Reading Shakespeare’s Language: The Sonnets

The language of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, like that of poetry in general, is both highly compressed and highly structured. While most often discussed in terms of its images and its metrical and others formal structures, the language of the Sonnets like that of Shakespeare’s plays, also repays close attention to such basic linguistic elements as words, word order, and sentence structure.

Shakespeare’s Words 

Because Shakespeare’s sonnets were written four hundred years ago, they inevitably contain words that are unfamiliar today. Some words that are no longer in general use- words that the dictionaries label archaic or obsolete, or that have so fallen out of use that dictionaries no longer include them. One surprising feature of the Sonnets is how rarely such archaic words appear. Among the more than a thousand words that make up the first ten sonnets, for instance, only eleven are not to be found in current usage: self- substantial (“derived from one’s own substance”),niggarding (“being miserly”),unfair( “deprive of beauty”),leese (“lose”),happies (“makes happy”) steep-up ( precipitous), highmost (“highest”), hap ( “happen”), unthrift ( “ spendthrift”) unprovident (“ improvident”) and ruinate (“ reduce to ruins”). Somewhat more common in the Sonnets are words that are still in use but that in Shakespeare’s day had meanings that are no longer current. In the first three sonnets, for example, we find only used where we might say “peerless” or “preeminent”, gaudy used to mean “ brilliantly fine” weed where we would say “garment” glass where we would say “mirror”, and fond where we would say “foolish".

The most significant features of Shakespeare’s word choice in the Sonnets in his use of words in which multiple meanings function simultaneously. In the line 5 of the first sonnet, for example, the word contracted means“bound by contract, betrothed,” but is also carries the sense of “limited, shrunken.” Its double meaning enables the phrase “contracted to thine own bright eyes” to say succinctly to the young man that he has not only betrothed himself to his own good looks but he has also thereby become a more limited person. In a later line in the same sonnet (“Within thine own bud buriest thy content”)[s. 1.11], the fact that thy content means both (1) “that which is contained within you, specially, your seed, that with you should produce a child ,” and (2) “your happiness” enables the line to say, in a highly compressed fashion, that by refusing to propagate, refusing to have a child, the young man is destroying his own future well-being.

It is a large part through choosing that carry more than one pertinent meaning that Shakespeare packs into each sonnet almost incalculable richness of thought and imagery. In the opening line of the first sonnet
(“From fairest creatures we desire increase”), each of the words fairest, creatures, and increase carries multiple relevant senses; when these combine with each other, the range of significations in this single line is enormous. In Shakespeare’s day, the word fair primarily meant “beautiful” but it had recently also picked up the meaning of “blond” and “fair-skinned”. In this opening line of Sonnet 1, the meaning “blond” is probably not operative( though it becomes extremely pertinent when the word fair is used in later sonnets). The second word, creatures, had several meanings, referring, for example, to everything created by God, including the plant kingdom, while in some contexts referring specially to human beings. When combined with the third word, increase( which meant, among, this pertinent definitions, “procreation”, “breeding”, “offspring”, “a child”, “crops”, and “fruit”).

Shakespeare’s Sentences 

When Shakespeare made the decision to compose his Sonnets using the English ( in contrast to the Italian) sonnet form, he seems at he same time to have settled on the shape of the Sonnets’ sentences. The two forms are distinguished by rhyme scheme: in the Italian sonnet, the rhyme scheme in effect divides the poem into two sections, the eight –line octave followed by the six- line sestet; in the English, it sets three four-line quatrains in parallel, followed by the two-line rhyming couplet.

The reader therefore seldom finds in the Sonnets the long, complicated sentences often encountered in Shakespeare’s play. One does, though, find within the sentences the inversions, the interruptions of normal word order, and the postponements of essential sentence elements that are familiar to readers of the plays.

In the Sonnets as the plays, for example, Shakespeare often rearranges subjects and verbs ( i.e., instead of “He goes” we find “Goes he”); he frequently places the object before the subject and verb ( i.e., instead of “I hit him” we might find “Him I hit”), and he puts adverbs and adverbial phrases before the subject and verb( i.e., “I hit fairly” becomes “Fairly I hit”). The first sonnet in the sequence, in facts, opens with an inversion, with the adverbial phrase “From fairest creatures” moved forward from its ordinary syntactical position after the verb. This transformation of the sentence “We desire increase from fairest creatures” into “From fairest creatures we desire increase”(s 1.1) has a significant effect on the rhythm of the line and places the emphasis of the sentence immediately on the “fairest” creature who will be the topic of this and many sonnets to follow.

However Shakespeare’s inversions in the Sonnets often create a space for ambiguity and thus for increased richness and compression. Sometimes the ambiguity exists only for a moment, until the eye and mind progress further along the line and reader sees that one of the initially possible meanings cannot be sustained.

Inversions are not the only unusual sentence structure in Shakespeare’s language. Often in his Sonnets as in his plays, words that would in a normal English sentence appear together are separated from each other, usually in order to create a particular rhythm or to stress a particular word or phrase.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets(Folger Shakespeare Library)- William Shakespeare
Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine.
Reading Shakespeare’s Language- The Sonnets
Pages: XVI, XVII,XVIII,XX,XXI,XXII,XXIII,XXIV.