Sapienza Università di Roma

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116:

‘Let Me not to the Marriage of True Minds’

or

What does ‘True’ Love Mean?

2nd year student, English and Anglo-American Studies

English Literature III-M

Academic year 2018/2019

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Introduction

William Shakespeare, in my eyes, is the most celebrated person in the world and he scarcely
needs an introduction. He is an English playwright, actor, favorite dramatist of the Queen, inventor
of new words, master of drama, and, what is relevant for my essay, he is a poet. He wrote 36 plays
and 154 sonnets, leaving behind him evidences of his genius mind such as the sense of humor, deep
comprehension of human emotions. Works has still being studied by many academics. It seems as if
almost everything has already been said about his works, but what is known about his personal life?
Shakespeare has not left us confessions about it, but he has left us 154 sonnets. The sonnets are written
in the first person, tempting many readers to look there for autobiographical disclosures. William
Wordsworth, for instance, famously declared, ‘with this key [i.e. the sonnet] Shakespeare unlocked
his heart’. 1 Unfortunately, as Auden reports ‘there has been more nonsense written about
Shakespeare’s Sonnets than about any other piece of literature extant’.2 In general, they are rumors
about his personal experiences, which may have inspired his works.

For centuries critics all over the world have been trying ‘to unlock Shakespeare’s heart’, of
course, I am not a professional critic, nonetheless, I will try to make my little contribution. Reading
various academic papers on Shakespeare I liked Bradley’s theory of reading poems most of all. This
theory is based on:

a particular concept of language as a transparent and directly expressive medium. Reading, in this way, takes the reader
through the text to make contact with the mind of the author whose contents the text expresses. The concern of reading is
to follow the path indicated by the text as closely as possible and so to recreate in the reader’s mind the original process
of composition, as it occurred in the poet’s mind .3

Undoubtedly, it is not possible to know what Shakespeare experienced when writing his poems,
nonetheless, in my analysis I will try to read the sonnet 116 as closely as possible in order to
understand it better.

1
Phyllis Rackin, “The Lady’s Reeking Breath”, in Shakespeare and Women, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 95.
2
AUDEN, W.H., "SONNETS", IN KIRSCH (ED.), LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE, PRINCETON, PRINCETON UP, P. 86.
3
Hawkes, T., "Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches", in Wells S. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's
Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, p. 287.

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Sonnet 116

As I have already mentioned in the introduction, my essay is about the sonnet 116, which is
one of the most famous Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as one of my favorites. However, it was not
easy to choose only one sonnet among such a various corpus. I have chosen this one because it is a
beautiful love sonnet, with quite straightforward language and it uses fascinating imagery. What
concerns straightforward language, according to Ewbank ‘it is by the perfect handling of some of the
simplest words in the language that he makes his assertion of belief both in his subject and in his
poetry’4. At the same time Vendler defines this sonnet “impersonal” 5. To put it another way, there is
no direct addressee and the poem can be dedicated to the same extent to a man or to a woman.
Nevertheless, it is known that the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man, described as the
“Fair Youth” , and reveal a deep, living friendship.

Here below there is the version of the sonnet taken from the Vendler’s book The Art of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.6

4
Ewbank, I.-S., "Shakespeare's Poetry", in Muir and Shoenbaum (Eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare's Studies,
Cambridge, Cambridge UP, p. 106.
5
VENDLER, H. "FORMAL PLEASURE IN THE SONNETS", IN SHOENFELDT M. (ED.), A COMPANION TO SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS, OXFORD,
BLACKWELL, p.488.
6
VENDLER, H. "THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS", THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, 1997, p.487.

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At first reading it is possible to notice lots of negative words such as nor, no, never, not.7 For this
reason the sonnet cannot be simply identified with a love sonnet, it has a deeper meaning. In the next
section some of possible meanings are explained.

Analysis

The First Quatrain

The poet begins the sonnet with a negative wish and says ‘let me not admit any impediments’,
probably before writing this sonnet lots of people, including his beloved, have been telling him that
this love cannot last forever, that love changes and with time emotions alter. In modern words the
first lines can possibly be translated as follows ‘I hope I may never acknowledge any reason why
minds that truly love each other shouldn’t be joined together. Love isn’t really love if it changes when
it sees the beloved change or if it disappears when the beloved leaves.’8

The word ‘impediments’ means obstacles, or ‘anything making marriage

or ordination invalid or illicit.’ 9
Shakespeare here is speaking about marriage, and ‘admit
impediments’ echoes marriage ceremony of that period. It is worth noting that in the Elizabethan era
during a marriage ceremony a priest generally asked: ‘Do either of you know of any impediment that
would prevent you from getting married?’10

‘Marriage of true minds’ means a marriage of two people who are deeply connected. It is
interesting to notice that Shakespeare uses the word ‘minds’, and not, for instance, ‘hearts’ or
‘bodies’. It is well-known that Shakespeare chooses his words carefully. That is why in the sonnet
the marriage is seen on a higher level, since there is a mental and spiritual connection between the
two lovers. Here is used an epithet ‘true’, which means not only ‘truthful’ but also ‘faithful’ and
‘honest’11. That is why ‘true minds’ means that they are moral and also faithful.

Then the poet writes ‘love is not love’, by the negation ‘not’ he confuses the reader. The
speaker means love is not true love if it changes when it finds a change in another person, or that
when conditions change, love is supposed to be constant and eternal.

7
VENDLER, H. "THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS", THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, 1997, p.488.
8
SPARKNOTES EDITOR, Spark Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/sonnets/sonnet_116/ , (accessed December 20, 2018).
9
COLLINS DICTIONARY, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/it/dizionario/inglese/impediment , (accessed January 10, 2019).
10
BALCARCEL REBECCA, ONLINE VIDEO CLIP, SIXMINUTESCHOLAR, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 116,YOUTUBE,
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=XGNOEEQGCYS, (accessed December 20, 2018).
11
William Shakespeare: Language, Vocabulary and Dictionary, http://www.william-shakespeare.info/william-
shakespeare-dictionary-t.htm, (accessed January 3, 2019).

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 The next line says ‘Or bends with the remover to remove’. Here the word ‘bending’ is used to
create a contrast, because ‘bending’ is not a positive word. ‘The remover’ may stand for a metaphor
of time, which removes the bloom of youth physically, and time also changes things. Another
meaning of ‘bend’ could be to be bent to someone’s will. ‘Remove’ at poet’s time meant to move to
a different place, here it means that true love does not move due to circumstances, it remains even if
it is not convenient for the lover. It makes ‘remover’ someone who moves away, in the poem the
‘remover’ is unfaithful lover.12

I would like to point out that ‘minds’ rhymes perfectly with ‘finds’, but ‘love’ does not exactly
rhyme with ‘remove’, the reason for this is perhaps that in the Elizabethan Age they might have
sounded similarly. Anyway, they look like the rhyme on the page, it is a sight rhyme. 13

The Second Quatrain

Let’s go forward with the second quatrain. Here the love poem deals with the sea theme, more
precisely with the fact that ‘true’ love withstands even horrible sea storms, it ‘looks on tempest and
is never shaken’. It is like a lighthouse, which is supposed to be very strong, and stands up against all
kinds of weather, provides guidance in the midst of storms or fog.

Moreover, the speaker tells what love is through a memorable metaphor ‘it is the star to every
wand’ring bark’, which means that love is a guiding star to lost ships and it is not susceptible to
storms. The word ‘star’ is important as long as the stars are fixed in the sky, compared to the planets
that seem to be moving against the backdrop of the fixed stars. The star is staying in one place, and
love is like that.

What concerns ‘every wand’ring bark’, ‘bark’ stands for a boat, and the boat could be
wandering, and it reminds of the word used in the previous quatrain, ‘bending’. Both words have
negative connotations, they are standing for what ideal love is not supposed to be. The poet prefers
‘straight’ and ‘true’ love that will guide this wandering boat. That is to say that love is like a star,
which a wandering boat can fix upon (the North Star), by which it is possible to navigate.14

In ‘whose worth’s unknown’, ‘whose’ also refers to the star. The phrase means that its worth
cannot be measured or quantified, and it also alludes to love. It is impossible to measure the value of

12
BALCARCEL REBECCA, ONLINE VIDEO CLIP, SIXMINUTESCHOLAR, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 116,YOUTUBE,
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=XGNOEEQGCYS, (accessed December 20, 2018).
13
Online Dictionary, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sight-rhyme, (accessed December 23, 2018).
14
BALCARCEL REBECCA, ONLINE VIDEO CLIP, SIXMINUTESCHOLAR, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 116,YOUTUBE,
HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=XGNOEEQGCYS, (accessed December 29, 2018).

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love. ‘Height betaken’ refers to calculating the altitude of a star, and then again navigating from that
location.

Third Quatrain

I would like to go on with the third quatrain. Here Shakespeare is saying again what love is
not supposed to be, namely ‘Love is not time’s fool’. A ‘fool’ refers to a jester, it means that love
does not trail around after time, making jokes the way a jester does. In Shakespeare’s time the jester
would go around behind the king making jokes, mimicking the king, making people laugh.
Nevertheless, love is not time’s fool, love is not playing that role in relationship to time.

In ‘though rosy lips and cheeks/ within his bending sickle’s compass come’, it is worth
noticing that Shakespeare uses here an alliteration 'compass come’. The main point of this line is that
‘rosy lips and rosy cheeks’ with time will pass and fade, and referring to them as ‘rose’ make them
even more temporal, because a rose is a plant that has a season of blooming and then dies.15 ‘Sickle’
stands for a curved blade used for cutting things down.16 The usual image we have is that Death is
using a sickle to cut down your life. So, time has a bending sickle, time that is so important to the
young man.17 The word ‘bend’ is used again and it echoes the previous ‘bending’. ‘Compass’ means
within the reach of that sickle, in the area where sickle is working, love does not come within that,
but rosy cheeks do. Certain things will pass away. Physical beauty is one of them, but love is not
affected. Only the Day of Judgment (invoked from the sacramental liturgy of marriage) is the proper
measure of love’s time.18

‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks’ – love does not change . ‘His’ might be
referring to time, which is eternal. ‘But bears it out even to the edge of doom’ – ‘to bear it out’ means
to stick it out or to endure, so we bear out problems ‘till they get resolved. Here love bears it out,
endures all the away to the age of doom, ‘Doom’ typically would mean doomsday, doomsday can be
an apocalyptic kind of day, like an end of time’s judgement day, or it can be the personal doomsday,
so love endures until the edge of death. Also in the marriage ceremony, we have the line, ‘until death
do you part’.

15
BALCARCEL REBECCA, OP.CIT., (accessed December 30, 2018).
16
COLLINS DICTIONARY, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/it/dizionario/inglese/sickle , (accessed January 10, 2019).
17
VENDLER, H. "THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS", THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, 1997, p.490.
18
VENDLER, H. OP.CIT., p.490.

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 The Couplet

Jan Kott in his introduction to Jerzy Sito’s edition of the Sonnets makes a telling comment on
the couplet: ‘The closing couplet of each sonnet is addressed directly to the protagonist [by himself].
It is almost spoken. It is an actor’s line.’19 That is why reading this poem the reader should bare in
mind that Shakespeare is ‘master in dramatic speech’. I agree with Vendler’s statement that most
Shakespearean poems may have been misunderstood. She thinks that most of them are dramatic, and
Sonnet 116 is not an exception, because this poem is probably ‘a reply to antagonist’s implicitly
quoted words’. 20 It is worthy to notice that Shakespeare uses a deictic word ‘me’ only at the
beginning and he uses ‘me’ and ‘I’ in the couplet. Hawkes states that ‘deixis is a highly important
semiotic device of drama.’21

To my mind, this couplet is clearly dramatic, it can be performed on stage by an actor who is
speaking to another character strongly expressing his point of view:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.22

It is curious to notice that the word ‘error’ is a legal word in Shakespeare’s time, it means ‘a
mistake in judgment or procedure of a court of record, usually prejudicial to one of the parties’23 .
‘Upon me proved’ is another legal term. These words together with ‘admit impediments’ show that
this sonnet should be taken seriously, almost as if it is a legal proceedings. Balcarcel notices the usual
phrase that includes both the word ‘writ’ and ‘error’ is ‘writ of error’. Generally speaking, if you
found out that some technicality was not observed in a courtroom, then you could file a writ of error.
The ‘writ of error’ will cause an entire trial to be done over again, so it is an important document.24
Probably, Shakespeare evokes that association, and at the same time says what he wants to say: ‘if
what I have previously said is wrong, well I have never wrote anything’. I think that Shakespeare
here uses irony, because of course he wrote this poem and lots of other works. Booth says ‘more than
a writer in any other genre, a sonneteer depends for his effects on the conjunction or conflict of what

19
Vendler, H. "Formal Pleasure in the Sonnets", in Shoenfeldt M. (Ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford,
Blackwell, p. 36.
20
Vendler, H. OP.CIT., p.30.
21
Hawkes, T., "Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches", in Wells S. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's
Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, p. 294.
22
VENDLER, H. "THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS", THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, 1997, p.487.
23
COLLINS DICTIONARY, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/error, (accessed January 10, 2019).
24
BALCARCEL REBECCA, OP.CIT., (accessed December 30, 2018).

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he says with what the reader expects.’25 To my mind here Shakespeare is playing with the reader,
because of course he has written other poems.

Conclusions

In this paper I have expressed my personal point of view on one of the most famous
Shakespeare’s sonnets. But, of course as Ewbank says ‘it is impossible in a single essay to deal fully
with even a single aspect of Shakespeare’s poetry’.26 To my mind, the Shakespeare’s heritage could
be discussed for an infinite period of time, because as Well states ‘Shakespeare remain (more or less)
constant, but those who read and see them are always changing’. People do not live in a vacuum, the
world and people’s points of view are always changing. That is why so many books, papers and
journals has been written about the Bard’s works, and who knows how many other works will be
written in the future.

To conclude my short essay I would like to cite one of the most famous Shakespearean’s critic
T.S Eliot:

‘Shakespeare criticism will always change as the world changes.’27

References

- AUDEN, W.H., "SONNETS", IN KIRSCH (ED.), LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE, PRINCETON,

PRINCETON UP.

- BALCARCEL REBECCA, ONLINE VIDEO CLIP, SIXMINUTESCHOLAR, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET 116,

HTTPS://WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/WATCH?V=XGNOEEQGCYS, (accessed December 20, 2018).

- Booth, S., "The Value of the Sonnets", 
 in Shoenfeldt M. (Ed.), A Companion to

Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford, Blackwell.

- COLLINS DICTIONARY, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/error, (accessed

January 10, 2019).

25
Booth, S., "The Value of the Sonnets", 
in Shoenfeldt M. (Ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford,
Blackwell, p. 20.
26
Ewbank, I.-S., "Shakespeare's Poetry", in Muir and Shoenbaum (Eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare's Studies,
Cambridge, Cambridge UP, p. 99.
27
Wells, S., "Shakespeare Criticism Since Bradley", in Muir and Shoenbaum (Eds.), A New Companion to Shakespeare's
Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, p. 260.

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- Ewbank, I.-S., "Shakespeare's Poetry", in Muir and Shoenbaum (Eds.), A New Companion to
Shakespeare's Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP.

- Hawkes, T., "Shakespeare and New Critical Approaches", in Wells S. (Ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Shakespeare's Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP.

- Online Dictionary, https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sight-rhyme, (accessed December 23,

2018).

- Phyllis Rackin, “The Lady’s Reeking Breath”, in Shakespeare and Women, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2005.

- SPARKNOTES EDITOR, Spark Note on Shakespeare’s Sonnets,

https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/sonnets/sonnet_116/ , (accessed December
20, 2018).

- VENDLER, H. "THE ART OF SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS", THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD

UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE.

- Vendler, H. "Formal Pleasure in the Sonnets", in Shoenfeldt M. (Ed.), A Companion to

Shakespeare's Sonnets, Oxford, Blackwell.

- William Shakespeare: Language, Vocabulary and Dictionary, http://www.william-

shakespeare.info/william-shakespeare-dictionary-t.htm, (accessed January 3, 2019).

- Wells, S., "Shakespeare Criticism Since Bradley", in Muir and Shoenbaum (Eds.), A New
Companion to Shakespeare's Studies, Cambridge, Cambridge UP.