vein by recognizing that the dark lady’s “might / Is
more than my o’er-pressed defence can bide” (ll. 7–8).
This recognition is posed as a question, however,
which undercuts its power.
The most diffi cult quatrain to believe is the last one,
because in it, the poet does what he has refused to do
earlier: “excuse” the Dark Lady. He does so by reinter-
preting the very looking that has been so hurtful to
him. Her glances remain his “enemies,” but if turned
elsewhere, he remarks, they will only injure others.
This concession is an act of self-deception. Apparently
the poet has failed to persuade the Dark Lady to alter
her behavior, and he faces a dilemma—either to ratio-
nalize her gaze as harmful to others or to ask that she
wound him with it, and undercut his earlier refusal.
Unhappily, the COUPLET ends as it must—with the
overmatched and no longer angry lover acknowledg-
ing his powerlessness before his beloved. Metaphori-
cally dead at heart, he asks to be killed by the very gaze
he has struggled to surmount. Despite his considerable
mastery of language, then, his cunning is no match for
his adversary’s dark and fl uid desirability.
See also SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW).
Larry T. Shillock
Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 140 (“Be w ise
as thou art cruel, do not press”) WILLIAM SHAKE-
SPEARE (1599) Tradition holds that Sonnet 140
takes up where Sonnet 139 leaves off, and there is
much to recommend this view. Both address the DARK
LADY imperatively, link the poet’s decline to her infi -
delity, and seek, through verbal stratagems, to control
her gaze. However, Sonnet 140 does more: It replaces
the powerlessness of a lover’s anger with voiced, if
unrealized, threats of retaliation.
The SONNET begins with the poet addressing the
Dark Lady. Readers quickly sense that they have blun-
dered into a quarrel, and it is now the lover’s turn to
speak. His reply takes his beloved’s cruelty to be
accomplished and, in a cruel retort, recommends that
she become equally wise. Ostensibly, the sonnet is to
educate her, yet it teaches through a reasoned threat.
Should the Dark Lady treat him disdainfully, the poet
says, and should his resulting pain become overwhelm-
ing, he will end his “tongue-tied patience” (l. 2) and
tell what she has done. Rhetorically speaking, the QUA-
TRAINs fi rst three lines list the causes that will compel
the lover’s response. The quatrain climaxes with a
promise to reveal “The manner of my pity-wanting
pain” (l. 4).
This threat borrows from the language of logic, but its
metaphors come from the domain of torture. Prisoners
who were accused of a felony but would not speak
underwent peine forte et dure. Pressed under heavy
weights, they offered a plea or “patiently” died silent.
Here, the Dark Lady is the torturer, and the poet’s silence
a kind of tortured “patience.” But matters between the
lovers are not that simple. He is speaking, not she. More-
over, the phrase “pity-wanting pain” means pain that
her behavior has caused, his desire to be pitied, and a
pitiful desire to feel pain. The poet’s patience is strained
and holds on only for impure reasons.
The second quatrain reasserts the poet’s teaching
role. However, the teacher now instructs the pupil to
lie. As a lover, she should say she loves him, an instruc-
tion that recalls Sonnet 138 and its lovers’ fl attering lies.
Like a physician, she should give her dying patient “No
news but health” (l. 8), an untrue diagnosis. To this
point, Sonnet 140 has likened the poet to a prisoner
undergoing torture, a lover who is being deceived, and
a dying—understandably impatient—patient. These
analogous cases share poor ends: The prisoner is likely
to remain imprisoned or die; the lover, to realize that
deception has occurred; and the patient, to see that
death is near.
The poet acknowledges his plight by returning to
the rhetoric of threats. The causal chain that will inform
the third quatrain starts with despair, shifts to the
insanity such despair causes, and concludes with the
poet—now out of control—telling all. Aptly, the key
words in this quatrain are mad, repeated three times,
and its variant, madness. Should I be made mad by you,
the poet reasons, “And in my madness might speak ill
of thee” (l. 10), it is likely in our “ill-wresting world” (l.
11) that I will be heard. Madness moves the poet
beyond powerless anger and, paradoxically, confers
linguistic authority, signaled by the alliterative phrase
“my madness might.” This ambiguous phrase could
signify that the power of madness could compel396 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 140