Recently Dennis and I did a piece at a little Shakespeare event, where he performed a musical setting of Sonnet 116 and then I gave a midrash. In case you forget, here's how Sonnet 116 goes:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
And this is what I read, while Dennis backed me up on guitar:
I love that this sonnet about the permanence of love is by the man whose characters are so divinely fluid, whose stories are full of mistaken identities, twins, and men who don’t realize that the boy they like so well is the woman they will marry. That’s comedy, isn’t it, not “the marriage of true minds.” Ha ha ha.
Let me be clear. In this sonnet he’s not saying that lovers never change, but that love itself is “ever-fixed,” that it’s “a star to every bark.” Love, we’re told, is not Time’s fool. It’s not a clown, it’s not a chump, it’s not a comedian.
Let me play the Fool here a bit myself. You may remember that in the plays, the Fool is the character who is allowed to mock the wise. His fooling shows them their own folly. The powerful tolerate him or ignore him; the cleverer or more cynical characters see the wisdom in his folly. Well that, I think, is what Love does to Time: it mocks the Great King even as it bows to him, keeping for itself, at least for a moment, the pleasures that Time and Death cannot reach. In that way, maybe Love is Time’s loving Fool.
Think of the most loving and lovable Fool in the plays, the Fool in King Lear. He taunts the King and he teases him; he offers Lear his fool’s hat to wear, and he says that he and Lear together are the sweet fool and the bitter fool. He also follows him into the fierce, raging storm; as in the sonnet, he “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” To the edge but not beyond, since the Fool famously disappears after that scene.
In a strange way, in the way of words, the Fool returns at the very end of the play, just before Lear himself dies, when he calls Cordelia, “my poor fool.” When he hears that Cordelia is dead, he says:
“And my poor fool is hanged: no, no, no life
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more
Never, never, never, never, never.”
The moment when he finally acknowledges his love for his “poor fool” is the moment of no no no and never never never never, the moment of death.
Some people say this reappearance of the Fool, a reappearance in name at least, was an inside joke, since Cordelia and the Fool might have been played by the same actor. Some say that they are actually the same person. I don’t know about that, but it does befit Love, Time’s Fool, to say to the King, the Father, to Time itself with his bending sickle, as Cordelia does say, “I love your majesty according to my bond, nothing more, nothing less,” which is to say, only infinitely. That is the bond of love that does not “alter when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove,” as the sonnet has it. That’s the love that “bears it out even to the edge of doom” and maybe in this case beyond.
And just to play the Fool a bit further: Perhaps Love has its own Fool, the joker that tries to kid Love, and in the end outlasts love. I mean poetry, I mean these sonnets. After the lover and the beloved are both gone, after Love itself may have left the stage, the poems stay on to tell the story, like Horatio at the end of Hamlet.
Touchstone, the fool in As You Like It says that, “the truest poetry is the most feigning” but he’s fooling, right? If love is changeable and fickle, why then, the sonnet tells us, Shakespeare never wrote. So tell me, who’s fooling whom?
