The Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets

1. Title: The Rival Poet of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
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Course title: A Special Course on Shakespeare
Date: 28. 05. 2001
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which were first published in collective form under this title in 1609,
consist of 154 poems. Many scholars have recognized the great autobiographical value of the
Sonnets and this resulted in their constant search for unveiling the mystery which envelops the poet’s
life and personality. Their search focuses on three identity issues: (1) who is the young man to whom
Sonnets 1-126 are addressed? (2) who is the Dark Lady of Sonnets 127-154? (3) who is the rival
poet who intrudes in Sonnets 78-86? As to the third question, the names of George Chapman and/or
Christopher Marlowe are often mentioned. The conclusions that we reach from trying to identify the
persons addressed in the Sonnets are twofold: no convincing identification of the young man, the
Dark Lady, or the rival poet has ever been made; thus scholars’ research has added little or nothing
of actual proof to the bare outlines which hearsay, tradition, and the spare records of Shakespeare’s
time have given us. However, a detailed analysis of the sonnets which comprise the series of rival
poet sonnets is very helpful for better understanding of the intelligent hints and covert allusions that
Shakespeare made to the rival poet(s).
In the first sonnet of the series, that is, Sonnet 78, the poet states that he called upon the
young man as a Muse to inspire his verse. The youth’s beauty and his excellence are an aid to the
poet’s inspiration. The third line - ‘As every alien pen hath got my use’1 suggests that another poet or
poets have usurped Shakespeare’s position. This poet or poets have been made known to a wider
audience through the young man’s patronage. In the fifth and sixth line, ‘Thine eyes, that taught the
dumb on high to sing/And heavy ignorance aloft to fly’, Shakespeare states that the youth’s eyes are
those which improve the qualities of ungifted poets i.e. those who are dumb (without the power of
speech) are taught to sing as angels sing in the heights of heaven and those who are slow of wit and
know little are taught to soar aloft into the sky. The seventh line, ‘Have added feathers to the
learned’s wing’, uses a metaphor taken from the practice of falconry, i.e. adding feathers to the wing
of a bird of prey to make it fly better. In this case, ‘feathers’ are added to the wings of ‘the learned’,
that is, scholars. Scholars are often said to be dull poets. There may be a reference to specific learned
poetasters of the day, such as Nashe or Chapman. In the third quatrain of this sonnet the poet claims that

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his verse is more deserving than that of all the other poets since it owes its inspiration entirely to the
beloved. In the verses of other poets, the youth does no more than improve the quality of their verse and
make graceful, elegant their poetic skills. In lines 13-14, ‘But thou art all my art, and dost advance/As
high as learning, my rude ignorance’, the poet seems to equate himself with the dumb and ignorant of
lines 5-6. Until, that is, he comes under the influence of his beloved, who then puts him on the level of the
learned scholars of line 7. Before that he had been in the pits, a mere ignoramus struggling to write. The
point is that whereas he is, or was, dumb and ignorant, but by the youth’s inspiration was elevated to the
status of chief poet and admirer, the others were already learned, and have merely polished their verse a
little. An achievement no doubt to be accredited to the youth, and worthy of comment, but nevertheless
superficial and nothing compared with the wonders he has created with this poet’s verse, in which he is
the all in all.
Sonnet 79, the second in the series of rival poet sonnets continues the questioning of the merits of
the rival sonneteer(s) or poet(s), on the assumption, as it seems, that it is known that he (the rival) has
already taken the favoured place which the writer thought was reserved for himself alone. The argument
here is that the fair youth himself provides the motive and subject for everything which the poets can
write. The writer therefore reminds the youth that he should not be praising these rival poets, but that they
should be thanking him for paying their debts. In the first two lines ‘Whilst I alone did call upon thy
aid/My verse alone had all thy gentle grace’ (p.54) the poet evokes the time when he was the only one
who called upon the youth as the inspiration for his poetry and asserts that then only his verse had all the
youth’s beauty and elegance. The term ‘numbers’ in the third line ‘But now my gracious numbers are
decayed’ was often used to refer to the metrical units and lines of poetry, hence to poetry in general. So
the poet says that his elegant phrases are now reduced in quantity and worth. ‘And my sick muse doth
give an other place’ (l.4) - his inspiration, which clearly has now become sick and feeble, yields its
supremacy to another . In lines 5-6, ‘I grant (sweet love) thy lovely argument/ Deserves the travail of a
worthier pen’, the poet admits that the youth, as the subject of a poem, deserves the toil or labour of a
worthier writer. Yet whatever any (or the rival) poet invents about him, he does not invent it at all, but
merely steals it and then gives him what was his own already. The implied accusations of theft and
trickery continue in the following lines. The usurping poet pretends to lend something (virtue) which he
had already stolen from the youth. The apparent ending of the sentence, or at least the sense of part of the
sentence, in the middle of lines 10 and 11, evokes the sensation of a breathless catalogue of crimes which
the usurper commits. There are so many crimes that the speaker does not have time to arrange them in a
proper and intelligible sequence, and they all come tumbling out in his speech. The rival poet is poor in
imagination, rich only in that the beloved provides him with the material sustenance for his verse, and rich
only in so far as he has stolen so much. Therefore, he cannot offer anything to the youth except that which

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the youth already possesses, except that which is naturally inherent in him. The financial imagery which
was started in lines 8-9 ‘He robs thee of, and pays it thee again/He lends thee virtue, and he stole that
word,’continues in the last line ‘Since what he owes thee, thou thy self dost pay’, giving the impression
partly that the relationship between poet and patron in this case is entirely mercenary, one-sided, and to the
disadvantage of the youth. He even has to pay the rival poet’s debts for him.
The questioning of the rival poet’s position continues in Sonnet 80. Here the poet portrays
himself as a foolish boat sailing in the shallows, whereas the rival is a stately galleon on the wide open sea,
foreshadowing the exclamatory question of Sonnet 86, ‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse?’ (l.1).
However, the content of the poem militates against itself, for the marine imagery gives it a sort of
buoyancy which overturns its declared humility. In addition there are subtle innuendos which undermine
the worthiness of the rival, not least of which are the half hinted sexual meanings which give a touch of
ribald mockery to the descriptions of the new poet. Lines 1-2, ‘O how I faint when I of you do
write/Knowing a better spirit doth use your name’, state: I am overcome with faintness and diffidence
when I write of you because a better spirit (poet) praises you (has you as patron), and makes my efforts
look weak by comparison. The rival poet is a spirit who is possibly using demoniacal powers and he
expends all his energies in praising the youth’s name. In line 4, ‘To make me tongue-tied speaking of your
fame’, it is not clear if the speaker or the rival poet is speaking of the youth’s fame. Both meanings are
acceptable, for the syntax allows either ‘He makes me tongue-tied when I attempt to publish your fame’,
or, ‘He makes me tongue-tied when he starts publicising your fame and qualities’. The next two quatrains
use a metaphor from the sea, comparing the poets’ flights of fancy and creation to ships sailing on the
ocean - either small inferior barks, which the speaker modestly and humbly claims as an adequate
description of himself, or else massive galleons, lofty and proud (and perhaps riding for a fall as the
Spanish ships of the armada). But the ocean is the symbol and metaphor of the worthiness of the beloved
and of his capacity to inspire his poets and admirers. It is on that ocean that these metaphorical ships of
poetry set sail. In line 7, ‘My saucy bark (inferior far to his)’, the poet claims that the ship he sails is
nothing more than a ketch in comparison with that of his rival. ‘Wracked’ (in line 11) means ‘wrecked’.
Being homophonous with racked it does suggest the torture the writer undergoes in his quest for the
youth’s loyalty. In the last couplet, ‘Then if he thrive and I be cast away/The worst was this, my love was
my decay’(ll.13-14), the poet says: Then if he should prosper (come off safely) and I should be cast away
(be shipwrecked, thrown onto the strand or shore), the worst aspect of the calamity would be this (that I
now describe), and my love would have been the cause of my fall from grace, my ruin. After this sonnet,
there is a little interruption in the series with Sonnet 81, a climacteric sonnet, which is dedicated to
mortality.

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The sequence continues again with Sonnet 82. The objections raised against the rival poet(s)
continue. The youth is being misled by them, allowing himself to be flattered with the artificiality of
rhetoric. Although he is committing no crime (yet he did vow eternal exchange of hearts), perhaps he turns
aside because he exceeds in beauty anything that may be captured by the pen of this writer, and his true
worth requires that he seek abroad for other talents to depict him. Yet the poet fears that this is dangerous
and corrupting, for the youth does not require flattery, or artificiality. He is himself so fair that he best suits
the simple truth. Let him therefore leave these false and empty poets. They had better turn their attention
instead to pale and sallow cheeks which need the hypocrisy of untruth to bolster their image. In line 1, ‘I
grant thou wert not married to my muse’(p.60), the implication is that no breach of marriage vows is
involved. The youth may look on the seductive words of other love poems and be tempted by them,
without loss of faith. And therefore he may look at the dedicated words used by writers (to their fair
subject) without being convicted of sin or crime. Lines 5-6, ‘Thou art as fair in knowledge as in
hue/Finding thy worth a limit past my praise’, seem to say - ‘Not only do you excel in beauty, but also you
excel in knowledge and understanding, therefore you discover that your worth exceeds the scope of my
praise.’ The meaning of lines 7-8, ‘And therefore art enforced to seek anew/Some fresher stamp of the
time-bettering days’, seems to be - ‘And therefore you are compelled to seek again a replacement (for the
outworn poet), a newer, livelier form of poetry (or poet) of days which are more advanced and better than
previous times.’ However, in the end, it will be obvious that only he, his true-telling friend, is fully able to
describe him as he is, without indecent, inaccurate descriptions, or exaggerated pictures. The conclusion
in the final two lines - ‘And their gross painting might be better used/Where cheeks need blood, in thee it
is abused’ (ll.13-14) - is that these other poets would be better employed using their talents to flatter
lifeless and bloodless folk who need puffing up with falsehoods; applied to the youth it is misuse,
misrepresentation and deception (and an abuse of his true qualities).
The next sonnet, Sonnet 83, is closely linked to the preceding one, especially by the opening
two lines, which pick up the idea of painting from the closing couplet of the previous one. In addition there
is the repeated idea of the limits of possible praise being exceeded by the youth’s natural merits, and the
‘devising’ of rhetorical artifices in the hope of praising him. The poet writes that he did not attempt to
paint the youth’s beauty, did not attempt any further improvement on his fairness (by describing it with
extravagant similes). The poet presumably owes the praise that he includes in his poetry to the youthful
beauty of the young man. The writer’s modesty compels him to claim also that the offering is worthless.
[It may be implied however that the ‘barren tender’ (line 4), the offering of empty verse, is made by the
rival poet(s), whose exaggerated praise misses the mark, and who are doing the youth a disservice by
falling far short of his actual worth.] And therefore the poet has been remiss (asleep) by not reporting
the youth to the world through his verse. He leaves the young man to see for himself how the

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modern, commonplace writers fall short of proclaiming adequately his excellence. In the last
quatrain:
For I impair not beauty being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes,
Than both your poets can in praise devise. (ll.11-14, p.56)
the poet says - ‘You imputed to me my silence as a sin, but my silence in this case will be my glory for, in
this condition of silence, I do not by attempting to describe or praise your beauty, fail in the attempt, and
hence do damage instead. Some other poets undertake to give life and succeed in enclosing him in a tomb
instead. Implicitly, the poet claims that dumb silence can speak with more eloquence than artificial verse.
But not all verse is artificial, and some speaks from the heart. There is a vibrant contrast between what the
true heart speaks and what the poet schooled in rhetoric can devise (The latter being the hall mark of the
rival poet(s)). Since the speaker currently claims that he is dumb and silent (although the presentation of
this poem alone undermines that claim), or that he only writes the truth, not rhetorical praise, it could be
that two other poets - ‘both your poets’(l. 14) - were engaged in devising conceits with which to amuse
the youth and win his allegiance. The word ‘devise’ used here and in the previous sonnet (line 9) is
suggestive of trickery and deception, or, at the very least, false praise. So, this sonnet in general discusses
the art of showing things in a false light with false praise.
Although a continuation of the rival poet(s)’ sequence, Sonnet 84 introduces new material by
investigating the reality of all comparisons. The youth is beyond compare, as attested in Sonnet 18, and
any praise of him is merely a repetition of what he is (Sonnets 38 and 39), and the miracle of his perfection
foreshadows all attempts past and future to provide an exemplar who could match him (Sonnets 53 and
59). To a certain extent therefore the poem is a re-hashing of old ideas, but here the implication is, more or
less, that all language is useless, for what after all is the point of asserting time and again that ‘you are
you’, and how could language itself, something entirely isolated and separate from the youth’s existence,
do anything but provide an empty shell as an example of the thing itself? The conclusion therefore is that
all poetry in this context is worthless, especially that of the rival poet(s), who flatter to deceive. But the
youth himself is (deliberately it seems) brought in to undermine the conclusion - perhaps he is not the
perfect exemplar described in the first four lines, for he has a sickly interest in this false praise that is
heaped on him, and this flaw in his character only makes the situation worse, for the more he welcomes it,
the more of it is generated and thrown upon him.
Who is it that says most, which can say more,
Than this rich praise, that you alone, are you?

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In whose confine immured is the store,
Which should example where your equal grew. (ll.1-4, p.50)
Lines 1-4 are ambiguous, complex, opaque, and elusive all at the same time. They could be read as a
series of four questions, each beginning with an interrogative pronoun Who?, Which?, In whose?, Which?.
The meaning would then be (approximately) - Who amongst your admirers praises you most? Which
person can say more than this in praise of you, that you are absolutely and inescapably yourself? In what
person is there walled up such a store of wit (as to praise you adequately)? Which poet could provide a
copy such as might equal you in all your perfection? ‘you alone are you’ (line 2) contains echoes from the
Catholic Mass - tu solus sanctus, tu solus altissimus, tu solus dominus - you alone are holy, you alone are
the most exalted, you alone are the Lord. It therefore treads a thin line between blasphemy and praise. The
poet states, ‘And such a counterpart shall fame his wit’ (l.11), that any poet who writes of the youth will
be made famous by the copy he makes of him simply by describing him as he is. In the final line, ‘Being
fond on praise, which makes your praises worse’(l.14), the meaning seems to be that, being so avid of
praise, the youth attracts false flattery, far worse than if the truth were told, which would itself be praise.
Being madly devoted to praise, being foolishly hooked on praise ensures that praise levelled at him is
artificial and corrupt.
Sonnet 85 (p.51) is another of the sonnets which undermines itself simply by existing. To say
that ‘I can say nothing’ is itself to say something, and the disingenuous modesty which claims only to think
good thoughts while at the same time offering, in poetic form, an offended criticism of others’ poetic
efforts of praise, clearly sets a higher value on his own expressions of love than the bare words of the
poem admit to. There is therefore an undercurrent of thought which flows in a direction contrary to that of
the main stream, for whereas the superficial meaning of the words claims that the work of other poets
dedicated to the youth is golden, polished, refined and inspired, the underlying message is that it is empty
breath, a hollow mockery of finical tracery and no substance. The only real eloquence, the poet seems to
say, is that of the love in my breast, and the repetitive words of this poem, saying ‘Amen Amen!’ to every
word of praise that is ever uttered on your behalf, are more eloquent than more than all the words the other
able spirits can ever produce. The first three lines, ‘My tongue-tied muse in manners holds her still/While
comments of your praise richly compiled/Reserve their character with golden quill’, could mean ‘My
tongue tied Muse continues to behave in the same manner as previously (by remaining silent as before)
while commentaries praising you preserve you richly in writing’. The drift of the first quatrain is to
concede that richly compiled poems praising the youth are at least as precious to the youth as the rich
praise of ‘you alone are you’. But there is clearly an element of hyperbole which seeks to undermine the
validity of these rival attempts. Since it is all so precious, refined, smoothed, gilded and inspired, it is

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probably too good to be true. The following lines continue to sow the seeds of doubt, for they imply that
the polished words are not the heralds of good thoughts, but only the breath of words. Only those whose
thoughts give the lead to what they say should be respected, and that seems to be the abiding message of
this poem. ‘Other’ (line 5) was a standard plural form in Shakespeare’s time. This appears to confirm that
there is more than one rival poet attempting to secure the affections and patronage of the young man.
‘Hymn’ (line 7) means paean of praise. This line, ‘To every hymn that able spirit affords’, is thought
probably to refer to George Chapman, one of the chief contenders for the title of rival poet. He published
in 1596 The Shadow of Night - Containing Two Poeticall Hymnes.The final two lines are an attempt to
belittle the effect of words composed by the rival poets. The implication is that the rival poet’s verses are
empty because the heart does not speak in them and the suggestion is that his dumb thoughts are of more
value and more effectual than all the empty words of the rival’s verses.
Sonnet 86 (p.52) is the last of the group of sonnets dealing with the threat of a rival poet taking
over the dominant position of affection that the writer claims to enjoy in the beloved’s eyes. The rival poet
here is given the credit of composing bombastic verse which conceivably could cow other poets into
submission, rather like a fleet in full sail (the armada?) bearing down on a seemingly defenceless enemy.
The image may be taken either way, as one of splendour and magnificence, or one of empty boast and
hollow show which leads to failure. Specific details are then given of how the rival poet relies on
supernatural help from voices and spirits which communicate with him by night, and ghostly figures
which prompt him. It is difficult not to read an undertone of ridicule into this description. Shakespeare
disingenuously admits the superiority of his rival’s verses, at the same time undermining that superiority
by writing a sonnet which is as good as that of any of his contemporaries. This sonnet, however, seems to
bring us far closer to the identity of a possible rival than any of the preceding ones. Many commentators
think that the affable familiar ghost and the compeers by night point directly at George Chapman,
translator of the Iliad, a translation much admired by Keats who wrote a sonnet in praise of it.
In the first quatrain, the image is that of a galleon (or possibly a whole fleet) attempting to
capture something on the high seas, that is, implicitly the image is that of the rival poet attempting to catch
the patron’s attention with his great verse. The poet asks himself the question whether this great verse
causes his thoughts (which were ready to be put into a poem) to die where they are engendered, in the
womb of his brain. Lines 5-10 are thought to refer to one particular poet, rather than to potential rivals in
general. Quite possibly this rival poet is George Chapman (already mentioned above). He published seven
books of his translation of Homer’s Iliad in 1598, and boasted subsequently that he was inspired by the
spirit of Homer himself. If Chapman is the rival poet, the spirits or ghosts which appeared to him in
nightly visions were Musaeus, Marlowe and Homer. In lines 11-14, Shakespeare answers his question
from the first quatrain. He claims that the rival poet and his ‘affable, familiar ghost’ (line 9) cannot boast

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themselves to be the victors who forced him to silence. He was not unable to write because of any fear
from his rival and his spiritual assistants. The true reason is given in the final couplet -‘But when your
countenance filled up his line/Then lacked I matter, that enfeebled mine’ - since the patron had
abandoned Shakespeare in favour of the rival poet’s verse, his absence was what weakened his verse, and
made it unable to stand because he lacked the subject matter for his sonnets.
The difficulty of making a certain identification of the rival poet in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
stems largely from the absence of concrete information on three essential points: a) The date of
composition of any of the sonnets, including the rival poets’ sequence. b) The identity of the youth to
whom the sonnets are addressed. c) The disappearance of the poems which supposedly were written as
rival poems and were accepted as offerings by the youth, to the detriment of the writer of these sonnets. In
the absence of this information, which, short of miraculous discoveries, is not likely now to come to light,
it is probably best to leave the identity of the rival poet in decent obscurity.
Endnotes
1. M.R. Ridley, M.A. ed. Shakespeare, W: The Sonnets (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1934), l.3,
page 59. (All further references to The Sonnets appear in the text.)
Bibliography:

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Evans, Blakemore G. The Sonnets. Cambridge: New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1996.
Kerrigan, John. The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics,
1986.
Onions, C.T. A Shakespeare Glossary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Ridley, M.R., M.A. ed. Shakespeare, W: The Sonnets. London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1934.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1997.