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Comments
Heavy
with “O’s,” mock lamentations, these 14 lines
comprising Rune 23 open the sestets in the visible Sonnets 15-28 and thus
help achieve logical transition there.
I’ve
settled on a reading of Rune 23 that takes several words in 1-3 as puns:
Then as “Thin” (1); the second life (2) as
“leaf” (or “page”); and should (Q3) as the
eyepun “fold.” Other reader/players can find gamy alternatives.
Though Sonnets editors, often skeptical about whether Q’s published
form is Will’s own, have routinely emended Q’s details, I’ve
felt honor bound as first editor of the Runes to take the texts “as
is” wherever I can. However, Q is all double entendre anyway,
and some of the best textual readings hinge on puns.
Accepting
punning variants as primary doesn’t negate my premise that
Q’s details, jot-and-tittle, are indeed Will’s own—almost
certainly rendered into type minim-by-minim by his printing agent Thomas
Thorpe.
The word “conceit”
in line 1 (see OED) ambiguously means ego, a trick, and/or a strained
poetic comparison of the sort that Will (in Q) and later the Metaphysical
poets favored.
Both
“Painful Warrior” (11)—a pun on “Pay-in-full
Worrier” that echoes “wary” (8)—and “Eternal
Summer” are conceits for the poet, who assumes here the mock-heroic
voice of one who plays “savior” to his knight, ambiguously gendered
(see 6). Will is, punningly, a “summer”—an “adder,”
a “numbers man,” a metricist who uses “figures,” an
“accountant” tallying things up. (In 1609, “numbers”
meant “metrics.” Each visible Q text is a number.)
Because the
same two phrases may also be names for the poet’s muse, they’re
“inconstant” conceits (see 1). Will’s wish to ensure immortality
is also twofold, focusing both on his own poems and on the unnamed person
he addresses.
Vaguely
subjunctive or conditional verbs such as “stay” (1)
and “Save” (13)—along with “should,” “shall,”
and “let” constructions—allow a sense of indefinite outcome
and possibility that looks ahead to the future day the Runes are “repaired,”
reassembled, perhaps by the listening muse, perhaps by someone else. The
point of view in the poem ranges among lst, 2nd, and 3rd persons.
Sonnets
editors routinely emend the “painful warrior” line
because it violates the rhyme scheme in Sonnet 25. (Editor Stephen Booth,
e.g., changes “...worth” to “...fight”!) In Rune 23,
unrhymed, the line works as is. The listening muse may be “painful”
for having a brow that is “carved” (5) by “the lines of
life” (2), worry lines perhaps triggered by failing looks. The poet
does the muse’s “eyes” a good turn (10) by keeping that
visage fresh; in the process, Will leaves evidence of “my soul’s
imaginary sight” (13)—not just of the muse’s image in
the poet’s heart, but also Will’s own poetic imagination.
The muse
may be either Eve-like or Adam-like (6). (He or she is also like Oedipus
for having a “carved face.”) Plays on “lines” and
a Book of Hours (5) imply that the muse may be “lining” the
brow by trying to write. Let me do that, the poet says, with
my books. Line 2, advice to the muse and/or the recompositor,
is a summary of the poet’s mission—to “repair that life
(or leaf).” “Save that” (13) reiterates the same directive.
Details
about money, economics, and coinage—and the opening clue
“Thin the conceit of this…” (1)—hint that
“the painful [pay-in-full] warrior” is Henry VII, Elizabeth
I’s grandfather, as depicted on the sovereign, a “splendid gold
coin” (Britannica) worth 20 shillings. Minted in 1489, the
coin bore the image of Henry, seated. Until 1546, well into Henry VIII’s
reign, the coin showed the elder Henry. Under the son its “worth”
declined. No doubt the “old sovereign” was treasured into Shakespeare’s
day as a famously worthy coin.
Henry VII was indeed
a “painful warrior,” depicted as tired and anxious looking,
with thin hair and bad teeth. As “warrior” he had ended the
War of the Roses and founded the Tudor line. His ruthless financial methods,
which put a hard squeeze on all creditors, made him, indeed, a “Pay-in-full
Warrior.” His “worth” also means the celebrated solvency
of his reign. Too, “pain-full”—i.e., full of
bread!—is a bilingual joke about Henry VIII’s girth.
Thus
the rune (like many) is a kind of riddle with several “solutions.”
Southampton,
also a military man named Henry, could have imagined himself relevant.
And then there’s Aeneas….
My unpublished studies of Will’s part of the More ms. suggest
that the runic subtext there similarly plays on coins—the Four Nobles—in
an elaborately covert allusion.
Some
likely puns allude to Will’s daughters, Susannah and Judith,
plausibly Sue and Judy. “Sue” puns include “Sue, S. Hall...”
(2, 3), “S. Hall” (4), and “Sue...” (13), encouraging
one to hear, e.g., “Sue, S. Hall, did Helen softly see...,”
followed by the run-on pun “Paris” (2-3). Other puns are “Beauty,
eternal summer, S. Hall in ode sight” (4) and “Now Sue had God-turned
eyes, sorry eyes, haughty, wan” (10). Meanwhile, guides
(12) puns on “Judy S.” and allows such puns as “...[the
fact] that Judy is my hymn avenges Ovid. Ha...” and “whatsoever
stared at Judy’s mime...” (12-13).
“Hat.
guides my moving [...mooing]”(12) encodes Will’s two-edged joke,
“Hathaway makes me leave home” and “...inspires these O-filled
verses.”
The pun “Thin/Thick, onset
of this [poem] inconstant is to eye” opens the text.
Sample Puns
1)
Th’ hints wan see
1-2)
Then the cunt-seat (seed) hostess joins, unfit Anne tough teases Hall,
diddling asses livid; cunt’s t’ end if diocese hold the lines
2) Ass,
offal dead, hell eye; Sue, S. Hall, did he limn softly; fold; leaf [page];
leaf rip; repair fix up, recover, recombine
2-3)
fetid lice rip Harry S.; East Atlas repairs; R.I.P., Harry S. (hairy ass)
3) age
the poet’s era; Sue, S. Hall dim
3-4)
…may be peer silhouette [anachronistic]; witty her agile butt
4)
S. Hall; knot [puzzle]; some marshal
4-5) So
m’ martial knot fades
5) O,
crown ode with thy Hours; O, see our veined wit; my loo’s sour burrow;
Ochre (Ogre) you note, witty whores, milieu is sere B-row
6) Anne
S.; And Sue, Roman wert thou first (fairest); serrated (cf. carved
[5]); Thomas-ire Shakespeare created 5-7)
fair, beruned Sue, Roman wordy, thou First-Created “O”
6-7)
See, read idol, Tommy T., rune low but truly writ (read)
7)
Ol’ Anne [= et] made her (mater) venal “O”—V,
a butt—true lyre (…rule your eye); O let meat ruin (mete rune),
low butt, “ruley” rite
8) Ode,
Harry S.; Ought hairy ass—our low, beasty self—soar? Why?
Sue; war
9) thin;
Ol’ Anne [= et] may be hocus, beaten t’ Hell o’
Cunts
9-10)
unseen “O’s” you hate
10) you hate
God, Turnus, I suffer; In “O” [rune] see what good your rune
says, suffer aye, ass, halved one; feud
11) Th’
pay-in-full lawyer see, muffed forward
11-12) T’
help Annie S., you’ll worry her, say m’ O’s defer war;
fame Ovid for worth t’ lewd Sue aver, fit art
12) Your Astarte
tugged, some Y (why?) moving; T’ eye, lewd sewer (fire) started;
mooing; Hat. guides my moving
13) Southy,
Tommy sole see Magi, an airy sight; fight; f--ked; Southy t’ my
soul is imaginary sight
13-14) “An
Airy (In Harry) F--k” titled he Dido Pleas; titled he Dido “play
femme”
14) tail;
hymned Howard bright (buried); to play, see Ham[n?]et hover, top right
[t’ be right].
Acrostic Wit
The
downward acrostic codeline—TS S BOAOOON TT SI—may
encode, e.g., such readings as “T’ ass suborned, ’tis
I,” “’Tis Boa Auntie’s ‘I’ [phallic],”
“Tea sup, want t’ sigh,” “’Tis S. beau,
Auntie, ’tis I,” “T’ ass sapient tease I,”
“’Tis ‘sapient’ to say (’tis I),”
“Tess’s boon (bone), titties eye,” “Tis bone to
tease aye [eye],” “ ’Tis sapient,’tis I,” and
“‘Tis his bone, T.T.’s [phallic] ‘I.’”
The upward
codeline— I STTN OOOA O BS ST—allows such readings
as these: “Eye Satan—OOOOO—Beast,” “Eye
Satan: Away, beast!” “Eye Satan, OO [pictographic eyes], why
be sad?” “…web’s saint,” “Is T.T.
nobis (knobby, no-B.S.)Saint?” “Is it to know why ‘O’
pissed (why opus)?” “Aye sit and wipe asses[ = code SS],
T., ”“Is T.T. Noah or beast?” and “Is T.T. in
Wyatt’s st[…anza]?” (code B=8).
The
letterstring ST intriguingly overlays a form of “saint”
on the Shakespeare family name cipher that I have deduced—an S seeming
to hold a dagger- or spear-shaked T as if by the handle and “shake”
it; the pictographic element is clearer in the digraph form of st
(with “long s”) common as a printform in Will’s
day. Conventionally, I think that ST would have come to mean “[Saint]
Shakespeare” in the poet’s always overlaid game, where one
meaning never rules out any other. In this acrostic occurs an interesting
juxtaposition of this form with TT (for Thomas Thorpe, Will’s printing
agent) and with letterstrings suggesting boon, bound, Satan,
and beast—along with pictographic oglers in the form of
OOOs. (Composers of “eye-music” played similar games with whole
notes.)
BOAOOON—suggesting
“bone”—is a letterstring conceit for the skinny acrostic.
Since an O = a round = a rune, line 10 in the text itself can pun, “In
this rune, see what good turns eyes, four eyes, have done.” Such
witty topical interplays between the textual lines and the acrostic codeline
occur commonly in the Runes.
Noah and
beast also interlink here in a way that suggests authorial
manipulation of the codestring.
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