18. The maze of time

 

            “In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?”

                                    *   *   *

            “Yet that which most my troubled sense doth move

            Is to leave all, and take the thread of love.”

                                                            lines 1 & 13—14,

# 77, from the Crown of Sonnets, Urania

                                                            Mary Wroth (1621)

For a moment, let's take the image of time as a labyrinth seriously. Is it possible that Shakespeare designed the Sonnets like a maze? In his time, both village-green, turf "labyrinths" and private estate, hedge "labyrinths" were popular.  But Robert Field differentiates labyrinths from mazes:

... the word 'labyrinth' should only be applied to two designs ...the 'Classical Labyrinth' and the 'Medieval Christian Labyrinth'.... A labyrinth ... [has] only one pathway to the middle and ... no choices are offered. Such designs are called ... 'unicursive'.... The word 'maze' is used where at various points you are given a choice of pathways. In such designs, it is possible to get lost.... Such designs are called ... 'multicursive.' (3)

            So the Minotaur of Crete was kept in a maze, not a labyrinth. What does it feel like inside the Sonnets? Well, there is one path to follow. That path has straight parts as in the first seventeen sonnets, but at Sonnet 18, the reader takes a turn. Sonnets 18 and 19 are a pair. Then we take another turn: Sonnets 20 and 21 form a pair, and so on. Many have tried to read the Sonnets in a linear way, as a "unicursive labyrinth." The other way to read them is to notice all the choices Shakespeare builds for exploration of themes.  When you read the Sonnets thematically or look at separated sonnets as pairs, the overall design feels more like a "multicursive maze" in a tall hedge, where you can make wrong turns and where you can't see the center.

            Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of Shakespeare’s favorite poets, used the maze as “an image of the lover’s confusion” (Schmidgall 91). Wyatt writes of his “long error in a blind maze chained” (Qtd in Schmidgall 91). In a ballade, Wyatt exclaims, “Alas, I tread an endless maze” (91). Wyatt and other Renaissance writers also used the maze as an image for the court (175). In Sonnet #58, Shakespeare calls himself his patron’s love “slave,” and like an angry suitor, he shows, in lines 13 and 14, his frustration at being stuck waiting for the young lord to get around to seeing him:

                        “I am to wait, though waiting be so hell,

                        Not to blame your pleasure be it ill or well.”

Gary Schmidgall quite rightly points out that in the poet/patron relationship, there can never be “equality.”  He points out that

                        Time weighs heavily in the Young Man sonnets. It is no

coincidence that the word time occurs about seventy times in them

and not once in the Dark Lady sonnets. (Schmidgall 174)

So, being stuck in the maze of the sonnets is supposed to feel frustrating. The music is complex, like sweet melody and dissonant counterpoint. But every musical composition or maze has a design. If only the reader could get a bird's eye view, the overall design might be seen. If only I were smarter or could fly higher like Shakespeare’s lark! But I cannot see all of his design. I enter 126 solar sonnets first, and then I enter 28 lunar sonnets. I feel the earlier introduction of the dark lady’s affair with the youth as an inserted triangle, Sonnets 34—61, an aside I can get lost in. I had heard early rumors of the youth’s lack of good faith.

I feel Shakespeare’s despair twice (at the same time): once in Sonnet #40 for betrayal by the youth and again in Sonnet #133 for betrayal by the lady. In Sonnet #40, Will cries, “Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all” (line 1), and in Sonnet #133, he cries, “Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken,/ A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed” (lines 7 & 8). So he doesn’t feel twice the pain. He feels three times three or nine times the pain. And he doesn’t feel double-crossed; he feels triple-crossed, forsaken even by himself. Each of the three relationships—to the youth, the lady, and himself—is multiplied by three. We experience a complex, kaleidoscopic vision when we take on his point of view. A triangle of internal mirrors bounces each image nine ways. This may make clear seeing in the maze impossible or very difficult.

In the first solar series, Shakespeare finally gets free of the youth’s betrayal and into clear air again. In the dark lady series, he does not. The end of the sequence is not an exit from the maze.  As we finish Sonnet # 154, we feel incomplete. Time bends back from the end of the lunar month to just before the middle of the solar summer. Time really runs on from Sonnet 154 back to #62 and then on until Sonnet 126. So the end of time happens before the end of the sequence. Time is a huge serpent with a loop and a double back and a tail.

I feel the Rival Poet series as another inserted triangle. I get lost at first because there is more than one rival. But the series finally narrows down to one main, more dangerous rival. And the series ends in the past tense as if the rival were dead and only his last written work was the ghost of a threat in a dark hallway. I am trying to “envision” Shakespeare’s design. Do the two triangles of the youth and the lady intersect in the maze like a Solomon’s Seal? Or do the two triangles of lady and rival share one straight line from Will to Henry and form a diamond out to the two points? The geometry of this maze includes straight lines, turns, pairs, opposites, parallel corridors, three interior triangles, an end that is not an exit, and an exit that is not an end. I am still trying to develop more ideas about the internal parts of this maze. But typical of any maze, the design does not reveal itself while you are strolling or lost inside it. Only a bird’s eye view would help us draw a chart.  (For my attempted bird’s eye view and map, see Figure 2.)

 

The problem of trying to represent the Sonnets with a garden maze is that this maze of time is also taking place in the sky. This sequence is a sophisticated maze of time. It is a 126-day summer with 28 nights represented in tandem with 28 days in May and June. We can read the sequence in a linear fashion; that lets us read about the solar youth and then read about the lunar lady, but that is also very confusing. And that is part of the confusion built in and generated by any maze. If we don’t coordinate days with nights, we get lost. If we don’t keep track of time, we get lost. If we make wrong turns, we get lost.

I believe that the only real Ariadne’s thread Shakespeare provides is the thread of time we can follow under the sun and the moon. Let's look up and fit the smaller Lunar cycle inside the large Solar series. Let’s pretend we can see the Moon and the Sun racing across the days and nights for 28 days. The lady's lunar cycle may be named with a silly rhyme: "June Moon." I believe we can match all of the 28 sonnets about her or under her influence with the phases of the Moon. In this astronomy, Henry is the Sun, Aemilia is the Moon, and Will is the Earth (or later, the Globe). If we do not look up at the sky to follow the Sun/days and Moon/nights, we will get seriously lost, and then “Devouring Time,” like that fabled monster, the Minotaur, will eat us, like the annual sacrificial boy and girl virgins from Athens, alive.

As in any encoded document, the names, the words, the letters, the dates, and the numbers all have to work together and be decoded together for us to get the full meaning of the message. Perhaps it is the code that provides the thread of Ariadne that keeps us oriented inside the maze. It is so easy to get lost in the Sonnets! Perhaps it is the code—in all its forms and even incomplete as my findings are—that gives us the string of clues to keep us on track. As readers we walk, picking up on puns as echoes, bits of logic, hints of autobiographical meaning, snippets of word music, and cycles of numbers.

For example, we know that the first sonnet about music is numbered 8 because the scale is an octave. In it, we hear the tonic chord based on the 1^st, 3^rd, and 5^th pitches as a sound “picture” of a happy husband, wife, and child. Later, we find a connection and clue in the only other sonnet about music #128. It, too, has an 8 in its number, and the dark lady is playing the virginal. 128 = 12 + 8, and twelve is a time number, half a day. This may refer to the night, and 128 = 100 + 28. Twenty-eight is a Moon number. As one of my students, who is a music major reminded me, there are also twelve keys in every octave. By such clues, we find our way in this maze and wonder where we are. Sometimes I feel a bit like the clown or the butler following Ariel’s music.

Overhead, there are the Sun and the Moon. It helps we can look up and see them in the sky over the maze. The solar and lunar cycles seem to interlock something like Table 9 in our Gregorian calendar (below). Here is a list of solar sonnets in blue, June dates in red, other dates in blue, and lunar sonnets in red to fit with days and nights and the phases of the Moon:

 

Table 9: Solar and Lunar Sonnets: Our Gregorian Calendar

SOLAR          Sonnet #      LUNAR         Sonnet # Subject              Phase

MONTHS     Sun                MONTH       Moon                                     of

                        Cycle             & DATES      Cycle                                     MOON          

MAY              Son. 1            May 1                        Sun Begins Summer

 

JUNE             Son. 34         June 3           Son. 127  Dark Lady          Dark/New

JUNE             Son. 35         June 4           Son. 128  Virginal               Waxing Cres.

JUNE             Son. 40         June 9           Son. 133  Triangle              Quarter

JUNE             Son. 48         June 17        Son. 141  Heart as fool       FULL

SOLSTICE   Son. 52         June 21        Son. 145  And Hate-away Waning Gib.

JUNE             Son. 58         June 27        Son. 151  Name spelled     Waning Cres.

JUNE             Son. 61         June 30        Son. 154  Cupid's Brand    Thin Bow/ 

      Old Moon

JULY             Son. 63         July 2            Sun is 1/2 way to 126

AUGUST      Son. 93         Aug. 1            Eve's apple grows

AUGUST      Son. 116       Aug. 24         North Star

SEPT.            Son. 126       Sept. 3          Sun Ends Summer

 

(Later, we will have to worry about conversion to Shakespeare’s Julian calendar that adjusts Sonnet 1 to April 24^th and Summer Solstice Sonnets 52 and 145 to June 14^th and Sonnet 126 to August 27^th. I have also designed a maze diagram that fits this Table. See Figure 3, next page.)

 

            Shakespeare is not the only poet of his time to set up a calendar in his sonnets. Kenneth J. Larsen discovered a calendar in Spencer’s Amoretti.

                        The eighty-nine sonnets of the Amoretti, as numbered in the 1595

octavo edition, were written to correspond with consecutive dates,

beginning on Wednesday 23 January 1594 and running, with one

interval, through to Friday 17 May 1594: they correspond with the

daily and sequential order of scriptural readings that are

prescribed for those dates by the liturgical calendar of the Church of

England. (Qtd in Weatherby 127)

Larsen’s thesis is based on “Dunlap’s remarkable discovery  (in 1969—70) … Dunlap claimed liturgical status only for sonnets 22 through 68, which appear to correspond to the days of Lent in 1594” (127). A brief summation of Dunlap’s claims would look like this:

 

                                    Table 10. Calendar Days and Spencer’s Sonnets

                        Sonnet 22                “penitential”                     Ash Wednesday

                        Sonnet 62                March 25, 1594                 New Year’s Day,

Feast of the Annunciation

                        Sonnet 68                “celebratory”                    Easter

           

                                                                        (Data from Dunlap, Qtd in Weatherby)

 

So, in 1595, Shakespeare may have been inspired by the Christian poet Spencer

to design his sonnet sequence with a different kind of built-in, secular calendar.