Notes from Upstream: Self-Awareness in Shakespeare's Sonnets

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Professor Harold Bloom praised the "self-awareness” of the character Hamlet.

Once again, I disagree. Hamlet wasn’t “self-aware.” He had no self to be aware of. He didn’t exist. William Shakespeare thought him up.

All the characters in all Shakespeare’s plays were imaginary, even the ones based on real people from history.

Beside his more famous plays, Shakespeare also wrote some narrative poems. They depicted characters with names like “Venus” and “Adonis.” They had no selves either.

If anyone possessed an aware “self,” it was the successful flesh-and-blood actor, producer, author and entrepreneur William Shakespeare.

But if a reader wants to know what Shakespeare the man thought and felt, what’s the reader to do?

Shakespeare did create one body of work in which he may have expressed his personal thoughts and feelings. 154 of his sonnets appear in a book. They are short poems, often great, and often the best poetry in English.

They were published in 1609. There is no evidence that Shakespeare had anything to do with their publication. No one knows how the publisher got hold of them. There is no evidence Shakespeare created the numerical order in which they were published. No one knows for certain to whom he wrote them or why.

Like nature, literature abhors a vacuum. Some have relied on textual clues to concoct a story they claim to find in the Sonnets. They supply names Shakespeare never used for the main characters, like “Fair Youth” and “Dark Lady.”

There is no doubt Shakespeare wrote the sonnets. As early as 1598, another writer named Francis Meres praised Shakespeare’s “sugared Sonnets among his private friends.”.

Shakespeare wrote a lot of sonnets. He even began Romeo and Juliet with a sonnet:

No one knows the precise identity of the “I” in Shakespeare sonnets. It could have been Shakespeare, or it could have been the generic “I” favored among recent pop songwriters. Take Lennon and McCartney’s “I” in this hit song:

Someone is “gonna be sad,” but who?

Once in a while, clues about the “I” pop through in the sonnets. Shakespeare may have written the lightly regarded Sonnet 145 early in his career.

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make

Breathed forth the sound that said “I hate”

To me that languished for her sake;

But when she saw my woeful state,

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom,

And taught it thus anew to greet:

“I hate” she altered with an end

That followed it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,

From heaven to hell is flown away.

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying “not you.”

Shakespeare’s wife was Anne Hathaway. The “hate away” phrase at the end looks like a pun on her name.

Those of us who watched the movie Shakespeare In Love may recall a randy young Will on the loose in London, his wife stuck back home with the kids in Stratford. The movie reflected the received scholarly opinion that Anne was an illiterate stay-at-home housewife Will abandoned so could gallivant around London and write all those great plays.

It looks like the received wisdom is wrong. News appeared recently of the discovery of a letter in the binding of an old book.

Letter to “Good Mrs. Shakspaire”

The name “Good Mrs. Shakspaire” is clearly legible at the top.

Here are some details. See also this.

The letter references a debt Will allegedly owes and asks “Mrs. Shakspaire” to pay it herself. She is easy to reach in London where she "dwelt in trinitie lane." Trinity Lane was a well-off London neighborhood about a mile and a twenty-minute walk from Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.

No one writes a letter to a woman who can’t read. No one requests payment from a woman who doesn’t control her own money.

There is handwriting on the back which may belong to her. If so, we have more of Mrs. Shakspaire’s handwriting than we do of her husband’s.

The sudden appearance in the historical record of the elusive Mrs. Shakspaire suggests a new reading of her husband’s sonnets. Let’s take an imaginative journey through my tentative draft reading. I’ll focus on two sonnets in particular, Sonnets 109 and 110.

Sonnet 110:

Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offenses of affections new.
Most true it is that I have looked on truth
Askance and strangely; but by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays proved thee my best of love.
Now all is done, save what shall have no end.
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most loving breast.

Here’s a translation into contemporary English.

Most of the Shakespeare we hear in movies is orated in stentorian “Received Pronunciation,” the British counterpart to the American NPR accent. which in normal Americans triggers a reliable shudder.

In 1600, Brits did not talk like BBC announcers. (Of course, they don’t now either.) The American Appalachian or so-called “hillbilly” accent is closer to the English accent of 1600.

Here’s Sonnet 110 in the original accent:

Let’s assume that Will meant what he wrote: that he has made a public fool of himself, that he has committed the same wrongs over and over, that he has sold out, that he has lied, but now he promises to do better.

In other words, he’s just another apologetic lover.

Sometimes two adjacent Sonnets pair up nicely. Sonnet 109 looks like another apology.

O! never say that I was false of heart,

Though absence seemed my flame to qualify.

As easy might I from myself depart

As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie:

That is my home of love; if I have ranged,

Like him that travels, I return again,

Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,

So that myself bring water for my stain.

Never believe, though in my nature reigned

All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,

That it could so preposterously be stained,

To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;

For nothing this wide universe I call,

Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.

And here’s a contemporary translation.

One particular phrase sums up human weakness: “in my nature reigned all frailties that besiege all kinds of blood…”

It’s easy to recognize these “frailties.” They are what the rabbis call the “Yetzer Hara,” the impulse to do evil. They are the usual impulses, like greed, lust, sloth…you know the thing.

So who’s talking in Sonnets 109 and 110? Is it the generic “I” of a pop song like Ticket To Ride or the writer speaking for himself, as in this later personal song by apologetic lover John Lennon?

One doesn’t have to stretch too far to read 109 as an apology to Mrs. Shakspaire, not that different from Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” apology to Yoko Ono, especially if Shakespeare’s wife was living right there in the house with him.

Shakespeare may have started out writing sonnets for money or as an exercise in craft, but eventually he seems to have been writing them as an expression of his self-awareness.

Other sonnets make it clearer. Take 135:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

And Will to boot, and Will in overplus;

More than enough am I that vex thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

Shall will in others seem right gracious,

And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

And in abundance addeth to his store;

So thou being rich in Will add to thy Will

One will of mine, to make thy large Will more.

Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;

Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

Translated in part here.

What “Will” was Will talking about? No one but Will himself.

It should come as no surprise if this great writer of human character was aware of his own failures and shortcomings, and that he personally possessed the self-awareness it is tempting to attribute to characters he imagined, like Hamlet.

Maybe he was just another “jealous guy” and therefore representative of men in general. That’s how art works: we see the general in the particular, and the more particular the art, the more broadly applicable are the insights we derive.

That’s the hardest part of being human: admitting you’re wrong takes the kind of self-awareness Shakespeare expressed in his sonnets.

Since this is the “Political Questions” Substack, I’ll add a slightly gratuitous but relevant observation: self-awareness is the primary missing ingredient in contemporary political discourse.

Unlike the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, today’s political figures rarely admit to being wrong about anything. Only one Democrat so far has recognized President Trump’s accomplishment in obliterating Iran’s nuclear program. Others babble about “impeachment” for Trump’s doing something presidents like Obama and Biden have been doing for decades.

A few Republicans are even worse. Before the U.S. strikes, podcaster Tucker Carlson led the opposition with literally dozens of predictions like this:

“It’s worth pointing out that a strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars.”

How wrong can you get?

Now anyone can get things wrong, even that wrong. I’ve been wronger than that myself. But some self-awareness requires that, after events prove you wrong, you cop to your mistakes.

Sadly, the opposite happened. I’ll quote PJMedia’s Scott Pinsker for what he saw in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast Friday, June 27. Carlson could have admitted he had been wrong.

“Instead, Carlson constructed an “alternative reality,” where his brave voice prevented Donald Trump from being tricked by that dastardly Mark Levin. In Carlson’s retelling — and Greene’s bobble-headed agreement — guys such as Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, Miriam Adelson, Ike Perlmutter, and other Republicans of “suspicious loyalty” (you know what we mean, nod-nudge-wink) were gonna bamboozle poor President Trump into a land invasion of Iran. Only their principled, pragmatic objections, you see, saved America from war.”

Saved Humanity From World War 3 and Nuclear Destruction

Carlson relies for his political credibility on the pretense that he represents the America First movement and is wired into the Administration’s inner workings. A direct attack on President Trump would shatter that pretense.

Instead, it’s safer to attack the Jew Mark Levin, the man Carlson’s pal Steve Bannon subtly nicknames “Tel Aviv Levin.”

But Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene all share one attribute with Mark Levin. President Trump pays little or no attention to any of them. He’s too busy consulting with the competent military and intelligence leadership he has assembled.

Why bother with podcasters? They’re a dime a dozen, like Substack writers.

President Trump summed it up: “I don’t know what Tucker Carlson is saying. Let him go get a television network and say it so that people listen."

In all my chatter about self-awareness, I left out one person: me. Self-awareness has got to be part of my own intellectual and moral equipment as well. Lord knows I have made plenty of my own mistakes.

If and when I screw up again, I know you’ll tell me.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His novel Blessed With All This Life tells a story of a musician repaying his moral debt to his mentor.