Sonnet 128
by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
How oft when thou my musike musike playst,
Vpon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently swayst,
The wiry concord that mine eare confounds,
Do I enuie those Iackes that nimble leape,
To kisse the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poore lips which should that haruest reape,
At the woods bouldnes by thee blushing ftand.
To be so tikled they would change their state,
And situation with those dancing chips,
Ore whome th[y] fingers walke with gentle gate,
Making dead wood more blest then liuing lips,
Since sausie Iackes so happy are in this,
Giue them th[y] fingers, me thy lips to kisse.
My modernisation:
How oft when thou, my music, music playst,
Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds
With thy sweet fingers when thou gently swayst,
The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,
Do I envie those Jacks that nimble leap,
To kiss the tender inward of thy hand,
Whilst my poor lips which should that harvest reap,
At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand.
To be so tickled, they would change their state,
And situation, with those dancing chips,
O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,
Making dead wood more blest than living lips.
Since saucy Jacks so happy are in this,
Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
Literary scholars (of whom more below) are keen to tell us that the jack was not the key depressed with the finger, but the wooden doohickey that jumps up when the key is pressed. The plucking gadget — plectrum, or whatever it is called — is attached to the jack, and this plucks the string, making the sound of the note. The jacks are therefore not in contact with the fingers during playing, as Shakespeare seems to assume, and so, the scholars go on to say, Shakespeare is using the word erroneously, or at least loosely. See for example the commentary at
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/128comm.htmBut of course, when you press the keys on a keyboard intrument they go down. They do not leap up, nimbly or otherwise. It is in the works proper that you see things jumping upwards. And we can imagine they might be leaping to kiss the player’s hands — even though they do not succeed. These things are the jacks, and Shakespeare obviously understood perfectly well what the jacks were. The image is of the virginal, (or virginals), a distant ancestor of the modern piano, coming to life under the hands of a player, and with its received life the jacks might well kiss the player’s hands. This is a musical instrument transformed by poetic metaphor, and does not have to behave like its real counterpart. The piano in the immortal cartoon where Tom plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody number 2, while Jerry gets caught up in the works is a useful analogy. The instrument is faithfully rendered by the animators, but cartoon conventions demand that it will not have the precise physics of a real piano.
We must not imagine a large intrument here, like a modern piano. The virginal was just a box, usually without legs, that you could carry around and set on a table to play. The poem conveys this sense of a small, almost magical, piece of woodwork. The word virginal itself is not in the poem, but twice it is called blessed, to remind us perhaps of the blessed Virgin herself. The virginal may have been given its unusual name because young virgins often learnt to play it. In any case there is irony here: the virginal in the poem is anything but virginal in its behaviour.
The commentaries tell us that my music, on line one, is in apposition to thou. In other words poet is addressing player as ‘my music’. They also tell us that sway in line three means rule, as well as carrying its modern meaning, so the player ‘undulates’ the music. But Shakespeare’s comma after swayst, ruthlessly pruned by modern editors, suggests that the verb might also be read intransitively, which then gives a third meaning. And then the player herself is swaying, while the wiry concord will have to be in apposition to the second music of line one.
The player rules her instrument with regal grandeur, and reminds us of Elizabeth, the virgin queen. The nimble Jacks are like courtiers, leaping for preferment (did Shakespeare know the nursery rhyme ‘Jack be nimble ...’?), or abasing themselves before her, as her fingers become a pair of legs walking over them. Or she is like a woman with numerous admirers, who try to kiss her while she teases them. Or perhaps she is playing with these men sexually — one thinks of the use of wood in modern American slang. Here it is the poet who is virginal, as he stands blushing beside her. Or rather it is his lips that stand, in the sense that they have ceased motion. All the motion is in the woman, the instrument, the music, while the poet’s mouth is still, because he is tongue-tied, and because he is listening.
(It is the connected ideas of the Queen, the virginal as an instrument for
girls, the Virgin Mary, and so on, that identifies the player as female, rather
than the position of Sonnet 128 in the whole sonnet series. Shakespeare usually
includes a clue or two to help us work out the sex of the person addressed.)
— And now a word from a common reader about four hundred years of work by scholars, editors and critics on the Sonnets of Shakespeare, from which of course this poem is taken. I must say that they have (with some notable exceptions) done their work incredibly badly. We might try to ignore them, but unfortunately we need their help, because the Sonnets are not at all easy to read. They are compressed, intricate, varied, puzzling, like the Songs and Sonnets of Donne, and we naturally turn to the commentaries to help us through their labyrinth. And what do we find? Decades of silence, revulsion and disgust, incomprehension, irrelevance, plain nonsense, stemming almost entirely from the inability of a predominantly male editorship to come to terms with the homosexuality, and sexuality, of the poems themselves. The Sonnets are also the focal interest of Shakespearean cranks and crazies, a separate group, but a group where it is difficult to draw a clear line to separate them from the genuine scholars. On which side of the line do we place Samuel Butler and A.L. Rowse, for example? Unfortunately even an enlightened modern edition cannot quite free itself from this appalling critical heritage. So we have to read about the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke and the Dark Lady, and are presented with a random collection of sonnets as if they exist in a well-defined time-frame, and describe connected events, like the chapters of a novel. Once you are in the trap of reading the Sonnets in this way, it is surprisingly difficult to break free. The sonnet isolated in an anthology makes a perfect reading opportunity, but the ones regularly selected form a small set: 18 (Shall I compare thee), 30 (When to the sessions), 55 (Not marble), 60 (Like as the waves), 73 (That time of year), 94 (They that have power), 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds) and a few others. For the rest, I believe that they gain enormously in value if they are read out of context of the Sonnets as a whole.
As far as this sonnet is concerned, a healthy frame of mind in which to approach it is to assume that we know nothing, and can never learn anything about the woman at the keyboard, that she may, or may not, figure in the other sonnets, and that even if we had her biography, it would be quite unimportant, either for reading the poem or more generally for understanding Shakespeare. It is possible that the event and the woman never existed.
Sonnet 128 seems to be deprecated by the editors. It is ‘a pretty sonnet to his lady playing the virginals, and certainly a relatively slight piece’ according to Martin Seymour-Smith (1963). Katherine Duncan Jones (1997) thinks its ‘stale lover’s conceit’ may be ironical. The problem for modern readers, apparently, is that the idea of the lover envying an object that has physical contact with the beloved is banal. But this could merely be a late anti-Victorian reaction. Shakespeare’s central image should not be confused with the coy prurience of Thackeray’s once popular Cane Bottomed Chair,
If chairs had but feeling, in holding such charms,
A thrill must have passed through your withered old arms!
I looked, and I longed, and I wished in despair;
I wished myself turned to a cane-bottomed chair.