April 23. Four hundred fifty-ninth birthday (by convention; we actually only know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564). Four hundred seventh death day.
The single most iconic, most studied, Dead White Male poet-playwright in the English language. Yet mysteries abound in his life. And work.
This little sonnet, for example.
🌿 107 🌿
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a cónfined doom.
The mortal Moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad Augers mock their own preságe,
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims Olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time,
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since 'spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes,
And thou in this shall find thy monument
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
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A good deal more will follow about Sonnet 107, for anyone interested, but first (via Wikipedia, slightly edited) the obit:
William Shakespeare was the son of a glove maker, born and raised in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married the pregnant Anne Hathaway, 26, with whom he eventually had three children: first Susanna, and then twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a theatre company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were were written by others (a hypothesis generally rejected by professional scholars).
His life has become much fictionalized; just lately, in 2020, the early death of his young son Hamnet became the subject of a multiple-prize-winning novel by Maggie O'Ferrell, which has since spawned both a stage play (at Shakespeare's reconstructed Globe Theater) and a film project.
His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Within those works also lurk mysteries. The ghost of Hamlet's father, for instance: meant to be real or not? And the witty Dane, when the wind blew north by northwest, was he apt to confound a hawk with a handsaw? Or a henshaw (heron)? Who, if anyone, were the unfaithful Dark Lady, so loved and hated, and what about the other personae of the Sonnets? Is gloomy Jacques in As You Like It a caricature of anyone in particular? Was the Taming of the Shrew actually supposed to be funny, wtf? :-/
Meanwhile, even if we never studied Shakespeare formally in school,
...[O]ne is familiar with Shakespeare to a degree, from one's earliest years. His celebrated passages are quoted by everybody; they are in half the books we open, and we all talk Shakespeare, use his similes, and describe with his descriptions...”
--Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
...and people refer to his leading characters, and continue to remake his plots, down to this day. Yes, death this time has to admit defeat.
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What follows are some conjectures about the more-difficult to account-for curiosities of Sonnet 107.
It is admittedly a longish read. In fact...it may be kind of a mess, because I started writing it only yesterday and got a little over my head. 🤪 Please forgive and/or point out typos, will correct in flight.
Feel free to either skip or go forward, whatever, and either way, thanks for reading so far. There's a poll at the end.
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So now, a speculative lens
Just so you know, what follows is quickly thrown together, with minimal footnotes, from contemplation and eclectic personal reading over a chunk of a lifetime. Anyone is invited to argue!
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., on its website offers the minimalist interpretation of #107:
This sonnet celebrates an external event that had threatened to be disastrous but that has turned out to be wonderful. The poet’s love, in this new time, is also refreshed.
But what sort of event? Anything even real? Or just imagined?
Something particular, something real, IMO. Despite jibbing by earlier scholars (notably uncomfortable over the plurality of the sonnets specifically addressed to men), if no other evidence existed a 1598 comment by contemporary Francis Meres seems decisive, praising Shakespeare's "sugared sonnets among his private friends." Variant readings and others' manuscripts also show that at least some were circulating in handwritten form, detached from one another, well before publication.
How they came to be published at all is another mystery.
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS, Never before Imprinted, came out in 1609, when the sonnet form, a fad of the 1580s and 90s, was already foing or gone out of style. The title page states that the volume was printed at London by G. Eld, "for" one T.T., who has been identified as Thomas Thorpe, a publisher of not entirely blameless reputation. There follows a the famous dedication to
THE.ONLIE.BEGETTER.OF.THESE.INSUING.SONNETS.Mr.W.H.
concerning whose identity no consensus has ever been reached. (The sonnets also are followed by a longish, weird poem about a deserted woman, titled, "A Lover's Complaint," whose authorship is today rated doubtful.)
It's not at all clear that Shakespeare had anything to do with the publication or dedication. Copyright in those days belonged to whoever first applied for and received permission to publish from the government Stationers' Office. An author who had sold a manuscript to such a publisher at any time lost all control of their work and could expect no royalties. And if an unpublished manuscript was obtained from some other party, or diligently gathered from various sources? The author was flat out of luck.
So what happened? Did Shakespeare (who seems to have been a diligent businessman, regularly attending to several "income streams") choose to dispose of a sheaf of outdated verses before all its potential value was lost? Did the passing of time make these verses safer to publish, six years into the reign of King James, than when they were fresh? Did some Mr. W.H. go about laboriously "be-getting" them from this and that private collection, being archly recognized in the publisher's dedication? Every speculation is open.
In severe contrast to Shakespeare's earlier-published poems, the printing of the sonnets was markedly sloppy. (As just one glaring example, number 116 was mistitled 119--probably due to a piece of type set upside-down and not caught in by the proofreader). It met with little interest. No second printing. Barely more than 20 copies of that edition are known to survive.
It's my intuition that an editor, or possibly the poet himself, put the pre-existing sonnets into the order in which they stand today--a sort of cobbled-together narrative but with many discontinuities in tone and subject. Very different, for example, from the artfully sequenced series by Sir Philip Sidney narrating a love affair, Astrophil and Stella.
Some of these sonnets of Shakespeare's may have been abstract exercises. But most, I think, bear earmarks of particular reference, though disguised.
Being understood on different levels by persons with different degrees of knowledge, and presenting work that could stand on its own while puzzling outsiders, was IMO part of the game. It's there in the plays too, which could be understood and appreciated differentially by the bricklayer's apprentice in the pit, the middle-class housewife in the gallery, and the upper-class patron, who might actually be seated on stage for better viewing in both directions or be attending a private performance alongside the Queen. The plays contained on occasion topical references, literary echoes, suspected caricatures of actual people, and other "Easter eggs." People of the day, too, expected and enjoyed literary puzzles like Thomas Nashe's baroquely delphic pamphlets; figuring out what Nashe meant is still an industry.
And the more mysterious the choice of words, I think, the greater likihood that something mysterious was going on behind the scrim, for those to see that might.
Even if we can't "solve" the riddle of reference, there may be some interesting points.
Prophecy:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come....
The world-soul seems like a pretty abstruse idea for Shakespeare's setting. It may date back to the ancient Greek disciples of Pythagoras, or earlier, but the first known written reference is in Plato's mystical dialogue, Timaeus, where the title character relates,
"...[T]he Creator...put intelligence in soul and soul in body...and the world became a living soul...and contained all intelligible beings, and...included all visible creatures.…and the soul, interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven, herself turning in herself, began a divine life of rational and everlasting motion. The body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible.…"
--Benjamin Jowett translation
This idea that the universe itself possesses a soul became current in Renaissance Europe thanks to the magico-scholarly works of Marsilio Ficino in the 1400s, who was also an astrologer--thus, the world-soul is also a prophet.
Eclipse
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured.
Eclipses in Shakespeare portend, or symbolize, major disasters. The one in the poem has already happened. I haven't been able to find reference to any lunar eclipses visible in England in Shakespeare's lifetime--maybe someone else can do that?--though there were partial solar ones in 1590 and 1605. The presumption is that this moon is metaphorical.
It's been suggested that the eclipse of this "mortal moon" refers to the death of a person.
But isn't it the whole point of an eclipse that the sun or moon survives? To us it is. We, confident in our materialism and predictive power, view each eclipse as a reassurance. But in Shakespeare's day it was no such thing, rather a potential prologue to worse. (I would say, though, that thought deserves to be kept open as an option. Could an eclipse refer to an illness, for example?)
Specifically, it's been suggested that the "mortal moon" refers to Queen Elizabeth, whose death came March 24, 1603. This would make some sense, as the moon was associated mythologically with the Roman virgin-goddess Diana, while Elizabeth systematically cultivated her image--turning her problematical single and childless state into a positive--as England's Virgin Queen.
That interpretation would also make sense in that great and public apprehension existed over what might happen after the Queen's death. Not only was she childless, she had refused to name an heir. People remembered all too well how bloodshed and chaos could follow from conflict over succession.
That disaster didn't happen. Unknown, probably, even to Elizabeth, her Chancellor Lord Burghley, the most powerful man in the kingdom, had already thrown his weight behind James VI of Scotland--son of Mary Queen of Scots, earlier executed for allegedly conspiring to overthrow Elizabeth. Thanks to quick action, no serious rival arose and the Scottish king smoothly proceeded to London, to be crowned England's James I as well.
The Augurs, of course, would be the pessimistic soothsayers who were wrong, and now--as professional soothsayers do--probably disavowed their own predictions. Whether there is more that that (the capitalization might suggest so) I have no notion.
Confined doom
But why would a humble playwright and poet celebrate such a national event as a monarchical succession, as having anything to do with
...the lease of my true love…
Supposed as forfeit to a cónfined doom.
When James came to the throne, there were also great apprehensions among the people concerning how he would govern.
For one thing, his mother had been Catholic. And the Church of Scotland was Calvinist. How would things go for the Church of England, when Catholic vs. Church of England conflict--ever since Henry VIII--had caused campaigns of torture, terrorism, insurrections, expropriations, executions? Not to mention the Church of England vs. radical Protestant conflicts, albeit at a lower level of violence, under Elizabeth herself.
Could James be trusted not to turn Catholic? Or at least take revenge on those who had executed his mother? Or might he, on the other hand, govern like a dour Puritan? For example, would he close the theaters?
Worst of all, James was a foreigner. A Scot. How could one king successfully rule two separate kingdoms? (England and Scotland would not be united until 1707.)
Wasn't there an inherent conflict of interest? Wouldn't he naturally favor one country over the other? And almost certainly it would be those other people who would benefit at England's expense!
As it turned out, King James did none of dreadful things that many feared. In fact, he took some early steps to extend an olive branch to various parties.
For example, James released a number of people who had been imprisoned by Elizabeth in the Tower of London--some of them for life.
At least one of whom might have been a patron and/or particular friend of Shakespeare.
Hold that thought?
And Shakespeare's own acting company, far from being closed down, gained a new patron, the King himself.
Peace proclaims
Here comes a really abstruse bit of trivia:
Casimir is classically an English, French and Latin form of the Polish name Kazimierz....It means "proclaimer (from kazać to preach) of peace (mir)."
Wikipedia
Coincidence?
Maybe not.
Casimir IV (in full Casimir IV Andrew Jagiellon)...was Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1440 and became King of Poland in 1447, holding both titles until his death [in 1492].
-- Wikipedia
There had been tension and resistance when Casimir, second son of the Polish monarch, was elected Grand Duke of Lithuania, in case exactly this dual responsibility might fall to him. But when his older brother died, Casimir became also an extremely successful ruler of both nations. And therefore a possible precedent for James.
(Chattier version, including Casimir's "cursed" tomb.)
And why would an English playwright think of Casimir, far away. over a century earlier, in referring to King James as a unifier and bringer of peace?
Well, for one thing London was a cosmopolitan city. Foreign residents and visitors were many. Queen Elizabeth herself had elaborately entertained a Polish Count, Albert Laski, in 1583. And theater folk had contacts from the lowest (servants) to the highest (patrons, and court officials, who arranged ) For another, playwrights were always ransacking history books, as well as other tales, for raw material. And finally, the story of Casimir might well gave been deliberately been put forward by the always public-relations minded government in order to help solidify support for the new King.
(Btw, it's just possible that I might be the first person to have suggested this connection. Don't be mean, please!)
A Prisoner
This idea is not original:
Among the prisoners released from the Tower by James was one Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. He was lucky not to have been executed. What he did to get locked up, originally for life, was taking part in a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth, led by the Earl of Essex, in 1601. Essex was condemned to die; so, originally, was Southampton, but the Queen was persuaded to commute his sentence.
There are at least two direct connections between Southampton and Shakespeare. He was the dedicatee of Shakespeare's two long poems published in the 1590s, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.
And Shakespeare's company was hired to entertain Essex's rebels the very night before their planned insurrection. They were questioned closely, denied knowledge, and escaped sanction.
Henry Wriotheseley has been one of the candidates for the Fair Youth of the sonnets, but there is no proof of this closer relationship. He returned to court in the reign of James, supported colonial enterprises, and died in 1624 of a fever contracted while fighting against the Spanish on the continent.
Olives of Endless Age
Coda.
Of course "olives" may simply be short for "olive branches," symbol of peace.
There was (and still is) also, coincidentally or not, a St. Olave's Church in central London. The name commemorates a Norwegian warrior king and saint who helped the English against the Danes, and who died in 1030.
The church dates back to at least the 1200s, when the original wooden building was replaced by stone. Practically "endless age"?
Coincidentally or not, St Olave's was the church where Elizabeth herself offered thanks after her own release from imprisonment the Tower during the reign of Queen Mary. Did others go there for the same purpose, perhaps? A number of historic figures were buried or entombed there.
This St. Olave's (oh, love?) stands, as it happens, in Hart (heart?) Street. Almost too good to be true?
There was another St. Olave's church, though, even older, in Southwark, where Shakespeare's Globe Theater was built in 1599. Th÷ original structure is believed to have been listed in the Domesday Book, 1086. Subject to flooding and damaged by fire, the church aa it later stood was demolished In the 1800s.
So who knows?
Speaking of plants, "balm" in Shakespeare's time meant a resinous, fragrant exudate of certain plants--a medicine, preservative and perfume.
Well, that's it. Longer than I meant. Go back to the top and reread the poem, if you have the patience? ;-) Does it seem richer, or more clear?
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And Happy Shakespeare's birthday, not quite too late!