The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 40

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: Total Love
Content: A sonnet bursting with references to the author's love except for the final couplet where it is completely absent having morphed into the subject's lasciviousness.

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

love is repeatedly droned out as what the author has given in completion, with heavy emphasis on my love.

all is also used in abundance, both explicitly and hidden such as in call, to emphasise the completeness of the love given.

Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.

The my love emphasis continues.

Unusual set of 4 feminine end-lines of -est.

I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet love knows it is a greater grief
To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.

The thief who robs and steals finally steals all trace of love from the following final couplet.

The reference to robb'ry may be a pun on the subject's name who may have been Robert Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

All and love return (both explicitly and hidden, as in Although) but love is no longer associated with the author.

love appears a total of 10 times in this sonnet, echoing the explicit references to ten in Sonnets 37 & 38.

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes.

The predominance of love in the sonnet (a quality of the author) now morphs to Lascivious (a 'quality' of the subject) in which it is contained as an anagram (lov) and whose morphing is aided by receivest and deceivest in Q2.

wilful in line 8 morphs to explicit ill which morphs to the blunt Kill.

all morphs into ill which itself morphs into well which again morphs into Kill.