Because Shakespeare’s sonnets were written four hundred years ago, they inevitably contain words that are unfamiliar today. Some are words that are no longer in general use—words that the dictionaries label archaic or obsolete, or that have so fallen out of use that dictionaries no longer include them. One surprising feature of the Sonnets is how rarely such archaic words appear. Among the more than a thousand words that make up the first ten sonnets, for instance, only eleven are not to be found in current usage: self-substantial (“derived from one’s own substance”), niggarding (“being miserly”), unfair (“deprive of beauty”), leese (“lose”), happies (“makes happy”), steep-up (“precipitous”), highmost (“highest”), hap (“happen”), unthrift (“spendthrift”), unprovident (“improvident”), and ruinate (“reduce to ruins”).
Somewhat more common in the Sonnets are words that are still in use but that in Shakespeare’s day had meanings that are no longer current. In the first three sonnets, for example, we find only used where we might say “peerless” or “preeminent,” gaudy used to mean “brilliantly fine,” weed where we would say “garment,” glass where we would say “mirror,” and fond where we would say “foolish.” Words of this kind—that is, words that are no longer used or that are used with unfamiliar meanings—are defined in the facing-page notes of the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
The most significant feature of Shakespeare’s word choice in the Sonnets is his use of words in which multiple meanings function simultaneously. In line 5 of the first sonnet, for example, the word contracted means “bound by contract, betrothed,” but it also carries the sense of “limited, shrunken.” Its double meaning enables the phrase “contracted to thine own bright eyes” to say succinctly to the young man that he has not only betrothed himself to his own good looks but that he has also thereby become a more limited person. In a later line in the same sonnet (“Within thine own bud buriest thy content”), the fact that thy content means both (1) “that which is contained within you, specifically, your seed, that with which you should produce a child,” and (2) “your happiness” enables the line to say, in a highly compressed fashion, that by refusing to propagate, refusing to have a child, the young man is destroying his own future well-being.
It is in large part through choosing words that carry more than one pertinent meaning that Shakespeare packs into each sonnet almost incalculable richness of thought and imagery. In the opening line of the first sonnet (“From fairest creatures we desire increase”), each of the words fairest, creatures, and increase carries multiple relevant senses; when these combine with each other, the range of significations in this single line is enormous.
In Shakespeare’s day, the word fair primarily meant “beautiful,” but it had recently also picked up the meaning of “blond” and “fair-skinned.” In this opening line of Sonnet 1, the meaning “blond” is probably not operative (though it becomes extremely pertinent when the word fair is used in later sonnets), but the aristocratic (or upper-class) implications of “fair-skinned” are very much to the point, since upper-class gentlemen and ladies need not work out of doors and expose their skins to wind and sun. (The negative class implications of outdoor labor carried in the sonnets by “dark” or “tanned” is carried today in the label “redneck.”) The second word, creatures, had several meanings, referring, for example, to everything created by God, including the plant kingdom, while in some contexts referring specifically to human beings. When combined with the third word, increase (which meant, among its pertinent definitions, “procreation,” “breeding,” “offspring,” “a child,” “crops,” and “fruit”), the word creatures takes the reader’s mind to Genesis 1.28 and God’s instructions to humankind to multiply and be fruitful, while the plant-life connotation of all three of the words provides a context for later words in the sonnet, such as rose, famine, abundance, spring, and bud. The words Shakespeare places in this first line (“From fairest creatures we desire increase”)—with their undoubted link to concerns about upper-class propagation and inheritance—could well have alerted a contemporary reader to the sonnet’s place in a familiar rhetorical tradition, that concerned with persuading a young gentleman to marry in order to reproduce and thus secure his family line and its heritable property.
While almost every line of the 154 sonnets begs for a comparable kind of unpacking of Shakespeare’s words, we will here limit ourselves to two additional examples, these from lines 2 and 4 of the same sonnet (Sonnet 1). First, the word rose in the phrase beauty’s rose (line 2) engages the reader’s mind and imagination at many levels. Most simply, it refers simultaneously to the transitory rose blossom and the enduring rosebush that bears it. But the rose signifies as well that which is most beautiful in the natural world. (See, e.g., Isaiah 35.1: “The desert and the wilderness shall rejoice; the waste ground shall be glad and flourish as the rose.”) And beauty’s rose not only meant youthful beauty but also inevitably called up memories of the Romance of the Rose (widely published in Chaucer’s translation), in which the rose stands allegorically for the goal of the lover’s quest. (The fact that the lover in the Romance desires a specific unopened rosebud, rather than one of the rosebush’s opened flowers, may have implications for the word bud in line 11.)
The word rose, then, gains its multiple resonances by referring to both a flower and its bush and through meanings accumulated in cultural and poetic traditions. In contrast, the particular verbal richness of the word his in line 4, “His tender heir might bear his memory” (and in many of the other sonnets), exists because Shakespeare took advantage of a language change in process at the very time he was writing. Until around 1600 the pronoun his served double duty, meaning both his and its. However, in the late 1590s and early 1600s, the word its came into existence as possessive of it, and his began gradually to be limited to the meaning it has today as the possessive of he. Because of the emerging gender implications of his, the pronoun as used in line 4, while primarily meaning its and thus referring to beauty’s rose, also serves as a link between the sonnet’s first line, where the fairest creature is not yet a rose, and the young man, first directly addressed in line 5.
The diction of the Sonnets is incredibly rich in meanings. When it seems possible to you that a given word might have more than one relevant meaning, take a moment to test out possible additional meanings and decide if they add richness to the line. The only hazard here is that some words have picked up new meanings since Shakespeare’s death. Especially careful study of the diction of his Sonnets thus compels one to turn to a dictionary based on historical principles, such as the Oxford English Dictionary.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. © 2004 Folger Shakespeare Library
