The first part of Notebook 13, here designated Notebook 13b, consists of a series of double entries. Both are on Shakespeare’s sonnets: the notes on the recto pages, which appear here as notes 1-24, examine the overall patterns of the entire sequence; the notes on the verso pages, here given as 25-35 but numbered 1-11 by Frye, are a sonnet-by-sonnet analysis that is soon abandoned (after Sonnet 11). Obviously related to “How True a Twain,” Frye’s essay on the sonnets, these notes are thereby dated prior to 1962. Frye’s occasional brackets are represented by braces; presumably he added these while in the process of transferring material from the notebook to his article. Notebook 13 is in the NFF, 1991, box 24.
[1] I hope a fairly close reading of the Shakespeare Sonnets will clear up some of my hazy notions about lyrical discontinuity. So far as I can see at present, the traditional division into 1-126 and 127-154 is a sound one. The latter is a miscellaneous group, probably written during the sonnet vogue of the 1590s. 153 & 154 are exercises, more likely to be based on Fletcher’s Licia than on a Byzantine original. 145, in octosyllabics, is a, silly little poem that fits nothing. Then there’s the dark lady group, in mood closer to the “gulling sonnets”1 than the conventional ones. Sidney’s Stella had black eyes and blonde hair, but probably a better claim to be called a lady. The tone of intellectual playfulness in Sidney does not appear in Shakespeare—it’s in LLL, though, which seems to have a particularly close relation to these sonnets. It’s difficult to see any real sequence in them as they stand. But if the Willobie his Avisa story has any relation to the sonnets,2 it’s only to this group: the story is a very literary one, that Polonius might have believed but hardly Rosalind. The whole youth sequence seems to me quite distinct, later in style (along with 129 and 146), and one that may incorporate the latter group but doesn’t to me seem to. Line 2 of Sonnet 42 hardly fits Shakespeare’s—I mean the poet’s—attitude to the dark lady.3
[2] The 1-126 group might be seen as a threefold, and not impossibly three-year, cycle of the poet’s revolving around the youth, in a state of utter devotion gradually tapering off to reproach, self-absorption, jealousy, & then returning to devotion. In the course of this cycle a dialectic naturally develops, expressed in the great time and eternity sonnets 123 and 124, and separating out from the objection [object] of devotion in 125 and 126. This dialectic is what associates the sombre and even glum tone of Shakespeare with Dante & Petrarch, and against the more playful English tradition that starts with Wyatt and culminates in Sidney. Sidney’s dialectic point, the “Leave me, O love” sonnet, is outside the A & S [Astrophel and Stella] series.4 In Shakespeare it’s 146, also outside the 1-126 group, and 129.
[3] The rhyme-link theory won’t work as that, but I notice that sonnets forming natural pairs usually have a strong link. Thus 33 & 34 both have “face” and “disgrace” in lines 6 & 8. So has 127. Every Shakespearean critic is a frustrated Baconian, and the Baconian in me tries to link the Dark Lady with the clouds that eclipse the splendor of the sun-youth.
[4] Samuel Butler talks a lot of nonsense about the Sonnets, but one thing he’s got right is the character of the youth, who, like other beauties, is a narcist, as stupid as a doorknob and as selfish as a weasel.5 He couldn’t be a patron of the arts or a person of any wit or cultivation. Southampton, whatever else he was, was certainly someone whom Shakespeare expected to be amused by his ribald tale of a sulky urchin who was beloved by Venus herself but couldn’t rise to the occasion. The youth is more like the Adonis of that poem than like any appreciative reader of it. Nor is there any real evidence that the youth was of higher rank.
[5] The genre of the lyric is one that suffers particularly from the fallacy that an actual experience must lie behind every poem, & that the hypothesis of such an experience is necessary as part of the value judgement that it’s a good poem. Otherwise we’re saying the poem is a “mere literary exercise.” Nobody calls Othello or King Lear a mere literary exercise, and every one of Shakespeare’s plays tells [tell] a story that he got out of a book.6 No imaginative person distinguishes his reading from the rest of his experience, and there’s no reason to suppose that the story told in the sonnets has a direct or simple relation to Shakespeare’s experience. {(The only reason for thinking it has is not in anything it says, but in what it doesn’t say. It’s the obscurity, the ellipses, the muttered allusions to pyramids and a mortal moon’s eclipse, that make us think so)}.
[6] The mood of 1-126 is like the problem comedies: the only character in all the plays remotely like the youth is Bertram in AW. But Bertram, if sulky, self-centred & immature, is far less effeminate, and has two strong-minded females to kick him around and make a man of him. The mood of 127-54 is more like the 1590s in some ways (cf. the Rosaline of LLL); yet the really savage odi et amo sonnets are pretty sombre too.
[7] {The androgynous youth (cf. Venus in Spenser)} is at the opposite pole from the union in one flesh celebrated in P.T. But the relation of the poet & the youth isn’t overtly homosexual: 20 and 151, the only ribald ones, show that the poet is intended to have no overtly sexual feelings except for women, and to assume that the same would be true of the youth. Cf. E.K.’s gloss to January.7 Samuel Butler’s sardonic comment that the relation of Achilles & Patroclus in Homer is English, pure & free from all taint, and the relation in the sonnets Greek, is perhaps more clever than accurate.8 Mann’s Death in Venice is closer to the real feeling.
[8] Incidentally, the whole Petrarchan tradition is really odi et amo, where the lover hates being in love. Who said: “An evil spirit, your beauty, haunts me still”?9 That’s why I think 40-42 tells [tell] a different story from 127-54: the poet in the former resigns a mistress he loves dearly to an implacable incarnation of Eros: but he didn’t love the Dark Lady: he hated her guts, but that didn’t loosen her hold on him.
[9] The first group (1-16) could be called the Awakening of Adonis, or, more accurately, the attempt to waken Narcissus.10 Its archetype is the appeal to the divine youth to transfer his divinity to a younger successor when he’s at his own peak. The series begins abruptly, as though it were a set task, and establishes the first stage of the dialectic: a line of succession counteracting the line of time.
[10] The situation treated in the sonnets is pathetic & cumulative, & so appropriate for dramatic lyric but not at all for dramatic treatment. If a rhyme-link won’t give the sequence in its clearest form, maybe an image-link will, if I organize the images & don’t just string them together.
[11] To appeal to the youth to marry is a strange appeal except in ritual terms. The poet realized that this is the only way of escaping from his narcist spell: he falls under it in 16-19 and has entered the androgynous trap in 20. He’s really fallen in love with Eros, and, despite his frantic efforts to impress the beautiful boob by telling him how he’s going to live forever in his verse, he’s succumbed to the fatal deception of the poet—the sense of the excess of the existential over the verbal—that is, of the spilled-over emotion as against the contained kind. Who lives forever in his verse? Somebody whose initials may or may not have been W.H., and that only by virtue of one jangling & illiterate prose sentence, not written by Shakespeare & not addressed to us, & no more likely to be an accurate statement of fact than any other commercial plug.11 He’d have done better to marry and beget an heir.
[12] When I speak of organizing the imagery I mean first throwing in the dialectic cluster-points. The first of these is the self-eating Narcissus of the opening sonnets as against the death-eating immortal soul of 146. The second is the odi et amo theme of love as a mixture of the marriage of true minds and lust in action—116 & 129. The third is eternity as opposed to the vanishing of all things in time, attained by poetry, love & the soul. Then the cycle goes in between. It seems to me that in the 1-126 group there are three main cycles.12 The first fifty sonnets show the poet moving, after the original appeal, into a state of identification with the youth through love. In this state he’s completely confident about the power of his verse to confer immortality (19). Then he starts brooding about his age. That leads to meditations on mutability only held to the theme by a somewhat perfunctory final couplet, and the poet’s sense of isolation increases. Then (33) something happens that alienates him from the youth, and reproaches begin. In the final cycle this has to do with his stealing the poet’s mistress; in the second it’s giving his favors to a rival poet. In 36 we meet the theme of separation, and in 39. Then a return to the youth begins, possibly marked by the parallelism of 46 and 24. The horse sonnets 50 & 51 complete his return and a new cycle begins in 52-3.13
[13] The somewhat effusive praise of 53 is immediately followed again by confidence in the immortality of verse and identification with the youth. Then the blacker meditations with what C.S. Lewis calls the hook couplet14 begin in 66; then slander touches the youth, then the poet begins to think of his own death, then a sense of inadequacy in his style begins in 76 (repeating 32) and expands into the theme of the rival poet. Separation begins in 87 and a reproach theme is developed that reaches its climax in 96. But 92.7-8 indicates a dialectical development.
[14] 97 begins a third cycle of renewal, full of coming-of-spring imagery and the effusive praise of 53 is repeated in 106. But here the dialectic works itself out. I haven’t got the details straight, but “my dear love” in 124 is his own love, not the youth. He is united to love; the shadow of the youth becomes the substance of his mind. He will make no objection to the deathless union which is a marriage of true minds, & his complaining sonnets don’t constitute that. But the marriage of true minds doesn’t include the youth—there’s nothing to show that he had a mind, certainly not a true one.15 The final victory of love and the poet over time is achieved in 123 & 124, and the youth separates out and is dismissed in 126, and perhaps 123. “Marriage” in 116.1 is the only mention of that theme after 17. Marriage & friendship the youth is not capable of, nor is he capable of love, but only of inspiring love in others. “A God in love, to whom I am confined” is the figure addressed in 126, otherwise there’s little point in being warned merely of death.16
[15] So the poet first approaches a spirit of love, who doesn’t love but causes the disquiet of love, and tries to settle him in two genuine relations/marriage & friendship. In Elizabethan times friendship was greater than love because more disinterested (F.Q. IV [The Faerie Queene, bk. 4]), but it used the language of love: see Browne’s RM [Religio Medici].17 Marriage & friendship are mature relations: that’s why the poet urges them.
[16] The Sonnets would be valuable for one only [only one] fact: that they are the only work of Shakespeare that deals with the creative process. It was inevitable in his day that the creative process would be associated with love. That there is a connexion with Shakespeare’s experience may well be: that there is a simple, one-to-one relation that would justify us in making a simple identification of the narrator with William Shakespeare & reading the sonnets as biographical allegory rather than poetry is another matter. I suspect that we still have a supreme literary genius to deal with, not a poet who has at last put himself on our level. Every reader knows that it would not improve the quality of the sonnets as poetry if we had an omniscient scholar to write the definitive footnotes on the mortal moon and the pyramids and the fools of time and of course W.H. the onlie begetter, but oh how we itch. That’s why every Shakespearean scholar is a frustrated Baconian: we’ve never forgiven him for minding his own business.
[17] I think I now have a fair sense of what is going on in 126, and a sense too of why 1-16 is the prelude to it. If I could see the 127-52 group is [as] an equally inevitable postlude I’d have solved the riddle of the Sonnets so far as I have any interest in riddles. The youth follows the regular love-beauty, subject-object, energy-form, heat-light dialectic. He doesn’t & can’t love; he’s beauty & inspires love. Now the dark lady is not beauty: what she inspires is something else. She’s the whore of the Book of Proverbs, not the Sapience. As I say, I don’t believe the fair angel of 144 is the youth, or the triangle of 133-4 the triangle of 40-2. She could at least play the virginals, whereas it was all the youth could do to read.
[18] The Sonnets, then, are best approached as Shakespeare’s contribution to that particular genre. Being Shakespeare’s, the contribution is experimental and superbly original. The Awakening of Narcissus, in sonnets 1-16, followed by the author’s—I mean the poet’s—falling into his spell, are beautifully logical within a literary form, but they are utter nonsense as transcripts of experience. As Christ says to Satan in Paradise Regained: “Why art thou solicitous?”18
[19] In the sonnet tradition the lady is seldom individualized: the poet talks about himself and his woes, or even his opinions, but not about her. She remains a symbol. So with Shakespeare: the youth is obsessively “fair,” but one would think a lover would delight to dwell on his accomplishments, if any. Again, frustration is normal, & is confirmed, in Dante & Petrarch, by the mistress’s death.
[20] In the ladder of love we start with a body, a substance, of which love is the attribute & a shadow. We end, Platonically, with love as the substance & lovely bodies as its shadows. If Shakespeare’s use of the terms substance & shadow makes sense I’m all set.
[21] Note how the cycle is associated with the wheel of fortune & how royalty & greatness seem to be symbols of it.
[22] Structure of imagery:
Youth as Adonis or principle of the cycle: spring & summer.
Cycle in the imagery.
“Increase” vs. “waste”: Defeating vs. succumbing to the cycle.
Onan & the wasted seed: fool in Eccl. [Ecclesiastes]
financial metaphors
eating & canker metaphors
Time as the enemy:
Death
Canker; eating
Waste (financial metaphors)
Time’s fools: majesty, new pyramids; painful warrior
Increase as the ally:
The creating of a new youth by the old youth vs.
The creating of a new youth by the old poet
Love: Chaucer
146 vs. 129.
[23] The arguments to beget progeny are not supposed to be specious: not Venus’s or Comus’s.
What is more important than sequence, however, is the structure of imagery in the sonnets, which is a most consistent & well integrated one.
[24] Similarly, the beautiful youth is “beauty’s rose,” in its Elizabethan “primate” sense;19 “a god in love, to whom I am confined” [Sonnet 110, 1. 12], a Messiah of beauty to whom all previous ages have been witness,20 world’s fair ornament and the essential spirit of the spring flowers (99).
§
[25] 1 [Sonnet 1]—Several themes stated here: the “Rose” (capitalized in Q [the 1609 Quarto]) as the primate of beauty [cf. par. 24], caught up in 109. “Contrasted” is a pun, and one meaning of it is continued in 2.7. The word “substantial” begins the shadow-and-substance theme, and “Feed it” and “glutton” start the eating metaphors that are finally resolved dialectically in 146. The sonnet turns on the contrast of “tender heir” and “tender churl” and there’s a concealed “consume” association of eating and burning. “Bed” starts the canker metaphors, and indicates that the poet himself is a worm to the extent that he’s buried in the youth’s beauty. There’s a narcist suggestion of a mirror, burning himself by the light of his own eyes. The last line defines the dialectic: the pull up from the cycle by getting a line of succession, and the pull down by time.
Why does the youth need such an appeal? It’s because being a narcist, he can’t project, & being beautiful, he forces others to. Thus he becomes a beautiful parallel to the grave itself, a Cyclops’ cave of devoured loves. He desires sacrifice & not mercy: Narcissus becomes a destroying mirror for others, not himself. He’s being tactfully urged to cast the feminine out of himself by taking on sexual relations with a real woman.
The famous lines 9 & 1021 make him an Adonis & Lord of the May, but all the overtones of “only herald” aren’t clear to me yet. Note that the upper line extends into the past as well as the future, hence “memory.” The youth has an odd contrasting relation to the P.T.,22 and there we have two heralds, one of good & one of evil omen (cf. 144).
[26] 2 [Sonnet 2]—Trenches, as a later sonnet points out, are connected with the grave. Note the theme of buried treasure in line 6, linked to misers, to buried fertility in winter, and to the vampirism or “all-eating” theme. Concealed pun on “chest” as place of both treasure and heart, brought out later. Or is chest for breast un-Shakespearean? “Sum my count” starts the audit metaphors that run straight through.
[27] 3 [Sonnet 3]—Here “self-love” is quite openly expressed, and the theme of memory, soon to be modulated as the poet falls under his spell, is announced. The break from the mother, the past female set against a future one, is right at this point. Harvest metaphors of course go with the “increase” business, and “use” in 2.9 as the metaphor of functional in contrast to merely structural beauty.
[28] 4 [Sonnet 4]—Mostly financial metaphors: there’s no discussion of anything but purely physical beauty. But now the course of Nature is appealed to, and Nature’s care for the species rather than the individual. The youth is now an embezzler as well as a miser, yet a spendthrift too. Parable of talents [Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-27] may possibly lurk in background.
[29] 5 [Sonnet 5]—The contrast between creative & destructive aspects of time is beautifully brought out here, and makes time a deceiver and traitor, a maker & dispeller of illusions. The odd metaphor of distillation, carried on in the next sonnet, leads up to a shadow-substance contrast in the last line. The metaphor seems to have a quite literal meaning of sperm, buried to revive in somebody’s cunt (vial). The lovely line 10 of course makes this poetically acceptable, though even here there are homunculus overtones. “Prisoner” has some overtones I don’t get, but the general sense is a beating of the cycle by rolling with its punch, hence the light & transparent prison contrasts with the miser’s buried chest. Cf. 48.
[30] 6 [Sonnet 6]—Carries on the distillation metaphor and returns to the financial ones, picking up the use-usury pun hinted at in 4.7. Only here an exuberance multiplies variety in a wilderness of mirrors: here he has ten children (I’m sure the talents parable is in), in contrast to the estate of worms in 1.14. The words self-willed & self-killed are added to the self-love of 3.
[31] 7 [Sonnet 7]—So far the cycle has been the seasonal one only: here we get the solar one added. Its connection with the life cycle is unusually explicit, but it associates the youth not only with the “eternal summer” of 18 but with a kind of perpetual high noon. The solar cycle also has a strong link with the wheel of fortune, and the whole afternoon & evening part of the cycle is connected both with the overshadowing clouds theme of 33 and the “eclipse” theme of 60. Note too the word “converted,” which is repeated in 11 and 14. The famous eclipse of 107 is also believed to be associated with royalty. The explicitly royal metaphors, “gracious,” “sacred majesty,” & the like, mythicize, so to speak, the youth, a tendency that develops through 18 & finally snaps off in 21.
[32] 8 [Sonnet 8]—Here the metaphors turn on the double meanings of harmony & concord, marriage being compared to the strings of a lute tuned in pairs. The Beulah trinity of father, mother & child appears in 1. 11. There’s an odd contrast between a contrapuntal pattern that is a unity and a single part that isn’t one because it implies others. (Certainly the poet’s praise of his love is a frantic accompaniment to a pretty monotonous cantus firmus). I don’t quite get lines 3 & 4: they certainly might have been asked of the poet, but I see nothing the youth loves & receives not gladly, except possibly age & death, which could be 4 all right.
[33] 9 [Sonnet 9]—The world, or Nature, is here the cosmological beloved of the youth, the Echo to his Narcissus, but a sterile Echo unless he wakes from his trance of time and enters the cycle of Nature. In line 2 the word “consum’st” appears, and in 14 the word “shame”—quite a strong word if we don’t think of it in its modern slang sense (also Elizabethan—Tybalt in RJ)—is picked up from 2.8 and carried into 10.1. Line 11 is deeply significant in illustrating the point above, and the double meaning of “waste” is very central.
[34] 10 [Sonnet 10]—The sentiment of the couplet of 9, that the youth is not only a self-murderer but incapable of love, is expanded into the main theme of this sonnet, which also introduces an image from the historical cycle, the ruined house. “Murderous” is repeated, and the ambivalence of love & hate comes in. Self-love is really self-hate, is the point. The word finds its place again in 129. The theme of “conspiracy” (1. 6) also appears. Treason to majesty has already been suggested in 7 and of course enters the eclipse & fool of time complexes, especially 124. Something here to be looked into. Wonder how well known the Greek tag: “a friend is another self” was known then (cf. 1.13)?23
[35] 11 [Sonnet 11] —The first line states one of the themes summed up in the envoy (126.3), and shows that the youth here is human, the incarnation of Eros, hence a union of divine & human natures (perhaps symbolized as male & female natures), whereas in 126 [Sonnet 126] he’s a discarnate god. The “convertest” of 1. 4, repeated in 14.12, is cyclical—it comes in somewhere else too—but also a voluntary movement with the cycle. The presence of the wisdom & folly antithesis in 5 & 6 helps out the “fool of time” business [Sonnet 124]. It’s followed by a parody of the Last Judgement and the end of time. The image of “store,” linked with “convert” in 14, is part of the seeding operation and its “if it die” rhythm. The wonderful rhythm of line 1024 expresses the sterile counter-cyclical rhythm that could reach the end of time in that way—the parable of the sower is involved as well as the talents. The “seal” image seems peripheral, though it has form and matter overtones.