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Notes on Set XI (Sonnets 141-154): My Mystery-Sighs
This
the second of the Perverse Mistress sets pairs with Set X to
comprise a formal “couplet” close to Will’s grand design,
Q’s Megasonnet; texts in Set XI (at the far right in that imaginative
construct) effectively add “‘unstressed’ syllables”
across the board, packing the structure full.
Readers
have long recognized that the last 28 sonnets in Q are somehow
of a different order from the rest. (Elsewhere on this site are my own
speculations about the origin and dating of the two final sets and about
how they fit into the overall scheme.) As a further terminal add-on to
the predominant Dark Lady materials in Sets X-XI, the last two overt sonnets
in the last set function visually on the spread as a “couplet”
close, exhibiting a conventional shift of subject matter in textual units
13-14, and concurrently rounding off the whole of Q with a bit of allusive
formality.
In
fact, the conventionally mythological materials about Cupid and
Diana in Sonnets 153-154, which have been critically lamented as a lapse,
exert a strong substantive influence on the 14 runes that emerge in Set
XI, cutting across all the runic texts in strategic final positions. The
magic of contextual significations—and especially of pre-positioned
pronouns pointing downward to elements in the runic couplets—allows
many thematic variations in Set XI, not all of them with a Cupid/Diana
tinge. Runes 141 and 142, as examples, seem momentarily to erase the concept
that Will’s “mistress” automatically means his “mysteries,”
the Q texts, but do not shift firmly into mythological gear either.
Overall,
the “different” subject matter in Sonnets 153-154 has the
practical effect on the set of generating variety, especially in what
“she” can mean in the runes. In Rune 141, e.g., the “careful
housewife” conceit dominates—perhaps a kenning for Will himself,
running back and forth between Sonnets and Runes, as if between husband
and lover. Still, the notion that “she” means “mistress/mysteries”
is pervasive enough throughout Sets X-XI to serve as an assumed hypothesis
for any reader unless contextual evidence in a given rune points in some
other direction. The Cupid/Diana stuff, for one thing, triggers a good
bit about “brands” as quills.
Like
the “couplet” pair 153-154, Sonnet 145—with
its perversely tetrameter lines—has across-the-board effects in
Set XI, if only to add one shortened line to every rune. Rune 142 wittily
butts a “stuttering” six-stressed line (Sonnet 146.2)
up against one of these tetrameter lines to generate an ironic “regularity”
in the linked lines, showing one of hundreds of instances where authorized
“error” proves playfully functional. In this particular case,
given the reiterated content “my sinful earth” (Sonnet 146.1-2,
punning “err-theme”), one reads the “error” as
a mea culpa in the medieval tradition—a reminder that only God,
and certainly not Will, creates perfection.
Sonnet 144
here has gone far toward defining received opinions about the “love
triangle” in Shakespeare’s sonnets—poet, male friend,
perverse mistress. Reading the text in the light of what we now know about
the suppressed runes allows other ways to view the implicit dramatic situation
that frames the Q texts.
As
usual, Will’s own self-imposed predicament seems to be
the dominant subject of the set, if indeed it has one. Notable in the
runes of this set are the “numbers” reference (to 28) in Rune
146.12 and the re-assertion in Rune 151 of the theme of immortality through
verse.
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