In their
respective plays Love’s Labour’s Lost and
Twelfth Night, Biron and Duke Orsino
represent two stages of the same person: Biron as the woefully self-loving wit
with little to no hope of changing, and Orsino as the spurned lover whose
self-love finds salvation in the unexpected love of someone who does effect a change. If Biron is
version 1.0, Orsino is version 1.5: better, but still much too comparable to
the original. As the precursor to a character capable of change, Biron makes a
multitude of mistakes, not the least of which is unashamed self-adulation, and
the sonnet he composes for Rosaline demonstrates this beautifully. It comes to
the reader as the first of the four suitors’ and opens with:
“If love make
me forsworn, how shall I swear to love? / Ah, never faith could hold, if not to
beauty vow’d! / Though to myself forsworn, to thee I’ll faithful prove: / Those
thoughts to me were oaks, to thee like osiers bow’d.”
On a formal level it follows the
basic Shakespearean model of fourteen iambic pentameter lines divided into
three rhymed quatrains with a rhyming couplet at the end, which, when compared
to the other suitors gives credit to the fact that Biron has an understanding
of poetic conventions. His approach to the subject matter, on the other hand,
fails splendidly and does so because, as far as the reader is concerned, the
subject of the first four lines is him! Whether in the form of personal or
reflexive pronouns: “me forsworn,”
“how shall I swear to love,” “myself forsworn,” Biron describes not
the extent to which Rosaline has gained his affection, but rather the effect of
his love for her on his attempt to keep an oath. And even in the moment when he
shifts the focus from himself he shifts it, not to Rosaline, but rather her
beauty, for he says, “Never faith could hold, if not to beauty vow’d!” The two subsequent uses of “thee” ( to “thee I’ll faithful prove,” “to thee like osiers bowed”) thus refer only
obliquely to Rosaline and even then to one of the most momentary aspects of her
character: her beauty.
One
would think that at this point Biron should at least attempt to portray
Rosaline with as much vividness and lucidity as the remaining ten lines could
contain. Instead, he continues to praise himself
and does so with overtly pompous scholastic language, which will introduce
Sonnet 23 as Shakespeare’s correction of Biron’s mistakes. In his use of words
like “study,” “book,” “comprehend,” “knowledge,” “know,” and “well learned,”
Biron couches his ability to praise Rosaline in the poetic evidence of his
privileged education. The lines that most explicitly demonstrate this are lines
8-10, which in a way mirror the thematic arc of the sonnet. He writes: “Well
learned is that tongue that well can thee commend; / All ignorant that soul
that sees thee without wonder; / which is to me some praise that I thy parts
admire.” (Doesn’t that just make your skin crawl?) Beginning at the turn with a
proclamation of the speaker’s ability, the lines continue with a more general
statement that could, in a different poem, contain a fair amount of affection,
but then ends with a flair of bathetic[1]
praise (that’s with a “b” not a “p”),
not for Rosaline, but for the speaker. The result is that by the end of line 10
Biron’s poetic momentum sputters from a dull gargle to an embarrassed, wheezing
defeat. The final four lines hardly bear mentioning beyond their attempts at
categorizing the “parts” Biron so casually refers to in line 10. They fail of
course because he likens her eyes and voice to “Jove’s lightning” and “dreadful
thunder”, and even then only when they are “not to anger bent.”
Looking at
Sonnet 23 then we see how Shakespeare uses the same scholastic language to
portray what is to him a deeper, truer, and more lasting love than Biron could
have ever conceived. Populating his poem with words like “stage,” “books,”
“learn,” “read,” and “writ” he creates an atmosphere of fastidious rehearsal,
which complements the opening line. The writing process also contains an act of
rehearsal in the form of drafts and revisions, so it comes as no surprise that
in a poem beginning with acting, the poet moves from oral to written forms of love.
A problem arises with the speaker’s use of “learn,” however, because it implies
that the intended subject is either ignorant of the projected love, or simply
illiterate! In either case this proves irrelevant however because the speaker
never assumes a superior or condescending tone, unlike Biron, which suggests
that no matter how unaware the subject may be, the human mind will always have
the capacity to learn new things. The existence of Sonnet 23 at all is evidence
of that. How the poem avoids this superior tone also illuminates one of Biron’s
biggest mistakes. At no point is the speaker the agent of his love, as seen in
the lines: like “some fierce thing replete with too much rage,” “and in mine
own love’s strength seem to decay / o’ercharged with burthen of mine own love’s
might”; instead he unselfishly submits to it. His love results from factors
beyond, not within, his control, but he can discern how to act upon it, and
unobtrusively presents it in the form of a sonnet that only hopes for a
response. In this manner Sonnet 23 gloriously succeeds, for in its very
language one sees the authorial realization that even if it goes unread, it
stands flag-like before its audience, one and all, giving a universal choice of
whether or not to accept it. This ability to chose illuminates the poet’s
reverence for the subject, as well as a recognition of the fact that love is at
once a passive and an active emotion – only by giving one’s love away could anyone
ever hope to fill its absence with the love of another. To bring Biron back
into the spotlight, he thus becomes Shakespeare’s masterful creation of a truly
despicable poet – one whose love of himself percolates even into that most
romantic gesture of a dedicated love poem. Its generic tendencies also
introduce opportunities for correction, as seen in Sonnet 23, and by isolating
the problems that seem most pertinent to Shakespeare – the arrogant use of
scholastic language and the blanket use of the word “parts” – we will soon see
Shakespeare’s strident criticism of the extant poetic conventions of his time.
Focusing on
that word “parts” then, we are directed to Katherine D. Carter’s article
“Drayton's Craftsmanship: The Encomium and the Blazon in ‘England's Heroicall
Epistles’” At the beginning of the article she defines the Blazon Tradition,
brought to England through Petrarch. In using the blazon, the poet praises his typically
female subject “by itemizing her
several ‘parts’- lips, cheeks, and eyes – and by amplifying the praise of each
‘part’ with a hyperbolic comparison with some commonly accepted ‘beautie’-
rubies, doves, stars, and so forth.” J.W. Lever also discusses this
tactic in his book The Elizabethan Love
Sonnet, saying:
The subject of
the image need have no rational bearing upon the theme of the poem beyond some
special attribute that evokes a direct sensory response. Attention is held by
this attribute just long enough to induce the required response, before the
poem moves on to some other stimulus. There is no need to infer an essential
similarity between the theme of human emotion and the image of impersonal
nature, which returns to its proper sphere unaffected by the momentary
connection. (4)
Essentially, the poet has at his
disposal a vast collection of stock conceits, a nearly one-to-one list of
female body parts and their corresponding hyperbolic images, and he need only
pick one and match it to the other if he wishes to engage the blazon. (For a delightful
parody of this technique, see Shakespeare’s 130th Sonnet) The effect
of such repeated comparisons is similar to the economic law of diminishing
value; for after fifty grandiose claims of what a woman’s beauty is like, or
what the poet’s love is like, there remains the simple question of what it
actually is.
Through
Orsino and Sonnet 69, Shakespeare shows what love is. From his very first speech, the audience gets the impression
that Orsino’s love of love originates more from impetuousness than any genuine
feelings; for it also possesses that distinctive interchangeability of
metaphors identified by J.W. Lever. (Orsino opens with:
If music be the
food of love, play on,
Give me excess
of that, surfeiting,
The appetite
may sicken and so die.
That strain
again, it had a dying fall.
O, it came o’er
my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes
upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and
giving odour. Enough, no more,
‘Tis not so
sweet now as it was before. (1.1, ll. 1-8))
In these eight brief lines,
Orsino sets himself up as wishing for love, simply because too much of it will
cure his appetite for it. To treat love in such a frivolous manner – though he
lessens this by hypothetically replacing it with music – is to equate it
directly with the innumerable similes and metaphors that constitute the blazon
tradition. Orsino himself seems to sicken of his own simile, and does so right
after making it. That the sentence “Enough, no more” appears in the same line
as the extended metaphor that “sound” both steals and gives odour is a formal
poetic acknowledgement that the preceding simile has outlived its usefulness,
and so Orsino moves on. This particular failure, while it only affects Orsino
for the moment, marks the beginning of a trend toward understanding the nature
of love and how one goes about expressing it, but not without a few pitfalls
along the way.
The
most explicit example of Orsino’s failed love-language comes in the form of a
small speech he asks Viola to convey to Olivia.
Get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty:
Tell her, my love, more noble than the
world,
Prizes not quantity of dirty lands;
The parts that fortune hath bestow'd upon
her,
Tell her, I hold as giddily as fortune;
But 'tis that miracle and queen of gems
That nature pranks her in attracts my soul.
Again using the word “parts,”
Orsino locates himself briefly in the tradition of Petrarchan poets who use the
blazon, but its presence here indicates a sharp degree of irritation rather
than a hackneyed attempt to praise her. Olivia responds to this in her
self-itemizing speech that goes:
I will give out
divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried and every particle and
utensil labeled to my will, as, item,
two lips, indifferent red; item, two
grey eyes, with lids to them; item,
one neck, one chin, and so forth.
The insouciant dismissal of her
variously describable parts identifies her as both rebelliously outside the
Petrarchan mode, but also inevitably within it: for she categorizes herself to
a larger degree than any of her suitors. As both Biron and Orsino exist as
Shakespeare’s creative examples and arguments against the blazon, if Orsino is
to fulfill the evolutionary difference that separates him from Biron, his wife
will by necessity wholly reject itemization. His small speech for Olivia,
conveyed through Viola and given off-the-cuff, therefore possesses more honesty
and legitimacy than he could possibly know because it comes immediately after his moment of redemption. When
Viola tells him that the “woman” or man she fancies is of “his complexion,”
Orsino responds “She is not worth thee, then.” That simple acknowledgement,
that he, despite all his stature and pride, is not worth the love of a servant,
forms the seed of restoration that eventually lands him Viola’s arms.
In
much the same way, Sonnet 69 immediately rejects the systematized appraisal of
“parts” with its opening lines: “Those parts of thee that the world’s eye doth
view / Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend.” This opening creates
a poetic binary between the lover’s and the world’s perceptions. It makes the
claim that praising beauty, or the value of physical attributes, is inherently
superficial because everyone can do
it. The lover’s separation comes from an ability to “look into the beauty of
thy mind,” followed by the later renunciation of self based on the permanence
of the subject’s character, at least as far as true love is concerned. This
fulfills the humility that Sonnet 23 so scholastically espouses, but it also
encapsulates Shakespeare’s sentiments not only that the currently existing
poetic conventions are insincere, but also that he can do it better. Knowing this he crafts a scenario in Twelfth Night in which Orsino absolutely
cannot marry Olivia because she embodies the blazon tradition. Even in her
name, she possesses two “I’s” and so Viola, whose name is merely a
simplification of Olivia’s (subtracting one i) becomes Orsino’s bride and hope
for a future understanding of true love.
[1]
an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the
sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.
