William Shakespeare Sonnet Number 8

From time to time I will be posting commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

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.”

The theme of encouraging the “Fair Youth” to marry and have children continues in this sonnet. However, a slightly different approach from that of the earlier sonnets is taken. Here, the imagery that Shakespeare uses is related to music. The “Fair Youth” is told that he cannot enjoy “well-tuned sounds.” The reason for this unfortunate reality is that beauty, in the form of music, is chiding the sonnet’s subject because the subject has not taken a wife and had children yet. Specifically, the melody, as strings “Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,” is compared to the beauty embodied by a small family.

In my posts on the previous Sonnets, I have observed that the argument presented to the “Fair Youth,” at least to my modern sensibilities, ranges from the unconventional to the odd. The subject of the sonnets is cajoled to marry and procreate essentially for two reasons. First, he is advised that he can live on for posterity through his offspring and thus, in a way, cheat age and mortality. Second, he is chided that the world should not be denied the glorious results that would be embodied by his decedents.

This sonnet seems to represent a shift. Here, we have the “Fair Youth” exhorted to marry and to have children for what seems to me as more conventional or understandable reasons. Here the beauty inherent in the art form of music is compared with the beauty inherent in having a family.

Appropriately, I find the lines of this sonnet particularly pleasing and beautiful, even in comparison to several of the previous sonnets in the sequence. This one seems to exude warmth not apparent in the earlier verse. The aesthetic joy that is created by music seems to be a fitting, or at least understandable, comparison to the joy that the subject will presumably feel and display when he finds a spouse and has a child.

If we look at the sonnets in chronological order, their “voice” has implored the “Fair Youth” to have children by using flattery, guilt and now an appeal to the subject’s sense of beauty and joy. As I read through these short poems, this one is among my favorites so far.

My commentary on additional Sonnets:

Sonnet 1

Sonnet 2

Sonnet 3

Sonnet 4

Sonnets 5 and 6

Sonnet 7

Sonnet 66

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream

A recent reread of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream has prompted me to ponder. I am not going to attempt to encompass the entire play in this post.  For my musings today, I will concentrate on just one part of the work that concerns itself with passionate and intense early love instead.

For those unfamiliar with the work: the part of the play that I am referring to here centers upon two couples. Hermia and Lysander are in love. However, Hermia is ordered by Duke Theseus to marry another man named Demetrius. Complicating matters is the fact that another character, Helena, is in love with Demetrius, who is uninterested in her.

 When the four find themselves in a forest at night, they encounter a group of fairies and elves. Oberon is the King of the Fairies, and Titania is his estranged queen. Puck is a mischievous elf who is a servant of Oberon. The king decides to send Puck to play a nasty trick on Titania by administering a love flower to the queen and pointing her in the direction of a buffoon named Bottom. The clownish Bottom is also in the forest that night rehearsing for a play. Adding insult to injury, Bottom is transformed into a man with the head of a jackass.  

While all of this is going on, Oberon comes across the love-struck Helena for whom he feels sorry. Thus, he sends Puck to apply the love potion to Demetrius in order to enthrall him to Helena.

Chaos ensues, as Puck is prone to make mistakes as to who he should be administering the herb to. Throughout the play, characters become obsessively smitten and un-smitten with one another as a result of Puck’s actions.

I think that it is important to define exactly what kind of love, if it is love at all, that Shakespeare is dealing with here. There are many kinds of love as well as variations within each kind. What Shakespeare seems to be exploring here is the kind of passionate love that comes on fast and burns intensely. Even this fairly insubstantial form of the emotion is complex and is characterized by nuance and exceptions. It often, but not always, strikes the young. It often burns out fast, but sometimes leads to a more substantial, long term and lifetime version of love. One gradient of the emotion may not really be love at all and would be better characterized as intense infatuation mixed with lust.

Shakespeare’s depiction of this type of love seems almost like a mechanical process. The emotion is depicted as if it can actually be turned on and off at the flick of a switch. In the play, Puck flips this switch on and off. When he applies it to the wrong person, it seems to further illustrate the random nature of this intense infatuation. I think that this comedic and dramatic convention can be seen as a reflection of how this emotion really affects people.

The Character of Puck is meaningful and seems to represent all sorts of things. One aspect to him and his tendency to trigger this amorous reaction in various people seems to be a representation of the human tendency to fall into such fickle passions. As the “controller” of the “passion switch,” he seems to reflect an innate nature that manifests itself during the lifetime of many people. This emotion is not something that Shakespeare seems to be portraying as virtuous or desirable. When Puck utters the famous lines,

And the youth, mistook by me,

Pleading for a lover's fee.


Shall we their fond pageant see?

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

He seems to be commenting upon something that he himself symbolizes.

Later, he rhymes, in a very mischievous way, about the changeability that he finds so easy to invoke.

Up and down, up and down,

I will lead them up and down.

I am fear'd in field and town.

Goblin, lead them up and down.  

This changeability seems to reflect the real life experiences of people.

Shakespeare was not the first to observe through poetry and fiction the seemingly arbitrary nature of intense infatuation. Mythology is full of such musings. There are plenty of examples of stories of gods, goddesses and various magical characters casting love spells that cause their recipients to act in all sorts of irrational ways. One thing that makes this a great play is that in his use of language, Shakespeare explores this issue in a way that is unparalleled. The above passages are only two examples among many.

At the play’s conclusion, all seems well. The two young couples are matched and satisfied to be in love and most are wedded to the person that they originally desired.  All are back to their original state except Lysander. He is left with Puck’s spell and is now in love and married to Helena, a girl whose affections he originally spurned.

Shakespeare does not hint whether the couples will end up happy in the long run or not. The only long-term relationship depicted in the play is that of Oberon and Titania, who seem to be locked in a strange relationship characterized by acrimony and power struggles that alternate with periods of true affection.

However the couples end up in the long run, this play is about a lot more then just a fun lark in the forest on a summer night. Indeed, this is perhaps the most enjoyable and fun of Shakespeare’s works. It also has a lot to say about the human condition, and it goes about saying it in a truly sublime way.