Sonnet 124 - Context

Context

Shakespeare places Sonnet 124 towards the end of the Fair Youth section of sonnets which are addressed to or concern a young man. Over the course of this first section the speaker “tells a ‘high’ story of devotion, in the course of which the poet discovers that the reality of his love is the love itself rather than anything he receives from the beloved”. Shakespeare accomplishes this through a three cycled love phase witnessed within this “Fair Youth” section. The first cycle sees the poet being confident in “Youth’s” love, where the poet “feels that his genius as a poet is being released by ”. However, as this first cycle is completed and the second begins, youth has taken the poet’s mistress and has created a rival poet. This causes the poet to become focused on his own old age and his love’s winter. The final cycle witnesses the poet’s rebirth, where in Sonnet 97 “a great rush of coming-of-spring images” flood the poem. This final portion of the poet’s love cycle is where Sonnet 124 is positioned. Within this final section “ replaces reproach with self-reproach, or, more accurately, he replaces disillusionment with self-knowledge, and gradually finds the possession of what he has struggled for, not in the youth as a separate person, but in the love that unites him with the youth”.

Another alternate contextual interpretation of this sonnet can be explained by Leslie Hotson. In the previous sonnet, 123, the speaker addresses time by stating “Thy pyramids built up with newer might / To me are nothing novel”. Shakespearean critic, Leslie Hotson, argues that the speaker in 123 is unimpressed by Time, which she claims to be a prince of Shakespeare’s time. Hotson states that this prince is referred to in Sonnet 124 where “This ‘fortune’s bastard’, this victim of the ‘time’s hate’, is…King Henri III of France”. The atrocities that are described within Sonnet 124 parallel actions that King Henri III committed against his people as “The first great ‘accident’ (line 5) or misfortune that befell was Paris’s famous Day of Barricades”. Ultimately, Hotson argues that “the blow of tralled discontent” (Sonnet 124.7) was the speaker’s reaction against a prince “as strong as his love, Shakespeare calls to witness the English fools of the inviting time, who die ‘for their religion’, having lived to murder their Queen”. This interpretation becomes on of praise for the speaker’s queen, which is clearly an “affirmation of the strength of his love voice…of every true-born Englishman in the preservation of his Queen from all the treacherous attempts on her life”. Shakespeare allows this speaker to praise the Queen as reference to the numerous failed “conspiracy and other plots of assassination” that Queen Elizabeth successfully evaded; effectively making “love untouched by assassins’ attempts”.