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Here Will, penning the sonnets, makes a new start on
a new leaf housing Set III. (We can imagine the 14 visible sonnets in
this set, 29-42, arranged on a large, two-page spread in Will’s hand-scripted
text, with Sonnets 29-32 across the top, 33-36 in the next row, 37-40
in the next, and 41 and 42 centered at the bottom. The first lines of
these visible numbers would link to generate Rune 29, our subject here,
if one were to “read across” the set leaf instead of down.)
The lines
of the first two visible sonnets in Set III—among the better known
in Q—color this and all the runes in the set with melancholy contemplation;
the affirmations of the sonnet 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 of 14 numbers inherent on the leaf.
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’s
fame, Set III stresses the poet’s alienation from the very figure
he “flatters.” Until the last covert text or so, the set materials
seems to ask, “What have I gotten myself into here?” Emerging
Stratford-focused wit in the runes invites new readings of the sonnets
in the set, but the irreducible mysteries of biography seem to remain
locked inside the poet’s crafty brain.
Unburdened
momentarily from so many conflicting pressures and having, in effect,
28 clean slates before him, Will contemplates his need for inventive new
subject matter (10) in the new set. Indeed, as we note, he creates some
of Q’s more famous texts, along with these emerging, unfamiliar
ones.
Will
sets Scene 1 (if you will) of Rune 29 in the hidden courtroom
of his “sweet silent thought,” where his familiar auditor, the
unnamed muse—actually that friend’s “bosom” (3) or
heart--appears at an imaginary hearing to give account for some unnamed
offense. At first in high spirits, Presiding Magistrate Will, an aging
and paternal figure (9), feels challenged by the full docket (4); quickly
he admits complicity and allows the friend liberty (8, 12-14), at last
seeming more grieved than ebullient. One suggestion (8) is that the speaker
assumes the plaintiff’s “guilt”—and thus may be off
to jail himself. (Indeed, locked in his writer’s lair while his “friend”
is at large, that is much the case.) As a “taker,” the friend
at last seems guilty of stealing Will’s “loves” (12), though
what originally brought the friend “disgrace” (1) seems to have
been a failure to keep his word (6).
“Manners” (11) suggests courtroom decorum, and more
overt legalese keeps the strained conceit alive: “promise” (6),
“grieved” (7, cf. “aggrieved,” “grievance”),
“subject” (10), “worth” (11), and “wrongs that
liberty commits” (13). The convoluted pun “assay decrepit farther
takes delight” (9) asserts “a run-down trial advances entertainment.”
Since lines 12-13 embed “My lawyer, take the Mall [St. James’s
Park?], / th’ hose pretty, wrong is thought,” the joke may be
that the gentleman’s “crime” is bad taste in dress. The
emphatic initials “W. H.”—always tied to the Earl of Southampton,
Henry Wriothesley, and always (as “IN. H.”) possibly meaning
son-in-law John Hall—yield the plays “W. H., in Inn Disgrace”
and “W. H., into the Sessions…” (1-2). The closing line
puns “That [i.e., What...] thou hast here, it is not all my grace
[…all, My Grace].” Overall, Southy (or some unknown constituent[s]
trained in law) may be the imagined auditor(s) for Will’s City and
courtly puns here. In any case, within the closed circle of the poem’s
development the muse figure goes from “disgrace” to freedom
while the speaker declines from high spirits to grief, finally trapped
in chambers—if not in a cell for having “confessed” (8)
and, with Christlike “grace,” having assumed the blame that
was not originally his. Notably, one finds “disgrace” at the
outset and “grace” at the last” (14, pun).
“Sessions”
is a conceit for the poet’s thoughts and his poems, where
he “sits” and controls readers’ responses (3). The poems
are “well-contented” (4)—having “underground”
sources, with the usual pun on inkwell. “We, too, must be twain”
(8) is a comment on double composition, while “Wet ‘O’…”
implies a newly-inked rune (a rown or round), or a page wet with tears.
“Witty ‘O’...” is concurrent. “Muse,” “invention,”
and “subject” all refer to writing, and “All my loves”
and “pretty wrongs” (12-13) refer to these licentious love poems.
“Her” (14) anticipates the Dark Lady conceit and means in one
sense “the perverse, licentious ms.” And the “widow”
(punning “wide ‘O’”) that “must be twain”
is like the bifurcated text itself—the visible Sonnets and hidden
Runes.
Though “her”
(14) anticipates the Dark Lady conceit and means in one sense “the
perverse, licentious ms.”—and though the “widow”
that “must be twain” is like the bifurcated text itself—the
technical antecedent of “her” is “liberty” (13).
Nonetheless the term vaguely suggests that the muse has a girlfriend who
is the speaker’s rival or bane, and thus an air of misogyny taints
the speaker’s loss. The puns on “Hall” (12, 14) and
the vague suggestion that “her” might mean Susanna—these
allow us imagine the son-in-law as reader and to create whatever reasons
we wish. Since elsewhere we imagine the speaker rejoicing in the union
and encouraging progeny from it, can we here imagine the jealousy of a
spurned lover? The disapproval is also vaguely like that a father might
display toward a son’s “sowing wild oats” (9-13), helping
explain the listener’s “original sin,” the one that
brought him into court in the first place.
Linked
elements that show careful craftsmanship include these: “Eyes”
(1) anticipates “seen” (5) and establishes the motif of “light,”
advanced by such details as “day” (4, 6), “morning”
(5), and “takes daylight” (9, pun). “Silent” (2)
establishes a foil for “promise” (6), “confess”
(8), and “sing” (11), while “fore-tune” and “soar,
tune” (1) pun on singing. Variants of the same up-beat epithet occur
in three consecutive lines: “my well-contented day,” “a
glorious morning,” and “a beauteous day” (4-6), while
“grieved” and “grief” (7, 14) establish a basic
countermotion.
If the poet
is playing a full-text letter-acrostic game, then perhaps we can forgive
him a certain choppiness in the text, with more adjacent end-stopped elements
than might ideally make a fluent text.
The
emphatic capitals of the pasteup and the initial word-elements
in the acrostic are both provocative in ways that are surely authorized—executed
with Thorpe’s help. (See acrostic wit, below.) The prominent capital
“W,” written as “VV,” is Will’s own initial
and links in every case with “H” to create plays on the title-page
“patron’s” name: WH, and Hen[ry]. Line 6, with its particularly
huge “VV,” houses a pictographic joke; partly
it’s about the poet’s baggy eyes, apparent in the Droeshout
portrait of 1623, since it comes just after the suggestive “glorious
morning[s] have I seen” line and implies he may have been up all
night. The pictograph is also about Ann’s corpulence, since it coincides
with the pun “…heavy is Annie, / WIDEST tupper (wide-eyed…)”;
the concurrent pun “heavy scene, / WIDEST (whitest) titty…”
turns VV into sagging dugs. Because archaic “W” is “wen”
and thus “protuberance,” the poet’s initial (and Wriothesley’s)
permits much strained wit beyond the convergence in the equation W = IN
= John = Anne! The capacity of Rune 29 to pun subtextually on “devil,”
“mule,” “lighthouse,” “Ptolemy,” “Synod,”
“Semele,” “Thebes,” “India,” “Hamlet,”
“a nurse,” “satellite,” “Tower,” and
“Lent” is—as another puns encodes—“amazing.”
“The
pretty wrongs that liberty commits” (29), a comment on the poet’s
own licentious errors in his text, occurs amid a “TTT” string
that includes “Thos.” (13); to find “Thorpe” one
goes to the “wide line” to hear the joke, “Why didst
Thorpe [Q thou p] row miss?” (6). The line “No More?
Be grieved aye, T.T.…,” varying as “be grieved at that
which thou half done” (7) seems likely to be on the subject of the
unpublished More text, with “No More be ‘gravèd
[i.e., engraved]…” concurrent.
The
opening “Anne joke” is offensively funny: “When
in disgrace with fortune, Anne menses” (1). The play about “separation”
does not spare Ann either: “…We two must be two, Annie—ass,
a decrepit, fat or tacky satellite who’s Anne, my muse….”
(8-10). The pun “Thou see pretty wrongs that Libby, artist, omits”
(13), just before a plausible “grandfatherly” lament in 14
about estrangement from Stratford, may identify the “her”
of 14 as the granddaughter Elizabeth Hall. The best “Judy”
play seems a compliment: “soft, sweet, silent, thou Judy be…”
(2-3, Q ght,/Thy). The occurrence of such “continuation”
or run-over puns in the Sonnets themselves can be illustrated by those
involving line 6 here, which also occur at Sonnet 34.1, where letterstrings
help create these plays: 1) “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous
sudde/n May? 2) “Why didst thou th’ row miss? If you see a
beauteous ‘D’ a/nd ‘M,’ ache….” And
3) “Why didst thou ‘prow’ miss? F--k a beauteous Da/ne,
make him t’ rail….” Such puns show how the poet embeds
“runic” wit in Q’s overt texts and hint that much more
wit of similar sorts waits to be discovered.
Topical
puns and bawdry in the Q line letterstrings include “...my
‘horn’ [whoring] enjoys Annie, / widest tupper [fornicator],
O, miss f**k I...” (5-6) and “Why didst [Thomas] Thorpe [Will’s
printing agent] row miss, so cheap, odious Dane...?” (6-7). (Recurring
puns suggest that Thorpe must have been red-headed, colloquially a “Dane”
or “Swede.”) In 14, such overlaid puns occur as “Tee! Hathaway
stirred, eyes note all my grief” (code: Hat thou ha ftherit,
is not all my griefe) and “Tea Hathaway stirred. Eyes know
Ptolemy greasy.” The letterstrings hat whi (7) and
how thy wo (11) also vary “Hathaway.” Daie
and FVll (4-5) link to pun on “devil,” as part of the
fuller pudendal pun “my well, c--t-ended devil, my Annie, aye galore
[OED 1675]...” (5). See below for other puns in the letterstrings
of the lines.
Sample Puns
1)
Whinny; W., Hen., in disgrace; …ends, gray, sweaty, sore, too, an
anthem in sighs; Grey see; in India, f--k her ass; gray, see witty fart,
you, neighing demon, sigh, ass (size); “tuna” demeans eyes;
Anne menses; witty four-two-né (i.e., playful 42 born):
42 overt poems are being created in Sets I-III.
2) W.
Hen., too; Whinny; …toothy ass seizing soft wit of island’d
thought; Windy, O, th’ season, soft, sweet, see Lent; violent thou
get (jet); violin huge
2-3)
ill end t’ haughty Thebes homme eyes; India, adieu; O,
you Judy, be awesome, aye seen dirty; scene; soft, sweet, silent, thou
Judy be of hommes endeared
3) Thy
“bow” (beau) foamy is; end “eared”; eye-cinder;
Wit Hall hard is; I sin, dear Ed., Wit (witty) Hall here tease (hurt ease);
dear Ed with Hall hard is
3-4) …hurt
his “I”; Thebes home aye seen dirtied, with hall, hearth safe;
safety house
4)
Eye fit [stanza], how firm; mule [cf. Whinny (1)]; my well, cunt-ended,
die; Will see, untended, die
4-5) Eye
of a mule, cunt-ended devil, m’ Annie eye galore
5) m’
horn-inch heavy seen (...scene, sin)
5-6)
in Jove (jaw) is Annie Widest [with a huge VV starting the line, suggesting
fangs or dugs]
6) W.
H., ye died, Shakespeare = [st] thou prow; abode; Why did Thorpe
row miss? …Rome aye see?
6-7)
Miss, f--k (suck) a beauteous Dane, o[r] Moor bigger; f--k a beau Tuesday,
no more
7)
W.H. edged housed don (Houston); aged
7-8)
Anne O, Moor bigger rooted Hat-Which, th’ O vast, tunneled, messy
O
8)
that wet woe, muffed between; twain bifurcated, like these texts;
cunt’s effete
8-9)
son seizes that widow muffed, between ass a dick ripped farther; Annie
is aye decrepit, fat, her tack [i.e.,blemish] a satellite
9)
Hell [Q L], Anne [Q Et = And], me, see, insist that
we two must be twain; Helen; a kiss; elide [i.e.,destroy]
9-10)
East lighthouse enemy may use
10) see Anne,
my Muse wan; muff he wants; O weaken; you swan (swain); few be jacked;
twin windy
11) O haughty
wart-hued man-arse (a nurse) amazing
12) Tackle;
Ache Hall, my love’s Semele; simile; smell loaves; my lawyer, take
the Mall!
12-13) yet
ached Hamlet [Q hem all, T], who’s pretty; awl
13) Prate
you rune jested; pirate, you’re on gusty Hat.; Thou see pretty Tower
owing Southy; at liberty see homme I tease; two wrongs; Southy
t’ lie bare
13-14) Ye
come, it’s t’ Hat., thou halved her (I tease not)
14) That thou
hast Harry, ’tis knot; it is no Ptolemy grave; Herod; sign o’
Ptolemy; eye snot, awl, my grease (cf. menses [1]); eye Synod Hall meager;
maugre fee [i.e., despite cost, etc.]; maugre [spite] fey; I snow, tall,
meager, easy; My Grace
Acrostic Wit
This printed first-line
rune generates double acrostic wit: The downward (or
down/down) code—VVTI FVN LAHOT TT VVF VVOES OHAHHHHH…—suggests,
e.g., “Witty few annihilate...,” “Witty, fon [i.e., foolish]
laddie T.T. [i.e., Thomas Thorpe, Will’s printing agent], whiff
woes , O!...,” “Witty, fon lady T.T. whiff woes, O, ha!”
“Wait, heavenly ode, T.T. whiffs O,” “Wight heavenly,
hot titty whiff [VV, pictographic ‘titties] o’ Sue,”
“Wide, heavenly ode t’ diffuse, O,” “10 to 1 funnel,
a hot, tough woe saw I (sway),” “10 to 1, fon laddie tough
woe sha[t?],” “W-typhoon let T.T. refuse [tongue-tied], O,”
“Wit eye few, anal 8 [scatological] whiff you easy,” “Witty
few in hell ate T.T. (titty)….”and “Witty, fon lady,
wife you owe [acknowledge], Sue Ha[ll]....” “Fun” (OED
1685, cf. “fon”; code FVN) suggests a hoax or trick.
The upward reverse codeline
(i.e., the up/up code)—HHHHHAHOS EOVV FVVTTTOHAL N VF I TVV—suggests
such readings as, e.g., “Hiss ‘Eve’—futile enough.
I, too,” “Is Eve feudal enough ado?” and “How
Sue feuded to Hall, enough ‘I do!’ (…anus eye, too [F=S]).”
Line 29.3 lacks
the usual second capital, perhaps consciously omitting the “h”
in “Thy” to control, in a modest but significant way, the
alignment of the capitalized acrostic code . The terminal codeline “H’s”
suggest “ladders.” (Such typographic manipulations would have
required the help of Thomas Thorpe, Will’s printing agent—or
of some other collaborator who was in on the game.)
The rune is built to
pull one further into the acrostic grid to see what phoneme is encoded
next. The opening plays “W., Hen…” (1-2) suggest an
acrostic focus on “Southy” or “Southampton.” Other
combinations occur in this doubled-columned (“laddered”) acrostic,
in the first text in the set with its amplitude of initial capitals. Down/up
and up/down codelines offer additional possibilities. The 6 V’s
suggest 30, the number of the next rune.
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