Set I: Runes 1-14
Marriage and Increase

         Scholars such as Paul Ramsey have sometimes stressed the thematic unity in Sonnets 1-17 or 1-18, but 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.
         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.

         The set houses no blockbuster sonnets—not one that has gained a wide readership or frequent anthology status.

         Note that its opening line stresses proliferation of “fairest creatures” and thus has in mind—at least partly—the multiplication that is occurring before our eyes as Sonnets turn into Runes, which are like twins or clones to the visible texts.

      5. Of Ears and Leaves

     Reduced to admiring yourself in the mirror, betrothed to your own vivacious image,
     and then being asked about the storehouse where all your beauty is bedded
     (for who is so attractive as to be unfruitfu
  4 and still beautiful?)—you stingy miser, why do you practice such abuse?
     For Time, always active like a true husband, leads Summer on.
     That practice is not an abusive investment of assets
     any more than having finally gotten up the rocky road to heaven might be.
  8 If it concurs in the truth, singing its lament in unison,
     the world will weep for you like an unfulfilled widow after you die
     because your mad selfishness kills off a generation!
     Wisdom lies in linking personal beauty with fruitfulness.
12 Just as I can perceive lofty growth here where pageless poems have no “leaves,”
     even so should the beauty that is latent within you spring into leaf.
     In no case—even given my conceits or your flowering—can I tally up fortune’s outcome in any short memorandum. Neither brevity nor fortunetelling is within my range.

     6. The Fire That May Burn Out

     Your lighted fire burns itself up, feeding on its own fuel
     at a prime stage during which the whole endowment of your vivacious sensuality
     haughtily scorns the kind of tilling that productive husbandry requires—
  4 that large gift that nature gave you to show
     hideous winter who’s boss—and thus your potent treasure blocks productivity and confuses the issue,
     a fact enjoyed vicariously by those of us who “Willingly” subsidize your exploits
     at stages in our own lives when the strength of our youth has hit middle age
  8 and is reined in by marriages. Anyway, you should listen when I remind you
     that you have not left yourself behind in any form
     and that you don’t seem reluctant to work against your own ends.
     Unless you replicate yourself, all of the foolishness, age, and destructive cold
12 that once overshadowed and froze out the mass of men
     will go on unchecked; in that eventuality, you would in effect be
     pointing each one warming at your fire back out away from shelter to deal alone with nature’s threatening elements.

     7. Of Leaves and Wells

     Creating little to consume in these buried texts, whereas an abundance lies
     within the depths of your eyes for a writer to express,
     who is this man whom Will is foolish enough over to become his tomb—or tome?
  4 Why, bankrupt lender, do you so often misuse
     the vital fluid—stopped cold as you are, with no heir, and even bereft of the “lusty leaves” that a better poet might generate—
     that’s for you to use to breed another likeness?
     (Nonetheless, mortals still look adoringly on that inactive beauty.)
  8 Admirers only gently criticize you, who resist and thwart
     the hoard of reclusive widows and scribblers keeping their “wells” fit     
     to try to raze that handsome head—and seat.
     If everybody chose to act as you do (or as they do), the times would end—or should—
12 and all our green summers. Sheaved in Will’s harvest of bound-up leaves,if not by virtue of your own productivity,
     you appear again here as yourself, after your demise,
     and may even find yourself niched in a snug little circle of princes, if my plan works.

      8. His Golden Pilgrimage: An Argument from Numbers

     For your sweet self to work cruelly against itself
     would be a totally wasteful shame; you would be singing an impractical anthem
     to your selfish egotism if you ended a lineage
  4 that might extend infinitely. As things stand now, life and beauty won’t go on
     if beauty stands in splendid isolation—a distant, snowcapped peak on a barren plane.
     In the end, it would be ten times better if ten rather than just one
     swelled the ranks of your sunset pilgrimage
  8 Single life offers you all the parts you need to reproduce:
     A child’s eyes (just for example) recreate a husband’s form in a widow’s mind—
     and all this business of mating and tending to your duty should be your main ambition.
     Then, when sixty years of living might put the world behind you,
12 carried on the bier—with your beard white and bristly—
     your sweet form could suitably be borne by your darling children, whose faces would still reveal your own.
      I find this scene often foretold as I read the stars.

      9. A Fall from Highmost Pitch

     I say to you who are now young and most beautiful that
     properly applying your beauty would merit far more praise than your beauty itself merits.
     You have your mother’s face;
  4 wherever you might be alone and self-engaged,
     summer’s distilled essence would be present—though it would not be perpetuated.
     Ten of you would be better than the one of you—and might also cheer you up.
     But when will you multiply? Moving down, as it were, from a lofty point on the scale and steadied in a graceful duet by a cautious vehicle,
  8 notice how two sweet strings sidling up to each other to create harmony (just the way these texts and subtexts intertwine)
     might look. What a world-class waster I see!
     Oh, change your attitude, so I can say I’m wrong!
     Escape those who are naturally improvident!
12 Then, on the subject of your beauty, let me pose a question:
     Who lets so handsome a house fall into ruin?
     Only your eyes answer my question.

     11. Within Thy Bud

     Your essence and your potential for real contentment lie buried inside you, budlike.
     My account here will sum things up, repeating my old argument,
     so that, looking at things through the eyes of yourself as one who is old—but also from an enlightened modern perspective—you can envision
  4 how, when Nature eventually calls you to leave,
     Beauty’s offspring, an heir of yours endowed with beauty, might feel loss at your passing.
     In that situation, what would Death gain at your departure?
     The childlike eyes, once dutiful to the living parent, now shift to serve a higher purpose,
  8 bringing together father and child and the mother’s happiness, perpetuating lost parentage.
     But if beauty is wasted in this life, it ends in this life.
     Be considerate and kind, the way you show yourself to be when one is with you.
     Take note of the fact that Nature gave you more than those she endowed with most!
12 Since beauties and physical charms fade and finally leave,
     in preparation for the hard blusters of the winter to come,
     consolidate your forces, perpetuate yourself by companionship—just the way Truth and Beauty will go on doing.

Set II: Runes 15-28
Your Painted Counterfeit

         Set II, which houses the first famous sonnet—No. 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—treats among its many themes the topic of the poet’s struggle to memorialize his unnamed muse.

            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 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 21, where the muse is a “man of hues” hanging in the poet’s “bosom shop”; 26, where the auditor is a “babe in the dark” and the poet is his nurse; and 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 [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.”

     15. Who Will Believe My Verse?

     When I think about you, and all of nature, and this growing body of poems,
     in what respect do you not outstrip my limited imagination?
     Who in the future will believe my conceits? (And who will finally see this verse into print?)
  4 Shall I compare you to a summer’s day—and broach a hackneyed conceit?
     Shall I say that you “devour time” and “blunt the lion’s paw” by staying unravaged, or that
     yours is like a “woman’s face, painted by nature’s own hand”?
     And can’t I say the same thing about myself that I say about the figure that inspires me?
  8 Neither my mirror or hourglass will convince me I am old:
     Like an unpolished actor onstage—
     overly made up to try to sustain illusion, raising eyes to the heavens in fixed poses—I’ve trained my vision to paint its own reality.
     Leave to their fates those currently in favor,
12 lord of my love, for whom, like a servant
     work-weary from this labor, I hurry to my single bed.
     How can I go back now with any joy—back home, or to bed, to work, or to where you are?

     19. A Couplement of Proud Compare

     At a time when I see men thriving, sprouting up like plants,
     you outdo them all, standing at the very top of the illuminator’s page, a summer sun at noon!
     If only I could describe the beauty of your eyes!
  4 Sometimes the eye of heaven is too hot,
     and the seasons themselves are inconstant in their effects; meanwhile you move on swiftly,
     like a sun brighter than any season’s, one less fickle in your revolutions,
     showing a real pair of beautiful eyes that suggest a handsome adjunct
  8 to all the beauty your countenance reveals—and to the proud couple who bore you. (Your eyes generate these linked texts. The “sun” analogy is a good one.)
     Thus, feeling myself untrustworthy on the subject, Sue, I haven’t said your name, nor said
     earlier that a painter’s artistry must always show in his work.
     The favorite courtly artists of great princes disseminate their fine pages,
12 important work indeed. What wit, Sue, is so poorly equipped for doing this as mine?
     For my thoughts are divided, meager and remote, here far from
     Anne, and two contentious clusters of influence dominate and coexist, London and Stratford skies pull me apart, two spheres reign, sonnets and runes contend, two eyes weep.

     20. The Seemly Raiment of My Art

     Heartened and held back by the same fickle sky,
     with many virgin knot-rows yet to be lined out
     or freshly planted, my verses enumerate all your graces,
  4 but with that “sky” often clouded over, hiding its essential brilliance.
     Now, whatever time or my own dashed-off verses may do,
     decorating the subject that my heart gazes on
     with conceits of sun and moon, with the rich gems of earth and sea,
  8 is merely the suitable (but gored) raiment my heart (and art) provides.
     This appropriate ritual, practiced by love’s craftsman as love’s prerogative,
     the act of discovering where the right conceit for your true image lies,
     may—like a marigold held up in the face of the sun—
12 merely convey bareness, for lack of the words to picture you as you are.
     Take note of a devout quest toward you;
     if you want to torment me, acknowledge it with a handshake.

      23. The Painful Warrior Famousèd for Worth

     My conceits here are flimsy: This work is a shaky pedestal for mounting a hero.
     Thus a future lineage must restore my page to its former liveliness, must reassemble and reinforce my forms.
     Yellowed by time but still mirroring the present Golden Age, this structure may collapse, this book stay closed, these pages go unread,
  4 yet you’ll always be fair, and I’ll still be your Eternal Summer—your undimmed sun, your shining metricist.
     O, as you spend hours wrinkling your brow over this, if you’ll just promise not to carve new wrinkles on my love’s fair brow in doing so,
     I can regard you as a new and perfect Adam, created just for a flawless Eve.
     O, why can’t I express myself just as precisely as my love is true!
  8 O, my friend in future years, watch out. Keep yourself secondary, and be skeptical of imposing your own thoughts on mine,
     O, so that you let my writings convey their own eloquence to readers of your own day.
     Now see what good turns your eyes, alive in the future, have done for this visionary
     poet—famous, substantive, hard, a painstaking and pain-inflicting struggler—and for the unnamed hero he would memoralize.
12 Until whatever star controlling my life and lines
     ensures the perpetuation of my deepest inner vision (and the ideal image it tries to capture) in some future age,
     I say to the day, “Your sun shines just to illuminate my creative imagination.” (I say to that future era, “You, my recompositor, apply your wit only to be of service to the Bard.)

     24. Mine Eyes Have Drawn Thy Shape

     My vision forms and presents you, a view from the front (or the past?) quite rich with youth,
     a view—current fashions in art and my schoolboy pen both
     being set aside in the same way that one rejects old men who talk a lot but are unreliable—
  4 a view that neither fails to attribute to you the handsome thing(s) you own
     nor adds any time-worn details that caricature you
     until nature herself, seeing you in a state of nature, has fallen in love with the representation.
     After this, believe me, my beloved is as handsome
  8 as I wish, as I determine—acting not selfishly but purely on your behalf.
     Thus, silent forecasters of what my audibly beating heart would say,
     my eyes have drawn your shape; and your form, all mine and playing its role just for me—
     its thousands of rapier-thrusts having found their mark—
12 points toward me kindly and handsomely
     and shows the shadow of such imagined victories to my inner sight,
     thus honoring that noble image (and this lyric) when clouds seem to blot out the heaven.

Set III: Runes 29-42
My Outcast State

            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 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.

     29. The Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought

     When your fortunes are low and you’re disgraced in men’s eyes, and in that condition
     your heart comes before the court of my mind for a sympathetic hearing,
     it’s still assured of being beloved by all other hearts
  4 if you can survive the full docket of this day and can tolerate my own sense of well-being while you yourself may be low.
     I have seen many such busy, glorious mornings.
     Why did you swear yourself in on such a beautiful day! (Why did you once guarantee me such a day?)
     Don’t be grieved any longer at whatever it is you’ve done.
  8 Let me confess here at the bar that I share your guilt, making us partners in disgrace and confirming that we two (like these bifurcated texts) must stay divided.
     Just as an aging father can enjoy talking on and on about his child,
     my imagination cannot lack subjects for invention.
     But in what manner can I praise your worth and still maintain an appropriate decorum?
12 Go ahead and abscond with all my displays of affection, my love, yes, take them all,
     all those pretty licenses that a free man may take, errors liberally perpetrated!
     The matter of your liberty is not my only perplexing concern. Your freedom does not terminate my grief.

      31. Bootless Cries

     Now in lame and hobbling meter I address without results a heaven deaf to complaints,
     lamenting the fact that I don’t have many things I’ve wanted
     (and the fact that love and all its aspects reign only in heaven and not here on earth)—
  4 things that, as fortune wills it, I shall consider again
     when I embrace green meadows with a sunlit face
     if only to have gloomy clouds overtake me on my way later on.
     Just as clouds and eclipses blot out both moon and sun,
  8 these blotted verses—in effect my trip companions—obscure and mar a heavenly subject.
     Thus, my dear, as a victim of circumstances hobbling along barefoot I abuse and frustrate
     the attractive case that you yourself, a paragon, are able to make on your own.
     What personal reward can this buried tribute to you bring me? What good would it do if I cast myself in a more favorable light than I do in this self-berating text?
12 Certainly not any love, my love, that you would call true love.
     Your beauty is perfect for your age and this era. A poet would need a lot of ink to capture it. It might be better for a poet to save his ink. With your looks and youth, you are made for sexual fulfillment with a woman.
     The main thing I wail about is that you are not mine but rather belong to heaven, or love, or beauty—or are under some other kind of feminine control that remains unstated here.

      33. Let Us Divided Live

     Wishing that I were more blessed with hope,
     I allow myself to weep freely, though usually I don’t gush
     so many reverential tears as are now flowing.
  4 See them as indications of better times,
     for soon the darkest clouds allow escape. We must let such clouds pass.
     It’s not enough for me that you sunder the heavens, sunlike.
     Everybody is similarly divisive—even I, in this writing project. All of us are “faulty.”
  8 Our divided affections are still an entity, singular in aspect,
     since any handsomeness, breeding, wealth, or cleverness
     seen in me, I insist, should be credited to you.
     Even granting all this (or because of all this), let us live separately—and let this project thrive;
12 thus if you take my love for what it is and also let me give you something,
     you prove yourself gentle and thus still susceptible to and worthy of wooing and “oneness.”
     I love “faulty” people, and so I, Will, will forgive you and let you go your own way, too.

      38. Trophies of Loss: Another Woe

     I happen to think about you and then about my own condition—my estate in Stratford, my isolation, my literary estate including the “state” of this eternally unpublished work—
     and gloomily repeat myself in this list of woes, from “wo-” to present “woe,”
     my loser’s trophies all proclaiming “My lover’s gone!”
  4 Would that my inspiration had matured in concert with my own years—and this great Age.
     Were I decorated with the laurels of great triumphs,
     my losses would still be realities, even if you changed your mind.
     Your estranged adversary, I also here argue your case;
  8 least of all should these guilty laments bring shame to you. (Published, they would do that.)
     As long as this crafty writer and these shadowy compositions convey content finer
     than what the nine muses whom poets always invoke can produce,
     isn’t it true that your sour manner not only has made my departure sweet but should also be said to have produced these “sugared” pages?
12 Even though you take my property, which is negligible, for yourself
     and nag and harp on lost beauty and straying youth
     and on losing one who is unnamed here, my friend has claimed that “ms.” for himself as he reads these texts, rediscovering all those other lost things, too, as fresh as ever.

      39. A Sad Account

     Like the lark rising to sing in the darkness of first light,
     those who are sad—these poems—recount previously lamented bereavements,
     creatures dedicated part and whole to you, as I have authorized, singing in harmony.
  4 The lark’s expression would have created something sweeter,
     but, lamentably enough, he popped out for just an hour. These laments of mine—
     stumbling along on unsteady “feet”—offer little consolation
     and may even justify charging me with something like disturbing the peace or carelessness.
  8 Further, my friend, you do not acknowledge me with public regard
     to let your bounty compensate for my shortcomings.
     So instead you let your present suitor, whatever lark sings to you now, produce
     timely entertainment, sentiments of love;
12 even now my affection senses (this is a grief worse than my own failings)
     who may be there leading you to join in their revelry.
     My love and grief link up here, but in setting them down in these unpublished works I lose them both. (You and some fellow may have each other, while I at present have neither.)

      42. Sweet Flattery

     I wouldn’t, then, change my condition—or the state of this ms.—with that of kings.
     Everything lost is restored, here in this terminal poem of the set, and sorrows end,
     and you, all kings (and indeed all sorrows) rolled together, have all there is of me.
  4 I’ll study kings’ estates to learn about style, and Christ’s kingdom because of his love.
     Sun-like kings of the world can blot or bloody it as they wish (we humans have stained the very Sun of Heaven, and this flawed line is my mea culpa)
     and, being rich, such kings can ransom criminals just as Christ did on the Cross.
     In that spirit, I reassure you, sweet thief who robs me (not playfully, as Prince Hal might):
  8 Because you are mine, I’ll speak well of you.
     If I can do this, then I’m made ten times happier.
     Let me suffer the pain, and Flattery be all yours
     in this praise of anyone—you, me, my verse, or Christ—whom this text may immortalize with eternal admiration.
12 We must not be enemies, even if your spites wound me gravely.
     If your spiteful acts—offshoots of your beauty, which is their rationale—betray me,
     the mistress Flattery (whom I have offered to you) may reject you and love only me.