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 VII-IX
Copyright © Roy Neil Graves 2003, All Rights Reserved

—Notes on Set VII—  

         Collectively, the lines of the 28 texts here establish a scenario not new in Q but with its own twists: The absence of the poet’s unnamed muse makes even springtime feel like winter (Sonnets 97, 98); the “tongue-tied” posture of the muse (Sonnet 85.1) leaves Will’s verse uninspired and gives other poets the chance to “write good words” about the friend (Sonnet 85.5) while Will searches for new conceits to do his subject justice—a process that the outcomes here show to be much more profitable than the poet himself usually implies, despite the damage that the duplicitous project does to individual texts. Will feels self-pity over the friend’s disregard—hyperbolized as “hate” (Sonnet 90.1)—but continues to admire the friend’s beauty, both criticizing and rationalizing the friend’s “youthful, wanton” behavior (see Rune 87, Sonnet 96.1).
          All in all, the set explores personal and artistic implications of Will’s self-abasing commitment to the project at hand, whose deep-hued “fruit” we are just now unpacking. As usual, materials here often allude sotto voce to the overlaid elements at work in Q: e.g., any “rival” writer here (see, e.g., Sonnet 85.5, Rune 89.1-2) means in one sense Will himself, and his usual lament over “inarticulate,” unrespected verse has in mind the unread Runes we now belatedly broach. Many conceits gain unique meaning as analogues for the Runes themselves—e.g., the “deep hue” in the Rows or “canker” in the Rose (Rune 86.11, Sonnet 98.10); Will’s “strangled acquaintance” (Sonnet 89.8); the puzzling “after-loss” event (Rune 88.6, see Booth’s long comment); and the figurative “winter” that equates with the “real spring” of the friend’s absence (Sonnets 97.1, 98.1)
          One sure paradox in the set is that amid the complaints about ineffectual verse emerge striking conceits that prove the poet wrong (and deceptive) when he says his “mine” is exhausted (Rune 98.2). Rune 92 seems more honest, somewhat like the soliloquy of Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV 1.2.218ff. that shows us how the speaker is silently working to gain his eventual end. Through his own patient work, Will believes the poems and friend will endure (see, e.g., Runes 86, 92). In various ways Will’s contrived conceits represent himself, his friend, their mutual situation, and/or the Sonnets/Runes project. Notable tropes include the vocal comic figures of the “unlettered cleric” (Rune 90) and “Words” the braggart soldier (Rune 96); the broadly suggestive images of a striking gem on “the finger of a thronèd queen” (Rune 89) and of “widow’s laps” that belatedly bear unlikely fruit (Rune 92.13-14); and vivid new employments of such stock conceits as Diana’s arrow (Rune 85), the poet as court minstrel (Rune 89), Eve’s apple (Rune 97), and a red rose,here rich with sinister suggestiveness (Rune 94.14). The line about Will’s “patented”—i.e., runic—method (Rune 92.3) now makes full sense to us. Some runes in the set, with their disparate figures, objectify the choppy incoherence that Will apologizes for (e.g., Runes 93, 98). Indeed it is true that the arduous mode of Q did cause all the poems in the project to suffer strains.
          The layers of irony in the Q project and the vagueness with which Will admits us into the facts of the “real” world that is the basis for his fiction—these elements leave us still asking many of the familiar questions about the absent friend, the “other” poet(s), and Will’s “real” feelings for and experience with the muse he addresses. Courtly implications, and hints that the friend is superficially occupied with shallow companions (see,, e.g., Sonnet 95, Rune 86.12), seem to “fit” Southampton in the 1590s better than other known candidates for the muse slot.
        A quick overview of the set shows no traditionally popular sonnet, though Sonnets 91 (“Some glory in their birth”) and 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been”) are reasonably familiar. The interesting “error” whereby some copies of Q show Charter as Chatter (Sonnet 87.3) seems playfully functional in Will’s overall plan, given how “The ‘chatter’ of [the friend’s] worth gives [that person] re-leafing [i.e., new paginations]” in the Runes. The term “chatter” also helps tie the poet to the figure of Words, the talky soldier; for in the runic context the military conceit has the poet assert that he will “fight” against himself and on the muse’s side (see Rune 87.3-4).
          The spread grouping of the set makes clear the couplet-like effect of the thirteenth and fourteenth units in the group—sonnets 97-98, about winter and spring. The pessimistic close of the couplet lines of this “couplet” pair overlays the whole set in the same way that any couplet in any sonnet gives it its final tone color. My selection of a title for the set holds this fact in mind.
          The vertical acrostic code on the set page—MSS VVTTH F SH F VVBS—suggests such readings as “Mss. witty, evasive webs” and “Mss. witty, this sheaf W.- ‘B.S.’ [F=S].” The strings SVV (suggesting Sue, WS reversed) and TT (suggesting Thomas Thorpe) emerge in this codeline, along with BS, suggesting “Bess.” This string, of course, is visible only on the composite leaf and is not apparent in the acrostic of Rune 85, which proceeds numerically and horizontally.

—Notes on Set VIII and its Unique Features in the Q Scheme—

          Numerologically important (in much the same way the year 1999 was) and emphatically positioned (like an emphatic larger letter signaling a new text), Sonnet 99 startles “like toothy lark at break of day arising” because it has 15 lines, not 14. Unlike other playful quirks in the formal mechanics of Q—odd metrical lengths, irregular rhyme schemes, or airy parenthetical lines—the “extra line” in Sonnet 99 is a serious aberration in Q’s mathematical architecture, one that stops reconstruction of the Runes cold until a player can “solve” the “problem” it generates.
          As any peer might have done in Will’s own day, I myself came upon this quirky challenge after I was well into the game. (Who first goes through a book and counts lines?) At that point the neat structural scheme I’d detected in Q seemed to crumple, flawed by one pesky extra line. What could be “done” with it? If one line should be discounted in the recomposition process, which one was “extra”? The rhyme scheme of 99 (ababa…) and the preface-like “feel” of Sonnet 99.1 both made the first line seem extraneous, but a more natural inclination was to lop off the extra line at the bottom—given our fondness for ABC order, our urge to “even the tops” of texts on the page, and our tendency to read “down” and not skip anything.
          As usual in Q’s forking-paths game, trial and error provided a way to proceed, and one option does not block the other: The “extra” authorized line is fully functional, a teasing challenge that curbs peer cockiness, shows oneupmanship, complicates the wit and “increase” of the game, and even punctuates the structure of Q with a showy climax in Set VIII to precede Q’s denouement in Sets IX-XI. In an already bifurcated cycle where Sonnets overlay Runes and vice versa, the 15-line text bedazzles by triggering a subsidiary division, two whole subsets of texts—A and B variants—in the set it headlines. (Hence the set title, Will’s own phrase.) Though the A and B sets are almost alike, the aegis-like position of the switchable line tends to send any given text off on its own tangent—so tenuous are the associative nuances in any runic linestring. (Imagine two identical paragraphs of obtuse prose with differently worded topic sentences.)
          Practically, a recompositor must in two separate stages ignore both Sonnet 99.1 and Sonnet 99.15. Ignoring line 15, the almost automatic choice, allows the subset of A texts to emerge. Ignoring line 1, thus letting the second line of Sonnet 99 function in the recomposition process as its first, produces the B texts. One can visualize this two-step process by imagining that in the first case the tops of Sonnets 99 and 100 are level on the Q leaf—leaving 99.15 dangling at the bottom without any succession of siblings; by shifting the text of Sonnet 99 up one line to create new horizontal alignments, each one of the lines 2-14 in Sonnet 99 gains a new string of successive siblings, with line 99.1 orphaned and (for the duration) non-functional at the top. Cultivated puns, especially in Sonnet 99.1 and 99.15, originally helped reveal such a solution to the Runemaster’s witty challenge. These puns include the play “The ‘forward violate’ [i.e., ‘disruptive preface’] thus did “[No.] IC [i.e., Roman numeral 99] hide” (99.1) and the lament about “looking for more ‘flowers’ [cf. lines of flowing ink]” and “seeing none” there (in 99.15). The latter is exactly what one senses upon reaching line 15 and not observing any righthand companions for it. Other puns elsewhere in the set reinforced my deductions—e.g., “that thou fore-jettest so long” (Sonnet 100.1); “three themes in one” (Sonnet 105.12); the pun on “A/Bism” (Sonnet 112.9); and the acrostic wit about A/B in Rune 110A. The meanings that emerge in the dual sets of recompositions are, of course, the real proof; the punning details are merely breadcrumbs dropped in the night forest for disoriented players to try to follow.
          Typically in Q, where all dualities are coeval, neither set of variants takes precedence, despite our inclination to read the A variants as primary, the B’s as afterthoughts. Admittedly, the emphatic first-line capitals in Q do seem to favor the A-form recomposition of Rune 99—which begins with glaring caps—over its B twin, which opens unemphatically. Nothing substantive, however, indicates that A-texts are better than B’s; in some cases, the quality of the latter seems superior.
In a small dilemma that mirrors all the larger ones, a first editor of the Runes faces choices about what to keep, value, and discount in Q’s myriad possibilities. Two perfectly parallel treatments of A’s and B’s would generate repetition, while postscript treatment of the B texts might closet and demean them forever. My compromise has been to give the B texts an abbreviated presentation that still respects their viability. By considering each edited rune in turn and focusing on what’s different in it from its A counterpart, the variants in the B subset can be heard, and readers can judge them. Obfuscated by this approach are puns in the opening line (as it merges with the second) and acrostic wit in the B codelines, which vary from the A forms by one letter.
          Read for “serious” meaning, Set VIII persists with familiar topics: The poet’s role and flaws, his isolation from and on-going dedication to the muse, the difficulty of finding new conceits, the friend’s mixed nature, Will’s vacillation between optimism and melancholy. Motives in the Runes of the set, triggered by some individually cohesive topics in Sonnets 99-112, include flowers (cf. Sonnet 99), figures from romance (see Sonnet 106), and the unspecified personal scandal that is the topic in the set’s “couplet” texts, Sonnets 111-112—and, e.g., in Rune 100. Much of the set feels teasingly personal in ways that do not seem directly to involve the Stratford family. Perhaps Southampton’s taint after the Essex rebellion—or some intense or misunderstood relationship between Will and Southy—is in the background. The notions of the muse’s absence and of the passage of three years (wee, e.g., Sonnet 104) are provocative but in themselves inconclusive. Will’s complaints about repetition (e.g. Sonnets 102-103) and “wasting time” (Sonnet 106) and such epithets as “wild music” (Sonnet 102.11), “profound abysm” (Sonnet 112.9), inventive change (see Sonnet 105.11), and jam-packed verses (see Sonnet 103.13) all gain new meaning with our expanded understanding of the 3-D quality of the Q enterprise.
          The phrase “another whited if-pair” (Sonnet 99.9) may point to ghostly, hypothetical pairs who occur in Q’s motific texture and wit: e.g., Sonnets/Runes, Hamnet/Judith, Adam/Eve, Tristan/Isolde, Will/Southy, Will/Anne, Sue/John Hall, granddaughter Bess/“th’ heir,” and so on.

In the column below are the edited "B" Variants,
which ignore line 1 of sonnet 99 (99.1) and use line 15 (99.15)

                             Rune 100B
(Third line, Sonnet 99, and Second lines, Sonnets 100-112)

     If not from my love’s breath, the purple pride—
     To speak of that which gives thee all thy might—
     For thy neglect, of truth, in beauty died;
 4  I love not less (though less the show appear)
     That, having such a scope to show her pride
     Fore, as you were when first your “I” I eyed,
     Not, my beloved, as an idolo show.
 8  I see descriptions of the fairest wights
     Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come
     Which hath not figured to thee, my true spirit.
     Though absence seemed my flame to qualify
12 And made myself a motley to thee, view
     The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds
     Which “Vulgar Scandal” stamped upon my brow!
__________
     Glosses: 1) purple pride is phallically suggestive; 2) To speak puns on “To his peak” (phallic); 3) For thy neglect puns, “Frothy (Forth, high...) ‘angle’ eased”; 4) though...appear = though I see you seldom; 5) That suggests the phallus; 6) Fore, as you were when puns on “Fore, azure wen...,” echoing purple pride in 1; 7) an idol puns on “...idle” (see 4) and “‘I’-doll”; 8) I see puns on IC = 99, the number of the preceding rune; wights = creatures, suggesting “wits”; 9) things to come = phalluses; 10) figured = added up, equaled (with innuendo about phallic measurement); true puns on “erect,” “right-angled”; spirit suggests ejaculated fluid and puns on “spurt” and “...speare”; 11) absence puns on absinthes (suggesting a bad taste); 12) a motley = a fool in chequered dress, linked with the pun “...aye motley, toothy”; 13) goddess = suggesting beauty (see 3), with phallic overtones; punningly, also Anne (see And in 12); 12) scandal puns on “ass-candle” and “assy handle,” a phallic conceit; brow puns on “burrow,” suggesting “crack,” asshole.

                      Rune 104A
     (Sixth lines, Set VIII: Sonnets 99-112)

     The lily I condemnèd for thy hand—
     In gentle numbers time so idly spent!
     Truth needs no color with his color fixed,
 4  When I was wont to greet it with my lace.
     Look in your glass, and there appears a face
     In process of the seasons have I seen,
     Still constant in a wondrous excellence
 8  Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow—
     And the sad augurs mock their own presage.
     I must each day say o’er the very same.
     Like him that travels, I return again,
12 Askance and strangely, but by all above;
     And, almost thence, my nature is subdued
     To know my shames and praises from your tongue.
__________
     Glosses: 2) numbers = metrics, verses; time plays on “rhythm”; 3) color puns on collar, choler (i.e., ire); 4) wont = accustomed; greet may mean assail (ME); lace (Q laies): also, lays, i.e., songs; 5) face = countenance (see 8); 6) In process puns “In th’ [p = th, archaic thorn] row [i.e., line or verse], see s’s”: the line has six of them; 6-7) Q’s seasons haue I seene / S... puns, “see Avon’s [long s = f eyepun] house, Annie S.”; 9) augurs = predictions; presage = prediction; 12) Askance = Obliquely; by all above suggests “transcendent, guided by heaven”; 13) subdued puns on “subdivided” (as Q is divided into Sonnets and Runes); 14) shames and praises are metaphoric epithets for Q’s Runes and Sonnets.

                        Rune 105A
     (Seventh lines, Set VIII: Sonnets 99-112)

                         Rune 106B
(Ninth line, Sonnet 99, and Eighth lines, Sonnets 100-112)

                        Rune 108A
     (Tenth lines, Set VIII: Sonnets 99-112)

                      Rune 110A
     (Twelfth lines, Set VIII: Sonnets 99-112)

                        Rune 111A
     (Thirteenth lines, Set VIII: Sonnets 99-112)

                         Rune 111B
(Fourteenth line, Sonnet 99, and Thirteenth lines, Sonnets 100-112)

—Notes on Set IX—

          Unaware of Q’s runic game, Sonnets editors have mostly ignored the “empty couplet” lines in Sonnet 126 as meaningless, unauthorized printer’s “filler.” In truth, these “quietuses two” (Sonnet 126.12) work as real lines and house complex sense and wit. In Runes 125 and 126 the lines have separate jobs, while on the leaf and in Sonnet 126 they work together.
          Interlinked are famous lines from Q’s “misnumbered” Sonnet 116 that, disparately, accrue new runic meanings. The pun “Let me knot two, the marriage of true minds”—housing “mirage” and the play “theme airy eye, a jest t’ rue, my ends”—alludes not only to all the linked Sonnets and Runes but specifically to the “knotty two” lines that close the set. Sonnet 116’s own coy close, “If this be error…,” comments both on Will (and Thomas Thorpe)’s “misnumbering” of 116 as 119 and on these two “missing” lines, which will punningly calls “Quietuses two” that “render thee” (Sonnet 126.12). Now, when Will tells us to “admit impediments,” (Sonnet 119.2), we concede Q’s stumblingblocks but don’t “alter” our affections upon finding the alterations (suggesting “adorations”).
          In a minimal sense, the “bending sickles” of Sonnet 116 also designate the two up-coming sets of italicized parentheses that we see in Sonnet 126, so that the “rosy lips and cheeks” that those parentheses house are pictographically one of the poet’s referents in Sonnet 116.9. These “rendered” parentheses, reasonably accurate as lips, also form a visual pun on fat buttocks, “cheeks” cut in two or “rendered,” with the broadened pictograph (    )(    ) implicit. The pun “Butt, bare side out (Butt bare sight out), even to the edge of doom” (Sonnet 116.12) has these paired “cheeks” in mind, “rendered.” The pictograph, further, may show a belted fat middle; a vacuous person; paired gums for chewing; a crowned head; dovelike whiteness; and the “zero” lurking in “Crow” (see “Crow or Dove” in Sonnet 113.12, initial in the set). Concurrently these marginalized airy spaces are the “edge of doom” that Will mentions at Sonnet 116.12, “rendering” the empty Unknowns that at bottom await us all and that will “render” humankind: The top one stands for heaven, the nether one for hell. As two “knotted” items, the empty-line pair also show us “the marriage of jesty rumens” (cf. Sonnet 116.1). The joke is Will’s, the stomach knots ours.
          The “renderings” probably refer also to Southampton’s moustache, also “cheeks” in one sense, though “proving” this is a complex, cumulative deduction. Briefly, in Rune 126, “em-peached” (13) links with the pun “Two [empty lines] give full growth to that which still doth grow” (3). Other puns (e.g., those in Rune 126.5-6) also point to an in-group joke about whether Southy had looked better moustached or clean-shaven. John Sanford’s Latin poem (1592) had praised Southy’s beauty “although his mouth scarcely yet blooms with tender down” (qtd. Akrigg 36).
          More broadly, the final formal “Audite” in Set IX echoes and complements the initial aberration in Set VIII. As paired “mysteries,” these last two lines also point forward as analogues that epitomize the upcoming Perverse Mistress sets (X, XI)—sets that provide a “couplet” close to the entire Q scheme, just as these two empty lines help round off Set IX. The MegaSonnets' couplet is ironically vertical, not horizontal, as Q’s organization scheme helps us visualize. Link: How Will Wrote the Runes.
          The epithet “quietuses two” also describes the blank corners of each folio leaf, providing a corroborating clue about arrangement of materials on the spreads. The joke in “rendering” suggests that one might doodle in these “quietuses.” The pun “…tore end earthy” (Rune 126.14) means “bawdy, separated toward the bottom.” In this set, Will’s “birds”—his “Crow and Dove”— soar higher, in the equivalent of the heavens, by coming early in the set, and also atop Rune 124.
Maybe the two empty page corners gave Will the idea of letting two “nothings,” two aberrant “perverse mysteries,” gain significance in his large plan. In the broadest sense, the “Quietuses” that still “render”—that “show,” “divide,” and torture like a rack—are the Runes themselves.
          Representative of other minimal wit in Set IX are the odd double T’s and commas in Rune 113.10—where redundancies point to Thomas Thorpe, the printer (and signer of the dedication) whose complicity was required to see that Will’s minimal authorizations were honored through the printing state rather than being “corrected” and edited out. Similarly eye-catching is the gappy pictographic spacing at Sonnet 120.6, encoding the pun “As I bare ass , ye have pastel of Tommy.” The italicized-word string also exemplifies a likely game element (cf. p. ).
          In new conceits, diverse materials in the set reiterate familiar themes that include vision, heart vs. mind, separation, suffering, faithfulness, apologies for Q and pride in it, the muse as ideal paragon and as Captain Ill—as Winner and Waster.

                         Rune 122
     (Tenth lines, Set IX: Sonnets 113-126)

     The most sweet favor or deformed’st creature,
     And my great mind most kingly drinks it up!
     Might I not then say now I love you best
 4  Within his bending sickle’s compass? Come,
     And, on just proof, surmise. Accumulate
     The ills that were not, grew to faults—assured
     That better is by evil still made better.
 8  (My deepest sense, how hard true sorrow hits!)
      At my abuses, reckon up their own.
      Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score,
      Not wondering at the present, nor the past,
12 Which works on leases of short numbered hours;
     And, take thou my oblation poor but free,
     She may detain but not still keep her treasure.
__________
     Glosses: 3) best puns on beast; 4) his = my...mind’s (see 2); bending sickle’s compass suggests Round, i.e., Rune; 8) how hard may be a topical pun on Howard; 9) their (ambig.) points to ills (6), creatures (see 1); their own puns on “the (thy) rown (...round, rune)”; 10) Nor need I tallies puns, “Nor needed Alice/...allies” (with Nor reversing to a pun on rune); 13) oblation = offering (compare present, a pun in 11); 14) She = thy...love (10), but, as an incipient form of the Dark Lady (who dominates Sets X and XI) pointing to punning forms of Alice (10), Witch (12), and Anne (13).