I mentioned my sonnet ritual here, and talked a little bit about Stephen Booth’s (the editor) acceptance of multiple meanings to such a dizzying degree that there are times when you do get lost. He’s okay with that, very unlike most scholars (and readers, come to think of it). His edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
And one of the footnotes struck me as indicative of the kind of analysis that Booth is so good at, so I thought I would share it. It should speak for itself, and if you are at all familiar with a lot of Shakespeare scholarship, you will know that almost nobody writes or thinks like Stephen Booth. At least not nowadays. There are times when he reminds me of T.S. Eliot, who wrote eloquently on Shakespeare, and sometimes Auden (who gave a series of lectures on Shakespeare – here’s just one example) – but that should tell you how singular Booth is, because Eliot and Auden are not academics. They are poets. Their focus and filter is different, and, in my estimation – when I read them on Shakespeare, much of the text starts to literally come to life for me, jumping off the page. The opposite is true of so much Shakespearean scholarship – which seems to deaden the text, silencing it completely through the exhaustive analysis.
1 As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou growest –
2 In one of thine, from that which thou departest,
3 And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st
4 Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
5 Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase;
6 Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
7 If all were minded so, the times should cease,
8 And threescore year would make the world away.
9 Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
10 Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish.
11 Look, whom she best endow’d, she gave the more;
12 Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.
13 She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
14 Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.
The sense of this seems pretty clear to me. If I had to paraphrase: “Nature means for you to pass on your genes to your wife, and to create children. Without children, there is no meaning to life.”
Booth doesn’t disagree, but what he does with the footnotes is so spectacular: he does not search for the ultimate meaning. He goes word by word by word, teasing out thoughts, references, puns, different meanings – and then just leaves you sitting in the kaleidoscope he has just created. It may seem MORE confusing when you’re done, and part of the fun is to read his footnotes (some of which go on for pages at a time), and then go back and read the Sonnet full through again. Watch how different it appears. The prism has shifted. You’re in the rainbow. I am a great lover of the Sonnets – always have been, since high school – they appealed to my OCD nature, I liked that they were all together, that there was some mystery to them, that if you read them in order they start to tell a story, but you just can’t see enough of it to get the whole thing. I liked that. Booth’s notes, and HOW he “analyzes” here – really jars me, and I love him for that. Who is so willing to sit in the not-knowing but Booth? He helps me. He shows me HOW to think. Or, let’s say, another way to think – which involves shattering apart each word, and leaving it all in pieces, and then moving on. Don’t try to put it back together. That’s the failing of the modern reader.
So let’s look at just one note for this Sonnet, which seems to illustrate Booth’s startling gift for 1. analysis and 2. openness to confusion and incompletion – a rare combination of assets in anyone, but totally bizarre in a scholar.
Here he is on line 2 in the Sonnet.
2. In one of thine (1) in the womb of your wife; (2) in the person of your child. from that which thou departest (1) out of that (i.e. sperm) which you bestow (this reading enhances a probable sexual meaning of wane in line 1 as male loss of tumescence after sexual emission; for other Renaissance examples of “depart” and “depart from” meaning “bestow”, see OED, 2, 13); (2) as a result of that (your youth) which you now leave behind. No note can take in all the permutations that occur among the various meanings of the words and phrases in lines 1 and 2 in all their relationship to one another. The crush of meanings in these lines is further swelled by overtones of three other common uses of “depart” – all pertinent to this context, all called up in a reader’s mind, but, unlike the two meanings given above, not syntactically harnessed to the sentence in which they appear or capable of inclusion in its particular logic: (a) “depart” meant “put asunder” (OED, 3), and the use of the word here invokes an echo of the Elizabethan marriage service (in which its use – “to have and to hold … till death us depart” – would have been as familiar as the words that replaced it in 1622 – “till death us do part” – are now), an echo that relates to two topics of the sonnet, marriage and death; (b) “depart” was used intransitively as a synonym for “die” (OED, 7); (c) the common construction “depart from,” which ordinarily means “go away from,” appears here in a context in which that meaning is substantially relevant but syntactically impossible.
