 | Kinky Shakespeare |
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Cuckolded: Sonnet 57
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.
Pussy Whipped: Sonnet 58
That god forbid that made me first your slave,
I should in thought control your times of pleasure,
Or at your hand the account of hours to crave,
Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O, let me suffer, being at your beck,
The imprison’d absence of your liberty;
And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check,
Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will; to you it doth belong
Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell;
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.
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Ah … the romance of Shakespearean sonnets.
(and what’s up with that earring?)
Love, Angela
I couldn’t have said it better myself, Mistress!
Or maybe you did, “AvonBard.” How’s this, guys, for the small, jealous pangs late at night of thinking of Angela on the phone with someone else?
Sonnet 61
Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no. Thy love, though much, is not so great.
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat
To play the watchman ever for thy sake.
For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.
The above sonnets were all supposedly written to a “Fair Youth”. Proof, some say, that Shakespeare was homosexual. I guess it doesn’t matter in the scheme of things, but this has always made me leery about sending Shakespeare’s sonnets to women who know something about English literature.
But the later ones are written to a “dark lady.” I think the emotions work regardless of gender.
I always figured he was a little light in the loafers. And kinky. Someone I’d be honored to know.
Yeah, when you think about it, if we dispensed with the work product of homosexuals, we wouldn’t have much culture at all.
Gay or straight or something in between, Shakespeare is still The Bard.
Apropos of David C., even the other William (Safire) will admit that we’ll always have on hand an extravaganza of interpretations and subtexts worth gleaning from the Bard’s words.