Notes on Set I (Sonnets 1-14): “Marriage and Increase”
Though
scholars have often stressed the thematic unity in Sonnets 1-17
or 1-18 (see Ramsey 6), 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 (Muir 45; Landry 144, crediting
Pooler’s Arden edition).
Necessarily,
the general content of the sonnets in a set determines that of
the sibling runes—and vice versa. Set I deserves the editorial title
“Marriage and Increase” since, however varied, its runes and
sonnets all encourage union and procreation. Set I houses no blockbuster
sonnets—not one that has gained a wide readership or frequent anthology
status.
The
set establishes patterns that the others follow. Each visible
text is “a number,” and each sonnet follows an English rhyme
scheme (abab cdcd efef gg) that precludes any rhyme
scheme in the runes. (If the runes rhymed, Sonnets 1 and 3 would
have the same scheme—as would Sonnets 2 and 4; 5 and 7; 6 and 8;
9 and 11; 10 and 12; 13 and 14—and the supply of end-words would
be sphinctered down hopelessly.) Four sonnets of the 14—1, 3, 4,
and 10—use be/thee or me/thee couplet rhymes,
generating incidental abaa rhymes in Runes 13 and 14 and “switched”
rhymes in the couplets of Sonnets 3 and 4 that pun on “witty be
/ be witty” and “to be / not to be.”)
Set
I also illustrates Q’s underlying “warp-and-woof” structure,
rationalizing the “knottiness” of both sets of texts. Eugene
Gant’s reference in Look Homeward, Angel to the “woven
density” of the Sonnets shows Thomas Wolfe’s apt prescience
(278). (Gant finally gives up on the Sonnets because they are so hard.)
Paul Ramsey’s “web” of connectedness is another metaphor
with the same drift (6ff.). What Elizabethans liked in their knot-gardens,
they also liked in their poetry: intricate, interlocked designs. The Q
texts are a covert reductio absurdum of this interest.
Looking
at Set I and imagining the poems penned on a folio-sized leaf,
about 22 x 17 inches, in the near-minuscule hand of the More
remnant (link: How Will
Wrote the Runes) invites us to envision how the poet composed a given
set. Writing the first sonnet of the set and the first lines of all 14
sonnets (generating Rune 1) would have imposed no unusual constraints,
except that each line as Will composed it had to start another
poem. These two texts, Sonnet 1 and Rune 1, laid out the formal and thematic
dimensions of the set. As the poet successively added lines, “down”
or “across,” the texture of his set thickened and his choices
grew more complex. Still, when he wrote any given line, his problem was
to advance the sense and wit of two texts concurrently, not 28.
Perhaps the poet roughed in all the lines for the set on a single folio
leaf and then refined the texts on separate leaves, jot-and-tittle, so
they could bear more punning freight. In any case, the process was exacting
and tedious.
Set
I also shows how each of the 14 visible sonnets in a set parallels
one line of a sonnet text, and how the 4-4-4-2 pattern of the
leaf parallels three quatrains and a couplet. Q shows the sonnet couplets
indented, and my restoration of the sets follows suit, generating
the symmetry that the poet surely aimed at, a set arrangement that allows
the two pages to mirror each other. Notably, the first mention of mirrors
in Q—“Look in thy glass…” (Sonnet 3.1)—comes
atop the righthand page just at the point where that page begins
to “mirror” the other. All references in Q to mirrors are
puns about the poet’s mirror-image set structure. (Sonnets and runes
“mirror” each other, too.) In many other ways Q’s verses
allude coyly to its architecture. If the poet meant all along to suppress
the runes at the printing stage—or was resigned to their loss—then
surely such references are clues, dropped to help us restore his lost
magnum opus in the very way they have proven to do.
Similarly
all the figures in the Q lines about numbers and “counting”
start to mean more when we know that a structure of numbers underpins
the cycle. Many hidden puns are thus about “relevant” numbers.
In Set I, the poet’s content points to his form
in Sonnet 1.14—the start of Rune 14—by punning “Two-eight…,”
the 28 texts on the spread that he is “starting” to complete.
More cryptically, the set’s terminal pun “…deux
meaned 8”—i.e., “2 stood as a ‘mean[s?]’
for 8”—reiterates the other one, the one that triggered our
search for such obscure wit.
Other
game elements on the set spreads are starlike acrostic links
of texts and of emphatic letters. While Will encoded AVON so that it appears
only when Rune 1 gets recomposed, other alignments stand in file only
on the visible spread. Reading “up” in Set I, e.g., reveals
the emphatic first-line acrostics OFT and ALL. Reading down and left to
right, a 14-element codestring teases us: FT I V[V]T FOLL AN V M VV
(encoding, e.g., “Fit [Stanza] eye, wit, follow new hymn. [signed]
W.,” “Fit eye, witty fellow…,” “Of twat-folly,
Ann, you mew [whine],” and “Half-taught fool Anne you mew
[coop up].” The reverse codeline reads VVM V NA LLOFT [V]VIT
F (encoding, e.g., “Wm. you know, a lofty Wit, forte
(F = S?)” and “Wm. you nail aloft—W., aye tough.”
Other variant codelines inhere in each set—up-and-downs, side-to-sides,
zig-zags.
Finally,
new strings of meaning emerge in the sets because two patterns
of linearity are always at work in Q, and because whole texts can behave
in the sets like lines—and, in the whole structure, like syllables.
In each set, for example, the last two texts look (and may act) like a
“couplet” to the whole unit (see, e.g., Sets III, XI). Too,
the content of any given poem, sonnet or rune, triggers 14 side-effect
patterns. Thus the progression of ideas in any rune—often replete
with octave-, sestet-, quatrain-, and couplet-like turns—roughly
parallels the progression of the other runes in the set, with modulations,
dramatic high points, and turns of thought acting like shared property.
Imagine fourteen cars driving on parallel roads in the same direction
through fourteen varied regions.
The miracle, of course, is that each report of the trip, as any Q text
records it, shows such a vividly particularized view of what’s out
the window. The modulations of “sonnet logic” in the apparent
texts do allow wide variations of substance in the runes. And a single
striking image from any one sonnet can sometimes seem to give a rune its
defining character, its main conceit.
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