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 IV-VI
Copyright © Roy Neil Graves 2003, All Rights Reserved

—Notes on Set IV—

         As in the other sets, these 14 runes sweep across the flow of 14 sonnets and take figures and meaning from them. (Though one might view the symbiosis from the opposite angle, the sonnets more than the runes are topically focused.) One effect is to make the runes in a set seem more like siblings that the sonnets do, because all the runes share somewhat similar bits and pieces that make their associational patterns feel less discrete, more “alike.” However, since each sonnet itself undergoes twists and turns, resolving in a couplet that may reverse the drift of its quatrains, each runes gains its own character. First-line and last-line regroupings, particularly, have natures partly contingent on where they fall in the set; no doubt the same is true of the sonnets—which the poet laid out in ways that would give the runes thematic places to go, drifts to follow, lines of thought to pursue.
          Sonnets 43-47, which open Set IV, elaborate the subject of “eyes” in various conceits. Though this popular Renaissance topic seems relatively quibblesome to modern readers because of its Metaphysical intricacies and nuanced wordplay, here it allows Will to explore the question of vision, including his own conception of the future and how his time-consuming project may eventually fare. All the runes in the set, then, open with variations on the notion of “seeing.” Sonnets 48-52, the next loose group in Set IV, variously deal with the poet’s “pilgrimage” toward the auditor/muse/friend—whoever that figure is in any given instance. The pilgrimage motif generates some sharp self-denigrating imagery, with Will a writer/rider on a “dull beast,” making haste slowly. Sonnet 53—opening with the question “What is your substance?”—initiates a winding-down group of four sonnet texts that explore questions of truth in art. Some of the material here seems vaguely classical—with references to Adonis, Helen, Mars, and “Grecian” attire. One of the closing sonnets in the set, No. 55, “Not Marble, nor the guilded monument,” the most famous of the visible texts here, deals affirmatively with the capacity of art to enshrine the beloved subject; its materials get scattered in the unrhymed but still couplet-like endings of the runes, providing quiet resolves of various kinds.
          The business of “naming the sets,” a small item among scores of editorial challenges, becomes a useful exercise mainly because it requires distilling diverse materials and finding what is new. Obviously, the earlier topics—preserving the friend’s beauty, contemplating the paradoxes and mixed, “doomed” nature of the current project—persist in Set IV. Set III has tended toward melancholy contemplations of how the writing project itself alienates the poet from his subject(s). In that sense those texts seem self-focused. Here in Set IV the new business of “eyes” allows the poet to turn outward, not only envisioning “where the friend is” but also looking toward the eventual discovery of what he is about. The sonnet texts about progressing toward a goal also help move the poet out of himself and away toward his auditors, whoever those might eventually be; even at their bleakest, these new figures at least establish a teleology and eschew weepy self-pity.
          As the person most responsible for the current “new unfolding”—for revealing what Will calls his “sharpened” stone or “edge”—I hear in Set IV whole poems in which the poet might well be talking directly to me and, by extension, to any and all future readers, creating hypothetical scenarios that just now we are all helping to eventuate. While these comments would have worked well enough in the poet’s own day to address his coterie readers—Dr. Hall, Thomas Thorpe, Southampton, or others—if they ever picked through the artifact-strewn terrain of the poet’s underworld, Will seems rightly to have anticipated that private, contemporary readings of his texts would remain limited and underground, and also tht someday the Great Work of the Quarto might be unleashed on the world. One motivation for finishing the project must surely have been his desire to leave a lasting mark that would reveal the intricacies of his capabilities as an artist.
           Will has a way of providing what look like clues about almost everything—including the naming of the sets. Thus, in Rune 49.11 we hear the term “Art of Beauty” set, just as earlier we detected the suggestion that “The Long Year Set” might apply. Since such clues are random and inconclusive, I’ve decided to apply topical labels reasonably consistent with substantive materials—using where possible terms and conceits the poet himself suggests somewhere or other.
          The Set IV leaf opens with WIT across the top (a part of the Rune 41 acrostic). Eyecatching, too, is the empaneled vertical acrostic string TAWS (Sonnet 45 down): The verb “taw” (OEff.) meant “to soften leather” and, figuratively, “to flog,” and the rare noun “taw” (1562) denoted prepared leather. Since Will’s father John was a glover and whitawer, a curer of glove skins (Harrison 8), TAWS seems almost as crafty as the AVON string on the Set I leaf. Because the Greek “Tau” was a cross-shaped “T”—a St. Anthony’s Cross and sacred symbol in the Middle Ages (OED)—the string gains further relevance in an “acrostic” setting, encouraging the reading of the vertical acrostic codeline of which TAWS is a part: WBT IHSN TAWS MH O cf. “‘Tan’ [VV = Ten] be tease in ‘Taw,’ some owe [acknowledge],” “Why, Betty is into S.-hymn, O,” “Whipped, I sin, ‘Tau’ is my ladder [= H, implying ‘ladder to heaven’], O,” “Whip, tease, and toss m’ ‘O’ [round, rune],” “Webbed, eye ladder’s end, eye W.S. hymn, O […m’ ‘O’],” “W. be teasing t’ awe ass more.” With B=8, cf. “Weighty, I sin, Tau [The Cross] is m’ Ho[pe?],” “…Tau is my Ladder, O.”
          The reverse of this codeline, OHM S WAT N SHIT BW, generates SWAT, SHIT, and a form of homme. Cf. “Homme is weighty and shitty beau,” “Hommes wade in shit beau,” “O, Miss, wade in shit beau,” “O-ms. wight, in shit be W.,” “Hommes, waiting is Hittite W.” The clue “bias” in Rune 56 encourages reading the diagonal code on the leaf: W BI TH T S AMN VVHS O cf. “Weighty Th[omas] T[horpe] is a man wise, O,” “Why, Betty is a menace, O,” “Weighty (Witty) that salmon (Simon). Why so?” The reverse of this code yields other possibilities: OSHVVN MASTHT I BW cf. “Ocean masted I be. W.,” “O, shun m’ ass, Th.T., aye beau.”

                         Rune 43
     (First lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see.
     If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
     The other two—slight air and purging fire—
 4  Mine eye and heart, are at a mortal war:
     Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took.
     How careful was I when I took my way;
     Against that time (if ever that time come)
 8  How heavy do I journey on the way.
     Thus can my love excuse the slow offence;
     So am I as the rich, who’s blessèd. Key,
     What is your substance? Whereof are you made?
12 Oh how much more doth beauty beauteous seem!
     Not marble nor the gilded monument,
     Sweet love, renew thy force. Be it not said.
__________
     Glosses: 1) wink = cry, nap, ignore reality, tease; 2) flesh is a compound of earth and water; 3) The other two (amplifying 2) round out the four primal elements (earth, water, air, fire); 5) league = covenant, three-mile distance, with the pun “Betwixt...., a leg I stuck!”; 6) took my way = left you, left Stratford to come to London, started the Q cycle of Sonnets/Runes; 7) Against = Regarding, Looking toward (with Against punning, “A gay (Ache...,) Anne Shakespeare [st = the family name cipher] ”; 9) offence = stumbling, indignity; 10) Key puns on “Quay” (landing point); 11) substance echoes 2; 13) gilded puns on “guilded,” i.e., cabalistic.

                          Rune 45
     (Third lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee;
     For then, despite of space, I would be brought
     Thee. First (my thought), the other (my desire)—
 4  Mine eye, my heart their pictures—sight would bar
     When that mine eye is famished for a look
     That to my use it might unusèd stay
     Whenas thy love hath cast his utmost sum.
 8  Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
     “From where thou art, why should I haste me thence,
     The which he will not ev’ry hour survey
     Since everyone hath, every one, one shade?”
12 The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem;
     But you shall shine more bright in these contents
     Which but today by feeding is allayed.
__________
     Glosses: 1) But = Except, Only; they puns “th’ eye” while vaguely suggesting “other people” and pointing to thought and desire—parallels in 3-4 to eye and heart; 2) brought encodes a pun on “burrowed” and on B-row (in the 2nd row, i.e., Row B); 5) famished helps explain feeding in 14; 7) Whenas = When; 11) shade (ambig.) = complexion, shadow, bosom companion; 14) by feeding is allayed puns “...beef eating, eye salad,” where “salad,” meaning “something mixed” (OED 1601), suggests these contents (see 13)—i.e., the Q texts, and especially the Runes.

                         Rune 47
     (Fifth lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     Then, thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright
     Know matter—then, although my foot did stand
     Fore. When these quicker elements are gone,
 4  My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie.
     With my love’s picture, then, my eye doth feast.
     But thou to whom my jewels trifles are,
     Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass
 8  The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
     O, what excuse will my poor beast then find?
     Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare.
     Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit—
12 The canker blooms—have full as deep a die.
     When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
     So, love, be thou, although today thou fill.
__________
     Glosses: 1) thou = the friend or unknown future decipherer; 2) Know (Q No) also puns on “No”; foot suggests “metrical unit,” verses; 3) When...gone suggests, “When I'm dead and the witty Runes are lost,” with quicker pointing back to foot in 2; the pun “Foreign tease” points to wasteful war in 13; 4) heart puns on “art,” and him, on “hymn”; 5) the picture may be a miniature (see jewels in 6, and see line note to Rune 51.5); 7) Against = Anticipating, Looking toward; 8) woe puns on “Whoa!”; 12) die: also, dye; 14) pun: “So-low beetle, toad odd eye, tough, ill.”

                         Rune 49
     (Seventh lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     To the clear day, with thy much clearer light
     For nimble thought, can jump both sea and land
     My life—being made of four with two, all one!
 4  But the defendant doth that plea deny;
     Another time mine eye is my heart’s guest.
     Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
     When love converted from the thing it was,
 8  As if by some instinct, the wretch did know
     Then should I spur, though mounted on the wind.
     Like stones of worth they thinly placèd are
     On Helen’s cheek: All art, of beauty set,
12 Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
     Nor Mars his sword nor wars. Quick fire shall burn
     Tomorrow: See again, and do not kill.
__________
     Glosses: 3) four suggests the four elements, four limbs; two suggests eyes, Sonnets/Runes; My life puns on “My leaf” (i.e., page, spread), with four and two alluding to the folio spread arrangement in the Ur-text; 4) defendant (ambig.) point to the thee of 1 (the poet’s light-giver) and to mine eye (5) and love (7); 5-6) family namepuns: m’ Annie, Anne, m’ Anne; 6) care (paradoxical) = concern, burden; 8) wretch (ambig.) points to the defendant (4), love (7); 10) they = my spurs (implied), punning “th’ eye”; 12) such thorns (ambig.) suggests the poet’s “spurs” (see 9, where Then puns on Thin), Helen’s lashes, archaic thorn (the symbol th, similar to p, which is in the line); 12-13) i.e., “Neither Mars...nor wars play...”;13) Quick fire suggests the sun (see 1); 14) See puns on Sea (see 2); kill echoes defendant (see 4), suggesting that the auditor/friend has destructive force.

                         Rune 5l
     (Ninth lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd made?
     But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought
     (Until life’s composition be) recured.
 4  To side this, title is empanelèd,
     So, either by thy picture or my love,
     Thee have I not lock’d up in any chest.
     Against that time do I ensconce me here:
 8  The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
     Then can no horse with my desire keep pace.
     So is the time that keeps you as my chest.
     Speak of the spring and foison of the year,
12 But for their virtue only is their show.
     ’Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
     Let this sad int’rim like the ocean be.
__________
     Glosses: 2) that I am not thought puns, “...that Hamnet thought,” alluding to Will’s dead son; 3) recured = made whole again, recurrent; 4) To side this = “To skirt this problem,” with the whole line alluding to the position of the sonnet and/or the runic text on the set leaf: “To [the] side, this title [i.e., number, poem text] is empanelèd”; 5) pun: “Southy [i.e., Southampton], our bitty picture ormolu [OED 1765, from F. or moulu, ‘ground gold’]”; 8) him... (ambig.) points to horse (see 9) and to I am not (2) while punning on him on,/T (8-9), i.e., Hamnet, and on “hymn”; 11) foison = harvest time; and foison puns, “and saw I son,” “and so eye son,” “Anne, Sue, eye son”; 12) for their puns on “father,” “for (fore..., [i.e., early in the verse line]), th’ heir,” alluding to Hamnet; 14) int’rim suggests “interlude,” “entr’acte” (see show in 12).

                         Rune 53
     (Eleventh lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     When in dead night, they’re fair, imperfect shade—
     But that so-much of earth and water wrought
     Who ev’n but now come back again assured—
 4  And by their verdict is determinèd,
     For thou nor farther, then, my thoughts canst move
     Within the gentle closure of my breast
     And this my hand against myself uprear,
 8  Which heavily he answers with a groan.
     Shall neigh no dull flesh in his fiery race
     To make some special instant special blest.
     The other, as your bounty doth appear,
12 Die to themselves. Sweet roses, do not so:
     Even in the eyes of all posterity,
     Come daily to the banks, that wen they see.
__________
     Glosses: 1) they’re = roses are (see 12); imperfect shade = thou (see 5), the unnamed listener/muse whom the poet addresses; 2) But = Just, Exactly; 5) For puns on “Far,” “[line] 4”; For thou nor farther... puns, “Farty, onerous art here/hear...”; 7) a mastubatory pun; 8) he = myself (with phallic innuendo); groan puns, “G-row I end,” pointing to Row G, i.e., line 7, just completed; 9) neigh puns on “nay” (v.), i.e., practice negation; 11) The other (ambig.) = roses (see 12), friends you leave there; 14) wen = mound, archaic (and thornlike) W, Will’s initial; wen they see puns on “windy sea,” “...th’ eye see.”

                         Rune 54
     (Twelfth lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     Through, heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay.
     I must attend times’ leisure with my moan
     Of their fair health, recounting it to me,
 4  The clear eyes’ moiety, and the dear hearts’ part;
     And I am still with them, and they with thee,
     From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part
     To guard the lawful reasons on thy part,
 8  More sharp to me than spurring. To his side,
     But love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade
     By new unfolding his imprison’d pride,
     And you in every blessèd shape we know.
12 Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odors made
     That wear this world out to the ending doom,
     Return of love, more blest may be the view.
__________
     Glosses: 1) Through, heavy sleep = “Life over, death...” and/or “Awake, fatigue...”; 2) times’ leisure = the pastimes of present and future ages, with a likely pun on “Tommy’s ‘leafure’...,” the pages Will has contracted to produce, agonizingly, for his printing agent, Thomas Thorpe; moan puns on “money” (see recounting in 3); 3) their = future ages’, i.e., times’; me = myself; pun: e.g., “Oft her fair, healthier cunt inched to me (...‘inchèd’ /...enjoyed Tommy)”; 4) moiety = half, share; 6) thou = you, my friend, and/or the reader; 6-7) thou mayst come and part / To guard... puns, “Thomas T. command part took...,” suggesting playfully that Will has lost control of the Q project; part / part / part (in 4, 6, 7) are exact rhymes; 9) jade (ambig.) = poor horse, fatigue, joke (jade [v.] = befool [OED 1679]); 10) a phallically suggestive line (see the pun in 3, above).

                         Rune 55
     (Thirteenth lines, Set IV: Sonnets 43-56)

     All days are nights to see till I see thee,
     Receiving naughts by elements so slow;
     This told, I joy but then no longer. Glad
 4  As thus, mine eyes’ due is their outward part,
     Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight,
     And even thence thou wilt be stol’n, I fear;
     To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws
 8  (For that same groan doth put this in my mind).
     Since from thee going he went wilful slow,
     Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope;
     In all external grace you have some part.
12 And so, of you, beauteous and lovely youth
     So—till the Judgment, that yourself arise
     As—call it winter, which being full of care.
__________
     Glosses: 3-4) pun: “Glad aye is (...Gladys...) th’ huss, my Annie S., dusty her outward part”; 5) Or, if puns, “Arise”; 6) And and wilt pun on Anne, Will; 8) that same groan puns, “that same G-row [i.e., line 7], Anne...”; groan puns, “G-row end,” pointing to line 7, “Row G” (see line note 53.8); 9) thee and he are both playfully ambiguous; pun: Will-ful; 11-12) pun: “tanned, soft you be, odious and lovely...”; 13) So—till puns on Sue, subtle; 14) As—call it puns, “A scalded...,” generating an oxymoron.

—Notes on Set V—
The ‘Flowerish’ Set on Youth (see Rune 65.4)

          This set houses several major sonnets on mutability, including Sonnets 60, 64, 65. Collectively the 28 texts here drift toward an emphasis on the poet’s obsequious role, insuring the friend’s permanence, through art, so as to record “what beauty was of yore” (Sonnet 68.14) for future ages, including ours; Will’s skepticism in his struggle is also a dominant topic in this set. Materials in the sonnets suggesting the flawed nature of both the poet and his subject (e.g., Sonnets 62, 67) color all the texts. Though some texts might be heard as addressing any current reader, the sense persists that Will has in mind some particular male auditor/muse with whom he shares a dark secret, though what the friend’s “sin” is remains mysterious. (Perhaps it is merely being a part of the coterie, with its School of Night aspects.) Adumbrations of the Dark Mistress (a conceit for the ms.) and the “other poet(s)” antagonistic to Will appear here and there in the set.
          Because the Sonnets themselves shift person (from “you” to “he” particularly), the Runes pick up a kind of name-that-pronoun ambiguity that usually is not such a factor in the overt texts. Here Sonnets 57-61 maintain a second-person address that Sonnet 62—where the paradoxical “thee/myself” intrudes—confounds. Sonnets 63-68 generally use the third person to speak of the friend. And the “couplet” texts on the leaf, Sonnets 69-70, return to second-person address. The upshot in the runes is ambiguity of reference; often the “he” pronouns gain new antecedents in context, ceasing to refer to the muse at all. While none of the Sonnets has ever been heard before to comment on the poet’s struggles with double composition—and on how the Q project itself makes “sins” inevitable—that topic is now insistent, and not just in the Runes. After the fact, it must hereafter be applied to the sonnet texts, too, to help us understand their fruitful possibilities. The opening of Sonnet 66, “Tired with all these…,” for example, now means much more to us than it did before. And “Those parts…the world’s eye doth view” (Sonnet 69.1) now must mean “the Sonnets—not the Runes.”
          Sonnet 66 offers an extended example of how we may now need to reapproach the Sonnets to find meaning we’ve been unaware of: Reading the opening “And’s” as “Anne’s” turns the poem into a catalog of parallel epithets, and a diatribe against the wife; one can almost hear her self-righteous self-descriptions (she’s “captive good,” attending “Captain Ill) and can laugh at Will’s pun “…from these wood [crazy] aye be John [Hall” (Sonnet 66.13).
           Among good titles that Will slips us within this set are “Windy Puffery” (see Rune 61), “Commend a Crow” (see Rune 60), and “The Ornament of Beauty is Suspect” (see Rune 59).
          The set leaf allows a player to skim left-to-right, top-to-bottom, across the emphatic letters BTIL / ISAVV / STAT / TT and read “Beetle eye saw stat (his tete), TT.” The reading “Betty (Bitty) Lisa, wise tot” jokes about Will’s new granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall. The vertical set-leaf code—B IS TSTT IAAT LWT—allows “Ate [8=B] is tasty, jawed hell-wit (…lewd)” and “Bess tested lute.” The most obvious diagonal code on the set-leaf—BITSSI TAL TAVVTT—encodes “Bitsy tail toyed (dowdy),” “Betsy told a witty…,” and “Betsy tail, too wet (…to wit).” Puns in the sonnets on “cheek” and “parts” (e.g., 68.1, 69.1) may have Betsy’s “bitsy tail” in mind.
           Egyptian and New World allusions in the subtexts continue to astound (see the index).

                         Rune 59
     (Third lines, Set V: Sonnets 57-70)

     I have no precious time at all to spend
     Or at your hand th’ account of hours to crave
     Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss,
 4  Each changing place with that which goes before.
     Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
     And for this sin there is no remedy?
     When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow,
 8  When sometime lofty towers I see downrazed,
     How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
     And needy Nothing, trimm’d in jollity
     That sin by him advantage should achieve?
12 Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
     All tongues, the voice of fools, give thee that end:
     The ornament of beauty is suspéct.
__________
     Glosses: 3) puns: “Witch,” “bear/bare a ms.”; 7) hours puns on whores; his suggests rage’s, beauty’s (9), the poet’s, and Christ’s (from contextual clues); 10) needy Nothing = the runic poem, a stillborn “bastard” (with pudendal wit); 12-13) born and give are past and/or subjunctive verbs.

                          Rune 61
     (Fifth lines, Set V: Sonnets 57-70)

     Nor dare I chide the world. Without end hour,
     Oh, let me suffer, being at your beck,
     Oh, that recórd could, with a backward look
  4 Nativity once in the main of light!
     Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee?
     Methinks no face so gracious is, as mine
     Hath traveled on to age’s steepy night
  8 When I have seen the hungry ocean gain.
     Oh, how shall summer’s honey breath hold out?
     And, gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
     Why should false painting imitate his cheek
12 Before the golden tresses of the dead?
     Their outward thus with outward praise is crown’d;
     So thou be good, slander doth but approve.
__________
     Glosses: 1) Nor dare puns, “In order, ...ardor, ...ordure”; 2) beck (ambig.) = summons, rocky stream; 3) that = I who...; could is an eyepun on cold; 4) main = sea (pun: mane, m’ Annie); 4-5) Q’s maine of light /Is it...puns, “m’ Annie o’ slight eyesight”; 5) suggesting “expiration,” breathing out, with a namepun on “...speare”; that thou puns on “Hath-o-V,”i.e., Hathaway; 6-7) mine / Hath traveled puns, “m’ Annie Hath-traveled [and is thus away]”; 7) steepy suggests both precipitous and moist; 8) “When I have seen the hungriest Anne gain...” is a joke (one of hundreds) about Ann’s obesity; 9) summers (Q 9): “Summer S.” is an epithet for Will as an “adder” or “numbers man,” i.e., metricist or poet;10) gilded honor puns on a code of secrecy inside a guild or coterie; 11) his cheek echoes the image of summer breezes in 9; 12) tresses—golden and buried—is a conceit for the Runes, adumbrating braids and thus “knots” (and see the puns “mane” in 4, crown’d in 13); 13) outward suggests both “exterior” and an outbound ship (echoing other nautical imagery) and alludes to the (overt) Sonnets; is crown’d / so thou puns, e.g., “I see Rune D...,” “I see (icy) rowing, DeSoto...” (with “lander” and “a prow” in 14). Other family namepuns include Sue (so, in 6, 14) and S. Hall (9, 11); ...hold out / And...(9-10) puns, e.g., “...Hall, doubting”; and Why should false painting (11) puns, “Wise Hall defaults, panting....”

  
                          Rune 68
     (Twelfth lines, Set V: Sonnets 57-70)

      Save where you are (how happy!) you make those
     Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime—
      Or whether revolution be, the same
 4  (And nothing) stands but for his scythe to mow.
     To play the watchman ever for thy sake,
     Self so self-loving, were iniquity.
     My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life
 8  That time will come and take. My love away,  
      O’er, who his spoil or beauty can forbid?
     And captive Good, attending Captain Ill,
     And proud of many, lives upon his gains,
12 Robbing no old to dress his beauty new.
     To thy fair flower add th’ rank smell of weeds
     To tie up, envy evermore enlarged!
__________
      Glosses: 4) his = revolution’s (alluding to time, “revolving” daily); 7) lover’s = lover is (punning on “lower S.-leaf,” the runic page); 8) time (always a pun on Tommy, suggesting Thomas Thorpe) puns on “(my own) meter,” these verses; 9) O’er (Q Or) suggests “Dead, his life over,” punning on “Oar” (phallically suggestive) and Whore; 10) captive Good and Captain Ill are, jokingly, the poet and his unnamed auditor/friend; 11) many = many gains, punning on “my Annie”; 13) flower puns on “flow-er” (a body-part pun that also suggests penman); weeds, suggesting funereal garb, puns on “witty ass” and “Witty S.”

—Notes on Set VI—

          Full of the usual personal ambiguities and of indefinite insinuations of “guilt” and of “rival poets,” the sonnets and runes in this half-way set anticipate the deaths of Will and his muse and focus on the poems’ capacities to memorialize the friend (and to blur the poet into obscurity). Though the persona’s stresses and anxieties do not dominate the materials here, the personal complaint “That time of year thou may’st in me behold” in Sonnet 73 has proven to be the most appreciated sonnet in the set. One appealing runic companion is Rune 82, with its strongly affirmative epithet “He of tall building and of goodly pride”; another is Rune 75, on mutability, showing Will working at some hour 400 years ago, an instant much like the one we now “enjoy.”
          While Sonnet 71 envisions Will dying first and instructs the friend on how to react, Sonnet 81 equivocates—in effect saying, “Either I’ll go first, or you will…”—but rests in the assurance that the friend’s “name from hence immortal life shall have” because Will’s verses will preserve it. One of the great ironies in Q is that we do remember the friend, but always as a nameless figure.
          A recurring thread in the set is the notion that the poet’s skill is not up to its job; a number of the runes might, in fact, be called apologies. Now that we know of its complexity, we understand how the nature of the project made Will’s outcomes inevitably flawed. We also understand the implication of “both your poets” (Rune 84.13)—Will Shakespeare as author of Sonnets and of Runes—and of the term “two newfound methods and two compounds strange” (Rune 74.6). Further, we can see how far off the mark Will’s tongue-in-cheek characterization of himself falls when he speaks of a “true-telling friend” who is recording the friend’s attributes “in true, plain words” (Rune 82.12). Ideas of fecundity and of counterparts here now gain new meaning. The themes of mutability and of permanence through art and the poet’s search for new figures and his interest in the long-range outcome of his texts—these ideas carry over from earlier sets.
          The opening of Sonnet 82, “I grant thou wert not married to my Muse,” seems puzzling in its obvious context as an address to whatever “muse” Will is supposed to be talking to but makes some sense as a coy, numerologically placed complaint about the poet’s own marriage: Will and Anne married in 1582, and the line is one of many clues that Anne in some sense may be (in the poet’s mind) one version of his Perverse Mistress. (The line puns, “I grant Tower in ode…,” “I guarantee whore-tenet merry, Ed. Tommy…,” “I grant thou wert not married, Tommy, m’ wife [Q Muse],” and so on.) Rune 82 manages in its early lines (see puns, 82.1-2) to encode a coy reference to F. (de) Sandell(s), a Shottery farmer who was a friend of Anne Hathaway’s father and who posted bond on the occasion of Anne and Will’s marriage.
          Sonnet 77, the halfway point in Will’s projected cycle, focuses appropriately on “wasting precious minutes”; its two middle lines read, “Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know / Time’s thievish progress to eternity.” Rune 77 (see comments) uses one of these two lines in its mid-section to comment on the pictographic connection between 77 and “half-added feathers” that in one sense mean “half-completed” products of a quill pen. (Each “7” looks like an angel’s wing, though the two may be “half-added” because both are stuck awkwardly on the same side.) Perhaps, despite the subtextual plethora of Anne-berating wit in Q, the opening of Rune 77 should be read as conciliatory: “That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, / Anne, hang more praise upon deceased I, / Which by and by black night doth take away.”
          The acrostic arrangement of Set VI lines out NOT B across the top, suggesting both Nota Bene and the “…not to be” half of his own best-known saw—one that he seems to joke about over and over in the subtext (cf. index). The vertical alignments SW (compare Sue), TT (i.e., Thomas Thorpe), and BSI (compare “Bessie,” Elizabeth [Hall]) on the set leaf—which get lost in the acrostic of Rune 1—encode the names of important subjects and/or auditors; in a pinch, the initial emphatic N will even do for “Ann.” Forms of “Southy” (e.g., SWOWOITT, SVVT) also align themselves.
          The set-leaf vertical acrostic codeline—N S WOVVOIT TOW B SI—suggests “Ensue, ode too busy,” “An ass, would Toby sigh,” “Anne, Sue vowed Toby’s I,” “…would ‘To be’ say,” “…vowed to be assy,” “Anne, Sue, ought to be busy,” and “In Swede [an epithet for Thorpe], Toby is aye.” The down/up reverse of this code yields, e.g., “In Swede, Toby’s ‘I’ is bawdy, teasing,” “…is body teasing.” The simplest diagonal code—N SOWVVT OT B IO SW I—suggests “In Swede, oat beaten, Sue eye [10=ten],” “Anne sought oat, hating [B=8] Sue aye,” and the like.
          Numeric totals of all the emphatic letters (treated as numbers) may yield 70, the last rune composed before the set starts: I+V+0+7+8+5+VV+7+5+VV+0+0+1+1+VV = 70. This construction requires us to read the opening “N” as I+V (or 6, the set number), not IV = 4.

                         Rune 80
     (Tenth lines, Set VI: Sonnets 71-84)

     When I, perhaps, compounded am with clay,
     That you, for love, speak well of me untrue
     That on the ashes of his youth doth lie—
 4  The prey of worms, my body being dead
     And, by and by, clean, starvèd for a look,
     And you and love are still my argument—
     Commit to these waste blacks, and thou shalt find
 8  Whose influence is thine, and borne of thee:
     From thy behavior, beauty doth he give,
     Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride,
     Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read.
12 What strainèd touches rhetoric can lend!
     Which shall be most my glory? Being dumb?
     Not making worse what nature made so clear?
__________
     Glosses: 2) That = So that; 5) for a look = at a glance; 7) Commit = Refer, Join (yourself).