… is to achieve an examination of the punctuation of Q1609 Sonnets to show how it would affect a Jacobethan reader’s experience. It is not to try and recapture Shakespeare’s experience as writer and persona in the Sonnets. His love is history.
But he was representative of his peers in how he approached the dramatic spoken and written word. He wrote on parchment with a goose feather quill and blacke inke. so each stroke cost time and ink. If it was evening there’s candles to be burnt and eyesight to be strained. These are not romantic musings, rather the consequence of imagining my world with those restrictions.
So how do you produce a 154 Sonnets? Or was it only during the writing of the first 17, that he realises this is something much bigger? The sonnet series to top them all. Not Spenser, nor SIdney, nor Drayton, nor Daniel, had a 154 in their series. And his would be a sequence, and way more real than those ponsy old lot. It’d show he saw life in Nature, saw the ideal in Art, and chose to see life through the ideals.
Fair, Kind, and True, is all his argument, he finally states in Sonnet 104. And if that’s the case then it could all get a little bit boring. But of course life steps in and love is no longer that knocked me off my feet wow anymore. In fact you are reprehensible.
Both of Shakespeare’s beloveds’ in his Sonnets are reprehensible in affairs of the heart, which kind of says something about Shakespeare, not too flattering that he attracted that to him. Coz it feels real. But then he was manipulating a verse line and poetic form into something new. something confessional. or seemingly confessional.
Imitation is at the heart of the Sonnets. Just as Aristotle prescribes in his Ars Poetica. But it is Horace in his Ars poetica, who produces the rules of decorum that govern these Sonnets. These, alongside Longinus’ and his emphasis on sublimity, cap the triad of ancient textual heroes Shakespeare (whoever he was) seems to have followed. The form imitates the content, as the content is patterned on the form. Verse cannot be speech yet this verse speaks. Therein lies the central antithesis of this sequence.
Finally over the course of 15-18 years his sequence is finished and then someone puts them into print. and this it what we have. 13 Quartos extant, a gazillion reprints and copies, baroque, romantic, enlightenment and post-modern philosophizing about Renaissance practice, generations of actors spewing them out in rehearsal and in practice at wedding and funeral.
Yet they live. These brief minutes of poetry. Descended from a provenance many claim and none can own. We are working here from several reprints of extant copy of Q1609 Sonnets. It’s been a passion for a while now. We will examine it for clues as to how Shakespeare (whoever he was) wrote solely in the style of his time and uniquely for all time.
These poems have sparked a thousand stories on their genesis. We will travel no farther than under the length of his verse line and up to his facility with manipulating the form to the max. That he did that, I am thankful. So we need to go into this printed quarto a little deeper, but not too deep.
In Q1609 Sonnets the punctuation, capitalicisation, italicisation and spelling could as easily be a compositor’s or copier’s and not necessarily Shakespeare’s, though it could be. In other words this is the closest we have to Shakespeare’s own hand scratching ink on parchment. Best of all it opens up his thinking about how to develop arguments in verse.
We are allowed in to a drama happening totally in the reader’s head, almost like in the writer’s head, after he got his head around them. This drama is seemingly intentionally personal; and concerns me and you and thou, him and her, and us and them. These personal pronouns are of utmost importance in the syntax of the sonnets. Who, specifically is referred to is irrelevant to the understanding of these sonnets. They make perfect and imperfect sense all on their own. So, who? Who cares?
Shakespeare’s involvement in his Sonnets is proven through his phoneticisation, ie sounding of his syllables, his use of a syllable’s fluidity in expanding or contracting it’s length and/or stress value. Syllables are long or short and in-between, as they are unstressed stressed or somewhere in between. His sense of euphony is astounding and is comparable to the jazz i’m listening to now. (Coltrane).
The only way we can hear Shakespeare in his Sonnets
is below the surface of spelling and punctuation
through his use and interaction with
consonants and vowels,
clusters of sound open or closed or checked,
making the syllables contained within, or
the syllable sound, comprising the word:
the same for words within a phrase, and
the phrasing within and/or often running over
the verse line, which is always 10/11 syllables long.
Lines are frequently end-stopped and often run-on
to the next line to stop boring delivery.
The line is always in war with the sentence,
which can be from 1 to 14 lines long.
Sentence or sentences create a syntactical whole,
within the apparently fixed Sonnet form:
or 14 lines, comprising 3 quatrains
of 4 lines length,
crowned by a
final couplet
of 2 lines.
Each piece of the puzzle exerts an effect on the final outcome of the Sonnet under examination. Word affects word, phrase phrase, line to lines to quatrain, sestet, octet to sentence or sentences that make the 14 lines.
And some of those pieces are invisible in modern editions of Shakespeare’s verse, although they were valid for their author. Their relevance for the argument we will be developing is minimal anyway.
We will discover there was a method to the madness and seeming chaos that reigned in Elizabethan orthography. And much of that is based in turn on the rhetoric any grammar school boy had studied ad nauseam.
Now let’s say you’re a writer wanting to embark on a career as a wordsmith in Elizabethan England.
What are the rules? And more importantly, how do we break them?
Say we have a word in Q1609, let’s say ‘beauties’,
which is made up of a possible 1 to 5 on a scale of poly-syllables used in Q1609 Sonnets.
‘Beauties’ contains 2 syllables without a doubt,
and to the ear starts with a ‘bju’ sound and ends in a ‘teez’ sound.
And you should notice it could never, without severe contortion,
be shortn’d to 1 syllable, or expanded to 3 syllables.
Now let’s take another word like ‘powre’
This monosyllabic word could reasonably be expanded to 2 syllables.
Let’s consider the following line beginning sonnet 150,
the only sonnet in the sequence exhibiting itself as the ‘perfect’ sonnet,
i.e. 14 consecutive end-stopped masculine lines,
arranged by question-mark punctuation after 1st, 2nd quatrains,
and full-stopped after the 3rd quatrain and final couplet.
OH from what powre hast thou this powrefull might,
Is ten mighty syllables laid down in an end-stopped verse line with immediate visual differences for the modern reader. It’s spelling is different, though the words seem to mean the same. It uses an unusual verb form with ‘hast’ and ‘thou’ meaning have and you in its then familiar 2nd person form. And the capitalisation of the first exclamation ‘OH’!
But it’s the scansion that is most relevant to how the line is packaged to be spoken. The meter is iambic pentameter with the odd change in foot that needs to be scanned. the oddness occurs at the first with an exclamation. Immediately the foot is shuffled to stressed/unstressed to resume the regular unstressed-stressed pattern to the end of the line.
We have seven monosyllables leading to and, broken by the semantic or ‘meaning’ break on the 4th syllable, up to the next repetition of the same word in a slightly different form, in the strong 8th and weaker 9th syllables, finishing the line with the strongest and most important 10th syllable, in an incredible display of suiting the word to the action, the action to the word.
You notice in the above line, a word is two things at once: written and spoken. When it is written its spelling may be peculiar or different, when it is spoken even more so. Its meaning can run the scale from fluid and elusive, to fixed and immutable. So the word can be showing off on a written level, and/or/as well on a spoken level.
Speech differs absolutely from verse, as black from white, yet the verse in the Sonnets uses this dichotomy, exploring all its shades of grey throughout its exegesis. Antithesis is the soul of Shakespeare’s wit on all representational levels, internal to external.
These pecularities of rhythm are the writer showing off his rhetorical prowess, involving his entire conception of the graphic or written word, opposing and in conjunction with the utterance of it.
This spelling you might conclude is Shakespeare’s because the compositor would have ruined the metre if he had printed ‘powerfull’ and/or ‘power’.
This idiosyncratic spelling ‘powre’ when printed mostly indicated a monosyllable. And indeed it seems we might say the writer’s intention for both instances was to use 1 and 2 syllables, instead of 2 and 3 syllables.
I say seems because we can never know the writer’s intention and it is a pathetic and intentional fallacy to believe we can.
Yet we can see what range of strategies he used to create his effects.
His verse line dictates 10 or 11 syllables and he complies in iron-clad conviction.
But we have to remember that a word does not live in isolation.
It needs other words to explain itself in relation to something else,
or to develop an extension of its meaning into an idea or concept.
This noun ‘powre’ chosen by the writer is conjectured amongst lowly meaning words like ‘oh from what’ which launch the conjecture, to heighten the adverb and noun ‘powrefull might’ it speculates the person addressed contains in ‘hast thou‘.
Elizabethan orthography was in the process of simultaneously inventing and defining itself through print, in order to standardise itself. That standardisation didn’t happen during Shakespeare’s years of writing, leaving him free to play with words on many different levels, especially contrasting or highlighting the graphic or written, with the phonemic or sounded.
The verse line was found to be an adaptable workhorse for metrical and elocutionary parts to interact and imitate spoken speech and inner thoughts. The whole process starts on the level of the phonemes or smallest units of sound within the syllable. These can be altered by deleting a phoneme or fusing phonemes initially, medially or finally.
Try following it in this ‘perfect’ example of Sonnet form, One Hundred and Fiftieth in the sequence.
i.e. 14 consecutive end-stopped masculine lines,
arranged by question-mark punctuation after 1st, 2nd quatrains,
and full-stopped after the 3rd quatrain and final couplet.
OH from what powre hast thou this powrefull might,
VVith insufficiency my heart to sway,
To make me giue the lie to my true sight,
And swere that brightnesse doth not grace the day?
Whence hast thou this becomming of things il,
That in the very refuse of thy deeds,
There is such strength and warrantise of skill,
That in my minde thy worst all best exceeds?
Who taught me how to make me loue thee more,
The more I heare and see iust cause of hate,
Oh though I loue what others doe abhor,
VVith others thou shouldst not abhor my state.
If thy unworthinesse raisd love in me,
More worthy I to be belou’d of thee.
Anyone notice the 5 syllable ‘insufficiency’ and 4 syllable ‘unworthiness’ and the 3 syllable ‘warrantise’? or the extra e’s on the end of do and hear? Or the i instead of j in just? Or the u instead of v in love? Or the missing e in raisd? Or the 2 V’s forming a capital W? Or the missing l in il? The extra m in becoming?
