The Shakespeare Code

It’s best to read ‘The Birthday Sonnets’  Part Five first.

Sonnet 9 continues the sequence of seventeen sonnets for Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton’s seventeenth birthday.

9. (8)

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly,

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:

Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

Shakespeare confronts a paradox. Harry has a beautiful, singing voice – but listening to music itself irritates him. How can he love singing and yet hate music itself?

If the true concord of well tuned sounds,

By unions married do offend thine ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou should’st bear:

Shakespeare believes he has the answer why Harry is unable to listen to music with pleasure. A beautifully tuned instrument resembles marriage – and this disturbs Harry. He wants to live singly in the same way he sings by himself and not with others.

Mark how one string sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;

Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,

Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,

Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

For Shakespeare a well-tuned instrument – with its resonating strings – resembles husband, wife and son singing and living together in harmony. He draws on the Southampton family motto – Ung par tout – All for One or A|l in One – to make his point. Although they all sing separately, the make up one rich sound. Harry will never be able to know this harmony in life if he insists on remaining unmarried.

10. (9)

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,

That thou consum’st thy self in single life?

Ah; if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife,

Shakespeare speculates it might be fear of creating a sorrowing widow that stops Harry from marrying. But if Harry doesn’t have children then the whole world will become his mourning widow. Also there is a sexual play on ‘eye’ which can mean the pudenda – and wetting it is a coded reference to ejaculation. Is Harry frightened of sex with women?

The world will be thy widow and still weep,

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep,

By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:

The whole world will be upset because Harry will have left no image of himself when he dies. Shakespeare brings the comparison home to the Southampton family itself when he talks about ‘private widows’ remembering their dead husbands through their children. Mary, 2nd Countess of Southampton, is a widow whose husband is dead. Harry enables her to recall her husband’s shape.

The 2nd Earl and the Countess did not get on because he thought she had been unfaithful to him. But we know from the effigy of him on the Southampton Tomb in St. Peter’s, Titchfield, that he was a very handsome man.

Photo of Second Earl of Southampton by Ross Underwood.

Shakespeare by using ‘eyes’ and ‘shape’ also suggests that Mary can recall the penis of her dead husband through her son.

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world injoys it,

But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unus’d the user so destroys it:

No love toward others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murdrous shame commits.

Shakespeare makes the contrast between a spendthrift and a beautiful young man who masturbates.  The wealth of the spendthrift is simply re-distributed – but semen once spent is lost for ever. And even if there is no ejaculation, the semen is destroyed by NOT being used. Shakespeare accuses Harry of not loving other people because of his insistence on solitary masturbation – which Shakespeare terms ‘murderous shame.’

To read ‘The Birthday Sonnets’, Part Seven, click: HERE