The World of Shakespeare's Sonnets: an Introduction by Robert Matz

Author:Robert Matz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2012-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Though the black mistress may grant her favor (including sexual favors) to others, Shakespeare complains that she is “cruel” to him. Renaissance sonneteers often use the word “cruel” to describe the customarily aloof courtly beloved. Shakespeare warns the black mistress that too much “disdain” on her part may lead him to express “the manner of my pity-wanting pain.” Returning cruelty for cruelty, Shakespeare will “speak ill” of the black mistress, angrily describing how she lacks (is “wanting”) pity for his love pains.

Surprisingly, Shakespeare does not advise the black mistress to love him in order to avert his anger. He advises her to pretend to love him, as physicians pretend to their dying patients that they are healthy: although she does not love him (“though not to love”) she should tell Shakespeare that she does (“yet, love, to tell me so”). She should “bear thine eyes straight, though thy proud heart goes wide.” She should seem to have eyes only for Shakespeare—not the roving eyes of misogynist complaint—even though these “straight” eyes disguise what’s in her proud and undependable heart.

This sonnet is remarkable because Shakespeare acknowledges that the slanders he threatens will be unfair and unfairly believed: “Now this ill-wresting world is grown so bad / Mad slanderers by mad ears believèd be.” The “ill-wresting world” interprets things—wrests meanings—in the most “ill” way possible.55 In this bad world both the slanderer of a woman and those who believe him are mad. These lines remind us of the importance and vulnerability of women’s sexual reputations in the Renaissance, as well as nearly mad attacks on women in Shakespeare’s day, brought to a low art in Swetnam’s 1615 Arraignment. Shakespeare’s criticism in this sonnet of slanders against women also recalls the plot of Othello, just as the slanders themselves do. When Othello calls Desdemona a “whore,” Emelia rightly says she “will be hanged if some eternal villain..., have not devised this slander.”56 In Othello Shakespeare sees both the deviser of the slander and the one who believes him—Iago and Othello—as “mad.”

But the very advice this sonnet gives to avoid “mad” slander is the stuff of slander. If the mistress should bear her eyes “straight” even though her heart goes “wide” she will be sexually deceitful, only pretending to love Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s knowing injunctions to be “wise” and his promise to “teach thee wit” insinuate this deceit. Both “wise” and “wit” in Shakespeare’s day can have overtones of craftiness. Shakespeare does not expect of the black mistress that she can truly love him, only that she can be crafty enough to dissimulate love.

This expectation reaffirms just the kind of slanders the sonnet apparently dismisses. It also creates, in a subtly mocking manner, a double-bind for the black mistress. If she does not demonstrate her love for Shakespeare he will slander her. But if she does show her love for Shakespeare, she will not only be vulnerable to slander for her deceit, but also prove slanders of women to be true rather than “mad.”

Shakespeare follows this pattern elsewhere in the black mistress sonnets.

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