When Shakespeare made the decision to compose his Sonnets using the English (in contrast to the Italian) sonnet form, he seems at the same time to have settled on the shape of the Sonnets’ sentences. The two forms are distinguished by rhyme scheme: in the Italian sonnet, the rhyme scheme in effect divides the poem into two sections, the eight-line octave followed by the six-line sestet; in the English, it sets three four-line quatrains in parallel, followed by the two-line rhyming couplet.
While Shakespeare finds almost infinite ways to provide variety within the tightly controlled form of the English sonnet, and while the occasional sonnet is made up of a single sentence (e.g., Sonnet 29), his sentences tend to shape themselves within the bounds set by the quatrain and the couplet—that is, most quatrains and most couplets are each made up of one sentence or question, with occasional quatrains made up of two or more sentences or questions. (Quatrains that, in modern printed editions, end with a semicolon rather than a period or question mark are often so marked only to indicate that the thought continues into the next quatrain; syntactically, the clause is generally independent and could be completed with a period instead.)
The reader therefore seldom finds in the Sonnets the long, complicated sentences often encountered in Shakespeare’s plays. One does, though, find within the sentences the inversions, the interruptions of normal word order, and the postponements of essential sentence elements that are familiar to readers of the plays.
In the Sonnets as in the plays, for example, Shakespeare often rearranges subjects and verbs (i.e., instead of "He goes" we find "Goes he"); he frequently places the object before the subject and verb (i.e., instead of "I hit him," we might find "Him I hit"), and he puts adverbs and adverbial phrases before the subject and verb (i.e., “I hit fairly” becomes “Fairly I hit”). The first sonnet in the sequence, in fact, opens with an inversion, with the adverbial phrase “From fairest creatures” moved forward from its ordinary syntactical position after the verb. This transformation of the sentence “We desire increase from fairest creatures” into “From fairest creatures we desire increase” has a significant effect on the rhythm of the line and places the emphasis of the sentence immediately on the “fairest” creature who will be the topic of this and many sonnets to follow.
In Sonnet 2 the sentence “Thy beauty’s use would deserve much more praise” is transformed into “How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,” in large part through a double inversion: the transposing of the subject (“thy beauty’s use”) and the verb (“deserved”) and the placing of the object before the inverted subject and verb. Again, the impact on the rhythm of the line is significant, and the bringing of the word praise toward the beginning of the line emphasizes the word’s echo of and link to the preceding line (“Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise”) through its reiteration of the word praise and through repetition of the vowel sound in shame.
Occasionally the inversions in the Sonnets seem primarily to provide the poet with a needed rhyme word. In Sonnet 3, for example, the difference between “she calls back / In thee the lovely April of her prime” and “she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime” seems largely to rest on the poet’s choice of “thee” rather than “back” for the sonnet’s rhyme scheme.
However, Shakespeare’s inversions in the Sonnets often create a space for ambiguity and thus for increased richness and compression. Sometimes the ambiguity exists only for a moment, until the eye and mind progress further along the line and the reader sees that one of the initially possible meanings cannot be sustained. For example, in Sonnet 5, the line “And that unfair which fairly doth excel” seems initially to present “that unfair” as the demonstrative adjective that followed by another adjective, unfair, until a reading of the whole line reveals that there is no noun for these apparent adjectives to modify, and that “that unfair” is more likely an inversion of the verb to unfair and its object, the pronoun that. The line thus means simply “deprive that of beauty which fairly excels”—though wordplay on fairly as (1) “completely,” (2) “properly,” and/or (3) “in beauty” makes the line far from simple.
Often the doubleness of meaning created by the inversion remains unresolved. In Sonnet 3, for example, the line “But if thou live remembered not to be” clearly contains an inversion in the words “remembered not to be”; however, it is unclear whether “remembered not to be” inverts “to be not remembered” (i.e., “[only] to be forgotten”) or “not to be remembered” (i.e., “[in order] to be forgotten”). Thus, while the primary meaning of the line may well be “if you live in such a way that you will not be remembered,” the reader cannot dismiss the line’s simultaneous suggestion that the young man is intentionally living to avoid being remembered. The inversion, in other words, allows the line to carry two distinct tones, one of warning and the other of accusation.
Inversions are not the only unusual sentence structures in Shakespeare's language. Often in his Sonnets as in his plays, words that would in a normal English sentence appear together are separated from each other, usually in order to create a particular rhythm or to stress a particular word or phrase. In Sonnet 1, for example, in lines 5-6 (“But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, / Feed'st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel”), the subject thou is separated from its verb feed’st by a phrase that, because of its placement, focuses sharp attention on the young man’s looks and the behavior that the poet sees as defining him.
A few lines later in the same sonnet, we find the lines
Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content . . .
Here the subject Thou is separated from its verb buriest, first by a clause that in its extreme praise (“that art now the world’s fresh ornament / And only herald to the gaudy spring”) is in interesting and direct contrast to the tone of accusation of the basic sentence elements within which the clause is set (“Thou buriest thy content”); the separation is further extended through the inversion that moves forward a prepositional phrase (“Within thine own bud”) that would in ordinary syntax come after the verb.
Line 12 of this same sonnet—“And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding”—exemplifies a familiar kind of interruption in these poems, namely, an interjected compound vocative. (Again, the archaic word “niggarding” means miserliness.) Direct address to the beloved in the form of compound epithets, especially where one term of the compound (“tender”) contradicts the other (“churl”), in meaning or in tone, is a device that Shakespeare uses frequently in the Sonnets, heightening the emotional tone and creating the kind of puzzle that makes the sonnets so intellectually intriguing. (Sonnet 4, for example, contains three such vocatives: “Unthrifty loveliness,” “beauteous niggard,” and “Profitless usurer.”)
Sometimes, rather than separating basic sentence elements, Shakespeare simply holds back the subject and predicate, delaying them until other material to which he wants to give particular emphasis has been presented. The first quatrain of Sonnet 2 holds off until line 3 the presentation of the subject of the sentence, and delays the verb until line 4:
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
In this quatrain, the subject and predicate, “thy . . . livery . . . will be a tattered weed,” are held back while for two lines the poet draws a vivid picture of the young man as he will look in middle age. Sonnet 2 is, in effect, an attempt to persuade, an exhortation to the recipient to change; the powerful description of youth attacked by the forces of time gains much of its strength from its placement in advance of the basic sentence elements. (One need only reverse the order of the lines, placing lines 3-4 before lines 1-2, to see how much power the poem loses with that reversal.)
In addition to the delaying device, the quatrain contains two further Shakespearean sentence strategies—a subject/verb interruption in lines 3-4 followed by a compression in line 4. The phrase “so gazed on now,” which separates the subject and verb (“livery . . . will be”), stresses both the beauty of the young man and the briefness of the moment for which that beauty will exist. The last line, an example of the kind of compression that one finds throughout the Sonnets, would, if fully unpacked and its inversion reversed, read “[that will be] held [to be] a tattered weed of small worth.”
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. © 2004 Folger Shakespeare Library
