![]() He tells him there are plenty of women out there who would be happy to bear his child: “. Instead, he asks him to proposition someone else. Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), for example, wrote a famous poem on this theme that begins “Come live with me and be my love.” In the Sonnets, however, Shakespeare does not proposition the young man directly in this way. ![]() Usually, in love poetry, the poet invites the beloved to “seize the day” and make love to him without delay. This explains Shakespeare’s weird take on the carpe diem motif. What is “natural”, therefore, turns out to be a very particular way of organizing society that is made to look natural. However natural it might seem, therefore, the act of producing a child is entirely bound up with such artificial considerations as legitimacy and inheritance. He is being asked to produce an heir-specifically a son-because this will ensure the continuity of his name down the generations and the proper transfer of property through the male line. The young man in the Sonnets is not being asked to sow wild oats, as it were. One of the things Shakespeare is doing here is encouraging us to think about what is natural and what is unnatural. ![]() The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. He suggests that both are a good thing and an increase in either naturally more so.ĭedication page of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609. In the Sonnets, Shakespeare effectively turns this metaphor around by describing offspring as interest. At a much earlier stage in the history of money, Socrates had described interest metaphorically as human offspring ( tokos in Greek). It was this traditional thinking that Shakespeare was challenging when he suggested that having children and practicing usury were basically the same. Many people still regarded usury as wrong. In Shakespeare’s time, this view was beginning to change as lending at interest was becoming more widespread and increasingly acceptable, but there was still a lot of resistance to it. Money could not breed in the same way that living creatures can. For thousands of years, usury had been condemned as unnatural and immoral for just this reason. This language strikes an odd note because making children might seem a natural process, while making money is an artificial one. Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, / If ten of thine ten times refigured thee” (Sonnet 6). “Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee, / Which usèd lives th’executor to be.” In Sonnet 6, having children is encouragingly presented to the young man in terms of the kind of increase promised by capital investment: “That use is not forbidden usury / Which happies those that pay the willing loan / That’s for thyself to breed another thee, / Or ten times happier, be it ten for one. In Sonnet 4, for example, the young man is accused of being a “Profitless usurer.” He is said to be guilty of abusing nature’s gifts by refusing to use them properly: he is not spending what nature lends him in order to make more. Specifically, he compares it with usury, the practice of charging interest on loans. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.Įqually unusual is the way the poet describes this business of making babies, which he compares with the business of making money. The title page of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1609. The young man is beautiful, and the poet wants his name and beauty to live forever. The reason for this, the poet says, is that “From fairest creatures we desire increase” (Sonnet 1). Still more unusual is the way the Sonnets begin, which is by urging the young man to marry and produce a child. Shakespeare’s Sonnets buck this trend by being addressed to a young man-at least the first 80 percent of them are. Her refusal is what keeps him writing poems as he tries to persuade her to love him in return. ![]() Most sonnet sequences of Shakespeare’s time involve a man addressing a woman who is aloof and not interested in his advances. Even though the first edition, published in 1609, was not reprinted in Shakespeare’s lifetime, the Sonnets are now among the most culturally valued and widely marketed of his productions. Many people recognize famous lines from the sequence or even know some of the sonnets by heart. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are enduringly popular. Shakespeare’s image as it appeared on the title page of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, known as the First Folio, published in London in 1623.
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