poem
The poem was discovered by researcher Leah Veronese. University of Oxford
While conducting research in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, a scholar discovered something remarkable: a handwritten copy of a sonnet by William Shakespeare dating back nearly 400 years.
The poem was found in a 17th-century “miscellany,” a manuscript featuring texts by various authors, according to a statement from the university. The collection had belonged to Elias Ashmole, a politician and collector.
Ashmole also tried his hand at poetry, and the miscellany even contains a few of his pieces. But the collection’s most intriguing text is an altered copy of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116,” a famous ode to unceasing love.
ashmole
Elias Ashmole, a 17th-century politician and collector John Riley / Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
“As I was leafing through the manuscript, the poem struck me as an odd version of ‘Sonnet 116,’” says Leah Veronese, the literary scholar who made the discovery, in the statement. The miscellany’s catalog describes the poem as “on constancy in love,” but it doesn’t mention the Bard, who died in 1616—about a year before Ashmole’s birth. This omission, as well as the fact that this version of the sonnet has a different beginning than the original, may explain how a copy of a Shakespeare poem remained undiscovered for centuries, according to Veronese.
“Sonnet 116” describes love as “an ever-fixèd mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” It’s especially popular at weddings due to its theme of unbreakable devotion and its use of the term “marriage” (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”), as Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute at England’s University Of Birmingham, tells the New York Times’ Amelia Nierenberg. But the miscellany’s copy of “Sonnet 116” may have been used for less romantic purposes.
This version of “Sonnet 116” had been transformed into a song set to music by the Baroque composer Henry Lawes. It also features several additional lines, as well as a modified beginning and ending. When examined in the context of the time, these alterations change the sonnet’s meaning: “Shakespeare’s text is transformed from praise of romantic constancy to political constancy,” writes Veronese in a recent article published in the Review of English Studies.
Between 1642 and 1651, Britain was enveloped in the English Civil Wars, a conflict between supporters of Charles I and Parliament. Ashmole, who supported the monarchy, was a known royalist. Considering that the miscellany belonged to a royalist and contains other royalist poetry, researchers think the sonnet had been “politically repurposed” to fit a similar agenda.
Leah Veronese
Leah Veronese and the manuscript University College, University of Oxford
Shakespeare’s original poem begins:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Meanwhile, the modified version reads:
Self blinding error seize all those minds
Who with false appellations call that love
Which alters when it alterations finds
As James Shapiro, a Shakespearean scholar at Columbia University, tells the Times, “Shakespeare has always been political. … People repurposed it in their own day—as in ours—for different political ends.”
Veronese writes that the newly discovered copy of “Sonnet 116” will shed light on “Royalist counterculture” and provide new insights into how the Bard’s poetry was circulated and received during the mid-17th century. The poem was published in Shakespeare’s 1609 quarto of 154 sonnets, which wasn’t widely popular in its day. As Dobson tells the Times, “The printed copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets was probably Shakespeare’s biggest flop.”
“Sonnet 116” isn’t thought to have been widely circulated or quoted, as Emma Smith, a Shakespearean scholar at Oxford, says in the statement. However, the newly discovered manuscript copy provides evidence that readers may have engaged with it in intriguing new ways.
Smith adds, “What Dr. Veronese shows in her investigation of this new version is that the sonnet [was] understood in the context of royalist politics—a long way from its role in modern weddings!