The Bard wasn’t a scientist, unless you consider him an explorer of the human mind as some critics have asserted, and yet if we can divine one overarching theme he pursued, we might say it is uncertainty itself. Sonnet 94 is perhaps his greatest achievement in this regard, as the meaning changes based on the reader’s own decisions how to interpret it.
William Shakespeare lived and wrote more than four centuries before anything resembling Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle was established. It wasn’t until 1927 that the famous physicist codified the concept that there are things we simply cannot know under any circumstances. Even should we be touched by the hand of god and have direct access to universal truth, Heisenberg’s simple formula prevents us from knowing both the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time – no matter what we do. The more we learn about one aspect of the particle in question, the less we know about the other. This is a universal truth according to quantum mechanics as pioneered by Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, and others. Their work was considered shocking and unbelievable at the time. Albert Einstein, the last legendary classical physicist in a line that sprung from Sir Isaac Newton, went to his grave refusing to believe it, claiming that “God does not play dice.” The final decades of his life were spent in a fruitless quest to prove how such uncertainty could not be an inherent part of nature. Many have taken up the mantle since, but Heisenberg’s principle and quantum theory in general has only been proven more accurate over time, not less. Shakespeare himself lived in a far less scientific and rational age, but if anything, the world was even more black and white, divided neatly into true and false, right and wrong based on the will of god. The will of god, of course, has ever been difficult to divine, but it provided a framework that admitted no subtlety in most matters. There was the right thing as proclaimed by divine power, and the wrong thing otherwise with nothing in between. This view extended into all aspects of life from a King or Queen who ruled by divine right, to churches and priests that dictated that will of god to the masses, to the organization of those masses into the saved and the sinners to literature with clearly defined heroes and villains. The world itself was created and ordered by a god who was considered infallible and incapable of making mistakes. Something either was or it wasn’t, whether or not we had the means to understand it. Objects could not occupy two positions at once, and things were either living or dead. Reality and the human nature that occupied it was in a word, mechanistic. Galileo would begin the transformation of these clockwork concepts into scientific theory and Newton would ultimately formulate them into the first physical laws, but the underpinning of both efforts began to emerge in Shakespeare’s era and generally brooked no argument.
Shakespeare, of course, was not a scientist by any means, unless you consider him an explorer of the human mind as some critics have asserted, and yet if we can divine one overarching theme he pursued throughout the course of his literary career, we might say it is uncertainty itself. In Shakespeare’s view of the world, heroes like Macbeth became villains. Tragic heroes like Hamlet contained both good and bad in equal parts, frequently manifesting behavior based on the events unfolding around them. King Lear is either ludicrously naive, self-destructive, or outright mad, at times he is all three at once. Othello hinges on the uncertainty of discerning another’s thoughts, and how often we get them wrong. Henry V is a hero to the English, a villain to the French, and a Machiavellian leader to both at the same time. In addition to penning some thirty plays, Shakespeare wrote over 150 sonnets, short 14 line poems in a patterned, rhyming set of stanzas. Sonnet 94 is, perhaps, his clearest attempt to capture the concept of uncertainty in poetic form (full text below), offering the reader thousands of possible interpretations hinging on how the pronouns and metaphors laced throughout are applied and to whom. The magisterial sonnet begins with the word “they” and concludes with a couplet that references “sweetest things,” offering near endless ways to tease out potential meetings in between depending on how you approach it.
Generally speaking, scholars consider sonnet 94 part of Shakespeare’s young man or “fair youth” series, wherein the speaker is apparently obsessed with an aristocratic male well above his station in life. Early in the sequence, the speaker idolizes the young man as a paragon of all things positive and true, but as we progress he is revealed to be flawed and unworthy. Sonnet 94 is part of a set from 87 to 96 where this fickleness and the secrets underneath the surface of the fair youth’s facade begin to become apparent. The sonnet plays a pivotal role in the before and after of this knowledge, and Shakespeare structured it as two poems in one to reflect this duality, literally splitting the 14 lines apart into dueling sequences with a bridge between. The subject of the first of these mini-poems is the familiar social world, wherein the speaker marvels at the majesty of the aristocrat, when that majesty is held in restraint: “They that have the pow’r to hurt, and will do none, That do not do the thing, they most do show.” When viewed as part of the sequence, one gets the sense that the young man holds the equivalent of a hammer over the speaker, one that could be brought down at any moment, but if you strip away the backstory and interpret the poem on its own, it is up to the reader to discern who is who, and why, creating another duality that appears throughout even beyond the two poems in one. What is the thing they most do show, but refrain from doing? Do the two lines even refer to the same person? There is reason to believe they do, but in the world of poetry subjects can change from one line to the next as they will later in this very same poem. We are likely justified in assuming “That do not do the thing they most do show” refers to the same “They” as the opening line, but it remains an assumption and could refer to something else just as easily. If we change that assumption, the entire meaning changes with it, similar to the way a measurement in the quantum world changes the outcome of an experiment.
This extended duality, uncertainty on top of uncertainty continues into the second verse. “Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow–” As part of the sequence, we can almost feel the cold reality that the young man is not who he seems seeping through, though the speaker has not fully realized this yet. There is nothing inherently negative in the description, and yet few would describe anyone they feel affection for in terminology more suited to a marble statue, describing him as “stone,” unmoving, and “cold.” Even “to temptation slow,” which might normally be an admiral quality, is rendered inert and lifeless when coupled with “unmoved.” Outside the sequence, we are still likely to interpret these lines as about the same person introduced in the opening, but assuming that is the case, much more is introduced that only compounds the previous dualities. The person in question, whether the same or someone else, is now analogous to a star at the center of a solar system, remaining in the same place while others fall into their orbit, or the nucleus of an atom with a cloud of electrons swirling around. We might wonder why they remain unmoved, what makes them cold, and what temptations they resist, supplying our own details to these open-ended terms the way the measurement of a quantum state mentioned above collapses it into the more classical view. Quantum states exist as wave forms until they are measured, when probabilistic uncertainty is replaced by (limited) knowledge of the system; the sonnet exists in multiple states until you make a decision about how to interpret it.
However you read these third and fourth lines, there is an intrinsic sense that the person or people serving as the subject of the poem are part of some larger system, having power over others that the lines themselves read as absolute, almost like physical laws. We can picture the subject almost as a framework of unassailable truth, within which others move, but the opening notion of “do none” introduces both the idea of choice, and the uncertainty that comes with it. This framework exists in the speaker’s mind, and yet the contours remain hidden and inscrutable with the potential for dramatic change at any moment. The second verse builds upon these themes, and serves as a bridge to the second mini-poem that will dominate the third, part of it and yet separate. Once again, we can only assume the subject is the same as Shakespeare repeats the pronoun, they. This time:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces,
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The speaker’s own cold facade appears to crack here, believing people that act in the manner he described previously and show restraint are special in this world, inheriting the blessings of the next and enjoying the bounty nature has to offer, but the reading is not so free of uncertainty when you consider what is actually being said. Beneath the surface, there is the implicit idea that these individuals are harvesting from another. Perhaps for good reason, but there is still the notion of taking from something. When coupled with being the “lords and owners of their faces” we return to the idea that the speaker is describing only the outside show from the second line. Faces are on the surface, and can be painted as they were in Shakespeare’s day among both rich men and women. The subject, assuming it is the same person, previously refused to do what he showed; now, he is all show, and any underlying excellence is managed and supported by these vague “others.” The speaker doesn’t say it specifically, but the duality between what we can see on the surface and what lies beneath underlies both stanzas, and cannot easily be separated from them. In the context of the fair youth sequence, we can see this as a continuation of darker thoughts creeping in, but the dual nature of things exists in any standalone reading and is only expanded if we consider the possibility that the pronouns and references to “others” apply to multiple groups. Even if we assume the poem must have a single subject, it is only our need to supply order to the narrative – the same way we supply order to the world through measurement – that we reason the “others” in the first verse are the same as in the second, nor does Shakespeare explicitly reveal whether the speaker is part of this group, or could he be a member of a third, even more ostracized and outside the aristocrat’s orbit? The answer is forever uncertain depending on how you look at it, or more accurately how you choose either intentionally or unintentionally to look at it.
The third verse introduces the second mini-poem, shorter than the first unless you consider the second as an introduction, this time relying on natural imagery, specifically plants and flowers, as an extended metaphor that runs in contrast to the social realm. The ninth line sets the stage by transforming the opening use of “pow’r” to “flow’r” and setting up an inherent contrast with the prior world of the poem. Socially, people are uncertain, but ultimately they act or do not act. Nature, however, doesn’t always work that way. It exists for its own sake, towards its own ends and cares nothing for our opinion. It simply is, for itself. “The summer’s flow’r is to the summer sweet, Though to itself only it only live and die.” People, however, are naturally hierarchical, imposing their own order on things, and the speaker introduces the idea that some plants are superior to others in the next two lines, analogous to how the aristocrat is inherently superior to the commoners moving in their orbit yet also completely different. The flower will normally remain supreme, but according to the speaker at least, “if that flow’r with base infection meet, the basest weed out braves his dignity.”
This is, of course, merely one way to read these lines in a poem rife with uncertainty, taking what the speaker says mostly at face value, whether or not you read the sonnet as part of the young man sequence or standalone. Much more is being said, however, and much of it remains unsurprisingly uncertain. The flower here can be seen as merely an ornament to summer, making the season sweeter only because they appear in their multitudes. The fate of one flower is irrelevant, but the combined presence of many flowers alters the nature of the season, making it better than it would be otherwise, especially when there are no flowers to speak of in winter. Weeds do not have the aesthetic appeal of flowers, but they too exist for their own sake, simply surviving. Outliving a flower somehow elevates them in the speaker’s mind. We would be remiss, however, if we failed to note that the preference for flowers over weeds is largely for aesthetic reasons. The flower that meets with a “base infection” loses its loveliness and either dies, or becomes something much closer to a weed. The infatuation with appearance therefore slips in, whether bidden or unbidden, even when the subject is the natural world rather than the social. First, the aristocrat doesn’t “show,” then he or another is the “lord and owners of their faces,” and now a flower is sweeter than a weed purely because it is pretty. There is also the inescapable sense that both of these worlds are tightly ordered, primarily based on appearance alone. There is a hierarchy to both the social sphere and nature that the speaker relies on, another framework if you will, but both are at least somewhat arbitrary, based on the superficial. Yet, lords will still be lords, flowers will be flowers, and weeds will be weeds. The speaker insists this is for their own sake, but he is also the person naming and ordering them, suggesting that there is an implicit connection between observer and observed, where the one influences the other in strange ways, the same as we see in quantum mechanics.
The final rhyming couplet makes the connection between both spheres, the underlying duality, and the relationship between observer and observed far clearer. “For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” We can read this simply as the great and glorious have a longer way to fall into perdition, that beauty corrupted is worse than never having beauty at all, and read into it that the speaker can no longer hide the young man’s transgressions from himself, but on a deeper level, this hierarchy is established purely based on the speaker’s perception – measurement in the quantum world. He is the one who has explained what is sweet and what is sour. He makes the comparisons between the relative horror of beauty lost and beauty never had. Sweet, sour, smells, etc. do not exist on their own, they are measurements and judgements we ourselves make about the world around us, and they are inherently uncertain at times bringing to mind the old adage about a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. Indeed, the speaker alludes to this himself when he claims the flower to itself only lives or dies whether or not someone witnesses it. The same speaker had previously praised the fair youth – whether as part of the sequence or merely in the opening lines of this sonnet – but now he is reconsidering his judgment, changing his perspective and the measurement he makes as an observer. Because he once thought the young man was so fair, he finds him far more fallen than he would some random stranger or person he didn’t value. Inescapably, the measurement of the one has dictated the measurement of the other. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in sonnet form. Obviously, I am not suggesting that Shakespeare invented or foresaw quantum mechanics, and yet there is no denying his ability to observe the world and understand the underlying dynamics in a way unheard of in his day remains striking nonetheless.
SONNET 94
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 