⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116. I asked Open AI’s 4o engine to modify it for modern spellings. I have typed the text with an IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. Click here for high-resolution version.
The most thrilling news I came across today is that a somewhat different version of Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 has been discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The New York Times wrote about it here, and an academic paper about the discovery is here.
This is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets. As the New York Times points out, the new version has an almost scolding tone aimed at those who deceive. The words “heretic” and “mountebank” are used, words that do not appear in the version with which we are familiar.
Sonnets were meant to be read aloud. Note that the word “fixèd” is two syllables.
Contempt for lying mountebanks! Now there’s a thought for the day.
⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116, with the text from the copy in the Bodleian Library.
⬆︎ Sonnet 116 as we have long known it. This page was scanned from the A.L. Rowse edition of the sonnets published in 1964.
⬆︎ I made a trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. I wasn’t in the market for eggs, because a neighbor has given me some nice big double-yolk eggs. At Whole Foods the egg shelves were pretty much empty.
⬆︎ Even Whole Foods’ most expensive eggs — $13.99 a dozen — were sold out.
⬆︎ I’m guessing that this truck probably cost at least $60,000. It’s also very likely that parts of it were made in Canada and Mexico. When these fools get what they deserve there will be a great feast of gourmet Schadenfreude. But what’s sad is that things will be much worse for people who don’t drive around rolling coal in $60,000 trucks.
They always seem to be finding interesting things in Bodlein library. I feel the university should do a rigorous audit of everything at some point 🙂
This is an interesting article about two of Shakespeare’s plays which have vanished, Cardeino and Love’s Labour Won. The former may have partly survived in a 18th century play.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20231107-the-420-year-search-for-shakespeares-lost-play
Hi Chenda: Isn’t it wonderful that there are still treasures to be discovered in that library. One thing that puzzles me is that, from the outside, the Bodleian library looks so small. Where do they keep all that stuff? Off site? On my recent trip to Scotland, Ken and I went to the National Library of Scotland to look at some old editions of Walter Scott and some books published by William P. Nimmo. It’s really an archive rather than a library. The strange floor numbers in the elevators indicate, I think, that there are many floors underground where stuff is stored. They need at least a day’s notice to fetch things upstairs to the reading room. I also perceived that archivists are twice as fierce as librarians. 🙂 Let’s hope they find those plays. Being able to quickly scan old handwritten texts to assess what they contain must be a rare skill. Apparently that’s how Sonnet 116 got overlooked. 🙂
Hi again, Chenda: I was thinking of A.L. Rowse (who came to my attention during my college years) and I found on YouTube the audio of a lecture he gave at UCLA in 1964. I would be very curious to hear what you might say about his accent. Do you hear Cornwall in it? Is it a received Oxford accent? My American ear hears it as having many of the features of the “Mid-Atlantic” accent, which, 60 and 80 years ago in early movies and television was pretty much standardized as the “posh” form of American English. One never hears it anymore except in old movies.
Rowse is very funny in the lecture. He has the UCLA audience in stitches.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ003G2M1E0
Hi David
That was an entertaining lecture! I would say it is largely a received Oxford accent, but I can detect a hint of an underlaying regional accent. I think today most people, at least outside the region, would struggle to clearly distinguish between a Cornish accent and a broader West Country accent. Historically, this was a somewhat stigmatised rural accent, associated with a ‘yokel’ stereotype. There was of course once a Cornish language which I believe went extinct around the 18th century, although in recent years there has been something of a revival and it has achieved some legal recognition.
Hi Chenda: Thank you! It was indeed a very entertaining lecture. I don’t know anything about how Shakespeare scholarship has changed since Rowse, but not very much, I’d guess. I remember buying and cherishing his book on the sonnets (for a Shakespeare class) back around 1970 or so. That copy was lost in a house fire in 1974, but I bought a new copy on eBay a few years ago to replace it. It was great fun to hear his actual voice after all these years.
Hi David
I hope you’ll forgive me if I rain on your parade a little. Sonnet 116 feels like an old kindred friend of mine, so I feel the need to defend it from Elias Ashmole (this ‘new’ version comes resurrected from his papers — mid-seventeenth century) or defend it from whichever other haughty royalist philistine that was holding the line for Charles I in the English civil wars who happened to have taken in hand possibly the most beautiful sonnet ever written in the English language — and besmirched it into cheap propaganda — to defend the crown in a time of political mudslinging. The fact that the saboteur of Shakespeare’s gorgeous, perfect words (that are still gorgeous and timely in their pristine 14), is a person who was compelled to load the lines that he struck out with a bunch of religious martyrism imagery and condemnation of heretics (like a reincarnated shadow of Thomas More), well, that just adds insult to injury and snark to arrogance. (Like if JD Vance’s stupid face was also a pilfered poem stripped for parts; entirely wrong, sneering, and a crime against all that is good in the world.) As I prefaced with: please know I’m sorry to contradict your enthusiasm at the perception of this find (and I hope you’re not offended). Side note: in looking up Ashmole I discovered that Milton was on the side of the Parliamentarians, not sure if that’s good or bad ultimately, but seems better than landing on the side of megalomaniacal tyranny and yelping piously at ‘heretics’ who ‘pervert’ things. It’s ironic the re-writing ‘propagandist’ (Ashmole?) of Shakespeare’s perfect sonnet doesn’t see the irony of his own perverting of the written word half a century later, or that in doing so, he’s the ‘mountebank’ for cheapening a work of beauty. I believe that would also be what they call — tone deaf — or cult think. (I envision Ashmole in my mind’s eye, quill in hand, chin tilted in the air, super proud of himself for what he thinks is ‘wit.’)
Anyhow, I don’t know if there’s a mix-up because of the way the Times article comes off, but it seems like the writer of it thinks there’s a chance this political hack job frozen in time is also potentially really Shakespeare, like, ‘changing his mind.’ (Even worse, it seems to be the same opinion of the dingus-sounding Prof Dobson she quotes in her Times piece who I do not like as he appears to hate true love and states his lording opinions in an irritating and idiotic way.) While this discovery on its face is at base level kinda cool for historical purposes and getting a glance into the human condition (if we must), and cool for archives (I admit), what is obvious is this re-written sonnet is most definitely *not* Shakespeare — somehow switching lanes like a fiend — now on a political, polemical tear, revising himself, snuffing out everlasting love to send up piety and politics instead. Anyway, that hypothetical is nipped in the bud to surmise from the start — when you consider that the dates don’t line up.
The Oxford Academic article you gave wasn’t bashful saying it up front:
‘ In Black’s catalogue [of Ashmole’s papers], the poem is unattributed to, or even recognizable as, Shakespeare. ‘
Also, from OA:
‘ The lack of more detailed analysis may be because the additional lines are not the most aesthetically pleasing. But, more pertinently, perhaps it is because the political charge of the additional lines is less apparent in the book of songs NYPL Drexel MS 4257 than it is in the context of Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37. ‘
From the Times (where she’s in line with OA):
‘ But in the context of the civil wars, the Oxford release said, “the additional lines could also be read as an appeal toward religious and political loyalty.” Could the self-blinding error have been the push to leave the monarchy behind? Are the parliamentarians the minds who were making such false appeals? ‘
Yes, but false to who? (Shakespeare was dead.)
What a farce. Is Ashmole just (an asshole? sorry.) Caught in time? — Imagine his tweets.
p.s. I made a genuine attempt of my own to write an Elizabethan sonnet in iambic pentameter once in 2012 for poetry friends like an exercise to see if I could. It came out sort of decent I thought . . . . To write these things masterfully but make it sound effortless and cohesive with the rhyming scheme is exponentially harder than it looks.
Here’s mine.
. . . .
Writing hand! sing my heart through all the hell
These wanton waves will wait no more to crash
Flourish paper well, mythically dispel
Thy swirls in agony, thy crests abash.
Sand is a thing once touched will loosen hold
As words that rushing falling strike the shores
No stoic wise nor secret loves it told
Dark aching sears the brain, and logic wars.
Thereby bless me written page and save me
Lift me, soar me height out of sight, or mind
Where body, wound, and pang will utterly
Come slow undone and through insight unwind.
For naught of pen or page to purge this sound
This charge bursts violent to seeking ground.
~ 121008
Hi Malinda: What a wonderful post! I quite agree with you, actually. The newly discovered version of the sonnet, even politics aside, is clunky and unbeautiful. My enthusiasm, really, is that Shakespeare scholarship is ongoing and that the old Bodleian Library still yields up lost materials. The sonnets, really, always spoke to me much more than the plays do.
Your sonnet is beautiful.