Shakespeare’s Lost Sonnets: A Restoration of the Runes
by Roy Neil Graves, Professor of English
The University of Tennessee at Martin

 The Edited Texts of the Runes
in the 1609 Quarto: Sets I-III
Copyright © Roy Neil Graves 2003, All Rights Reserved

—Notes on Set I—

          Though scholars have often stressed the thematic unity in Sonnets 1-17 or 1-18 (see Ramsey 6), Kenneth Muir, Hilton Landry, and C. Knox Pooler have all concluded—without knowing about Q’s 11 lost sets—that Sonnets 1-14 form a thematic group. Pooler has suggested that Sonnet 15 is the first to treat the theme of immortalizing the poet’s friend through art. Muir finds consistency in the first 17 sonnets but notes that “in the last three…there is a change” as the theme of immortality through “the permanence of great poetry” takes over and that of encouragement to marry fades (Muir 45; Landry 144, crediting Pooler’s Arden edition).
          Necessarily, the general content of the sonnets in a set determines that of the sibling runes—and vice versa. Set I deserves the title “Marriage and Increase” since, however varied, its runes and sonnets all encourage union and procreation. (I reserve the “set rubrics” for the section of this site where the paraphrases occur, since these titles—though often suggested by the Q text—are, like the paraphrases, blatantly unauthorized, urely editorial additions.
           Set I houses no blockbuster sonnets—not one that has gained a wide readership or frequent anthology status.
          The set establishes patterns that the others follow. Each visible text is “a number,” and each sonnet follows an English rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg) that precludes any rhyme scheme in the runes. (If the runes rhymed using an English scheme, then the visible Sonnets 1 and 3 would have exactly parallel rhyme scheme—as would Sonnets 2 and 4; 5 and 7; 6 and 8; 9 and 11; 10 and 12; 13 and 14—and the supply of end-words would be sphinctered down hopelessly.)           Four sonnets of the 14 in Set I—1, 3, 4, and 10—use be/thee or me/thee couplet rhymes, generating incidental abaa rhymes in Runes 13 and 14 and “switched” rhymes in the couplets of Sonnets 3 and 4 that pun on “witty be / be witty” and “to be/not to be.”)
          Set I also illustrates Q’s underlying “warp-and-woof” structure, rationalizing the “knottiness” of both sets of texts. Eugene Gant’s reference in Look Homeward, Angel to the “woven density” of the Sonnets shows Thomas Wolfe’s apt prescience (278). (Gant finally gives up on the Sonnets because they are so hard.) Paul Ramsey’s “web” of connectedness is another metaphor with the same drift (6ff.). What Elizabethans liked in their knot-gardens, they also liked in their poetry: intricate, interlocked designs. The Q texts are a covert reductio absurdum of this interest.

***

          Looking at Set I and imagining the poems penned on a folio-sized leaf, about 22 x 17 inches, in the near-minuscule hand of the Thomas More remnant invites us to envision how the poet composed a given set. Writing the first sonnet of the set and the first lines of all 14 sonnets (generating Rune 1) would have imposed no unusual constraints, except that each line that Will composed had to start another poem. These two texts, Sonnet 1 and Rune 1, laid out the formal and thematic dimensions of the set. As the poet successively added lines, “down” or “across,” the texture of his set thickened and his choices grew more complex. Still, when he wrote any given line, his problem was to advance the sense and wit of two texts concurrently, not 28. Perhaps the poet roughed in all the lines for the set on a single folio leaf and then refined the texts on separate leaves, jot-and-tittle, so they could bear more punning freight. In any case, the process was exacting and tedious.
          Set I also shows how each of the 14 visible sonnets in a set parallels one line of a sonnet text, and how the 4-4-4-2 pattern of the leaf parallels three quatrains and a couplet. Q shows the sonnet couplets indented, and my restoration of the sets follows suit, generating the symmetry that the poet surely aimed at, a set arrangement that allows the two pages to mirror each other. Notably, the first mention of mirrors in Q—“Look in thy glass…” (Sonnet 3.1)—comes atop the righthand page just at the point where that page begins to “mirror” the other. All references in Q to mirrors are puns about the poet’s mirror-image set structure. (Sonnets and runes “mirror” each other, too.) In many other ways Q’s verses allude coyly to its architecture. If the poet meant all along to suppress the runes at the printing stage—or was resigned to their loss—then surely such references are clues, dropped to help us restore his lost magnum opus in the very way they have proven to do.
          All the figures in the Q lines about numbers and “counting” start to mean more when we know that a structure of numbers underpins the cycle. Many hidden puns are thus about “relevant” numbers. In Set I, the poet’s content points to his form in Sonnet 1.14—the start of Rune 14—by punning “Two-eight…,” the 28 texts on the spread that he is “starting” to complete. More cryptically, the set’s terminal pun “…deux meaned 8”—i.e., “2 stood as a ‘mean[s?]’ for 8”—reiterates the other one, the one that triggered our search for such obscure wit.
           Other game elements on the set spreads are starlike acrostic links of texts and of emphatic letters. While Will encoded AVON so that it appears only when Rune 1 gets recomposed, other alignments stand in file only on the visible spread. Reading “up” in Set I, e.g., reveals the emphatic first-line acrostics OFT and ALL. Reading down and left to right, a 14-element codestring teases us: FT I V[V]T FOLL AN V M VV (cf., e.g., “Fit [Stanza] eye, wit, follow new hymn. [signed] W.,” “Fit eye, witty fellow…,” “Of twat-folly, Anne, you mew [whine],” and “Half-taught fool Anne you mew [coop up].”
           The reverse codeline reads VVM V NA LLOFT [V]VIT F (cf., e.g., “Wm. you know, a lofty Wit, forte (F = S?)” and “Wm. you nail aloft—W., aye tough.” Other variant codelines inhere in each set—up-and-downs, side-to-sides, zig-zags.
          Finally, new strings of meaning emerge in the sets because two patterns of linearity are always at work in Q, and because whole texts can behave in the sets like lines—and, in the whole structure, like syllables. In each set, for example, the last two texts look (and may act) like a “couplet” to the whole unit (cf., e.g., Sets III, XI). Too, the content of any given poem, sonnet or rune, triggers 14 side-effect patterns. Thus the progression of ideas in any rune—often replete with octave-, sestet-, quatrain-, and couplet-like turns—roughly parallels the progression of the other runes in the set, with modulations, dramatic high points, and turns of thought acting like shared property. Imagine 14 cars driving on parallel roads in the same direction through 14 varied regions. The miracle, of course, is that each report of the trip, as any Q text records it, shows such a vividly particularized view of what’s out the window. The modulations of “sonnet logic” in the apparent texts do allow wide variations of substance in the runes. And a single striking image from any one sonnet can sometimes seem to give a rune its defining character, its main conceit.

                         Rune 3
     (Third lines, Set I: Sonnets 1-14)

     But as the riper should by time decease,
     Thy youth’s proud livery—so gazed on now,
     Who’s fresh—repair if now thou not renewest.
 4  Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
     Will play the tyrants to the very same.
     Make sweet (some vial) treasure thou, some place
     Doth homage to his new-appearing sight.
 8  Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly?
     Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die!
     Grant, if thou wilt, thou art belov’d of many,
     And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st.
12 When I behold the violet past prime,
     Against this coming end you should prepare—
     But not to tell of good or evil luck.
__________
     Glosses: 2) livery = uniform, flaunted “badge” (with phallic overtones and a pun on “liver,” a body part); 3) repair (subjunctive) = may depart; 6) Make (sb.) = Mate, Companion (ME); 7) his = youth’s (see 2); 14) not to tell of (elliptical) = it’s unclear whether you will have...

                         Rune 7
     (Seventh lines, Set I: Sonnets 1-14)

     Making a famine where abundance lies
     To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
     O’er who is he so fond, Will be the tomb?
 4  Profítless usurer, why do oft thou use
      Sap, check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,     
      That’s for thyself to breed another thee?
     Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still.
 8  They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
     When every private widow well may keep,
     Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate.
     If all were minded so, the times should cease,
12 And summers green. All girded up in sheaves,
     You “selve” again, after your self’s decease—
     Or fay with princes, if it shall go well.
__________
     Glosses: 2) say = express; 3) who = whom; fond = doting, foolish; Will = the poet; 4) do oft (also dost); 7) his points back to who...? in 3, but gone in 5 puns on “John,” suggesting Will’s son-in-law, Dr. John Hall; 8) They = The eyes of mortals (see 7), punning on “Th’ eye”; 9) well (adj., sb.) = fit, a pudendum, an inkwell; 10) a quiet allusion to Xanthippe, who once emptied a pisspot on Socrates’ head; 14) fay = fit snugly; thus, Or fay with = “or else fit snugly with”; alternately, “O’er, say, with princes, if....”

—Notes on Set II—

         Set II houses the first famous sonnet in the cycle, No. 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Seeing its familiar lines sharing space with new siblings is unsettling and may even generate a sort of anger—as if a teenage daughter in some household down our street were uprooted from her home and forced against everybody’s will to take lodgings with some alien family.
          Critics have noted that the first several overt texts here segue into the theme of immortality through art and downplay the exhortation to marry, but I believe that no one has detected in Sonnets 15-28 any especial thematic consistency. I can’t say for certain that I do, either. Now that we understand how each line in Q carries a double weight of meaning, we can see that keeping topical unity or telling any progressive story would have been more than doubly hard in Q.
          Particularly the materials of personal lament in Sonnets 27-28—which function like a closed couplet to Set II—color all 14 runes with “how hard this is,” so that that complaint, finally, may be what each rune seems to add up to, whatever has come earlier—a mix of material representing the muse and discussing the poet’s struggle to memorialize that figure. Whether or not Will composed the 11 sets (as they appear in Q) in sequence, Set II seems, at an early stage in the cycle, to say, “What have I gotten myself into? What can I hope to get out of this hopeless undertaking?” The runes make that complaint continually clear from 15 onward, while Sonnets 15-28 do not do so.
          Whatever thematic consistency can be found in the set, the unique variations of implicit dramatic situations and conceits are what make the runes vital. Three runes that show how a strong conceit can make a text memorable are Rune 21, where the muse is a “man of hues” hanging in the poet’s “bosom shop”; Rune 26, where the auditor is a “babe in the dark” and the poet is his nurse; and Rune 28, where the poet is trapped like a pregnant animal in the “lair” of his art.
          Set II has much else that is memorable: e.g., The poet’s struggle for conceits in 15; the theatrical imagery (always suggesting The Globe) in 17; and Will as “best painter” in 18 and 19. The imagined situation closing 20—where the poet envisions himself meeting the “friend” at last and being effectively dismissed, after all his efforts, with a polite handshake—evokes genuine pathos, especially after we know about the excruciating, self-isolating work he has undertaken.
          Three runes in Set II seem heavily influenced by familiarly problematic lines—all from Sonnet 20, “A Woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted”—where the first-line pun on “Onan” is just as much at work in the Sonnet 20 as in Rune 15. Offshoots of this Sonnet are Runes 16, 21, and 27, where we hear anew the famous address to “the Master Mistress of my passion” (Rune 16.6); the problematic line A man in hew all Hews in his controwling (Q Rune 21.6); and the suggestively bawdy comment “…she [i.e., Time] prickt thee out for women’s pleasure” (Rune 27.6)
          As in Set I, Runes 15-28 often call into question the “reality” of the auditor by hinting that the “increase” the poet speaks of may be that of his own poetry—with the implication that the “fairest creature” he addresses may be his own cycle or Beauty itself. Set II keeps this conundrum active by variously making us think the poet is talking to Sue and/or John Hall, to Anne, to Southampton, to the texts themselves, to Beauty, to himself, or to his own “dark ms.”
          On the leaf (see the paste-up arrangement), Set II houses the first of several lines in Q that are long enough to require parenthetical “doubling back” to make them fit the margins of the small-format page in the 1609 book. The couplet at Sonnet 28.13-14, punning “…draw my furrows longer” (28.13) and “…make grief’s length seem stronger” (28.14) invites us to start looking for such “long-line wit.
          Except for contiguous “WS” strings (Sonnets 17/21, 17/18) and “WH” strings (Sonnets 27/28), acrostic alignments of the bold, oversized letters on the leaf do not particularly strike the eye. The vertical code WDA B A M VVS LH SML suggests “Witty be aye m’ W.S. lay [poem] small.” The reverse letterstring SVVMA BAD suggests “Swami Bad.”

***

          Though any generalization (except about rhyme) on the absolute difference between the Sonnets and the Runes is beset with problems, the poet does seem to give each sonnet a kind of topical unity that any given rune may lack. Still, the Runes typically cohere as texts in all kinds of ways—through figures, puns, echoic language, and even in many cases by the logic of octave, quatrain, sestet, and couplet; more so than the Sonnets, the Runes seem to me to progress by add-on association, meandering through a range of ideas and holding onto logic and sense somewhat more precariously and incrementally. The missing punch of rhyme is also a part of what they “don’t have.” As riddlic texts, the runes thrive on vague and prepositioned pronouns, a shifting point of view, and strained syntax. And Q’s punctuation, already unreliable in the Sonnets, becomes mostly irrelevant in the Runes—except on special occasions, where it works.

                         Rune 19
     (Fifth lines, Set II: Sonnets 15-28)

     When I perceive that men, as plants, increase,
     Now stand you on the top of happy hours.
     If I could write the beauty of your eyes!
 4  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines;
     Make glad and sorry, seasons—as thou fleetest,
     An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
     Making a couplement of proud compare
 8  For all that beauty that doth cover thee.
     So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
     Fore, “Through the painter must you see his skill.”
     Great princes’ favorites their fair leaves spread,
12 Duty so great. Which wit so poor as mine?
     For thin my thoughts, from far where I abide
     And—each though enemies—two ethers reign.
__________
     Glosses: 2) happy hours suggests an illuminated Book of Hours (see 10-11); 5) Make...seasons: i.e., “Seasons bring both joy and sorrow”; 6) eye suggests the sun; An eye puns on “Annie,” linking with Make (i.e., Mate) in 5 and Making in 7; 7) couplement = linkage (of eyes, of texts [such as Sonnets/Runes], etc.), analogy; 8) For all puns on “Fore-all” (phallic) and “For Hall” (suggesting Will’s son-in-law); 9) So puns on Sue, alluding to Will’s daughter Susanna, Mrs. John Hall; “Judy” is the other daughter; thus, e.g., the pun “Sue is our fairest trust—fore Judy S. aye”; 12) so (twice) puns further on Sue; mine puns on “m’ Anne (...Annie)”; 13) I puns on “aye,” “eye” (see 6), suggesting the sun; 14) And puns on Anne; two ethers reign puns on “...rain,” suggesting, “two eyes weep.”

—Notes on Set III—

         The lines of the two opening sonnets here—among the better known in Q—color all the runes in the set with melancholy contemplation; the affirmations of their couplets, by contrast, lend a relatively upbeat tone to Runes 41 and 42, as if to make those two a sort of “couplet close” to the runic string inherent on the leaf. Sonnet 33, with its butchered-looking confessional line mentioning “Heaven’s Sun [Son]” (Sonnet 33.14), provides a rare “Christian” detail—however “serious”—in a welter of Q verses sometimes verging on sacrilege. The acrostic NOT (Sonnets 35, 39, 42) catches the eye on the leaf, as does the familiar TT (41-42) and (less overtly) the long-line endpun “dusty f--ker” in the upper right (Sonnet 32.2).
The nascent figure of the Perverse Mistress, anticipated in Rune 26.13, finds various manifestations in Set III—e.g., as “Thy Amiss” (Rune 35), “Lascivious Grace” (Rune 41), and “Sweet Flattery” (Rune 42). Rune 32.9-10 here uses the concept of Rival Poet, first mentioned in Rune 19. These conceits—for the poet’s “perverse mysteries [cf. mss.]” and for himself in the “antagonistic” role of rune-writer—gain momentum as the cycle builds in later sets. On one level, at least, the “crime” of the auditor, portrayed as a “sweet thief” (Rune 42.7) etc., is his complicity in the runegame.
          As it emerges in the runes, the tenuous topical unity in Set III comes from a preoccupation with the bifurcated writing project itself, its paradoxes and ironies, the impossibility of its publication. The usual text in the set is a lament or complaint. If Set I urges “increase” and Set II deals with the poet’s role in securing the muse fame, Set III stresses the poet’s alienation from the very figure he “flatters” and—until the last covert text or so—seems to be saying, “What have I gotten myself into here?”
The editorial title I’ve imposed on Set III denotes not only Will’s personal isolation—as romantically suffering artist, necessarily isolated by the act of writing from the object(s) of his intense attention—but also these unprinted “discards,” the Runes, that we are not recompositing, as it were, from the “outcast” fragments of Q, as printed. Though OED shows “state” emerging late (1874) as a technical engraving term, the meaning “condition (of a ms.)” is already inherent in the ME meaning: “One of several forms or conditions in which an object…is found to exist.”
          Emerging Stratford-focused materials invite new readings of the Sonnets in the set, but the irreducible mysteries of biography seem to remain locked inside the poet’s crafty brain.

                          Rune 37
     (Ninth lines, Set III: Sonnets 29-42)

     Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
     Then can I grieve at grievances foregone—
     Thou, art, the grave where buried love doth live.
 4  Oh, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought
     Ev’n so: My sun one early morn did shine!
     Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief,
     For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense:
 8  I may not evermore acknowledge thee
     So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised.
     Be thou the tenth muse, ten times more in worth,
     Oh, absence, what a torment wouldst thou prove!
12 I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief.
     (Ay me, but yet thou might’st my seat forbear!)
     If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain.
__________
      Glosses: 1) Yet = Still; these thoughts = what I’m thinking now as I write—i.e., these verses; 2) foregone = in the past; 4) Q voutsafe = vouchsafe, i.e., “agree to grant”; 8) the line may pun, “I may not ever, More, acknowledge thee,” alluding to Will’s part in the unpublished (probably censored) play about Sir Thomas More;10) self-consciously, tenth and ten occur in line 10, along with further (this time disparaging) wit about the More play; 13) seat = homeplace, soul, punning on “backside.” The line jokes, “You might at least leave my backside alone!” with my seat (like thy sensual fault in 7) a witty metaphor for the Runes, which are bottom-end texts, decorously covered.