|
Comments
As
elsewhere in Set II, a main subject here is the poet’s struggle
to record the nature of the absent auditor. “Biblical” details
invite us to read the muse as a Saint of Love in whose “soul”
is “thought all naked” (12)—absolute meaning and Truth.
The imagery of the poem connects eyes (a favorite Renaissance conceit)
and stained-glass windows.
As “love’s
might/mite” (9), the poet is like Cupid, a naked, angelic-looking
boy: “All-naked Will” (12) is as “blind” (13) as a
newborn “mite.” This little angel, through whose eyes the muse’s
“eyes” shine, may thus be a figure in a stained-glass window
(10) in some sanctuary honoring the friend; if the muse “frowns”
as the sun goes behind a cloud, then the “glory dies” (11) and
the window dulls. Because the muse’s “painted counterfeit”
(2) is on one level the image of that figure in the glass, the phrase
“this huge rondure” (7 ) suggests a magnificent rose window
in a cathedral—as well as Will’s theatre, The Globe, and the
Earth itself.
Echoes
of the Bible stories of The Widow’s Mite (9) and of the
healing of the blind (13) add allusive texture, as does the contradictory
idea that the muse is a thief (6) “forbidden…one more heinous
crime” (5)—more like a corrupt moneychanger than a saint. (“Most
heinous crime” suggests “moist, anus crime” and “moist
anus-rim.” Jokes about buggery recur in Q.)
Vaguely textural,
too, are such latent puns as “thin, European” (2, suggesting
“Gothic”), “Rheims” (7), and “Seine” (8).
By reading
the text as a gamy joke, one may hear the poet addressing his muse pejoratively,
something like this: “If you were dead so people could think of you
as a saint, it would be easier to believe this image of you, but as it
is, your ‘heinous’ nature makes it hard to imagine you as holy.”
It helps in such a reading to remember that the auditor, just by reading
the poet’s bawdry and being part of his perverse circle, is automatically
partaking of a kind of “crime.” Vague hints abound in the visible
sonnets that the listening friend has a “criminal” nature.
Other
comic diversions include the manly puns “awl naked Will
bestowed” (12), a phallic joke, and “untrimmed” (4), suggesting
a bearded face. The dispute about whether Shakespeare’s only known
patron—Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton—looked better
with or without a beard was a hot courtly topic at one point in the 1590s
and may be behind the term, but any male auditor might smile at hearing
“You need a shave.” The “n’er-touched earthly
face...” (3) may pun on “Wriothe’ley,” though
Southy’s family name was probably pronounced more like “Rizley”
or “Roseley.” (Wit about how to pronounce such an ungodly spelling
must have been routine among Southampton’s intimates. The suggestion
that the Q lines pun routinely on “Southy” is my own, having
no backing that I know of in prior critical discussion.)
Much wit is
expended here on another of Will’s usual topics, the toilsome writing
project itself. Printing puns, e.g., include “B-row state” (in
the “A-row,” line 1); “untrimmed” (4, with “reamed,”
“rhymed”); “count our [her] feet” (2); and “be
letter [leader]” (8, with a play on Eld, the printer who owned the
shop where Q was printed). The play on “rune”—e.g., in
“evince a rune t’ hiss, huge Rune D [runed, ruined] your hymn
is” (7)—is a typical latent reference to the Runegame. An overlaid
pun on “see air [song] in this book” depends upon a printed
“h” that looks like a “b.” (My theory is that Will’s
printing agent Thomas Thorpe helped effect such typographic wit.)
Amidst
the usual subliminal Anne-wit, the rhetorical question about
relative age (8) reminds us that Will’s Anne is eight years his senior.
The pun “In this huge rondure Ham. S. housing” (7-8) is almost
certainly a joke about her girth, since Hamnet Shakespeare was the couple’s
son (he died in August 1596) and since many other sly jokes in Q imply
that Anne is fat (as well a mother of twins might be). Plays on “father”
and estrangement in 14 also make the poem uncomfortably personal, as does
the concurrent pun in 7, “...evince heir in this huge rune dour,
Ham S.”
The first
line puns, poignantly, “Anne dour [I endure...], th’ heir [i.e.,
Hamnet] be roused, a tot of memory.”
Such
plays as “House arid I left ill, farther off from thee [...father
off, roamed he]” (14) may address Susanna and John Hall, Will’s
daughter and son-in-law, who jointly may be the “they” of line
1. My theory is that Will imagined his son-in-law, soon to be his daily
companion in Stratford after his retirement, as one of his primary auditors—and
that John and Sue Hall are in one sense the “master/mistress of my
passion” whom Q, a perverse epithalamion cycle, addresses and honors.
“The haughty Anne siring this huge Rune, dour hymn [...dour Ham S.],
show...” illustrates further puns in the same line. John Hall would
have heard all the “Anne-wit” in Q as a complex of mother-in-law
jokes.
Typically,
this text is coy about the gender—and even the number—of the
absent “muse” toward whom the poet toils.
One
variant pun in 13-14 is this: “...the blind do see / how
fertile Shakespeare, ill father, off roamed he,” alluding to Will’s
abandonment of his family in Stratford to seek his fortune elsewhere.
(Here, I propose, the digraph st encodes “Shakespeare”
and is Will’s recurring “name cipher”: a “long s”
holding a spear-like t and “shaking” it.) Finding such letter-specific
wit in the Q lines as this and the ambiguous “b/h”
in line 7 is really a whole new way of reading them. Rationalizing such
minuscule examinations of meaning in Q are the facts that the cycle is,
at heart, Game and its author a deviously ingenious punster.
Sample Puns
1)
Endure th’ air, be roasted; dour t’ Harry B-Row is;
“Anne” we writ here; fit eye doubts
2) M’
huge “awl” (hell) I curtain; Much liquor thin Europe ended
(undid); Europa; European; Ed., count her feet; Muscle I curtain—your
painted cunt or feet
2-3) dick
owned [admitted] erased suck; sauces
3) Suck
(F--k) you anally, touch ass near to huge tear [rip], the lice aye seize;
to you, shitter-tail sauces
3-4)
a Wriothesley (“Wrioth’ley”) face is by chance or nature’s
change course untrimmed; tear th’ icy seas, bitchin’
4)
canker; see our fount (sound) rhymed; see our fiend, wry, M.D. (empty);
see hanging curse (curve) untrimmed
4-5)
ornate, you, Rizzy, inching, see whores “V,” enter, amid butt’s
“O” rabid (orbit)
5) Beauty,
Sue or Betty, one most heinous, see her eye me; Body’s orbit t’
Hen. must hie; the One Most High knows our hymn (serum)
5-6) …knows
wry muses’ talisman
6)
Witch Shakespeare, alas, menses; Which Shakespeare, a lass, menses? Anne
dome [wisdom] ends; woman’s foul ass amazeth
6-7) a
maze, Th[omas] Th[orpe], attune (a dune), sire, in this huge rune;
7) That
Heavy Anne, Siren in this huge rune; huge rondure suggests The
Globe; in this huge rondure, Ham S (is); hymned; shoo, gerund, you rhyme!
7-8) in
this huge rune, Durham shows; Rheims huge Anne eyed
8) How
sane (Seine) I then build; builder; Hawk Annie’d Hen be; Hawk-eye
Nathan; Hulk Annie’d t’ Hen be elder than T[homas] Howard;
Eld
9) O,
wreck her, God, with burden of mine own loo smite; he knows m’ Annie
Owen loves; Love’s mite (cf. Cupid); low Semite
10) That Hath-ass-sway
endow we, ass glazed with thine “I’s”; th’ Annie
use; thy naves, knaves, niece
10-11) I neigh
ewe’s fart as Rune 80 (…81)
11) Forehead,
a frowned hint here galore yet eye; For Ed. I’ve rowned handy, high
regal “O” ready; gallery
12) souls,
fowls, fools; see Hall (awl) naked; Willobie, too, eyed; Will
be Shakespeare [st], owe [i.e., own] it!
12-13) John,
this old, stout…Will, Best o’ Wit, Loo-king;
13) Lo, King
John, dirk in ass
14) Hover
I (Aver aye) t’ oil (However I toil,) Shakespeare [st],
ill father, off from thee; House arid I left, ill is author (ills artier),
off from thee; fiddles Arthur; to oil still of Arthur, offer “O”
mythy.
Acrostic Wit
The
downward acrostic codeline—AMS B BWT HOT F IL H—may
encode, e.g., such wit as “A miss be bawdy, hot filly,” “A
ms. be bawdy ‘O’ [rune] t’ fill eye,” “A.M.’s
be beau t’ hot village,” “Aye m’ ass
be bawdy, hot, feel itch,” “A ms. be bodied village,”
“A ms. be bawdy hoot of Ill Age,” “A ms. be beau
thought of Ill Age,” “A ms. be beau, thoughtful,”
“A ms. be beau, Tho. T., feel (of Hell) [i.e., the acrostic]
edge,” “Amiss, baby wet hot village.” Overall, the mix-and-match
pattern “A miss [Amiss] be bawdy [Beauty], hot [haut] filly”
seems insistent.
The pun miss/ms.
is, I think, routine in Q (see OED: miss = a kept mistress [1667]).
The letter H suggests both the “edge” and a pictographic “ladder”—and
thus in two senses may refer to the up-and-down acrostic fringe of a text.
The
upward (reverse) letterstring code—HLIFTOHT WB BS MA—is
crafted to encode such hidden “messages” as, e.g., “Each
[H. = Hall?] lifted webs, M.A.,” “H. lifted web, Bess may
(be summa),” “Hell, I’ve taught, whips M.A.
(May),” “Hell, eye of toad, web, ass-hymn (…some) eye,”
“Hell, life-taught, whips (webs) M.A.,” “H-life taught
web’s M.A..,” “Hell of twat whips me,”and “Edge
lift, oat; wipe B.S., M.A.”
|
