From Fairest Creatures…

…sounds like the beginning of a fairytale instead of a series of 154 sonnets. But we don’t know for sure if he intended to write a series of 154 sonnets. I believe he did, but then i would, to support the things I’m about to outline. See circular thinking is so easy to do. 

Now this exposition today depends on Helen Vendler’s ‘The Art of Sh’s Sonnets’. We are going to follow her idea that sonnet 1 was deliberately composed late, as a ‘preface’ to the others.

As she says,

‘the sheer abundance of values, images and concepts important in the sequence (ie following on, as preferable to series…and)…the number of significant words brought to our attention.’

She sees this first sonnet as an index. Let’s follow her whim.

Values: (ie what the speaker of the sonnets finds self-evidently good)

Beauty, increase, inheritance, memory, light, abundance, sweetness, freshness, ornament, springtime, tenderness, and the world’s rights.

Images: (ie what we see in our mind’s eye as we read or speak them)

fair creatures, the rose, bright eyes, flame and light, fuel, famine, abundance, foe, ornament, herald, spring, bud, burial, tender churl.

Concepts: (ie the author’s basic thoughts and ideas used to develop his argument, often paired in Sh)!

increase and decrease, ripening and dying;

beauty and immortality versus memory and inheritance;

expansion and contraction;

inner spirit (eyes) and outward show (buds);

self-consumption and dispersal, famine and abundance, hoarding and wasting;

gluttony, debt.

Finally resonating words repeated throughout the sequence:

fair (43x), beauty (52x), time (53x), tender (7x), bear (12x), memory (8x), bright (11x), eyes (51x), self  (11x), make (43x), sweet (55x), cruel (8x), world (27x), waste (7x), pity (8x).

Helen includes more words than this list (ripe, heir, feed, light, flame, substance, abundance, foe, fresh, ornament, spring, bud, bury, content, eat, due, grave) and indeed they are repeated but fewer than five times, which doesn’t hold that much resonance other than a vague memory. I would include rose(s) (6x, 7x), die (12x)on this list. Either way Shakespeare is concerned in this sonnet with a profusion of repeated images, values and concepts.

Shakespeare always uses a multi-layered approach to his subject. Here the object of his devotion is a beautiful young man, who is so beautiful, he forces all descriptions of his beauty to be incapable of capturing his beauty, while at the same time his behaviour is not beautiful, ie not good, not kind, not clever! and deserves little praise. 

This is the core or basis for the circular, or rather spiral, thinking that the Speaker will explore in Sonnets 1-17. He is convincing the Young man to get married and have children, thereby fulfilling the prophecies predicted in this first sonnet.

What we don’t know yet is that he won’t listen and so the more negative aspects predicted will come true. His tender heir will be thwarted by this tender churl and his all-consuming beauty.

Now a word about reciting and listening to a sonnet. As a thought arises and is developed, allow it to take shape in your mind, and then drop it as the next thought arises. A single line usually contains a thought and even a contradiction of that thought!

The original punctuation of this Sonnet dictates that all 14 lines are actually one sentence! There are 3 uses of the colon (:) to end each quatrain. Modern editors often change either one, two, or all of these colons to a period (.) as befitting modern grammar.

Now this begs the BIG question of whether punctuation, in such an early stage of development was there to help speaking (ie Actors) or reading (Publishers). I take David Crystal as my authority here, backed up with readings of Hart and Puttenham and other contemporaries of Sh writing on orthography:

‘Between 1590 and 1630 it is possible to sense a sea-change in the way people thought of punctuation: early on, the phonetical/elocutional approach was the dominant one; later, the grammatical/semantic approach ruled.’

p.68, Think on my words’ CUP 2008

The idea that punctuation is authorial (i.e. belongs to the person who wrote the sonnets) speaks to me the actor (It may be just wishful thinking from this well-wishing adventurer).

Although many modern scholars poo-poo the idea; claiming the compositors could as easily have changed or inserted it, the phonetics often backs me and Shakespeare up.

Examples will appear as we work through the sequence. In any case it is but one aspect in the foundation of my exploration of these poems.

As Helen reminds us, authorial instruction is embedded. Quatrains cannot be re-ordered at will. The author is instructing you to speak his words and feel his words as you speak them. Categorise, box and pigeon-hole as much as you like if it o’er-flows its gotta go.

She continues, (There is)…

a very permeable osmotic membrane between the compartments holding his seperate languages: pictorial description, philosophical analysis, emblematic application, erotic pleading. Words leak from one compartment into another, rejuvenating the diction.