|
Comments
A
main riddle in Rune 37 is the matter of whom or what the poet
is addressing. One way to make sense of the text is to hear the poet speaking
to “Thou, art,… (3)—the buried runic text itself, or the
Runes as a cycle. Concurrently, the text also embodies the unidentified
friend, who by extension is the poet’s “love” (3, 14 ),
his “loving thought” (4), and his “muse” (10).
As elsewhere
in Q, the apologetic poet implies that this love poem, and all his art,
is vaguely “shameful.” Finding the Runes helps us see a part
of his logic, since the Runes are hidden, tortured, imperfect, subversive,
and not creations the poet can openly acknowledge. Though the linkage
between “thy sensual fault” (7)—suggesting a crevice or
crevasse—and “my seat” (13) is comical, overall the rune
rings serious and may have in mind two real losses in the poet’s
life: his shining Sunne (5, punning on “son”) and his
Stratford “seat” (13), the family home he left to pursue his
destiny.
The
poem, with many others, supports the deduction that the Runes—as
the “grave where buried love doth live” (3)—are on one
level a memorial to the dead Hamnet, the poet’s only son, whose death
in 1596 at age 11 ended his family name. The letterstrings “I may
not” (8) and “…I am not…” (9) house apt plays
on “Hamnet.” Puns on Sue (e.g., Q9 So) and John (Q2,
fore-gon, an eyepun on “sore John”) offer other rusty
keys to family wit about Susanna and Dr. John Hall, the poet’s daughter
and son-in-law in whom Will’s hope for family survival rested. John
Hall, too, was the poet’s “Sunne” after June 1607, and
the phrase “give physic to my grief” (6) gestures toward Hall’s
profession, medicine. The letterstrings ge thee (8) and giue
thy (12) pun on “Judy” and thus on a diminutive form of
“Judith,” Hamnet’s still-living twin.
In the “twinned”
Sonnets/Runes projects, the buried Runes parallel the dead son, while
the overt Sonnets emblemize Judith. I also think that as Will prepared
the Q texts for publication ca. 1607-1609 he saw them as an epithalamion
group celebrating Susanna’s marriage to Hall—so that the Halls
are, in one primary sense, the “Master Mistress” of the poet’s
love (see Sonnet 20.2).
The
identity of the person or agency addressed here and elsewhere
in Q is, of course, ambiguous, and that obfuscation seems to be intentional,
a part of the Quarto Game. Often in Q Will seems to banter with his male
addressee(s) in erotic terms—a “sensual fault” to which
he “brings in sense.” The pun “I may not evermore acknowledge
thee, / Southy [Q Sothe ]” (8-9) suggests Southampton,
Shakespeare’s only known patron; so does the pun “My Grace.”
The
address may apply equally well to John, Will’s son-in-law, for no
one writes love sonnets to men! Whatever the nature of the poet’s
love for John, he recognizes that his own “loss is Susanna’s
gain” (14). In any case, extravagant puns about back-door sex undergird
the poem: e.g., “‘Ope’ scene see, what a torment, wood[y]
Shakespeare [st, the family name cipher] thou ‘prow’”
(10), and “Thou mightst my seat forbear!” (13). Contemporaries,
too, would have heard here,“You might at least leave my ass alone.”
Puns in 13-14 amplify and confound the suggestive wit: e.g., “Aim,
butt wide (...white) to homage...,” “Aim, bawdy Tommy,
just Tommy...,” “effete, sore be Harry S. (...hairy ass),”
and “thou madest my seat sore,” and “...my seedy ‘fore’
bare I feel, OO, Southy, my love, is my loose game.” (Tommy,
here and elsewhere, is likely to allude to Will’s known printing
agent, Thomas Thorpe.)
Crafty echoic patterns
occur in greeue, greeuances, graue (2-3), and
griefe (6)—the last rhyming with “thief” (12).
(Q’s spelling greeuances [2] allows an internal pun on “rune.”)
“Thief thoughts” (1), an eyepun, anticipates “robbery”
and “gentle thief” (12). Other linked elements vary “despise”
(1, 9) and “thoughts” (1, 4). “Foregone” (2) anticipates
parallel “for…” forms (7, 12, 13), while “lame”
(9) prepares for the eyepun “feet” (13). Throughout Q, the f
/ “long s” interchange allows puns, contradictions,
and bad jokes lost in modern typeforms: Q’s loose, losse,
and loues (14), e.g., all encode “love,” thus allowing
other meanings in the line. By means of thissame visual interchange, disparate
terms overlay each other: e.g., fame and shame; and
griefe, grease, and grace (6, code: griese).
Disconcertingly,
Yet (1) can always pun on Wyatt (the English sonneteer,
Will’s forerunner), and also on wide, white, and Waite
(perhaps a topical allusion.)
In
Q’s numbers game, the “tenth muse” line here is—self-consciously—line
10.
Sample Puns
1)
Yet jaunty is Anne [= et= and], haughty ass; myself, awl (cell)
moist does pissing; Wyatt auntie’s thoughts may sell
2)
John [= in], join; fit [i.e., stanza]; Yet eye naughty
set (fit) huge, ’tis ms.-leaf (missal, missile); Thin cigarro
[Sp.]; “I” great; egret; an egg; ass is our John
2-3)
Rovert Greene see suffer, gone t’ Howard, the grave; sore,
John, thou art; W., Harry, buried love (low), doth live; oath low
3)
Thou art Harry W., eerie, buried, lauded alive
4)
Oath, new ode is aye same; out, Sesame; femme beauty; see m’
butt, his low inch taut (th’ “O” jet); lo, John, jet
you; avenge
5)
You ’n’ Sue, my son, one early morn did shine; in wan “ear”
lie; m’ whore needy divine; Moor night I’d shine
5-6)
early my horn (whoring) did shine in Horsy Anne (whore-scene)
6)
Nor rune [reversed]; Inner [hidden]; see Anne, this
Ham give physic to; Ham.[cf. Hamnet]; Jew fey f--ked homme; grave;
gravy; sick Tommy, grieve
7)
Fart o’ thy sin fuel Saul t’ bring incense; sin of you, Hall,
faulty (salty) be; eye bare engine
7-8)
For tooth, essential salt I bring in a fancy hymen (amen); Semen
7-9)
Simon (Simeon), ought your Moor acknowledge, the sodden “I”?
8-9)
Eye my knot, evermore acknowledge this “O”
9)
Sue; Southy name not lame, poor; whored “I’s” pissed;
Sodden [Tearful] Hamnet lay may be our inner deaf-piece; Sudden; I’m
not your Moor, ass, no lad jetty; Southy, name Anne
10)
Beth, O you the tenth Muse; Betty; muffed intime; ten times more
eye new earth
10-11)
t’ knight (Nate, tonight) I’m ass (S.), moor in warty “O”;
Moor I knew, earthy Ahab, fancy
11)
sin sweet: Ate whore men two, old, stop her! O abyss ensued, a torment;
man too old, Shakespeare [= st], thou prow; P-Row
11-12) O,
absinthes, what a torment, woods t’ th’ hopper Ovid owes our
Jew [sacrilege]
12) Aye
dose her, Judy [Judith], ’er ovary genitalled, heavy; th’
heir abridge, entail thief
12-13)
Gentile thief I may be
13) Aye,
maybe you died, Tommy, ghost; Eeii! m’ beauty Anne [et
= and], thou mightst my seat forbear! Betty, thou mite, Shakespeare ms.
ate, sorbet; my seat, sore, bare (be hairy); feate feet; my Set
IV; ms. 8 [Set VIII?]; “home” aye guessed, my seat; item
13-14) arras;
sorbet [cf. “ice”], aye, raise eye, [eye] lofty Himalayas,
mellow skein (scene)
14) I
feel “O” o’ Southy, my love aye seamy; mellow face,
mellow ass; I fill “O’s” themey, low; seize my love’s
game; my love is my loose, gay Annie; mellow, use gay Annie; skene [knife]
Acrostic Wit
The
downward acrostic codeline—YTT OENF IS BOI A I—suggests,
e.g., “White (Wide) enough (a knave) is boy I ‘I’ (eye),”
“Yet enough (a knife) is boy ‘I,’ aye,” “Ye,
T.T., want office-boy (…wan [tuna] fish boil),” “Ye,
T.T., own, fist boy,” “Y’ titty one of ice be. Why?”
“Yet tune forte is bois [wood, ‘crazy,’ cf.
‘hautbois’],” “Yet two knaves, boy I eye,”
“Wide anus I sate… [B=8],” and “Wyatt-onus aye
is a toy.”
The upward codeline—IAIOB
S I FNEOT TY—conveys such potential readings as “Job-sigh
( eye, ‘I’) finite weigh,” “Job is aye fini,
O,T.T., why?” “Jabs ‘I’ of knight (Nate) t’
‘Y’ [groin],” “Jabs ‘I’ F., Nate,
‘Y’,” “Jabs eye of night. Why?” “Eye
apes, aye finite. Why?” “Eye apse infinite t’ eye,”and
“Lay low be sieve knotty.”
“F.,
Nate” suggests Nate Field, a BOIAI actor.
|
