for the role of Fair Youth, were still alive in 1609—they both married and outlived Shakespeare.

Sonnet 2 seems to follow directly from the first sonnet, with its pretty opening. If Shakespeare had a hand in the arrangement, as some have argued, the whole sequence derives from the argument announced in “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die.” The sonnets were almost certainly not written in the order we have; but these two come from the same source, whatever prompted them, and the second after the first. Some metaphorical strains in the first seem recollected or teased out by the second, so that “riper” in the first is complemented by metaphors of field and weed(s) in the second; and “bright eyes” become the “hollow suncken” or “deepe sunken” eyes. Perhaps the idea of “famine where aboundance lies” is echoed in those weeds—fallow fields or fields that no longer produce may be overgrown with such trash. “Thy selfe thy foe” may have been extended into the second sonnet’s “beseige,” and spring in the first becomes the winters of the next. The closing accusation of sonnet 1, “else this glutton be,” is in W turned into Truth, which all must eat, but in Q becomes the glutton Shame, the Fair Youth’s shame, which shall eat him up.

I understand the argument that the differences in manuscript are not beyond some meddling reviser. As Duncan-Jones has it, “Collectors of poems in this period frequently introduced readings which could in some sense be called improvements, and may have taken a pride in doing so.”61 We must look, not backward from Q, however, but forward from the manuscript. The differences are perhaps, not degradation from published text, but improvements from manuscript with the stamp of Shakespeare’s mature mind. We must take notice of what was lost, because the manuscript is not without its own delicacies of meaning. The phrasing in Q has been cooled (pretty to fair) or redirected (truth to shame), generally made more complicated. What was more highly tempered has been composed. Note too how the metrical position of some words has quietly been adjusted, not just “how much” in line 9, “This” in 10, and “my” in 11, but “liuery” in 3 (two syllables in W, three in Q). Such alterations seem, not the work of an eager stranger, a would-be Shakespeare, but second thoughts of a man of forty-five reviewing his raw, youthful, emotional sonnets for print, tinkering to make them more of a piece, the way the revision to “thriftless” ties it more deeply to other sonnets early in the sequence.

A critic sharpened by such thoughts would look at what is revealed when “trench” is changed to “digge,” “rotten” to “totter’d,” “lustre” to “treasure,” “hollow” to “deepe,” “say” to “answere,” “saues” to “sum,” and “borne” to “made.” The manuscript is in places more aggressive, rougher, more intense, while Q is artful and calculated, poised in greater subtlety. If warmth had become coolness, the changes in Q, some of them, might be admissions of regret. The former directness, the rich conversion of feeling to verse, might have been just what an older Shakespeare would eliminate when about to publish such poems. Detachment makes them slightly more fictional, perhaps just the note he wanted. The changes, to push the idea further, might have been caused, not just by regret, but by embarrassment.

Was Shakespeare the boy with small Latin and less Greek, the adolescent deer poacher, the May in a May-December marriage, the rural schoolmaster, the horse minder at early theaters, the traveling player, the lawyer’s clerk, old King Hamlet’s ghost, Greene’s hick actor and “upstart crow” (a “Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde”), the playwright who never “blotted a line,” the canny part-owner of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the prickly seeker after a coat of arms (“Non sanz droict”), paterfamilias of the Stratford mansion, the real-estate investor, the country conservative in favor of enclosing common land or the country sentimentalist who hated the idea, the sociable lush, the secret Catholic, the husband with a roving eye for women and men alike, or all of these, or none?

Reading the private life as if it too were a work of art can be claustrophobic as well as illusory, a will-o’-the-wisp. The temptation is always to look for hints and clues that explain the words on the page (private prejudices, past sins, haunted dreams, ragged desires), when often what the poet was trying to do was to escape the burdens of the life. That doesn’t mean the life isn’t there in cryptic form.

We’re unlikely ever to know who Shakespeare was, he was so many. Even were a chest of his papers to surface tomorrow in some lumber room in Warwickshire, the biographies would lie only a little closer to the poet whose shape shifts with every reading. We know more about Shakespeare than about many another Elizabethan playwright—Kyd, say, or Webster. Yet Shakespeare’s language, darting like a water strider now here, now there, ignoring the dark currents it rides on while courting the toothy monsters below, could only have been written by a man difficult to grasp. A biography of a thousand pages, every fact tacked down like a piece of upholstery, could not tell us enough about Shakespeare; but every poem, packed like an overstuffed cloak-bag, tells us too much.