Where There's a Will

Amber,

I'll pick up the challenge on the last two lines: "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used lives th' executor to be." I read them as Shakespeare setting up a simple reversal turning around the "unused/used" pair. If you fail to marry and have children, thus passing on your beauty, it dies with you. On the other hand, if you use your beauty appropriately -- propagation -- it continues ("lives") on.

You raise the question about "executor," which I think is exactly right. For me it really captures the merchant-class values of the sonnet and persistent imagery of money-lending and miserliness. In this sense, beauty here is capital, not to be wasted on the self, but invested in the future, and capital which if properly invested will distribute itself to one's descendants after death. I find this quantification of beauty a little distasteful. Having had Keats' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all/ Ye know on earth and all ye need to know" drummed into me at a relatively early age, the idea that beauty ain't truth but a sort of stock portfolio to be distributed to one's children so they can be more likely to pass on the "investment" seems more than a bit boorish.

And having had such a blasphemous thought -- is Shakespeare a boor? -- like someone made aware of a cheating spouse, I start to find evidence everywhere. Go back to Sonnet 2 for a second, where our poet scolds his target: "If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine/ Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'/ Proving his beauty by succession thine." And there it is again: Beauty passed on to one's children settles all outstanding accounts. No doubt fading beauty creates a kind of debt; do we owe the world a replenishing of its coffers of comeliness? In Sonnet 1, Shakespeare speaks of "the world's due."

Or take Twelfth Night, where Viola (as Cesario) tweaks Olivia, echoing much of what we've discussed in these first few sonnets:

VIOLA
Lady, you are the cruel'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
OLIVIA
O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two gray eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth" (1.5.239-249).

Again: Beauty as estate, to be divvied up amongst the progeny. When reading Twelfth Night, I have, to this point, felt that Olivia's arrogance is being mocked. In the context of the play, her regression from society to mourn her dead brother is over the top, and Viola's voice of sensibility reminds us that a woman should know "well what love women to men may owe," something Olivia seems to have forgotten. Viola also reflects here the role we see the poet of the sonnets take.

But in light of Sonnet 4, my appreciation of Olivia's response has shifted. It strikes me that our young man has had no voice in the sonnets, except that provided by his accuser (see quote from Sonnet 2 above). Olivia gives him a voice, and in doing so she seems to turn from mockee to mocker. What would she say if Viola's words were "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used, lives th' executor to be"? Maybe this:

"Send for a lawyer to draw up my will
My beauty will act as executor,
Distributing my fair in codicil:
Item, two lips, indifferent red..."

Now that's putting the "cute" in executor. I wonder what to make of the money images we've found so far. Spending and owing. Accounts and executors. Largess and niggardliness. Audit and bequest. Can Shakespeare really see beauty as so much filthy lucre?

-rrf