A rare hand-written copy of one of the most famous love poems ever written has been discovered after hundreds of years.
Dr Leah Veronese uncovered the version of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 tucked away in a 17th Century poetry collection at the University of Oxford.
The manuscript was found among the papers of Elias Ashmole, founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.
Prof Emma Smith, an Oxford expert in Shakespeare, said the “exciting discovery” would help researchers understand the Bard’s popularity in the decades following his death. Dr Veronese found the sonnet featured in a miscellany – a type of manuscript which contains a selection of texts from different authors on various subjects – stored at the Bodleian Library.
“As I was leafing through the manuscript, the poem struck me as an odd version of Sonnet 116,” the university researcher explained.
“When I looked in the catalogue (originally compiled in the 19th Century) the poem was described, not inaccurately, as “on constancy in love” – but it doesn’t mention Shakespeare.” In Ashmole’s version, parts of Sonnet 116 – also known as Let me not to the marriage of true minds – have been altered, and additional lines added.
What makes this version particularly fascinating is how the poem has been adapted. The sonnet sits among politically charged works, for example banned Christmas carols and satirical poems on the tumultuous events of the early 1640s. In this copy the sonnet has been adapted as a song set to music by the composer Henry Lawes. This copy only includes the text, but the music itself can be found in a book of songs in New York Public Library. The song-setting includes seven additional lines, and changes to the Shakespeare’s original opening and final couplet. The opening is changed from:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
…to:
Self blinding error seize all those minds
Who with false appellations call that love
Which alters when it alterations finds
A likely practical reason for these added lines is to create more verses to be sung. However, in the context of the English Civil War, the additional lines could also be read as an appeal towards religious and political loyalty.
Although the additional lines are quite ambiguous in meaning, they read more politically when read in the collection of a Royalist, surrounded by Royalist poetry. The added lines potentially transform the sonnet from a meditation on romantic love into a powerful political statement. It is worth noting that the public performance of songs was outlawed during the Republican regime. Many musicians, like Henry Lawes himself, survived by secret private performances in the home. Not only does this text provide us with a new example of how Shakespeare was being read during the civil war, but also how his texts were being politically repurposed to suit the issues of the day.
Professor Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford, said: ‘This exciting discovery shows that centuries of searching for evidence about Shakespeare and his early reception hasn’t exhausted the archives. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds” is now one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, but it doesn’t seem to have been very popular in his own time. Whereas other sonnets were widely circulated and quoted, only one previous reference to this one was known. And what Dr Veronese shows in her investigation of this new version is that the sonnet being understood in the context of Royalist politics – a long way from its role in modern weddings!’
