每日一首Sonnet (68)

LXVIII.

1. Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
2. When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
3. Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
4. Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
5. Before the golden tresses of the dead,
6. The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
7. To live a second life on second head;
8. Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
9. In him those holy antique hours are seen,
10. Without all ornament, itself and true,
11. Making no summer of another's green,
12. Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
13. And him as for a map doth Nature store,
14. To show false Art what beauty was of yore.




The two portraits of Elizabeth shown here give some ideaof the crispy,snaked golden locks which were ‘the right of sepulchres.Otherfeminine adornments are also well displayed.

Commentary:
This sonnetand the previous one make a closelylinked pair. They both inveigh against the artificiality of cosmetics,atheme which Shakespeare never seems to tire of. In his mind it waslinkedclosely to deception, and to the threat that that posed to humanrelationshipsand to the social fabric in general.
            ...... ... ... There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face
as Duncan observed in Mac.(I.4.11-12). It is folly to think thatcharacteris writ in the face. On the other hand, if one cannot trustappearances,what else may one trust?
Superficially the twosonnets present a criticismof cosmetics, deception, misrepresentation, or whatever, but they areswunground in favour of showing how beautiful the youth is compared with thehideousness of the age. One might suppose that this is not toocontroversiala topic. Yet there are serious obstacles in the way of an understandingof this group of sonnets (66-70). Not only are they difficultlinguistically,but we lack the background knowledge to set them in a realistichistoricalcontext.

The twochief difficulties are that the attackon cosmetics is easily construed as a denigration of Elizabeth I, andthatthe pessimism of both this and the preceding sonnet, and the group as awhole, is out of tune with the age.
To deal with thefirst point first. We may notethat, despite the fact that Elizabethan censorship of literature wasnotentirely complete or institutionalised, and rather haphazard in itsapplication,(authors were punished after publication, rather than being constrainedbefore the event, as in 19th. century Russia), a direct attack on thecustomsand practices of the monarch must have been dangerous. Yethere wehave the practice of using the golden tresses of the dead to beautifyone'sown scalp roundly censured, a practice which Elizabeth I was known toemployto good effect. When Essex burst into her chamber, after his returnfroma disastrous foray in Ireland, he found her without her customary wigs,looking very unglamorous in her thinning white old woman's naturalhair,and this was remarked on. It was well known that her beauty was nolongernatural, but gallantry was encouraged and she enjoyed praise of herbeauty,her figure, and her dancing.
We could take thiscensure of cosmetic adornmentas being merely a part of the Puritannical tradition, which was fairlystrongin post-Reformation England and Scotland at the time, reaching its fullfruition in the time of the Commonwealth. But with Shakespeare'sclosenessto the court through the presentation of his plays, and his linksthroughhis few published works to members of the nobility, it is difficult toseehow he could lightly sanction such adverse comments against the timesand,more specifically, against Elizabeth. We do not know how significant itis that the sonnets were not published until 1609, five years afterElizabeth'sdeath, since so little of Shakespeare's work was published by him inhislifetime. It is always possible that in the mass of published matterandas a small part of a sequence of sonnets, a few adverse comments hereandthere would pass unnoticed. We assume that the lines in the Merchant ofVenice quoted below (note to l.6) were not suppressed, even though theywere critical of periwigs and hence of royal practice. So perhaps thiswasreckoned to be a not too dangerous area of politics, something touchinga little the Queen's vanity, but not a matter to which she would everrespondtyrannically.
In the commentary tothe previous sonnet, I madethe suggestion that the poet has possibly introduced a fictitious thirdparty whose comments are contrary to the general tenor of the age. Heisthe speaker of 67 & 68 and somewhat extreme in his views, buthe isevidently not the writer of the bulk of the sonnets, a point which hemakesclear by referring to the youth in the third person. His conclusionsarethe same tedious repetition in each sonnet, and he adopts the pose ofanold man who dislikes everything of today. His saving grace is that headmitsthe attraction of the youth and with an attempt at metaphysics tries toshow why the youth strides forth from corruption. But apart from thatallelse is bad and irredeemable.
This is a plausiblethough unverifiable idea. Itis after all difficult to assess how widespread the view was that thetimeswere universally bad. Here is a comment on Elizabethan literature fromtheOxford History of England (2nd. edition):

".......the age of Elizabeth was an age of optimism, of experiment, ofconstructive achievement. The present was too full of interest for menof letters to fall back on the storehouse of memory, or to indulge invain regrets for a vanished splendour. They looked forward notbackward. They blazed fresh trails and opened up new channels ofliterary expression which subsequent generations turned into broad,beaten highways. Like pioneers, too, they fumbled and blundered; buttheir irrepressible exuberance and fertility of mind carried themthrough to amazing success." J.B.Black, OHE, 1959-85.p.281.

Evidently this sonnetand several others do notchime with the above viewpoint, for they look far into the past, andtheyare exceedingly pessimistic. No doubt we now view the Elizabethan agewithspectacles slightly rose tinted. In Victorian and earlier times it wasmorecommon to see Elizabeth herself as a vain and frivolous woman who toyedwith a kingdom and was saved by the greatness of her loyal men ofgovernmentand the devotion of her subjects. Now the pendulum has swung the otherwayand she is praised for her clear sightedness and moderation and becauseher clever policies (often simply policies of delay) allowed thecountryto flourish as never before. Yet there were substantial bodies ofdiscontentwithin the land which were capable of making their voices heard. Oftentimeswhich appear in retrospect to be a golden age are thought to be nothingof the sort by the contemporaries who are supposedly enjoying itsprosperity.
Another possibilityis that this group of sonnetswere written when James I was king, after Elizabeth's death in 1603.Thebad times would then be the recent ones under James, and the golden agethat which had ended with Elizabeth. This does seem unlikely, given theverbal echoes in this sonnet from the Merchant of Venice, which isusuallydated around 1596/7. The bad times could perhaps be the time of theEssexrebellion, and of his downfall. He was a man who had much sympathy fromthe populace, and if Southampton is the beloved youth his involvementwithEssex, although he was subsequently pardoned, would have made the timeslook very bleak. Essex was beheaded when he was only 33, whileElizabethwas 67, beautifying herself with wigs, making her summer of another'sgreen.These sonnets could therefore arise from the hostility felt by thewriterto such a situation.
However I raise thesepossibilities more to emphasisewhat vast areas of unknown territory lie before anyone who undertakes astudy of the sonnets, rather than to offer a solution. In the end onehasto admit that the historical setting is unknown, the scope andapplicationof the personal references can only hazily be guessed at, the level ofsatireor seriousness remains obscure, and the depth of involvement shifts asonegazes, like the refraction of images in water. Readers must judge forthemselveshow far they wish to enter the maze, for poetry has no limits, and themazeprobably has no centre.

Note:
1. cheek - stands herefor the face. That theface could be seen as a map of personality was a popular Renaissanceidea.
Ah, uncle Humphrey! in thy face I see
The map of honour, truth and loyalty 2H6.III.1.202-3.
days outworn = days long ago which are nowabraded from memory. Theyouth is an image or record of past history, a golden age when thingsweremore beautiful than in these bad times.

2. i.e. without external means ofbeautification,but with their own inherent splendour, as flowers live and dienaturally.

3. bastard signs of fair= false, misleadingmeans of beautifying one’s face or appearance; cosmetics.
bastard - (an adjective) because they weresupplanting natural andlegitimate beauty.
born = given birth to; worn (as clothing oradornments). More probablythe latter, although the imputation of bastardy and illegitimacy pointsmore to the former meaning. Shakespeare did not like the use ofcosmetics,as they seemed to be the outward symbol of a false persona.The Puritandislike of them was rooted more in an intense prejudice againstfrivolityof any kind. Cosmetics here includes not only face painting but otheradornmentsalso, such as wigs. They were bastard signs of fair in that they werenotborn with the person, but came into being as a subsequent birthalongsidethe individual they adorned, something born the wrong side of theblanket,as it were. Yet they were worn by the person, hence borne, or carried,byher/him. (Note Q's spelling, borne).

4. durst = dared to;
inhabit = occupy, place itself (on);
brow= forehead, head, face. Cosmetics would inhabit a face by dwelling onit,being placed on it.

5. This is areference to wigs being made fromhair removed from corpses. Whether or not this was the chief source ofhairused in wigs is uncertain. Presumably barbers would have supplied someofit. Golden was the desired colour for hair, but any shade approximatingElizabeth’s fading red hair was acceptable. The following is from achapter on costume in Shakespeare’s England Oxford1916, p.96.
"True golden hair washeld in the highestestimation, but naturally all shades of auburn and red were favoured ina court whose Queen set the fashion by her own Tudor tresses,supplementingthem as they faded with various wigs of these tints. … … …Women of fashion incurred much censure from the pulpit and scorn fromthesatirist for the general practice of dyeing their hair and wearingwigs.Face-painting was common among women and at court, and evidently wascarriedmuch farther than ever before. Harrison, Stubbes, Stow, Gosson, andotherwriters of the time see in it a token of a depraved mind, and implythatthe use of face-paint is incompatible with moral behaviour."
Cosmetics to enhancefacial colour were used bymen also in the Elizabethan period.

6. Theright of sepulchres - the hair ofthe dead should rightly be buried with them. A sepulchre is a tomb orburialplace, a building, vault or excavation made for the internment of thedead.(OED 1.)
shorn away = cut off. Shakespeare’spre-occupation with thissubject may also be illustrated by the following from the Merchant ofVenice:
… … … Lookon beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight;
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.MV.III.2.88-96.
Other links to thesonnets from this scene of MVhave already been noted. See especially the extended commentary on Sonnet 37.
An old ballad which sings of the changing times under Queen Elizabethtellsof a flourishing gallant who came to this land:
With a new lady whose face is beautiful and fair,
Who never knew what belongs to housekeeping or care,
But purchased seven new fans to play with the air,
And seventy new dressings of other women’s hair;
From MS. Ashm. 38, fo. 113, (The Bodleian) quoted in Shakespeare’sEngland p.41 (see above). The seventy new wigs might well notbe excessivein terms of the outlay of a fashionable lady. Queen Elizabeth probablyhadmore.

7. The vituperative homily against wigscontinues.KDJ notes that Shakespeare’s interest in the matter might arise becausehe himself was a bald actor, and because he lived for a time in SilverStreet,the home of the wig trade in London.

8. fleece - perhapssuggested by shorn inline 6. The thought of lines 5-7 reiterated. There may also be areferenceto the golden fleece of classical legend, a prize which tempted Jasonandthe Argonauts.

9. those holy antique hours- times of antiquitybefore the world was corrupt; the golden age.

10. A restatement ofPlatonic perfection, recallingline 8 of the previous sonnet. Although the antecedent of itselfis doubtful, it probably refers to the youth. The thing itself is theunadornedand perfect creature. In King Lear’s eyes, (probably, but notcertainly,written later than the sonnets) the naked Edgar was the epitome of the‘trueman’. Clothing and adornments obscure what is real and true. All thatis missing in Lear’s raging tirade against hypocrisy is a referenceto wigs.
Is man nomore than this? Consider him well.Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, thecatno perfume. Ha! here's three on 's are sophisticated! Thou art thethingitself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forkedanimalas thou art.KL.III.4.102-6.
SB thinks also thatthere may be a bawdy referencein all ornament to female pubic hair. Hence theline would also imply‘you are more perfect than a woman’.

11. Not adorning himself with the borrowedgreen andfreshness of someone else’s growth and vigour.

12. old = old tradition;older person (by takingtheir hair). The emphasis is on the youth’s freshness. He has nothingthat is outworn or dead on him, no cosmetics and no other adornments.

13. Resuming the statement of line 1. Thecoupletis similar in its argument to the couplet of the previous sonnet:
O! him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.
The homily against deception of the previous lines peters out into aconclusionthat was foretold in line 1, with the addition that Nature hasdeliberatelyset aside the map of his face as a record in the ultimate hope ofregeneratinglost beauty from it as from a copy. store is usedin the sense ofkeeping aside for improving the stock as in
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store, 11.
and in the previous sonnet:
O him she stores, to show what wealth she had67
where the word is used in a similar sense.

14. false Art = cosmeticpainting; those whouse it.
what beauty was of yore = what real beauty waslike long ago (beforethese last times which have been so bad).