The Sonnets of Shakespeare: Sonnet 107. “The mortall Moone hath her eclipse indur'de”

107

Not mine owne feares, nor the prophetick soule,

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love controule,

Supposde as forfeit to a confin'd doome.

The mortall Moone hath her eclipse indur'de,

And the sad Augurs mock their owne presage,

Incertenties now crowne them-selues assur'de,

And peace proclaimes Olives of endlesse age,

Now with the drops of this most balmie time,

My love lookes fresh, and death to me subscribes,

Since spight of him Ile live in this poore rime,

While he insults ore dull and speachlesse tribes.

And thou in this shalt finde thy monument,

When tyrants crests and tombs of brasse are spent.

This sonnet has been the source of so much controversy over the centuries that we will have to address it topic by topic. Today, the identity of the “mortall Moone” and the nature of the eclipse. The following are extended samples from the commentary cited in Rollins, Alden and Rendell. The dates in Rollins commentary refers to each commentator's conjectured date the sonnet was composed.

Rollins] 1579. B. E. Lawrence (Notes, 1925, p. 339), a Baconian: The reference is ... to the power of Turkey. The Turkish emblem was the crescent moon, and . . . the Turks had endured an eclipse at the battle of Lepanto [October, 1571], and eight years afterwards arranged a treaty of commerce with England.

1594. Keller (Sh.s Werke, 1916, XV, 117): [107 does not refer] to the death of Elizabeth—for this Diana “survived” the eclipse—but to some danger that she fortunately escaped. Perhaps the allusion is to the plot of the Jew Lopez in 1594, through the discovery of which Southampton’s party rose in the queen’s favor.

1595. O. F. Emerson (S. P., 1923, XX, 132 f.) thinks that 107 was written soon after a total eclipse of the moon over London on April 14, 1595.

Harrison (T. L. S., November 29, 1928, p. 938): Queen Elizabeth ... on September 6, 1595, . . . entered upon her sixty-third year, her Grand Climacteric, which according to the astrologers was the most critical year in the human life, for then the mystic numbers seven and nine were united. The Queen’s climacteric actually caused genuine anxiety, especially in the early months of 1596. . . .

Again in T. L. S. (January 25, 1934, p. 60) Chambers notes that the Camden letter of March 15, quoted by Harrison, “cannot possibly have been written in 1596,” and probably describes the queen’s last illness of 1603.

As an illustration of how proof is obtained, both Fort and Percy Allen (the same, March 8, p. 162) quote Antony and Cleopatra, III.xiii.153, “Alack, our terrene moon Is now eclips’d,” the former in support of the date 1596, the latter of 1603.

Alden] [This sonnet is of chief interest because of the suggestion it gives of allusion to external events, which has led to widely divergent conjectures respecting the date of composition. It seems to have been one "J. G. R.," a correspondent of N. & Q., (2d s., 7: 125; Feb. 12, 1859), who unwittingly opened the long discussion. He interprets the sonnet as referring to Southampton's imprisonment, the death of Queen Elizabeth, and the accession of James, — the theory which still seems to claim the majority of adherents. Massey develops this at length:] Sh. thus addresses Southampton upon his release from the Tower, at the time of the Queen's death in 1603. (p. 203.) In his Essays Bacon tells us, "It was generally believed that after the death of Elizabeth England should come to utter confusion." (Works, 1856, i, 291.)

Froud says... Chamberlain, writing to Dudley Carleton, April, 1603, says, "The 10^th of this month the Earl of Southampton was delivered out of the Tower by warrant from the King," sent by Lord Kinloss — "These bountiful beginnings raise all men's spirits, and put them in great hopes." (p. 334.)

Lee: [This sonnet] makes references that cannot be mistaken to three events that took place in 1603 — to Queen Elizabeth's death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex. ... It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which Elizabeth's crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable consequence of Elizabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia (i.e., the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. "Fair Cynthia's dead" sang one. "Luna's extinct," . . . wrote Henry Petowe, in his "A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of Dead Eliza," 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One poet asserted that death "veiled her glory in a cloud of night." Another argued: "Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in darkest night." A third varied the formula thus: .

When winter had cast off her weed

Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair.

(These quotations are from Sorrowes Joy, a collection of elegies on Queen Elizabeth by Cambridge writers (Cambridge, 1603), and from Chettle's England's Mourning Garment (London, 1603).) At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance "not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone" but to all Europe.

Was Shakespeare Gay? What do the sonnets really say?

Rendel] Thus absolutely introduced, ‘the mortal moon’ must designate a person; and, as Tucker says with perfect justice, ‘the one practically certain reference is to Queen Elizabeth.’ Since Raleigh’s Poem, so often and so much admired by Spenser, Cynthia had become the poetic appellation for the Virgin Queen, and is so used by Lyly and Ben Jonson in their Masques, by Davidson, by Barnes and others in their Odes and Sonnets. ‘ Eclipse ’ for death is an accepted Elizabethan use, employed by Shakespeare himself (i Henry FI, iv, 5, 53); and certainly in

Alack! our terrene moon is now eclipsed

Ant. Cleop. III. 13. 153,

there is no note of temporary or merely passing obscuration, even if on occasion the word assumes a secondary value in suggesting a no less radiant life in store. ‘The sad Augurs’ (l. 6) are the prophets of evil, who had predicted confusion and disaster as the inevitable sequel of the Queen’s death, whose gloomy presages had been so signally belied by the event. To Elizabeth’s last breath the ‘incertainties’ which beset the succession to the throne had disquieted men’s hearts in vain, until all conflicts were composed in the ‘ assured ’ union of the Crowns of England and Scotland in the person of King James.

Those who know my work on the sonnets — in my Edward de Vere was Shakespeare and Was Shakespeare Gay? — know that I maintain that the evidence shows that the Monument of sonnets that  Shakespeare built was not for Henry Wriothesley the Earl of Southampton, but for Queen Elizabeth I. That being the case, I am doubly confident that the moon referred to here was Queen Elizabeth and its eclipse was her death.

Alden, Raymond MacDonald. The Sonnets of Shakespeare from the Quarto of 1609 (1916). 244-6.

Rendall, Gerald, H. Personal Clues in Shakespeare Poems and Sonnets (No date). -6.

Rollins, Hyder. Edward. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: the Sonnets (1944). I.263-5.

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