The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Seventy-One In which Pickleherring presents a lost sonnet by William Shakespeare

The door to the room where Mr Shakespeare wrote his sonnets would not close fast again. Its hinges had been rusted up with the salt water of tears.

I call those sonnets William Shakespeare's spiritual and sentimental autobiography. In them he opens his heart.

Mind you, some of the sonnets were very obscure in their original form.

What would happen is that he would write one and then he would try it out on me, have me read it, or better still have me read it aloud to him, and then I would say I liked this line or that line, and he would strike out the others. Or he would learn what he needed to know about the sonnet from my reading of it, the hearing of his words spoken by another voice, and he would strike lines out himself, or add them to other lines. Sometimes he would end up with a completely new sonnet made from the lines I had liked. At other times, he would end up with several sonnets clarifying an obscure one, sonnets written by taking lines out and making sense of them by finding them new homes where they belonged.

Mr Shakespeare used to say that in a true poem the words make a truth of themselves. But unfortunately I do not know what this means.

To give you some small notion of what he was up against - the degree of confusion in his mind and heart - I am going to include in this book a sonnet of William Shakespeare's never before published. This was a first draft of one of the early ones. While this sonnet does not appear among the 154 eventually published by Thomas Thorpe from the manuscripts provided for him by William Hervey, Rizley's stepfather, and sold as a sixpenny volume in 1609, it contains within itself the germs of more than a dozen which are to be found there, lines with which the reader may therefore be familiar.

Here, then, is

A LOST SONNET BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day

That thereby beauty's rose might never die?

Though heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay

My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes

With means more blessed than my barren rhyme,

To find where your true image pictur'd lies

I would not count the clock that tells the time.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,

And yet love knows it is a greater grief:

Look what thy memory cannot contain

Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief.

But thence I learn and find the lesson true,

And all in war with Time for love of you.