THE ALEXANDER SHAKESPEARE
THE SONNETS
William Shakespeare

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

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This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2016

Life & Times section © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Gerard Cheshire asserts his moral right as author of the Life & Times section

Shakespeare: Words and Phrases adapted from

Collins English Dictionary

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Cover image © croisy/iStock

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008171285

Ebook Edition © January 2016 ISBN: 9780008171292

Version: 2016-01-07

Prefatory Note

This Shakespeare play uses the full Alexander text. By keeping in mind the fact that the language has changed considerably in four hundred years, as have customs, jokes, and stage conventions, the editors have aimed at helping the modern reader – whether English is their mother tongue or not – to grasp the full significance of the play. The Notes, intended primarily for examination candidates, are presented in a simple, direct style. The needs of those unfamiliar with British culture have been specially considered.

Since quiet study of the printed word is unlikely to bring fully to life plays that were written directly for the public theatre, attention has been drawn to dramatic effects which are important in performance. The editors see Shakespeare’s plays as living works of art which can be enjoyed today on stage, film and television in many parts of the world.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prefatory Note

The Theatre in Shakespeare’s Day

Shakespeare: A Timeline

Life & Times

Money in Shakespeare’s Day

The Sonnets

Sonnet 1

Sonnet 2

Sonnet 3

Sonnet 4

Sonnet 5

Sonnet 6

Sonnet 7

Sonnet 8

Sonnet 9

Sonnet 10

Sonnet 11

Sonnet 12

Sonnet 13

Sonnet 14

Sonnet 15

Sonnet 16

Sonnet 17

Sonnet 18

Sonnet 19

Sonnet 20

Sonnet 21

Sonnet 22

Sonnet 23

Sonnet 24

Sonnet 25

Sonnet 26

Sonnet 27

Sonnet 28

Sonnet 29

Sonnet 30

Sonnet 31

Sonnet 32

Sonnet 33

Sonnet 34

Sonnet 35

Sonnet 36

Sonnet 37

Sonnet 38

Sonnet 39

Sonnet 40

Sonnet 41

Sonnet 42

Sonnet 43

Sonnet 44

Sonnet 45

Sonnet 46

Sonnet 47

Sonnet 48

Sonnet 49

Sonnet 50

Sonnet 51

Sonnet 52

Sonnet 53

Sonnet 54

Sonnet 55

Sonnet 56

Sonnet 57

Sonnet 58

Sonnet 59

Sonnet 60

Sonnet 61

Sonnet 62

Sonnet 63

Sonnet 64

Sonnet 65

Sonnet 66

Sonnet 67

Sonnet 68

Sonnet 69

Sonnet 70

Sonnet 71

Sonnet 72

Sonnet 73

Sonnet 74

Sonnet 75

Sonnet 76

Sonnet 77

Sonnet 78

Sonnet 79

Sonnet 80

Sonnet 81

Sonnet 82

Sonnet 83

Sonnet 84

Sonnet 85

Sonnet 86

Sonnet 87

Sonnet 88

Sonnet 89

Sonnet 90

Sonnet 91

Sonnet 92

Sonnet 93

Sonnet 94

Sonnet 95

Sonnet 96

Sonnet 97

Sonnet 98

Sonnet 99

Sonnet 100

Sonnet 101

Sonnet 102

Sonnet 103

Sonnet 104

Sonnet 105

Sonnet 106

Sonnet 107

Sonnet 108

Sonnet 109

Sonnet 110

Sonnet 111

Sonnet 112

Sonnet 113

Sonnet 114

Sonnet 115

Sonnet 116

Sonnet 117

Sonnet 118

Sonnet 119

Sonnet 120

Sonnet 121

Sonnet 122

Sonnet 123

Sonnet 124

Sonnet 125

Sonnet 126

Sonnet 127

Sonnet 128

Sonnet 129

Sonnet 130

Sonnet 131

Sonnet 132

Sonnet 133

Sonnet 134

Sonnet 135

Sonnet 136

Sonnet 137

Sonnet 138

Sonnet 139

Sonnet 140

Sonnet 141

Sonnet 142

Sonnet 143

Sonnet 144

Sonnet 145

Sonnet 146

Sonnet 147

Sonnet 148

Sonnet 149

Sonnet 150

Sonnet 151

Sonnet 152

Sonnet 153

Sonnet 154

Shakespeare: Words and Phrases

About the Publisher

An Elizabethan playhouse. Note the apron stage protruding into the auditorium, the space below it, the inner room at the rear of the stage, the gallery above the inner stage, the canopy over the main stage, and the absence of a roof over the audience.

The Theatre in Shakespeare’s Day

On the face of it, the conditions in the Elizabethan theatre were not such as to encourage great writers. The public playhouse itself was not very different from an ordinary inn-yard; it was open to the weather; among the spectators were often louts, pickpockets and prostitutes; some of the actors played up to the rowdy elements in the audience by inserting their own jokes into the authors’ lines, while others spoke their words loudly but unfeelingly; the presentation was often rough and noisy, with fireworks to represent storms and battles, and a table and a few chairs to represent a tavern; there were no actresses, so boys took the parts of women, even such subtle and mature ones as Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth; there was rarely any scenery at all in the modern sense. In fact, a quick inspection of the English theatre in the reign of Elizabeth I by a time-traveller from the twentieth century might well produce only one positive reaction: the costumes were often elaborate and beautiful.

Shakespeare himself makes frequent comments in his plays about the limitations of the playhouse and the actors of his time, often apologizing for them. At the beginning of Henry V the Prologue refers to the stage as ‘this unworthy scaffold’ and to the theatre building (the Globe, probably) as ‘this wooden O’, and emphasizes the urgent need for imagination in making up for all the deficiencies of presentation. In introducing Act IV the Chorus goes so far as to say:

… we shall much disgrace

With four or five most vile and ragged foils,

Right ill-dispos’d in brawl ridiculous,

The name of Agincourt, (lines 49–52)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene i) he seems to dismiss actors with the words:

The best in this kind are but shadows.

Yet Elizabeth’s theatre, with all its faults, stimulated dramatists to a variety of achievement that has never been equalled and, in Shakespeare, produced one of the greatest writers in history. In spite of all his grumbles he seems to have been fascinated by the challenge that it presented him with. It is necessary to re-examine his theatre carefully in order to understand how he was able to achieve so much with the materials he chose to use. What sort of place was the Elizabethan playhouse in reality? What sort of people were these criticized actors? And what sort of audiences gave them their living?

The Development of the Theatre up to Shakespeare’s Time

For centuries in England noblemen had employed groups of skilled people to entertain them when required. Under Tudor rule, as England became more secure and united, actors such as these were given more freedom, and they often performed in public, while still acknowledging their ‘overlords’ (in the 1570s, for example, when Shakespeare was still a schoolboy at Stratford, one famous company was called ‘Lord Leicester’s Men’). London was rapidly becoming larger and more important in the second half of the sixteenth century, and many of the companies of actors took the opportunities offered to establish themselves at inns on the main roads leading to the City (for example, the Boar’s Head in Whitechapel and the Tabard in South-wark) or in the City itself. These groups of actors would come to an agreement with the inn-keeper which would give them the use of the yard for their performances after people had eaten and drunk well in the middle of the day. Before long, some inns were taken over completely by companies of players and thus became the first public theatres. In 1574 the officials of the City of London issued an order which shows clearly that these theatres were both popular and also offensive to some respectable people, because the order complains about ‘the inordinate haunting of great multitudes of people, specially youth, to plays interludes and shows; namely occasion of frays and quarrels, evil practices of incontinency in great inns …’ There is evidence that, on public holidays, the theatres on the banks of the Thames were crowded with noisy apprentices and tradesmen, but it would be wrong to think that audiences were always undiscriminating and loudmouthed. In spite of the disapproval of Puritans and the more staid members of society, by the 1590s, when Shakespeare’s plays were beginning to be performed, audiences consisted of a good cross-section of English society, nobility as well as workers, intellectuals as well as simple people out for a laugh; also (and in this respect English theatres were unique in Europe), it was quite normal for respectable women to attend plays. So Shakespeare had to write plays which would appeal to people of widely different kinds. He had to provide ‘something for everyone’ but at the same time to take care to unify the material so that it would not seem to fall into separate pieces as they watched it. A speech like that of the drunken porter in Macbeth could provide the ‘groundlings’ with a belly-laugh, but also held a deeper significance for those who could appreciate it. The audience he wrote for was one of a number of apparent drawbacks which Shakespeare was able to turn to his and our advantage.

Shakespeare’s Actors

Nor were all the actors of the time mere ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ as some were described in a Statute of 1572. It is true that many of them had a hard life and earned very little money, but leading actors could become partners in the ownership of the theatres in which they acted: Shakespeare was a shareholder in the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres when he was an actor as well as a playwright. In any case, the attacks made on Elizabethan actors were usually directed at their morals and not at their acting ability; it is clear that many of them must have been good at their trade if they were able to interpret complex works like the great tragedies in such a way as to attract enthusiastic audiences. Undoubtedly some of the boys took the women’s parts with skill and confidence, since a man called Coryate, visiting Venice in 1611, expressed surprise that women could act as well as they: ‘I saw women act, a thing that I never saw before … and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture … as ever I saw any masculine actor.’ The quality of most of the actors who first presented Shakespeare’s plays is probably accurately summed up by Fynes Moryson, who wrote, ‘… as there be, in my opinion, more plays in London than in all the parts of the world I have seen, so do these players or comedians excel all other in the world.’

The Structure of the Public Theatre

Although the ‘purpose-built’ theatres were based on the inn-yards which had been used for play-acting, most of them were circular. The walls contained galleries on three storeys from which the wealthier patrons watched, they must have been something like the ‘boxes’ in a modern theatre, except that they held much larger numbers – as many as 1500. The ‘groundlings’ stood on the floor of the building, facing a raised stage which projected from the ‘stage-wall’, the main features of which were:

1 a small room opening on to the back of the main stage and on the same level as it (rear stage),

2 a gallery above this inner stage (upper stage),

3 canopy projecting from above the gallery over the main stage, to protect the actors from the weather (the 700 or 800 members of the audience who occupied the yard, or ‘pit’ as we call it today, had the sky above them).

In addition to these features there were dressing-rooms behind the stage and a space underneath it from which entrances could be made through trap-doors. All the acting areas – main stage, rear stage, upper stage and under stage – could be entered by actors directly from their dressing rooms, and all of them were used in productions of Shakespeare’s plays. For example, the inner stage, an almost cavelike structure, would have been where Ferdinand and Miranda are ‘discovered’ playing chess in the last act of The Tempest, while the upper stage was certainly the balcony from which Romeo climbs down in Act III of Romeo and Juliet.

It can be seen that such a building, simple but adaptable, was not really unsuited to the presentation of plays like Shakespeare’s. On the contrary, its simplicity guaranteed the minimum of distraction, while its shape and construction must have produced a sense of involvement on the part of the audience that modern producers would envy.

Other Resources of the Elizabethan Theatre

Although there were few attempts at scenery in the public theatre (painted backcloths were occasionally used in court performances), Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were able to make use of a fair variety of ‘properties’, lists of such articles have survived: they include beds, tables, thrones, and also trees, walls, a gallows, a Trojan horse and a ‘Mouth of Hell’; in a list of properties belonging to the manager, Philip Henslowe, the curious item ‘two mossy banks’ appears. Possibly one of them was used for the

bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act II, Scene i). Once again, imagination must have been required of the audience.

Costumes were the one aspect of stage production in which trouble and expense were hardly ever spared to obtain a magnificent effect. Only occasionally did they attempt any historical accuracy (almost all Elizabethan productions were what we should call ‘modern-dress’ ones), but they were appropriate to the characters who wore them: kings were seen to be kings and beggars were similarly unmistakable. It is an odd fact that there was usually no attempt at illusion in the costuming: if a costume looked fine and rich it probably was. Indeed, some of the costumes were almost unbelievably expensive. Henslowe lent his company £19 to buy a cloak, and the Alleyn brothers, well-known actors, gave £20 for a ‘black velvet cloak, with sleeves embroidered all with silver and gold, lined with black satin striped with gold’.

With the one exception of the costumes, the ‘machinery’ of the playhouse was economical and uncomplicated rather than crude and rough, as we can see from this second and more leisurely look at it. This meant that playwrights were stimulated to produce the imaginative effects that they wanted from the language that they used. In the case of a really great writer like Shakespeare, when he had learned his trade in the theatre as an actor, it seems that he received quite enough assistance of a mechanical and structural kind without having irksome restrictions and conventions imposed on him; it is interesting to try to guess what he would have done with the highly complex apparatus of a modern television studio. We can see when we look back to his time that he used his instrument, the Elizabethan theatre, to the full, but placed his ultimate reliance on the communication between his imagination and that of his audience through the medium of words. It is, above all, his rich and wonderful use of language that must have made play-going at that time a memorable experience for people of widely different kinds. Fortunately, the deep satisfaction of appreciating and enjoying Shakespeare’s work can be ours also, if we are willing to overcome the language difficulty produced by the passing of time.

Shakespeare: A Timeline

Very little indeed is known about Shakespeare’s private life; the facts included here are almost the only indisputable ones. The dates of Shakespeare’s plays are those on which they were first produced.

1558 | Queen Elizabeth crowned.
1561 | Francis Bacon born.
1564 | Christopher Marlowe born. | William Shakespeare born, April 23rd, baptized April 26th.
1566 |  | Shakespeare’s brother, Gilbert, born.
1567 | Mary, Queen of Scots, deposed. James VI (later James I of England) crowned King of Scotland.
1572 | Ben Jonson born. Lord Leicester’s Company (of players) licensed; later called Lord Strange’s, then the Lord Chamberlain’s and finally (under James) the King’s Men.
1573 | John Donne born.
1574 | The Common Council of London directs that all plays and playhouses in London must be licensed.
1576 | James Burbage builds the first public playhouse, The Theatre, at Shoreditch, outside the walls of the City.
1577 | Francis Drake begins his voyage round the world (completed 1580). Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland published (which Shakespeare later used extensively).
1582 |  | Shakespeare married to Anne Hathaway.
1583 | The Queen’s Company founded by royal warrant. | Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, born.
1585 |  | Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, born.
1586 | Sir Philip Sidney, the Elizabethan ideal ‘Christian knight’, poet, patron, soldier, killed at Zutphen in the Low Countries.
1587 | Mary, Queen of Scots, beheaded. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Part I) first staged.
1588 | Defeat of the Spanish Armada. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Part II) first staged.
1589 | Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (a ‘revenge tragedy’ and one of the most popular plays of Elizabethan times).
1590 | Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Books I–III) published.
1592 | Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Edward II first staged. Witchcraft trials in Scotland. Robert Greene, a rival playwright, refers to Shakespeare as ‘an upstart crow’ and ‘the only Shake-scene in a country’. | Titus Andronicus Henry VI, Parts I, II and III Richard III
1593 | London theatres closed by the plague.Christopher Marlowe killed in a Deptford tavern. | Two Gentlemen of Verona Comedy of Errors The Taming of the Shrew Love’s Labour’s Lost
1594 | Shakespeare’s company becomes The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. | Romeo and Juliet
1595 | Raleigh’s first expedition to Guiana. Last expedition of Drake and Hawkins (both died). | Richard II A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1596 | Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Books IV–VI) published. James Burbage buys rooms at Blackfriars and begins to convert them into a theatre. | King John The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare’s son Hamnet dies. Shakespeare’s father is granted a coat of arms.
1597 | James Burbage dies, his son Richard, a famous actor, turns the Blackfriars Theatre into a private playhouse. | Henry IV (Part I) Shakespeare buys and redecorates New Place at Stratford.
1598 | Death of Philip II of Spain | Henry IV (Part II) Much Ado About Nothing
1599 | Death of Edmund Spenser. The Globe Theatre completed at Bankside by Richard and Cuthbert Burbage. | Henry V Julius Caesar As You Like It
1600 | Fortune Theatre built at Cripplegate.East India Company founded for the extension of English trade and influence in the East. The Children of the Chapel begin to use the hall at Blackfriars. | Merry Wives of Windsor Troilus and Cressida
1601 |  | Hamlet
1602 | Sir Thomas Bodley’s library opened at Oxford. | Twelfth Night
1603 | Death of Queen Elizabeth. James I comes to the throne. Shakespeare’s company becomes The King’s Men. Raleigh tried, condemned and sent to the Tower
1604 | Treaty of peace with Spain | Measure for Measure Othello All’s Well that Ends Well
1605 | The Gunpowder Plot: an attempt by a group of Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
1606 | Guy Fawkes and other plotters executed. | Macbeth King Lear
1607 | Virginia, in America, colonized. A great frost in England. | Antony and Cleopatra Timon of Athens Coriolanus Shakespeare’s daughter, Susanna, married to Dr. John Hall.
1608 | The company of the Children of the Chapel Royal (who had performed at Blackfriars for ten years) is disbanded. John Milton born.Notorious pirates executed in London. | Richard Burbage leases the Blackfriars Theatre to six of his fellow actors, including Shakespeare. Pericles, Prince of Tyre
1609 |  | Shakespeare’s Sonnets published.
1610 | A great drought in England | Cymbeline
1611 | Chapman completes his great translation of the Iliad, the story of Troy.Authorized Version of the Bible published. | A Winter’s Tale The Tempest
1612 | Webster’s The White Devil first staged. | Shakespeare’s brother, Gilbert, dies.
1613 | Globe theatre burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII (the firing of small cannon set fire to the thatched roof). Webster’s Duchess of Malfi first staged. | Henry VIII Two Noble Kinsmen Shakespeare buys a house at Blackfriars.
1614 | Globe Theatre rebuilt in ‘far finer manner than before’.
1616 | Ben Jonson publishes his plays in one volume.Raleigh released from the Tower in order to prepare an expedition to the gold mines of Guiana. | Shakespeare’s daughter, Judith, marries Thomas Quiney. Death of Shakespeare on his birthday, April 23rd.
1618 | Raleigh returns to England and is executed on the charge for which he was imprisoned in 1603.
1623 | Publication of the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays | Death of Anne Shakespeare (née Hathaway).

Life & Times
William Shakespeare the Playwright

There exists a curious paradox when it comes to the life of William Shakespeare. He easily has more words written about him than any other famous English writer, yet we know the least about him. This inevitably means that most of what is written about him is either fabrication or speculation. The reason why so little is known about Shakespeare is that he wasn’t a novelist or a historian or a man of letters. He was a playwright, and playwrights were considered fairly low on the social pecking order in Elizabethan society. Writing plays was about providing entertainment for the masses – the great unwashed. It was the equivalent to being a journalist for a tabloid newspaper.

In fact, we only know of Shakespeare’s work because two of his friends had the foresight to collect his plays together following his death and have them printed. The only reason they did so was apparently because they rated his talent and thought it would be a shame if his words were lost.

Consequently his body of work has ever since been assessed and reassessed as the greatest contribution to English literature. That is despite the fact that we know that different printers took it upon themselves to heavily edit the material they worked from. We also know that Elizabethan plays were worked and reworked frequently, so that they evolved over time until they were honed to perfection, which means that many different hands played their part in the active writing process. It would therefore be fair to say that any play attributed to Shakespeare is unlikely to contain a great deal of original input. Even the plots were based on well known historical events, so it would be hard to know what fragments of any Shakespeare play came from that single mind.

One might draw a comparison with the Christian bible, which remains such a compelling read because it came from the collaboration of many contributors and translators over centuries, who each adjusted the stories until they could no longer be improved. As virtually nothing is known of Shakespeare’s life and even less about his method of working, we shall never know the truth about his plays. They certainly contain some very elegant phrasing, clever plot devices and plenty of words never before seen in print, but as to whether Shakespeare invented them from a unique imagination or whether he simply took them from others around him is anyone’s guess.

The best bet seems to be that Shakespeare probably took the lead role in devising the original drafts of the plays, but was open to collaboration from any source when it came to developing them into workable scripts for effective performances. He would have had to work closely with his fellow actors in rehearsals, thereby finding out where to edit, abridge, alter, reword and so on.

In turn, similar adjustments would have occurred in his absence, so that definitive versions of his plays never really existed. In effect Shakespeare was only responsible for providing the framework of plays, upon which others took liberties over time. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the English language itself was not definitive at that time either. The consequence was that people took it upon themselves to spell words however they pleased or to completely change words and phrasing to suit their own preferences.

It is easy to see then, that Shakespeare’s plays were always going to have lives of their own, mutating and distorting in detail like Chinese whispers. The culture of creative preservation was simply not established in Elizabethan England. Creative ownership of Shakespeare’s plays was lost to him as soon as he released them into the consciousness of others. They saw nothing wrong with taking his ideas and running with them, because no one had ever suggested that one shouldn’t, and Shakespeare probably regarded his work in the same way. His plays weren’t sacrosanct works of art, they were templates for theatre folk to make their livings from, so they had every right to mould them into productions that drew in the crowds as effectively as possible. Shakespeare was like the helmsman of a sailing ship, steering the vessel but wholly reliant on the team work of his crew to arrive at the desired destination.

It seems that Shakespeare certainly had a natural gift, but the genius of his plays may be attributable to the collective efforts of Shakespeare and others. It is a rather satisfying notion to think that his plays might actually be the creative outpourings of the Elizabethan milieu in which Shakespeare immersed himself. That makes them important social documents as well as seminal works of the English language.

Money in Shakespeare’s Day

It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to relate the value of money in our time to its value in another age and to compare prices of commodities today and in the past. Many items are simply not comparable on grounds of quality or serviceability.

There was a bewildering variety of coins in use in Elizabethan England. As nearly all English and European coins were gold or silver, they had intrinsic value apart from their official value. This meant that foreign coins circulated freely in England and were officially recognized, for example the French crown (écu) worth about 30p (72 cents), and the Spanish ducat worth about 33p (79 cents). The following table shows some of the coins mentioned by Shakespeare and their relation to one another.

A comparison of the following prices in Shakespeare’s time with the prices of the same items today will give some idea of the change in the value of money.

THE SONNETS

TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF.

THESE. INSUING. SONNETS.

MR. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.

AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.

PROMISED.

BY. OUR. EVER-LIVING. POET.

WISHETH.

THE. WELL-WISHING.

ADVENTURER. IN.

SETTING.

FORTH.

T.T.

1

FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory;

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

2

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now,

Will be a tatter’d weed of small worth held.

Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,

If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse’

Proving his beauty by succession thine!

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

3

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest

Now is the time that face should form another;

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,

And, being frank, she lends to those are free.

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largess given thee to give?

Profitless unsurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,

What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unus’d beauty must be tomb’d with thee,

Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.

5

Those hours that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

Will play the tyrants to the very same,

And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter, and confounds him there;

Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’ersnow’d, and bareness every where.

Then, were not summer’s distillation left

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was;

But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show: their substance still lives sweet.

6

Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface

In thee thy summer ere thou be distill’d;

Make sweet some vail; treasure thou some place

With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-kill’d.

That use is not forbidden usury

Which happies those that pay the willing loan –

That’s for thyself to breed an other thee,

Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee.

Then what could Death do if thou shouldst depart,

Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair

To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

7

Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

And having climb’d the steep-up heavenly hill;

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage;

But when from higmost pitch, with weary car,

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes, ‘fore duteous, now converted are

From his low tract and look another way;

So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

Unlook’d on diest, unless thou get a son.

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?

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 shouldst bear.

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’.

9

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye

That thou consum’st thyself in single life?

Ah! if thou issueless shall hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife:

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.

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys 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 murd’rous shame commits.

10

For shame! deny that thou bear’st love to any,

Who for thy self art so unprovident.

Grant, if thou wilt, thou art belov’d of many,

But that thou none lov’st is most evident;

For thou art so possess’d with murd’rous hate

That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,

Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate

Which to repair should be thy chief desire.

O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!

Shall hate be fairer lodg’d than gentle love?

Be, as thy presence is, gracious and kind,

Or to thy self at least kind-hearted prove;

Make thee an other self for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

11

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