Title page of British Library copy of the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
The Meter of The Sonnets
The Sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, a verse with five feet, each foot made up of two syllables. In regular iambic pentameter, all the feet contain iambs, which have an unstressed first syllable and a stressed second syllable. A good poet, though, will use variations to keep iambic pentameter from sounding dull. (See the hysterical parody by John Davies (c. 1594) of fourteen lines of unvaried iambic pentameter in one- and two-syllable words (Gulling Sonnets, #5). There are four variations of stress used in The Sonnets: trochees (reversed stress), spondees (both syllables stressed), pyrrhics (both syllables unstressed), and feminine endings (an eleventh, unstressed syllable at the end of a line). [Note: Spondees usually have a slight difference in stress between the two syllables, sometimes more on the first, sometimes the second. There are other variations on the iamb, but I have not found any examples in The Sonnets.] When I cite text with these variations, I will put them in bold. These are my personal readings of the verse. Not everyone will agree with these readings since there are many ways to read verse, depending on how much emphasis you put on a syllable or how you read a given phrase. But I’ve found that it’s more important to discuss the effect of meter than to agree on some notion of the correct way to read it. If you disagree with a reading, you’re more likely to appreciate the effect of the meter on your experience of the sonnet than if you read the sonnet without any metrical analysis. In the discussion below, W. refers to the writer of the Sonnets and Y.M. to the young man to whom the first 126 are (mostly) addressed.
A note on pronunciation. Fausto Cercignani is the authority on the subject (see reading list). He gives evidence both from contemporary sources and from Shakespeare’s usage on how his words were likely to be pronounced. I agree with him that it is hard to believe that Shakespeare used “eye-rhymes,” that is, rhyming words that sounded different but looked similar in spelling (since most of his work was for the stage, and therefore aural). However, neither he nor other phonologists take account of the fact that contemporary writers considered it acceptable to change the accent of syllables and the vowel sounds of words when poetically expedient (see Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Art of Language, 294). We are then sometimes faced with a word that could be pronounced in a way that’s unusual to us in order to make a line scan regularly or a rhyme sound perfect, whereas if it’s pronounced with a modern pronunciation the line becomes irregular or the rhyme imperfect. The question in these circumstances is, which is intended? In my opinion, it’s often impossible to tell. If the irregular line reads as well as a regular one, it may be the intended pronunciation. If Shakespeare didn’t mind imperfect rhymes, perhaps that was intended. Did Shakespeare prefer more irregularity than his contemporaries? Was he more advanced in his use of assonance? Or was he just as conformist as the rest, changing the accentuation of words to fit the meter and vowel sounds to fit the rhyme? Like most other questions about Shakespeare, I believe the answer to this one is, “nobody knows.” This conveniently allows me to read Shakespeare however I please. I choose to read him comfortably, pronouncing words with a modern accent whenever reasonable, and altering accentuation when necessary. Whether right or wrong, I have found it easier to accept assonance in all instances than to guess which vowels to change and try to wrap my tongue around them.
Note on Reading the Text
I have tried to depart from the original text, as printed in the Huntington-Steevens copy of the Quarto of 1609, as little as possible. I have emended only where it seemed absolutely necessary, and modernized only where it seemed both helpful and not harmful to the original intent. I have been particularly conservative in regard to punctuation, often retaining commas that would be omitted in modern usage but that point the way to proper scansion. I have used the usual convention of the accented “e” (é) to indicate pronunciation of the final -ed of past tense verbs as a syllable where we would elide. Verbs endings elided in the Quarto are printed in this text with ’d (they are variously represented in the Quarto as ’d, -d, -de, or -t).
I have usually kept Shakespeare’s format for compound words, i.e., whether written as one word or two, or connected with a hyphen. For common words, where deviation from current forms seemed pointless, I have modernized. However, I have kept strictly to the original for words involving personal pronouns, e.g., thy self, my self, me thinks. Shakespeare almost always kept these words separate so that “my self” and “myself” or “me thinks” or “methinks” are homographs, and cannot be distinguished in the original except by context. Since this can, at times, affect meaning (cf. Sonnets 40 and 112) this conservatism is necessary to allow the reader freedom of interpretation. On the other hand, the form “an other” occurs several times and I have consistently printed this as “another” since it probably reflects nothing more than a peculiarity of Shakespeare’s handwriting.
I have consistently maintained the capitalization and italicization of the Quarto (other than the convention used by the compositor of capitalizing the second letter of each sonnet), seeing no reason to change them. It seems perfectly sensible to assume that they serve to emphasize words (italicization more so than capitalization) and this often has a perceptible effect on the scansion. They should not be taken to indicate meaning. For example, the modern use of capitalization to indicate personaliztion of an impersonal noun, such as “Time,” is clearly not consistently implied by Shakespeare’s usage.
For glosses of the text, see my book, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Among His Private Friends.
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