“Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it’s because I’m not a bitch. Maybe that’s why Miss Crawford's always plays ladies.”
- Bette Davis
“Fame is a bitch, man.”
- Brad Pitt
Ladies and gentlemen of the literary jury, for your delectation I give you Sonnet 127 from the talented god-damn son of a bitch, William Shakespeare:
127
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name:
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame,
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem,
At such who not born fair no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem,
Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
Had William Shakespeare lived long enough to see the 1990’s, he might have given sonnets 127-152 an epigraph from the N.W.A. song, ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’. A firm believer in the idiom ‘a rolling bitch gathers no moss’, Shakespeare shifts his focus away from his beloved ‘Young Man’ and turns his attention to bitching about a figure known to critics as ‘The Dark Lady’.
The basic message that Shakespeare is trying to communicate in this sonnet is that “back in the day, bitches were all pale and shit, but now they all be makin’ they-selfs up with all foundation and what not, there be a million pastey-shortiez all up in this bitch, so now it’s the darker honeys that be where it’s at…”
Wordsworth used to massively bitch about these ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets. In a private letter to his sister, Dorothy, he once wrote ‘shouldst any potential suitor speak to you in such a manner as Shakespeare addressed his Dark Lady, so helpst me God I would bitch-slap him all the way off beachey head.’
Attitudes and critical perceptions of Shakespeare’s work has changed greatly since the Romantics however. In her exhaustive analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Helen Vendler writes “all evidence seems to support the fact that The Dark Lady was a complete bitch, and was in fact having it right off with both the poet and The Young Man to whom Shakespeare’s first sonnet sequence is addressed.”
All literary incongruence aside, what we have here is an incredibly weak piece of writing. I don’t know if any of you have ever tried writing a sonnet before, but let me tell you… they can be an absolute bitch. First off you’ve got the whole iambic thing to think about, then the rhymes and how you’re going to spin an idea out for a whole 14 lines! Take this poem for example, you can see Shakespeare padding this bitch out with all manner of erroneous imagery in the hope of giving the illusion of a nice tightly thematic 14 lines.
Such out-of-place images as the lady’s mourner-black eyes are a classic example of Shakespeare’s flannel-rinsing approach to filling his sonnets. Unable to meditate in any depth upon the ephemeral nature of beauty and the superficiality of our bitchy preoccupation with appearances, Shakespeare decides to go back to his standard box of tricks and talk about eyes. Of course, we are to be grateful that in this sonnet he doesn’t rely on his standard trick of shoehorning the trochee ‘bee-yatch’ into his constantly eroding metre (see Sonnet 157, line 1: “Thou knows’t full well I am Shakespeare. Bee-yatch!”)
And why does he mention the lady’s black eyes, anyway? What is he trying to cover up? By constructing a beguiling image of their ‘raven-black’-ness, does he think he can distract us from the fact that his girlfriend clearly looks like she has been beaten up? Samuel Pepys, who used to live next door to Shakespeare, once wrote in his diary “I don’t know the guy, and I’m not trying to stir things up, but often at night it sounds like somebody is getting the business end of a bitch-slap in young Shakespeare’s house. I would go over and do something about it, but then who would be back here, writing about it in my journal?”
What cannot be denied however, is that Shakespeare’s sonnets are a mixed bag. The Shapiros of this world will generally attest to them being truly bitchin’, whereas others simply see the guy as being Marlowe’s bitch. Shakespeare himself once responded to a harsh review of his sonnets from a fellow dramatist by saying “truly I have caused ripples in the literary star-scape, but I am a man more bitched about than bitching!”
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Did you enjoy this commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnet 127? If so, I highly recommend Don Paterson’s recent response to the sonnets. If you’re in the mood for something with a sense of research, gravitas and having been proof-read by someone before going to print however, then I strongly suggest the RSC edition.
-Phil Brown
Poetry Editor
