218 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS
Romeo and Juliet’s first words
Romeo
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
Juliet
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this.
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
Romeo
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?
Juliet
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
Romeo
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:
They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
Juliet
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
Romeo
Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. [He kisses her.]Sonnet form in the plays
Few of Shakespeare’s sonnets
appeared in print until 1609, but
he had often used the sonnet form
before this date. Parts of his plays,
especially but not only in the early
part of his career, are written in
the form of a sonnet. An obvious
example is the Prologue to Romeo
and Juliet. Shakespeare also uses
sonnet form within the dialogue
of that play, most conspicuously in
the first lines that Romeo and Juliet
speak to each other (see box, below).
The first reference to the sonnets
comes in 1598, when Francis
Meres, in a book on contemporary
and other writers called Palladis
Tamia, or Wit’s Treasury, cryptically
mentions “Shakespeare’s sonnets
among his private friends,” implying
that he had written poems of love or
friendship that came to be known
about at least within a circle of
intimates. The following year,
versions of two sonnets—Nos. 138
and 144—made it into print without
his permission in a book called
The Passionate Pilgrim, which
also includes three extracts from
Love’s Labour’s Lost and other short
poems that may or may not be
by Shakespeare.
In 1609, a collection of 154
sonnets called Shakespeare’s
Sonnets appeared in print. The
154 sonnets are followed by a longer
poem, “A Lover’s Complaint” (p.224).It is not clear whether Shakespeare
himself intended the collection
to be published, and there are a
number of strange features about it.
The title page reads not, as might
have been expected, “Sonnets,
by William Shakespeare,” but
“Shakespeare’s Sonnets, never
before imprinted,” which seems to
imply both that someone else was
publishing them on his behalf and
that people had known of their
existence, and looked forward to
their publication, for some time.“Mr. W. H.”
Even stranger is the fact that the
book’s dedication does not appear
over the author’s name, as is the
case with the poems Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,
but over the initials “T. T.” of its
publisher, Thomas Thorpe. The
dedication, laid out in the manner
of a tombstone, is puzzling in other
ways, notably in that the dedicatee
is also identified only by his initials.
It reads: “To the onlie begetter of
these insuing sonnets Mr. W. H.
all happinesse and that eternity
promised by our ever-living poet
wisheth the well-wishing
adventurer in setting forth.”That thou are blamed shall
not be thy defect,
For slander’s mark was
ever yet the fair.
The ornament of beauty
is suspect
Sonnet 70So shalt thou feed on death,
that feeds on men,
And death once dead,
there’s no more dying then.
Sonnet 146