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Notes on Set VI (Sonnets 71-84): When We Are Dead
Full
of the usual personal ambiguities and of indefinite insinuations
of “guilt” and of “rival poets,” the sonnets and
runes in this half-way set anticipate the deaths of Will and his muse
and focus on the poems’ capacities to memorialize the friend (and
to blur the poet into obscurity). Though the persona’s stresses
and anxieties do not dominate the materials here, the personal complaint
“That time of year thou may’st in me behold” in Sonnet
73 has proven to be the most appreciated sonnet in the set. One appealing
runic companion is Rune 82, with its strongly affirmative epithet “He
of tall building and of goodly pride”; another is Rune 75, on mutability,
showing Will working at some hour 400 years ago, an instant much like
the one we now “enjoy.”
While Sonnet
71 envisions Will dying first and instructs the friend on how to react,
Sonnet 81 equivocates—in effect saying, “Either I’ll
go first, or you will…”—but rests in the assurance that
the friend’s “name from hence immortal life shall have”
because Will’s verses will preserve it. One of the great ironies
in Q is that we do remember the friend, but always as a nameless
figure.
A
recurring thread in the set is the notion that the poet’s
skill is not up to its job; a number of the runes might, in fact, be called
apologies. Now that we know of its complexity, we understand how the nature
of the project made Will’s outcomes inevitably flawed. We also understand
the implication of “both your poets” (Rune 84.13)—Will
Shakespeare as author of Sonnets and of Runes—and of the term “two
newfound methods and two compounds strange” (Rune 74.6). Further,
we can see how far off the mark Will’s tongue-in-cheek characterization
of himself falls when he speaks of a “true-telling friend”
who is recording the friend’s attributes “in true, plain words”
(Rune 82.12). Ideas of fecundity and of counterparts here now gain new
meaning. The themes of mutability and of permanence through art and the
poet’s search for new figures and his interest in the long-range
outcome of his texts—these ideas carry over from earlier sets.
The
opening of Sonnet 82, “I grant thou wert not married to
my Muse,” seems puzzling in its obvious context as an address to
whatever “muse” Will is supposed to be talking to but makes
some sense as a coy, numerologically placed complaint about the poet’s
own marriage: Will and Anne married in 1582, and the line is one of many
clues that Anne in some sense may be (in the poet’s mind) one version
of his Perverse Mistress. (The line puns, “I grant Tower in ode…,”
“I guarantee whore-tenet merry, Ed. Tommy…,” “I
grant thou wert not married, Tommy, m’ wife [Q Mufe],”
and so on.) Rune 82 manages in its early lines (see puns, 82.1-2)
to encode a coy reference to F. (de) Sandell(s), a Shottery farmer who
was a friend of Anne Hathaway’s father and who posted bond on the
occasion of Anne and Will’s marriage.
Sonnet
77, the halfway point in Will’s projected cycle, focuses
appropriately on “wasting precious minutes”; its two middle
lines read, “Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know /
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.” Rune 77 (see
comments) uses one of these two lines in its mid-section to comment on
the pictographic connection between 77 and “half-added feathers”
that in one sense mean “half-completed” products of a quill
pen. (Each “7” looks like an angel’s wing, though the
two may be “half-added” because both are stuck awkwardly on
the same side.) Perhaps, despite the subtextual plethora of Anne-berating
wit in Q, the opening of Rune 77 should be read as conciliatory: “That
I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, / Anne, hang more praise upon
deceased I, / Which by and by black night doth take away.”
The acrostic
arrangement of Set VI lines out NOT B across the top, suggesting
both Nota Bene and the “…not to be” half of
his own best-known saw—one that he seems to joke about over and
over in the subtext (cf. index). The vertical alignments SW (cf.
Sue), TT (i.e., Thomas Thorpe), and BSI (cf. “Bessie,”
Elizabeth [Hall]) on the set leaf—which get lost in the acrostic
of Rune 1—encode the names of important subjects and/or auditors;
in a pinch, the initial emphatic N will even do for “Anne.”
Forms of “Southy” (e.g., SWOWOITT, SVVT) also
align themselves.
The
set-leaf vertical acrostic codeline—N S WOVVOIT TOW
B SI—suggests “Ensue, ode too busy,” “An ass,
would Toby sigh,” “Anne, Sue vowed Toby’s I,”
“…would ‘To be’ say,” “…vowed
to be assy,” “Anne, Sue, ought to be busy,” and “In
Swede [an epithet for Thorpe], Toby is aye.” The down/up reverse
of this code yields, e.g., “In Swede, Toby’s ‘I’
is bawdy, teasing,” “…is body teasing.” The simplest
diagonal code—N SOWVVT OT B IO SW I—suggests
“In Swede, oat beaten, Sue eye [10=ten],” “Anne sought
oat, hating [B=8] Sue aye,” and the like.
Numeric
totals of all the emphatic letters (treated as numbers) may yield
70, the last rune composed before the set starts: I+V+0+7+8+5+VV+7+5+VV+0+0+1+1+VV
= 70. This construction requires us to read the opening “N”
as I+V (or 6, the set number), not IV = 4.
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