[Len Krisak]

Given time, you will understand my post. Some of you are not famililar with this person.

My response was not ad hominem. I simply
fervently hope he will stop posting.

That's called a wish.

If Mr. Mezey and Alicia want to open his
old threads (I suppose Alex is in charge of this),
they will discover much.

Cut me a tiny bit of slack and e-mail around
to Tim and Alan and other masters/mistresses. Investigate.
Then... well, the decision is of course yours. But
it always is.

[Alder Ellis]

>> Line 1--"Boy" is an old term once in use in the English legal system. It is French in origin (after the Norman conquest French was the language of the courts) and means executioner. Shakespeare has been dismissed (as he foreshadows in the sonnets) from Southampton's service. Southampton has out-grown Shakespeare's poetry. <<

In the first place, "boy" is a very common word, occurring hundreds of times in Shakespeare's works, and in the present context easily applying in its ordinary sense to the young man being addressed in the sonnets (cf. "sweet boy" in sonnet 108). The Franco/legal sense you assert doesn't seem to show up in OED as a recognized English usage, unless my quick perusal missed something. What evidence do you have for this usage, and what in the present context would support such an obscure sense being read into such a common word being used in such a straightforward fashion?

And even if it did mean "executioner," I don't see how you get from that to the message that Shakespeare has been dismissed from Southampton's service. (Mind you, I'm not accepting your assumption that Southampton is in fact the addressee of the relevant sonnets; he may very well have been, but that's more than we know for sure.)

>> Line 1--"power" is also French. It is the word "pouver" (which meant power). At that time the letter v was not used within a word (only to start a word) and "pouver" would have been printed "pouuer". A double U was often replaced with a W creating what was to become the standard English spelling "power". Here the printer used that convention. (In other words the English "power" comes directly from the French "pouver" by means of a printing convention.) <<

So, in other words, "power" actually means "power" here. Interesting about the typesetting conventions, but.... so what?

>> Line 2--"hower"--This word has been mistakenly taken for "hour" but it is really the French word "houver" with the "uv" by the same printing convention as above converted into a "w". "Houver" in French means "hover" or "hovering". So we see that "time's fickle glass" (the sand in it) and "his sickle" are held "hovering" (making perfect sense of the line's commas.) <<

I ain't no French scholar, but I find it a little hard to believe that "houver", an infinitive form, can mean, not only "hover", but also "hovering." How does that work? In any case, I'm pretty sure it's not going to fly very far in an English poem.

Admittedly, "hower" is problematic. The usual construction is to take "sickle hour" as a phrase meaning something like "hour of reaping," and this is not quite satisfactory somehow--one of many places in Shakespeare where one would like to think the text has been garbled. But to drag in an unlikely French meaning used ungrammatically is not a very useful way of solving the problem.

>> Lines 5,6,7,& 8--In these lines Nature is personified and represents the Logo created by God that controls all regeneration. <<

Logo? I think you meant Logos... Anyway, this is blasphemy: "in the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." God did not create the Logos, He is the Logos. And what do you mean by "regeneration"? Judging from your subsequent statement:

>> (Nature herself is not creative. She merely recreates again and again the forms and creatures God invented during the first six days.) <<

I think you might want to check the dictionary on this. "Regeneration" does not mean "repeated generation." In a Christian context, especially, it means "spiritual rebirth." Hence the negative meaning of "unregenerate". Of course, the Logos.... but, let's not confuse the issue too much.......

>> to "still keep" meant to keep a distillation of the essence of something <<

Nonsense, "still" means "always, continually." Please present evidence of your highly unlikely meaning.

>> Southampton had a worldly outlook and was interested in personal fame and worldly pleasures. Shakespeare final poem warns Southampton that he must someday face the judgment of God and he leaves the last lines of this poem blank asking Southampton to fill them in, saying--"Southampton, eventually you must face the judgment of God--what will that judgment be? <<

Your interpretation, aside from points already addressed, is basically right, I think, although hardly original. However, the insistence on a doctrinaire Christian viewpoint is off-center and reductive. The overt antithesis of the poem is purely secular: Nature versus Time. It's not the judgement of God but the fact of inevitable death that is urged on the "boy". This can be assimilated to a "higher" Christian interpretation but there's nothing in the poem that requires it. If Shakespeare had wanted to write dogmatic Christian pronouncements, he was certainly capable doing so, but he didn't. He writes to the existential situation, not to any theological framework in which the existential situation is to be interpreted. What he's saying here is, not, "you're gonna be judged," but, "you're gonna die." That death entails judgement is certainly a potential significance, but it's not specified.

[Nigel Holt]

AE,

The Logos as creator of the demiurge is only blasphemy if you accept the orthodox gospels of the modern standard Bible. Many gnostic gospels not included in the Bible have a clearly discrete Logos and demiurge - the logos usually being female.


Nigel

[Len Krisak]

Thank you, A.E. You saved me a lot of time, but
I'll just add a few comments from notes I've prepared
on this interpretation--some of them almost exactly identical to points you made, and some with very slightly different additional distinctions.

"Boy"

Not only does my OED, including the Supplement, like A.E.'s, also show no--I repeat, no--definitions of "boy," "boye," "bouy," or any other variant spelling of this word meaning "executioner" or "hangman" or anything even remotely similar, but...

My current French dictionaries define boy in French as
"houseboy," etc.

Now it is of course quite possible that at some time
(a time unbeknownst to us) the Norman legal system used
this definition. I did not have access to a middle French
dictionary. But (and this is important), I ask you to stop and think this through along with me. Suppose such a usage did exist. By what possible evidence does Ewrgall's interpretation prove that Shakespeare, in the 1590s, and writing as an English-language poet, used the word the way this totally hypothetical definition implies?

Those of you who have taught recognize the method employed in making this first of many assertions (the one
about the word "boy"). It is what beginning students do in
writing essays of literary interpretation: they simply assert something is true without offering any evidence.
I call it the equating syndrome. Students read a poem with
a rock, a bird, and a tree mentioned in it and proceed to write, "The rock represents Bolivian archaeology, the bird stands for topiary, and the tree is a symbol of bicycle riding." When asked why they believe these assertions to be true, students have no rational responses.

Why would Shakespeare suddenly use the word "boy" this way when the most obvious meaning makes perfect sense? I invite those of you who found my first comment--my first devout wish--untoward to consider this long and hard. Ewrgall's assertions are exactly what Caleb called them, even if only
figuratively speaking: conspiracy theories of literature.
All of Ewrgall's previous rantings (I hope by now Alicia and Mr. Mezey have looked them up and digested them) are exactly of this nature--obvious paranoia of a quality that makes
Oxfordians and Baconians and assorted what-not-ians positively pallid by comparison.

Next:

The first two lines of #126 appear in print as follows:


O Thou my louely Boy who in thy power,
Doeft hould times fickle glaffe.his fickle,hower:


Admittedly that's some pretty hard going. However, the character [f] as printed could resemble the long swash [f]
familiar to us from other texts and made particularly familiar by Grierson's famous edition of Donne. Or...it could just be an "f."--in other words, a modern "f" or "s."

Did the compositor not have available to him the long swash
[f] that was an "s" or did he just assume that readers would be able to tell from context that his [f] was of course our modern "s"? No one can possibly answer this question given our current state of knowledge, but we can read the line with all those [f]s in it both ways and end up choosing the
one that makes the most sense given the grammar and syntax of the two lines. This is something Ewrgall has failed to do.

I'm going to guess that what makes the most sense is to read "Doeft" as "Doest." If others can advance a reason for a better choice, please respond. "Hould times": is not the least conspiratorial reading here "hold time's"? If not, why not?

Hold time's what? Would his "fickle glaffe." make the most sense--i.e., time's fickle glass or time's sickle glass (We'll return to that fickle/sickle issue later)? Is the glass a mirror, a piece of glass, or an hourglass? Unless Ewrgall would like to argue that time is not time, but a rare instance of Goidelic Gaelic left over in the market system of pre-Norman England and almost surely a word and meaning Shakespeare had in mind that denominates "whetstone"
or "carp" or "hawthorn"--do I have any takers?--then the grammar of the sentence must mean "o you, my lovely boy who in your power hold time's sickle/fickle glass--his sickle/fickle hour; you who has/have by waning grown, etc." or possibly "time's sickle/fickle glass's sickle/fickle hour."

No possible grammatically intelligible meaning can allow us to turn "power" and "hower" into "hover" or "pover" or any other so-called French ot "typographically conventional" pair of words--not "povver" or "hovver" either--because they simply don't make any grammatical sense. Go back and read Ewrgall's assertion that his spelling and Frenchifying and whatnot do make sense, and compare my reading. Report in when you feel like it. "Hovering" says Ewrgall? But his own argument (if one can dignify it with that name) says "hovver."

Notice that fickle and sickle almost need not be resolved.
Time is both fickle--random and arbitrary and capricious--and acting with a sickle--a scythe that cuts men down.

That raises the question of the general interpretation advanced by Ewrgall. The general sense of #126 is an address to some young man (perhaps Southampton, but for the purposes of our understanding of the sentiment expressed it really doesn' matter who): nature will demand you and you will have to yield yourself up to the sickle of time and answer the audit. That scholars and critics have for decades agreed on this broad interpretation doesn't make it incontrovertibly right (when shall we have that on the face of the earth?), but its general outlines convince me. So is Ewrgall's interpretation in general contrary to this? Yes, the poem comes at the end of the young man series and before the "dark lady" series, but where's the argument? What has Ewrgall added to this understanding by turning us to Norman legalese (if in fact he can back up his claim about "Boy," for example)? Right where we already were.

Why the two open parentheses at the end of the 12 lines?
Would not the simplest explanation be that the compositor or compositors has/have set 153 other sonnets and probably thought that two lines were either missing or to come? How does Ewrgall know--know, not assert--that Shakespeare left those two line blanks and not the compositor(s)? Doe he have manuscript proof or holographic copies of the sonnets that show this? If so, let him cone forth and share them with us and the world.

Ewrgall has failed to make a sensible, reasonable case even for the first two lines he sets out to mangle. He employs exactly what Caleb says he does--conspiracy theories. He merely concocts "facts" out of thin air and reads the minds of people 400 years dead with absolute certainty. Those are some of his "facts," Mr. Mezey.

Again, thanks to A.E.

[Clive Watkins]

AE’s remarks seem very much to the point. You are attempting to explain what does not require explanation, for, despite the quirks AE has commented on, the general trend of your account is largely consistent with - for instance - that implicit in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly Arden edition (Thomas Nelson: London, 1997) and also with Helen Vendler’s interesting reading (The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets,Belknap Press: Cambridge, 1997).

What is the purpose, the focus, of this board? "The tradition of the masters: the classics & how they did it"? I wonder whether your original posting really belongs here.

Clive Watkins

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Len Krisak:
Given time, you will understand my post. Some of you are not famililar with this person.

My response was not ad hominem. I simply
fervently hope he will stop posting.

That's called a wish.

If Mr. Mezey and Alicia want to open his
old threads (I suppose Alex is in charge of this),
they will discover much.

Cut me a tiny bit of slack and e-mail around
to Tim and Alan and other masters/mistresses. Investigate.
Then... well, the decision is of course yours. But
it always is.

Hey Krisak---say openly what your problem is. None of this--go behind my back--nonsense. Be a man, speak up like a poet should. You seem to have some difficulties with the fact that some of Shakespeare's sonnets carry a Christian message. His was a very religious time. Wars all over Europe were being fought over religion. The Spanish Armada was about religion. Is it really surprising that the greatest writer whoever lived had deep religious concerns--that he was a believing Christian (by the way i am an atheist but I dont mind that Shakespeare was a Christian). So what is your problem? Are you offended by the Christian values that Shakespeare held? They don't offend me and I repeat, I am an atheist. I am the one who should be put out by Shakespeare's Christian morality. Back in his day atheism was a crime punished by torture and death.

ewrgall

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by AE:
In the first place, "boy" is a very common word, occurring hundreds of times in Shakespeare's works, and in the present context easily applying in its ordinary sense to the young man being addressed in the sonnets (cf. "sweet boy" in sonnet 108). The Franco/legal sense you assert doesn't seem to show up in OED as a recognized English usage, unless my quick perusal missed something. What evidence do you have for this usage, and what in the present context would support such an obscure sense being read into such a common word being used in such a straightforward fashion? Cotgrave (early French English dictionary) defines Boye as "an executioner, a hangman". Shakespeare in a couple places in his plays calls Cupid a hangman. In Loves Labour Lost Biron makes the joke--(not exact quote) "If I fall in love, Hang Me."----Boy is capitalized. That meant it was a generic type of something. Go learn what the printing convention were back in those days.---It is being used straightforwardly. The sonnets are filled with legal phrases. This whole sonnet is about judgment--legal terms fit the sense of this sonnet.

Referring to Cupid (who was a boy) as a hangman was a common joke not just in Shakespeare but in other writers of his time. When Shakespeare wrote "Boy" in sonnet 126 he was not, TOO READERS OF HIS TIME, being terribly obscure. The "cupid=boy=hangman" joke was forgotten over time (When French stopped being the language of the English legal system then a great number of French words dropped out of common usage among the elite) but I have now reclaimed it for Shakespeare readers.

And even if it did mean "executioner," I don't see how you get from that to the message that Shakespeare has been dismissed from Southampton's service. Shakespeare has been predicting his dismissal throughout the sonnets---plus I know what the sonnets just before this one actually say (I know what the "foles of time" are--I know what a "subbornd Informer" is.)(Mind you, I'm not accepting your assumption that Southampton is in fact the addressee of the relevant sonnets; he may very well have been, but that's more than we know for sure.)Just so long as you don't start saying that you believe Bacon wrote the sonnets. Actually there is no evidence whatsoever that they were addressed to anyone but Southampton.

>> Line 1--"power" is also French. It is the word "pouver" (which meant power). At that time the letter v was not used within a word (only to start a word) and "pouver" would have been printed "pouuer". A double U was often replaced with a W creating what was to become the standard English spelling "power". Here the printer used that convention. (In other words the English "power" comes directly from the French "pouver" by means of a printing convention.) <<

So, in other words, "power" actually means "power" here. Interesting about the typesetting conventions, but.... so what? OK, so you are not interested in my small contribution to etymology. Sorry.

>> Line 2--"hower"--This word has been mistakenly taken for "hour" but it is really the French word "houver" with the "uv" by the same printing convention as above converted into a "w". "Houver" in French means "hover" or "hovering". So we see that "time's fickle glass" (the sand in it) and "his sickle" are held "hovering" (making perfect sense of the line's commas.) <<

I ain't no French scholar, but I find it a little hard to believe that "houver", an infinitive form, can mean, not only "hover", but also "hovering." How does that work? In any case, I'm pretty sure it's not going to fly very far in an English poem. The word is, of course, hover. When something is held hover, it means that it is held suspended or hovering. I was just trying to make it clear in what sense "hover" was being used. The proper grammatical term for Shakespeare's use of the word "hover" escapes me.

Admittedly, "hower" is problematic. The usual construction is to take "sickle hour" as a phrase meaning something like "hour of reaping," and this is not quite satisfactory somehow--one of many places in Shakespeare where one would like to think the text has been garbled. But to drag in an unlikely French meaning used ungrammatically is not a very useful way of solving the problem. Shakespeare uses the word grammatically--his understanding of grammar is just better than yours.-----A second (less likely) alternative is that Shakespeare simply spelled "hover" as "hovver" (exactly as it is actually pronounced since many long consonants have a tendency to bleed over into the next syllable). The double "v" would be converted to a "w". Shakespeare did a lot of interesting things in the sonnets. He spells the word "ruined" (a three syllable word in his time) as "rwn'd" converting it into a one syllable word. The vowels "u" and "i" which would have been separately pronounced he converts into a "w" running them together. Finding various uses for "w" seems to have been a preoccupation of Shakespeare's.

>> Lines 5,6,7,& 8--In these lines Nature is personified and represents the Logo created by God that controls all regeneration. <<

Logo? I think you meant Logos... Anyway, this is blasphemy: "in the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." God did not create the Logos, He is the Logos. And what do you mean by "regeneration"?I am an atheist. My Christian theology aint that good. So burn me at the stake.---- Logo or Logos, Nature poetically represents them.---- And it is my understanding that in Shakespeare's time the Logos were the ideas of God which once thought and put in effect continued in action independent of his further contemplation. God's thoughts took on a life of their own. Of course, there have always been six different stories about any religious idea. Judging from your subsequent statement:

>> (Nature herself is not creative. She merely recreates again and again the forms and creatures God invented during the first six days.) <<

I think you might want to check the dictionary on this. "Regeneration" does not mean "repeated generation." In a Christian context, especially, it means "spiritual rebirth." Hence the negative meaning of "unregenerate". Of course, the Logos.... but, let's not confuse the issue too much.......
Random House Dictionary--regeneration--3)to renew or produce anew, bring into existence again, 4)Biol. to renew or recreate a lost, removed or injured part.---


>> to "still keep" meant to keep a distillation of the essence of something <<

Nonsense, "still" means "always, continually." Please present evidence of your highly unlikely meaning.A "still" (my grandfather use to have one in his barn during Prohibition} distills things. Sonnet 119--"What potions have I drunke of Syren tears
Distil'd from Lymbecks (a chemical still) foule as hell within." Quite obviously Shakespeare knew what a distillation was. Sonnet 54---"When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth". Here he distills Southampton's virtues by means of his verse.----The usage "still keep" was not that odd in Shakespeare's time. Fish and beef were "salt kept"--salted and stored--as one example that comes to mind. Familiar with Shakespeare's previous use of distillate imagery in the sonnets and aware of what nature's ability are and are not (nature keeps the body but not the soul) it seems to me that Shakespeare is saying that Nature, through her limited natural processes cannot retain Southampton's essence--his soul escapes her.

>> Southampton had a worldly outlook and was interested in personal fame and worldly pleasures. Shakespeare final poem warns Southampton that he must someday face the judgment of God and he leaves the last lines of this poem blank asking Southampton to fill them in, saying--"Southampton, eventually you must face the judgment of God--what will that judgment be? <<

Your interpretation, aside from points already addressed, is basically right, I think, although hardly original. In all honesty I have never seem the blank lines at the end of this sonnet explained the way I have explained them. So show me a source that gives the explanation I give. Otherwise retract your statement about it being "hardly original".

However, the insistence on a doctrinaire Christian viewpoint is off-center and reductive. The overt antithesis of the poem is purely secular: Nature versus Time. It's not the judgement of God but the fact of inevitable death that is urged on the "boy". This can be assimilated to a "higher" Christian interpretation but there's nothing in the poem that requires it. If Shakespeare had wanted to write dogmatic Christian pronouncements, he was certainly capable doing so, but he didn't. He writes to the existential situation, not to any theological framework in which the existential situation is to be interpreted. What he's saying here is, not, "you're gonna be judged," but, "you're gonna die." That death entails judgement is certainly a potential significance, but it's not specified. The above is a bunch of deliberate bullshit. Nature's Quietus is to render up the bodies of the dead who will stand before God and be judged. How can you possibly deny that most Christian of all images? [/quote]



[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited September 17, 2001).]

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Len Krisak:
Thank you, A.E. You saved me a lot of time, but
I'll just add a few comments from notes I've prepared
on this interpretation--some of them almost exactly identical to points you made, and some with very slightly different additional distinctions.

AE's remarks were far more coherent than the mangled mess you write below. I find it hard to make sense out of most of what you write. I am sure others will have the same problem.

"Boy"

Not only does my OED, including the Supplement, like A.E.'s, also show no--I repeat, no--definitions of "boy," "boye," "bouy," or any other variant spelling of this word meaning "executioner" or "hangman" or anything even remotely similar, but...

My current French dictionaries define boy in French as
"houseboy," etc. You should "festinately" get yourself to a library and look into Cotgrave -- a French English dictionary contemporary with Shakespeare. ("Festinately" is a French word that only Shakespeare has been found to use but is defined in Cotgrave.) As I explained to AE-- That Cupid was a boy and therefore a hangman was a common joke in Shakespeare's time. I just succeeded in rediscovering why the joke was funny by pointing out that in French boy meant hangman.

Now it is of course quite possible that at some time
(a time unbeknownst to us) the Norman legal system used
this definition. I did not have access to a middle French
dictionary. But (and this is important), I ask you to stop and think this through along with me. Gee, everybody, lets try to follow his "logic". Suppose such a usage did exist. By what possible evidence does Ewrgall's interpretation prove that Shakespeare, in the 1590s, and writing as an English-language poet, used the word the way this totally hypothetical definition implies?

Those of you who have taught recognize the method employed in making this first of many assertions (the one
about the word "boy"). It is what beginning students do in
writing essays of literary interpretation: they simply assert something is true without offering any evidence.
I call it the equating syndrome. Students read a poem with
a rock, a bird, and a tree mentioned in it and proceed to write, "The rock represents Bolivian archaeology, the bird stands for topiary, and the tree is a symbol of bicycle riding." When asked why they believe these assertions to be true, students have no rational responses.That Love was a boy therefore a hangman was a common joke in Shakespeare's time. Examples: "And hang me up at the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid."

Why would Shakespeare suddenly use the word "boy" this way when the most obvious meaning makes perfect sense?Well, if you want to know the truth, in the previous poem Shakespeare just got done insulting an Earl. That Earl, with a word, could have had Shakespeare's quill stuffed up Shakespeare's ass. At that minute in time Southampton was Shakespeare's potential hangman. But I refused to go into a detailed explanation of sonnet 125 right now. I invite those of you who found my first comment--my first devout wish--untoward he is referring back to his first post where he tells me to go away to consider this long and hard. Ewrgall's assertions are exactly what Caleb called them, even if only
figuratively speaking: conspiracy theories of literature.
All of Ewrgall's previous rantings (I hope by now Alicia and Mr. Mezey have looked them up and digested them) are exactly of this nature--obvious paranoia you need to look paranoia up in a dictionary you are misusing the word. of a quality that makes Oxfordians and Baconians and assorted what-not-ians positively pallid by comparison.

Next:

The first two lines of #126 appear in print as follows:


O Thou my louely Boy who in thy power,
Doeft hould times fickle glaffe,his fickle,hower:

The following is such brainless nonsense that it is hard to even make jokes about it. Nonetheless I will try.
Admittedly that's some pretty hard going. Only if you are as unfamiliar with Shakespeare as you obviously are. However, the character [f] as printed could resemble the long swash [f]
familiar to us from other texts and made particularly familiar by Grierson's famous edition of Donne. Or...it could just be an "f."--in other words, a modern "f" or "s."

Did the compositor not have available to him the long swash
[f] that was an "s" or did he just assume that readers would be able to tell from context that his [f] was of course our modern "s"? No one can possibly answer this question given our current state of knowledge, but we can read the line with all those [f]s in it both ways and end up choosing the
one that makes the most sense given the grammar and syntax of the two lines. This is something Ewrgall has failed to do.Well, since I eliminated what you designate the "long swash [f]s of the original text and replace them with a modern "s" apparently I did make some choices--the exact same choices editors have been making for a couple hundred years. What you say above is incoherent.

I'm going to guess that what makes the most sense is to read "Doeft" as "Doest."GASP! He comes to the same conclusion as every editor of Shakespeare ever has! The man is a genius! If others can advance a reason for a better choice, please respond. No,no, rest assured that no one in the entire history of Shakespeare studies has ever held any other opinion but yours. "Hould times": is not the least conspiratorial reading here "hold time's"? If not, why not? GASP! Once again he comes to the same conclusion as everybody else. A true savant!

Hold time's what?I am holding my laughter--better is yet to come and I wouldn't want to waste it. Would his "fickle glaffe." make the most sense--i.e., time's fickle glass or time's sickle glass (We'll return to that fickle/sickle issue later)? You leave us in suspense! Suspended! Dare I say hovering? Is the glass a mirror, a piece of glass, or an hourglass? Unless Ewrgall would like to argue that time is not time, but a rare instance of Goidelic Gaelic left over in the market system of pre-Norman England and almost surely a word and meaning Shakespeare had in mind that denominates "whetstone" or "carp" or "hawthorn"--Hey, has this guy been putting us on all this time--has really been trying to be funny and we haven't recognized it???--Naw, he's for real. do I have any takers?--then the grammar of the sentence must mean "o you, my lovely boy who in your power hold time's sickle/fickle glass--his sickle/fickle hour; you who has/have by waning grown, etc." or possibly "time's sickle/fickle glass's sickle/fickle hour." Notice how conveniently this guy forgets the commas that appear in the actual line. He is distorting the original text right in front of our eyes and thinks us too stupid to notice it.

No possible grammatically intelligible meaning can allow us to turn "power" and "hower" into "hover" or "pover" or any other so-called French ot "typographically conventional" pair of words--not "povver" or "hovver" either--because they simply don't make any grammatical sense.You left out the commas! You deliberately distorted the original text! Put back the commas where they are suppose to be and you line makes absolutely no sense! Go back and read Ewrgall's assertion that his spelling and Frenchifying and whatnot do make sense, and compare my reading. Report in when you feel like it. "Hovering" says Ewrgall? But his own argument (if one can dignify it with that name) says "hovver."I really don't understand this bit of nonsense. I think few people will have difficulty understanding the line--Doest hould time's fickle glass, his sickle, hover (hovering). Both the sand in the glass and time's sickle are held suspended, hovering, waiting to fall. (Though my primary opinion is that "hower" is the French word "houver" in my answer to AE I also said there was a possibility that we really might be looking at an alternate spelling of "hover", namely "hovver" with the double "v" represented by a "w". Printers in Shakespeare time did use that trick.

Notice that fickle and sickle almost need not be resolved.
Time is both fickle--random and arbitrary and capricious--and acting with a sickle--a scythe that cuts men down. Mercifully you go on to something else.

That raises the question of the general interpretation advanced by Ewrgall. The general sense of #126 is an address to some young man (perhaps Southampton, but for the purposes of our understanding of the sentiment expressed it really doesn't' matter who)Absolutely wrong. That is like saying we don't need to know the addressee of Cicero's offices to his son: nature will demand you and you will have to yield yourself up to the sickle of time and answer the audit. That scholars and critics have for decades agreed on this broad interpretation doesn't make it incontrovertibly right (when shall we have that on the face of the earth?), but its general outlines convince me. So is Ewrgall's interpretation in general contrary to this? Yes, the poem comes at the end of the young man series and before the "dark lady" series, but where's the argument? What has Ewrgall added to this understanding by turning us to Norman legalese (if in fact he can back up his claim about "Boy," for example)? Right where we already were.This all started when I gave the solution to Sonnet 107 in which Shakespeare makes an open public statement of his Christian belief in Christ and of Christ's resurrection. I then did some more sonnets that demonstrated a MORAL, I repeat MORAL Christian concern in the sonnets. I posted Sonnet 126, the last of the Southampton sonnets, to demonstrate that the last thing Shakespeare had to say in the sonnets was to warn Southampton to be careful of the state of his soul. What more important last advice could a Christian man give to another?
This whole angst by certain members of the sphere comes about because they cant tolerate the fact that Shakespeare was undoubtably a believing Christian and who {there is no evidence to the contrary) held himself to a high moral standard of behavior and as one of his contemporaries wrote "would not let himself be debauched". And that in the sonnets he was preaching morality to Southampton and not immorality. I could be more specific but I find it more amusing not to be.

Why the two open parentheses at the end of the 12 lines?
Would not the simplest explanation be that the compositor or compositors has/have set 153 other sonnets and probably thought that two lines were either missing or to come? How does Ewrgall know--know, not assert--that Shakespeare left those two line blanks and not the compositor(s)? Doe he have manuscript proof or holographic copies of the sonnets that show this? If so, let him cone forth and share them with us and the world. Give it a moments thought. The idea that compositors (typesetters), who were supposed to COPY a text as accurately as possible, would slap in a couple lines of parentheses on their own initiative is pretty farfetched. It is hilarious that people actually take that idea seriously. Shakespeare left those lines blank for the reason I stated. He followed the rule of all good poets--he did not tell, he implied.

Ewrgall has failed to make a sensible, reasonable case even for the first two lines he sets out to mangle. He employs exactly what Caleb says he does--conspiracy theories. He merely concocts "facts" out of thin air and reads the minds of people 400 years dead with absolute certainty. Those are some of his "facts," Mr. Mezey.

I laugh.
ewrgall





[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited September 18, 2001).]

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Clive Watkins:
AE remarks seem very much to the point. You are attempting to explain what does not require explanation, for, despite the quirks AE has commented on, the general trend of your account is largely consistent with - for instance - that implicit in Katherine Duncan-Jones?scholarly Arden edition (Thomas Nelson: London, 1997)I doubt it but I'll take a look. I haven't looked at the 1997 Arden but it is probably just the same old rehash. and also with Helen Vendler?nteresting reading (The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets,Belknap Press: Cambridge, 1997)Not that is both ridiculous and insulting. Helen Vendler's book is nothing but incoherent nonsense. It is just so much brainless graffiti.

What is the purpose, the focus, of this board? "The tradition of the masters: the classics & how they did it"? I wonder whether your original posting really belongs here.
What I am explaining is exactly how Shakespeare "did it". To understand what his words meant is too understand what he did. Until you understand what he did, you can't understand how he did it.
Clive Watkins

[Alder Ellis]

>> In all honesty I have never seem the blank lines at the end of this sonnet explained the way I have explained them. So show me a source that gives the explanation I give. Otherwise retract your statement about it being "hardly original". <<

I stand corrected on this point. I wasn't thinking of your interpretation of the blank lines, just of the sense of the sonnet. Your interpretation of the blank lines is plausible enough, assuming the parentheses originated with Shakespeare. More likely, in my opinion (concurring with editorial tradition, I believe), they originated with the printer who was unsure of how to treat the 12-line poem. Had the poem consisted of the 3 quatrains of a Shakespearean sonnet rather than 6 couplets, the "missing couplet" idea would be more persuasive, though still pretty gimicky. And, anyway, your interpretation of it doesn't really add any meaning not already implied in your reading of the 12 lines.

>> The above is a bunch of deliberate bullshit. Nature's Quietus is to render up the bodies of the dead who will stand before God and be judged. How can you possibly deny that most Christian of all images? <<

Not deliberate, I assure you. If you're implying that "Quietus" always carries the sense you indicate here, I would disagree, if only on the basis of Hamlet's "his quietus make / With a bare bodkin." "Quietus" is simply Latin for "discharge" or "acquittance" and is presumably originally a legal term. Granted, the idea of "acquittance" (of a debt) is applicable in the way you indicate to Christian theology. A proverbial reflection of this in Shakespeare is, "you owe God a death." There is a whole cycle of symbolism around this idea (involving, e.g., the parable of the talents) which Shakespeare is keenly aware of and often alludes to. But there is no indication of it in this poem, which, or so I argued before, presents a strictly secular perspective: Nature owes the life to Time (the inevitability of death), not to God (the inevitability of judgement). The Christian perspective is not denied, but it is left unexpressed and latent.

I appreciate your efforts to answer my other objections. I'm not persuaded, but don't think it would be useful to argue them any further. You evidently lack the necessary scholarly groundedness to be able to see how wildly absurd something like your Franco/legal interpretation of "boy" is, and no amount of argument would suffice to give you that groundedness. The only real solution would be for you to acquire, perhaps by means of divine intervention (in spite of your atheism), the degree of intellectual humbleness that is required for opening the mind to other points of view, this being the starting-point of real education. If you can't appreciate other points of view, you have no way testing and developing your own point of view. It stunts your growth. Your theory of Shakespeare may well have originated in a valid insight, but the insight can't develop properly unless it is tested against other insights. As soon as you commit yourself to the proposition that "I'm right, and everybody else is wrong," you've killed your intellectual potential. You've taken yourself out of the game.