Continuing our discussion of the poem entitled The Earl of Southampton Prisoner, and Condemned, to Queen Elizabeth, written by Southampton in his Tower of London prison room during February-March 1601…
Inside Traitors Gate, where Southampton and Essex were brought by boat around midnight into the Tower of London, on the night of February 8, 1601
In the 74-line poem he begged the Queen for mercy, which was granted in the third week of March 1601; and as suggested in The Monument, the forty Shakespeare sonnets 27 to 66 were written in correspondence with the forty days and nights of that tense time.
Was Oxford sending copies of individual sonnets to Southampton? Because he was the highest-ranking earl of the realm, or for other reasons, was he able to have manuscript copies delivered to the younger earl in the Tower?
(In Sonnet 45 he writes of “those swift messengers returned from thee/ Who even now come back again assured of thy fair health, recounting it to me.” Southampton was ill in the Tower at that time, with painful swellings in his legs; and in his poem to the Queen he refers to “my legs’ strength decayed.”)
The Tower of London
It would seem that Southampton was influenced by these specific sonnets, given that he used key words (in one form or another) to be found in that same forty-sonnet sequence. Here is a partial list of such correspondences:
BLOOD
Sonnet 63: When hours have drained his blood
Southampton: Like a true blood-stone, keep their bleeding still
BURIED
Sonnet 31: Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Southampton: There I am buried quick…
CANCEL
Sonnet 30: And weep afresh love’s long-since cancelled woe
Southampton: To cancel old offenses…
CRIMES
Sonnet 58: Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime
Southampton: Swim above all my crimes…
DEAD
Sonnet 31: As interest of the dead…
Southampton: As one may, sith say the dead walk so
DIE
Sonnet 54: Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so…
Southampton: Cleaving to walls, which when they’re opened, die
FAULTS
Sonnet 35: All men make faults…
Southampton: Where faults weigh down the scale…
GRAVE
Sonnet 31: Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Southampton: (For this a prison differs from a grave.)
GRIEF
Sonnet 34: Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief
Southampton: My face which grief plowed…
GROANS
Sonnet 50: For that same groan doth put this in my mind
Southampton: Vouchsafe unto me, and be moved by my groans
ILL
Sonnet 34: And they are rich, and rich, and ransom all ill deeds
Southampton: Perseverance in ill is all the ill…
LIBERTY
Sonnet 58: Th’imprisond absence of your liberty
Southampton: But with new merits, I beg liberty
LOSS
Sonnet 34: Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss
Southampton: Than one that plays small game after great loss
OFFENSES
Sonnet 34: To him that bears the strong offense’s cross
Southampton: To cancel old offenses…
PARDON
Sonnet 58: Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime
Southampton: So they, when taken forth, unless a pardon
POWER
Sonnet 65: But sad mortality o’ersways their power
Southampton: Without such intermission they want power
PRISON
Sonnet 52: By new unfolding his imprisoned pride
Southampton: Prisons are living men’s tombs…
SORROW
Sonnet 34: Th’offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief
Southampton: Sorrow, such ruins, as where a flood hath been
STAIN
Sonnet 33: Suns of the world may stain, when heaven’s sun staineth
Southampton: In lawn, a stain/ Well taken forth may be made serve again
TEARS
Sonnet 34: Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds
Southampton: For my tears have already worn these stones
So much of our ability to understand the Sonnets and to feel their emotional weight depends upon the context in which they are viewed. Are they homosexual love poems within a bisexual love triangle? Or are they private, highly sensitive messages, in poetical form, written during a time of tremendous grief and danger?
The former view has no documentary record to support it, while the latter view (expressed on this blog site) has an underpinning of contemporary history supporting it at every twist and turn: the failed Essex rebellion of Feb 8, the trial on Feb 19, the execution of Essex on Feb 25, the trial of other conspirators on March 5, the execution of two men on March 13, the execution of two more men on March 18 and so on.
Now the Southampton Tower Poem places yet another historical and biographical fact in evidence.
Hank Whittemore's Shakespeare Blog 