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Detachment and Engagement in Shakespeare's Sonnets : 94, 116, and 129

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Carol Thomas Neely
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Abstract

Sonnets 94, 116, and 129 are unique in their mode and function. They are general, impersonal, deliberately detached from the conflicts explored in surrounding sonnets. However, the model created in each sonnet breaks down, resulting in heightened conflict in ensuing sonnets. Sonnet 94 creates a hypothetical “they” who share the conventional Petrarchan beloved’s incorruptible beauty and self-possession. But as the sonnet proceeds, the model collapses, and the corruption of the friend is painfully confronted in Sonnets 95 and 96. Similarly, the abstract model of perfect love in 116 is qualified in the couplet and destroyed in Sonnet 117. Sonnet 129 begins by defining lust as, like the love of 116, absolute and inalterable, but concludes in paradox, thus serving as a paradigmatic introduction to the dark lady sonnets. These three sonnets, however detached and immobile, participate in the ceaseless flow of the sequence, reacting to or acting upon the surrounding sonnets.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 92 , Issue 1 , January 1977 , pp. 83 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1977

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References

Notes

1 “An Essay on the Sonnets,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 303.

2 Certain other sonnets detach themselves from the sequence, but not in the same ways and not with the same force. Sonnet 5 (“Those howers that with gentle worke did frame”), although not naming lover or beloved, is closely linked to Sonnet 6, which explicitly draws a particular moral from the preceding sonnet: “Then let not winters wragged hand deface, / In thee thy summer ere thou be distil'd.” Four sonnets other than 129 are anomalous in the dark lady portion of the sequence. Three of them, 145 (“Those lips that Loves owne hand did make”), 153 (“Cupid laid by his brand and fell a sleepe”), and 154 (“The little Love-God lying once a sleepe”), are unusual in their light tone, their mode of presentation, their conventionality, and their thinness, but in them, as in the rest, an “I” speaks about love and about his beloved. In the fourth. Sonnet 145 (“Poore soule the center of my sinfull earth”), the speaker is indubitably the “I” of the sequence. meditating on its great theme, corruption, but offering a variation on the usual strategies for confronting it. All quotations are from the 1609 Quarto edition of the sonnets as reprinted in Shakespeare's Sonnets (Garden City: Doubleday, n.d.).

3 Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954), pp. 102–06 (on 94), 92–93 (on 116), 35 (on 129); J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1956), pp. 216–21, 180–81, 264–66; Hilton Landry, Interpretations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), Chs. i (on 94), iv (on 129); James Winny, The Master-Mistress : A Study of the Sonnets (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), pp. 163–69 (on 94), 26 (on 116), 112–15 (on 129); and Peter Martin, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Self, Love and Art (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 30–44, 88–96, 55–61, discuss these sonnets in connection with the themes of the sequence as a whole. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (New York : New Directions, 1960), pp. 85–97 ; Albert Gerard, “The Stone as Lily,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 96(1960), 155–60; L. C. Knights, Explorations (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 68–70; Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 152–68, focus intensively on the text of Sonnet 94, placing it in the context of the surrounding sonnets (Booth), of the first 17 sonnets (Empson), and of Measure for Measure (Knights). Most of these critics are led by the contexts to find some degree of irony in the octave of 94, most talk as if 94 were about and addressed to the young man and as if 129 were about and addressed to the dark lady, ignoring the deliberate impersonality of both poems. Explicating the text in relative isolation from context are Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), pp. 188–91, 172–76, 18788; Elias Schwartz, “Shakespeare's Sonnet xciv,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22(1971), 397–99; Robert Graves and Laura Riding, “A Study in Original Punctuation and Spelling: Sonnet 129,” in Discussions of Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 116–24; Richard Levin, “Sonnet cxxix as a ‘Dramatic’ Poem,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 16 (1965), 175–81; and Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELH, 23 (1956), 279–98. Even when the poems are considered in isolation, there is a compulsion to make them too quickly and too facilely personal. Neither group of essays attempts to account for these sonnets' detachment or to show how this detachment is functional in the sequence.

4 Critics often claim that these sonnets resolve issues, and rearrangers of the sequence, revealing similar assumptions, place them at the conclusion of “groups” of sonnets. Lever claims that Sonnet 94 “results in a certain clarification of the main issues” (p. 216) and terms 129 a “palinode” in which “in a frenzy of invective the Poet purges himself of its (Desire's) bitter fruits” (p. 180). Winny says 94 provides a “masterly summing-up” (p. 164) and 129 provides a “massive summingup” (p. 112) of the issues that preoccupy the poets in the two parts of the sequence. Tucker Brooke, Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), p. 42, sees 94 as following and “developing the moral of no. 70” (93 in Quarto) and leaves it in the middle of a group, but 116 concludes a group, and 129 (with 146) concludes his sequence. Brents Stirling in The Shakespeare Sonnet Order : Poems and Groups (Berkeley : Univ. of California Press, 1968) places 94 at the conclusion of his group n H (Sonnets 91–93, 69–70, 95–96, 94) arguing that it is “climactic and ‘final’ ” (p. 105). Sonnet 116 concludes his Group iv I (Sonnets 106,59-60,107-08,115-16) while Sonnets 129 and 146 are a group of their own with 146 seen as “resolving” and 129 seen as either introduction or conclusion (p. 224). The tendency to see these three sonnets (and 146 as well) as resolutions has led critics to neglect their relationships to the sonnets that follow them and that dramatically reveal the intensification of conflicts, not their resolution.

5 Schwartz, “Shakespeare's Sonnet xciv,” p. 398. The two terms that explicitly evaluate the poem's subject, “excellence” and “sweet,” are favorable. I take “rightly,” following W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath, eds., Shakespeare's Sonnets (London: Univ. of London Press, 1964), p. 214, to mean “truly,” “really,” and hence, as its unemphatic second place position in the line confirms, to be matter-of-fact in tone, neither straightforwardly praising nor ironically dispraising. Ingram and Redpath usefully note that nowhere in its 23 other Shakespearean uses (all in the plays) is “rightly” used in its moral or legal sense to mean “rightfully” or “justly.”

6 The first line is a variation of the proverb, “To be able to do Harm and not do it is noble,” Morris Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950), H170. Booth, Essay, p. 163, mentions the similarity of “their” attributes to courtly “daunger.”

7 Quotations are from Petrarch, Sonnets and Songs, trans. Anna Maria Armi (New York: Pantheon, 1946); and from The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, ? (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960). Sonnet numbers are cited in parentheses.

8 I can see no way to be grammatically certain whose “excellence” is referred to in the line nor any point in seeing ambiguity here. I attribute the “excellence” to the poem's subject in view of the aptness of allowing “excellence” to sum up the attributes given them in the quatrain, of the expectation of a contrast between the subject and others here as in the first and third quatrains, and of Folio's comma after “others.” “Steward” here then means one who is subordinate as in R iii iii.vii. 133 : “take on you the charge / And kingly government of this your land; / Not as protector, steward, substitute / Or lowly factor for anothers gain.”

9 See Landry, Interpretations, pp. 7–25 ; Empson, Some Versions, pp. 90–92; Knights, Explorations, p. 69. For an extreme statement of the octave's irony see Hubler, Sense, p. 103.

10 Similarly, in the plays, sexuality, when seen as most healthy and positive, is associated with procreation—often in surprising contexts. In As You Like It, Rosalind's realism identifies Orlando, almost as soon as she has fallen in love with him, as “my child's father,” merging sexuality with procreation. In Measure for Measure, Lucio, the pimp, uncharacteristically views sexuality without disgust or cynicism when he describes Juliet's pregnancy: “As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time / That from the seedness the bare fallow brings / To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb / Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry” (i.iv.41-44). At the last, the violent eroticism of Cleopatra's Liebestod diffuses into tender maternal eroticism: “Peace, Peace! / Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, / That sucks the nurse asleep? … As sweet as balm, as soft as air, as gentle—” (v.ii.308-12).

11 Hallet Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 190, says the image structure of 94 is Italian; Empson, Some Versions, p. 88, talks of the “jump from octet to sestet”; Hubler, Sense, p. 103, talks of the “full stop” after the “octave” ; Landry, Interpretations, pp. 24–25, says “the Sonnet provides a classic example of the so-called Petrarchan break” and contrasts the “octave,” which he interprets in terms of Sonnets 92 and 93, with the “sestet,” which he interprets in terms of Sonnets 95 and 96. However, Booth, Essay, p. 165, says “Line 9 both sharply divides and firmly unites the octave and the last six lines,” characteristically having it both ways. His following discussion illuminates both contrasts and similarities between the first two quatrains and the third. Modern editions help to create the division that modern critics discuss by their substitution of a period for Quarto's semicolon after “excellence” and by (in many cases) removing Quarto's semicolon after “slow.” See, e.g., the editions of Tucker Brooke, Irving Ribner and George Lyman Kittredge, G. B. Harrison, Edward Hubler, Douglas Bush and Alfred Harbage. Hardin Craig, W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath, as well as the Signet and Riverside editions.

12 Richard P. Wheeler, “Poetry and Fantasy in Shakespeare's Sonnets 88–96,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 151–62, notes this shift—“But the poem seems to deteriorate, or perhaps slide into a different mode, as it moves toward placing the young man within the frame developed by the first eight lines” (p. 160). Wheeler's article describes in rich detail the progression in this group of sonnets. I disagree, however, with his view that the “control” and “authority” of the poem's opening are achieved by the “establishment of a personal presence behind impersonal statements” (p. 160); they are achieved precisely by the elimination of the personal presence. I am also indebted to Wheeler for many conversations about the sonnets; our agreements and disagreements have been invaluable to me.

13 Cf. Some Versions, pp. 94–95, and Landry, Interpretations, p. 26.

14 The problem is that “mine is thy good report” is semantically and syntactically ambiguous, and the vagueness of the admonition that introduces the couplet, “But doe not so,” further complicates the meaning. “Report,” invariably glossed as “reputation,” has a prior meaning, “account,” which would seem to be its primary sense in 96, a sonnet about the public evaluation that precedes and creates reputation. “[T]hy good report,” grammatically ambiguous, can mean “your good reputation” (which is also mine, accrues to me as well) or “your favorable account” (my positive evaluation of you or your positive evaluation of me). These ambiguities are exploited in an exchange in Cymbeline touched off by a nearly identical phrase:

Cloten. There is gold for you.
Sell me your good report.
Lady. How? my good name? or to report of you
What 1 shall think is good? (ii.iii.83-86)

Cloten, of course, uses “report” to mean “account” as does Shakespeare in Sonnet 83 when he apologizes, “And therefore have I slept in your report.” In view of these ambiguities, the couplet seems to take on different meanings in the quite different contexts of the two sonnets. In Sonnet 36, “But doe not so” means “Don't damage your reputation by publicly honoring or acknowledging me.” The rest of the couplet must then mean something like “I love you in such a way that, as long as you are mine, your reputation is necessarily mine without any need for public acknowledgment” or, perhaps, “I necessarily have your favorable account of me, and don't need it made public.” In Sonnet 96, however, “But doe not so” means “Don't use your power to corrupt others” (instead of “Don't try to save me”). The rest of the couplet then means: “Whatever you do, or whatever others may say [cf. ”some say thy fault is youth, some wantonesse“ and the ”ill report“ of Sonnet 95], I love you in such a way that my account of you is favorable.” In 36 the poet needs the friend's “good report” ; in 96 the friend needs that of the poet.

15 Hubler, Sense, p. 93, says that this marriage is “true friendship”; Lever, Elizabethan, p. 264, calls it a “figurative match … whose progeny will be immortal verse”; Burckhardt, “Poet as Fool and Priest,” p. 292, says that it is “speech.” Hilton Landry, “The Marriage of True Minds: Truth and Error in Sonnet 116,” Shakespeare Studies, 3 (1967), 98–110, notes the critical disagreement about this apparently simple poem and illuminates its complexity by placing it in the context of the surrounding sonnets.

16 In Petrarch's Song 73 and in numerous imitations of its image (e.g., Spenser's Sonnet 34), the poet is the pilot or ship and his lady (in Petrarch's song, specifically her eyes) is the star to guide him through the storm : “As when a windstorm cries, / The weary pilot at night lifts his head / Toward the two lights that stay fixed at our pole, / Thus in the tempest's dread / That I endure for love, her shining eyes / Are the true sign and comfort of my soul.” See later uses of the image cited by Lisle Cecil John in The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 122.

17 I am indebted to Jan Hinely for alerting me to the possibilities of irony throughout Sonnet 116.1 do not see the poem, however, as deliberately ironic, but rather, like 94, as a straightforward description of ideals which, however, erode throughout the poems as their unattainability and even, perhaps, undesirability, become apparent. I have also learned much about Elizabethan sonnet sequences from conversations with Hinely and from her illuminating and wide-ranging manuscript on the subject.

18 The Elizabethan Love Sonnet, p. 174. Almost all commentators are eager to remove Sonnet 129 from what is felt to be an inappropriate place in the 1609 Quarto and to couple it with Sonnet 146. This arrangement allows the bad taste left by the unmitigated bitterness of 129 to be sweetened by the renunciations in 146 and its disquieting conclusion to be passed over. An appropriately solemn, upbeat conclusion to the sequence is thereby provided—“the one possible finale,” Lever calls it (p. 181). See also n. 4 above. But most of the dark lady sonnets lie between the description of lust in 129 and the renunciation of the flesh in 146; even this latter sonnet does not conclude the sequence. Its assertions fall apart, too, in Sonnet 147, “My love is as a feaver longing still,” which is a bitter translation of the imagery of 146. Instead of the soul feeding triumphantly on death, love is eating the speaker up, “Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill.” My own speculation is that Sonnets 153 and 154, pale and inept though they may be, are intended as a conclusion of sorts to the dark lady sonnets, paralleling the conclusion in Sonnet 126 of the sonnets to the young man. These last two sonnets are finally able to dispense with the dark lady, handing her over to the convention as Sonnet 126 handed the youth over to time. Neither resolution nor palinode, they provide a stopping place, a comic epilogue, “proving” in another mode what we and the poet already know all too well : “Love's fire heates water, water cooles not love.”

19 The mingled pleasure and pain of Sidney's wry farewell to his “old companion,” Desire, and the abrupt baffled conclusion—“Now banisht art—but yet, alas, how shall”—have parallels in 129. However, Sidney's sonnet on Desire, “Thou blind man's marke, thou foole's selfe chosen snare” (which is often linked with “Leave me ? Love, which reachest but to dust” and appended to the Astrophel and Stella sequence, and which is frequently cited as an analogue or source for Sonnet 129), is in fact in sharp contrast to 129. Neither the personal mode of Sidney's sonnet, its theme that desire is destroying his higher aspirations, nor the concluding triumph over desire finds parallels in Shakespeare's sonnet. “Desire” and “Leave me ? Love” are similar to the sonnets I am discussing in their generalized openings and themes, but both conclude intimately, with a wish (“Desiring nought but how to kill desire”) and a prayer (“Eternall Love maintaine thy life in me”). Quotations are from The Poems of Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford : Clarendon, 1962).

20 The sonnet uses antimetabole or regression, which turns the sentence around on itself in 11. 2 and 14; anadiplosis, the repetition of a word at the end of one sentence and the beginning of another, in “mad … Mad” ; anaphora, the repetition of words at the beginning of clauses, in “Past reason hunted … Past reason hated” ; polyptoron or traductio, the repetition of words derived from a single root, in “had … having,” “proof… provd”; repeated modifiers in 11. 3 and 4; progression, or contrary sentences, in “Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,” and an additional uncatalogable repetition of the had/mad rhyme at the end and beginning of lines. Douglas L. Peterson, “A Probable Source for Shakespeare's Sonnet cxxix,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 5 (1964), 381–84, argues that a passage in the third book of Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhétorique is a source of the theme and grammatical schemes of the sonnet which is “the embodiment of an intention expressly rhetorical” (p. 381). The article usefully calls attention to the nature and number of such devices, and Wilson's Arte may be a “source” of sorts. But rhetorical schemes are not the poem's raison d'être. They are instruments used to achieve a detached tone and to embody lust's characteristic movement without progression.

21 My reading of the sequence corresponds in general to Northrop Frye's description of the sonnets to the young man as a series of cycles in which the poet moves “through every aspect of his love, from the most ecstatic to the most woebegone.” “How True a Twain,” in The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Edward Hubler (New York: Basic, 1962), p. 40. Extending Frye's reading, I would see the dark lady sonnets as a final revolution of the cycle, magnifying the darker side which has been there from the start.

22 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random, 1952), p. 208.