Probability maths says given infinity, a random character generator (producing upper and lower case letters, numbers, spaces and punctuation marks) will reproduce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Think monkeys and typewriters, if you like.
Shakespeare is wheeled on for this thought experiment rather than, say, Charles Dickens because Shakespeare is the supposed apogee of literary creativity. The reductionist probabilitarians are saying: you think Shakespeare’s great – well, he can be reproduced by empty randomness.
You can kind of see what they mean, and there’s probably not much point arguing with a probability mathematician (though there are valid questions about the abstract concept of infinity) – but it just seems wrong, doesn’t it? The first sentence or two, maybe – but the whole thing? Maybe some things will never happen by chance, even in ‘infinity’.
Then there’s the origin of DNA. Scientists say it can be explained by random chemical events occurring over a very long time. There are several different theories as to how this might have happened, but none of them sounds remotely plausible. As with the randomly reproduced Shakespeare, it just seems impossible.
I know it sounds like I’m on the slippery slope from intelligent design to creationism, but I’m not. I’m suggesting the crucial element in both cases is meaning.
Henry VI, Part One Scene I: Westminster Abbey. Dead March. Enter the funeral of King Henry V, attended on by Dukes of Bedford, Regent of France, Protector; and Exeter, Earl of Warwick, the Bishop of Winchester, heralds, etc. Bedford: Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night!
I’m yawning already, but that’s not the point. The works of Shakespeare, including that opening of the first play, exist because they have meaning. That meaning comes from human consciousness and its medium, language. The unique sequence of six million characters comprising that product of meaning could never be reproduced by chance, I’d suggest.
Wikipedia says DNA is a molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms.
Most DNA molecules consist of two strands coiled around each other to form a double helix. Both strands store the same biological information, which is replicated when the two strands separate. DNA molecules called chromosomes contain an organism’s genetic information.
Does that sound like something that came about by chemicals randomly bumping into each other?
Even if the random bumping went on for a very, very long time (analogous to infinity in the Shakespeare thought experiment), how – without the benefit of natural selection – could it have produced that massively complex self-reproducing molecule? It couldn’t.
Some sayRNA, a similar but single-strand molecule currently synthesised from DNA, appeared first, and DNA evolved from RNA. RNA is thought to be capable of self-replication. However, the appearance of RNA in a hypothesised pre-DNA ‘RNA world‘ presents the same problem.
So how could DNA – or RNA – have come into existence? Perhaps it happened because – humour me – the universe (or multiverse, if you like) has meaning, perhaps deriving from universal consciousness. Again, I’d suggest meaning is never the product of random processes.
Random mutation, of course, fueled the natural selection which led from the first living organisms to humans capable of pondering the meaning of meaning. However, randomness and meaning are worlds apart.
Perhaps they’re in a hierarchy, with randomness subject to probability, and probability subject to meaning.
Try as it may, maths and science can’t yet explain the origin of life, what consciousness is, or the ultimate nature of the universe.
I’m a big fan of maths and science. I’d love them to have an explanation for everything; but perhaps some things are unknowable. Perhaps maths, for all its fundamental beauty, is the scaffolding rather than the be-all and end-all.
Perhaps the edifice supported by that scaffolding is a multiverse made of consciousness and meaning.
If so, the meaning of life and the ‘purpose’ of DNA is to reflect multiversal meaning – a reflection exemplified by the works of Shakespeare.
I thought my post title was original – but, of course, it’s not. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism by Charles Ogden and Ivor Richards has been in print continuously since 1923.
The most recent publication is the critical edition prepared by Terrence Gordon as volume 3 of the 5-volume set C. K. Ogden & Linguistics (Routledge, 1995).
Wikipedia says the book proposes a contextual theory of signs: words and things are connected by signs that are the source of our power over the external world.
(I’d say: sod the signs, it’s language that has the power – the power of meaning.)
The book has apparently been used as a textbook in many fields, including linguistics, philosophy, language, cognitive science, semantics and semiotics.
Umberto Eco described it as ‘a seminal book, whose merit was to say certain things well in advance of its time’.
Shakespeare’s most famous love poem isn’t a love poem – it’s an advert. It’s beautifully written, but it’s a device to promote his bardic skills. His subject might as well be an unsculpted lump of clay.
In the late 1990s I went to Skyros, the Greek island known for its creative holiday resort.
The resort has the knack of getting famous people to teach classes there for free – for bed, board and the pleasure of being there. (Pop singer Toyah was there, teaching radio production – presumably a phase she went through.)
I did reciting Shakespeare with radical actor (and Bond baddie) Steven Berkoff. Our text was the famous Sonnet 18 – ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’
Studying it, I realised that, for all its beauty, it isn’t the love poem it’s supposed to be – it’s actually a paean of self-praise.
I put this to Berkoff over a beer on the terrace, but he was concerned about having left a notebook on the plane. He seemed disappointingly uninterested in my fascinating theory.
Everyone else also seems uninterested. At the time of writing this afterthought preamble (June 2022), my post’s had only 41 views, no Likes and no Comments. (After reading this, a friend took pity and added a Comment. Thanks, Nige.)
By (another!) comparison, my most-viewed post, Jackson Browne & Daryl Hannah (about the unfounded rumour of domestic abuse), has had over 50,000 views in about the same time. Obviously, the time’s out of joint!. 😉
Anyway…some 20 years after my beer with Berkoff, a 2016article in the UK Guardian on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death said Shakespeare’s sonnets show his belief that art can give immortality.
I remembered my Skyros epiphany. That’s true, I thought, and Sonnet 18 shows that in claiming immortality for his art, Shakespeare could be heartless and selfish – oddly so, for the writer of what’s supposed to be a wonderful love poem.
Shakespeare’s much-admired Sonnet 18 has a rapturous opening:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely…
But it doesn’t go on like that. Sonnet 18, digested:
You’re more lovely than a summer’s day at the moment, but soon you’ll wither and age. However, luckily for you, my brilliant poem about you will live forever.
Having alluded in detail and with cruel eloquence – ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May’ – to the lovely one’s imminent ageing (see below), Shakespeare gets to the point: the immortality of his poem.
Death shan’t brag, but the poet shall:
…thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st
The poem shows the writer’s love not for the supposed beloved, but for his own poetic skill in preserving their youthful beauty in his eternal lines. It’s Shakespeare, the self-aggrandising youth-fetishising bardic taxidermist!
The question then arises: did Shakespeare write the sonnet as himself, or as a persona?
Oxford University Shakespeare specialist Professor Jonathan Bate, in the Guardian article that prompted this post, wrote:
[Shakespeare] clearly believed that love is a powerful and complicated thing, that poetry is an effective way of exploring its many dimensions, and – if his lines are to be taken at face value – that creative art is a way of achieving a kind of immortality for the beloved and perhaps for creative artists themselves. But his lines are not necessarily to be taken at face value. The “I” who speaks a poem, even an intimate love poem, is not synonymous with the person who writes the line. All poets rejoice in creating a persona.
Just so. But Shakespeare, aged about 30 when he wrote Sonnet 18, was becoming a successful and popular writer who wanted social advancement for himself and his family. Why risk that by creating a persona so casually heartless?
However, if, on the other hand, Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 18 as himself, then how come he wrote such a disturbingly narcissistic poem?
Cambridge University Shakespeare specialist Professor Raphael Lyne, replying to my email about this post, said:
Can anything make the perfection last? It’s an offer – maybe a poem can. It’s also staking a claim, and aiming for a poem that will last forever. I think there is a selfish claim involved, but it’s a knowing exchange, not pretending that writers are innocent when they make memories last, because they gain too.
Good point. But whoever the ‘I’ is in ‘Shall I compare thee…’, whatever the writer’s motives, and however knowing the poem is, the problem is: if the writer loved the addressee of his poem, he’d say he’d always love them even when they got old and wrinkled.
Instead, he crows about how his precious sonnet will immortalise their youthful beauty. Sonnet 18’slanguage is beautiful but the message isn’t. Was Shakespeare a crazy, mixed-up 30-year-old? Did he have emotional deprivation disorder. Or was he just full of it?
Still being fair, can Shakespeare be given the benefit of the doubt about his poetry-plugging sonnet (the first of a series assuring the loved one poetry would preserve their beauty)?
Sonnet 18 seems heartless in saying, Never mind your lost beauty – it’ll live on in my timeless poem. (To which the appropriate response would be, ‘Well thanks for nothing’).
But perhaps Shakespeare was just being honest about a young person’s beauty and its inevitable fading. Perhaps such honesty would please a lover by reflecting their own feelings about their looks.
It might not please a childish romantic, but perhaps it’d comfort a mature young person.
So, Sonnet 18, re-digested (after a generous slug of the antacid of goodwill):
Sadly, your youthful loveliness will fade – but let me console you by preserving it in my eternal lines.
In that reading, the implication is:
You’ll lose your looks, but please accept my flawless poem as your consolation prize. I give you my love by giving you my art.
With extreme leniency and goodwill, Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18 can be seen as a heartfelt romantic gesture, rather than heartless PR.
But even then, it shows an uncharacteristic shallowness by addressing only the beloved’s skin-deep good looks, and pandering – perhaps with the desperation of an obsessed suitor – to the vanity of beautiful youth.
However you slice it, the sonnet’s richness of language obscures a fundamental poverty of meaning.
Other Shakespeare sonnets are more meaningful. They show the beloved as a real person – not just a pretty face. So perhaps emotional deprivation disorder (see above) is the wrong diagnosis. Perhaps, rather, the genius was on the autism spectrum – or bipolar.
Having scanned the sonnets (sorry – life’s too short), I’d say: they’re supposed to be love poems – but they’re actually dense and gloomy! They’re obsessed with desire, time and ageing. At times, they read (scan) like the diary of a mad man.
Perhaps Shakespeare was as sane and neurotypical as the next man (Christopher Marlowe). But the lavishly dressed emptiness of Sonnet 18 suggests there was something twisted about him.
This critique of Sonnet 18 as heartless self-promotion isn’t entirely original, of course – nothing written about Shakespeare can be.
However, most analyses which mention the self-praise also propagate the sonnet’s widespread but undeserved reputation as a great love poem.
This reputation rests entirely on the first line and a half. The whole 14-line poem hypnotises with dizzying imagery but the opening is especially ecstatic:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely…
It’s a brilliant start to a love poem – but that’s it. Instead of moving on to a lovingly sculpted likeness, the artist leaves us with a barely sculpted lump of clay. There’s no love for the addressee, only self-love for the poet.
After that lovely opening, it levels off with the dull ‘…and more temperate‘, then, although the enchanting language continues to mesmerise, it’s all relentlessly downhill:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d
And every fair from fair sometime declines
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d
Those six lines of doom, albeit beautifully written, cruelly overwhelm the opening enconium. Then comes the cocky twist:
But it’s OK. My brilliant poem (with its line and a half of praise) will make your loveliness last forever:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee
That astonishingly confident forecast of longevity has come true. Over 400 years later, the sonnet has not only survived – it’s world-famous.
By far the most popular of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, Sonnet 18 is famous because of its sublime opening, and because it’s beautifully written. But it’s beautifully written rubbish.
Millions laud it as a great love poem, but they’re wrong. They’re a bit like the townsfolk in the fable about a magical suit of new clothes made for a king.
The clothes don’t exist – they’re a confidence trick – but the townsfolk, wanting to believe the magic and not wanting to disrespect the king, go along with it.
He’s all together as naked as the day that he was born.
It’s not Shakespeare – it’s by award-winning Broadway songwriter Frank Loesser – but it’s the truth about the king’s supposed new clothes, and, in this (possibly overexcited) analogy, it’s the truth about Shakespeare’s supposed love poem.
Sonnet 18 is all mouth and no trousers.
(Yes, I know: it should be ‘all mouth and trousers’ – see my post All fur coat and trousers – but for once the misspoken version of that phrase is apt.)
I think you’re a bit hard on Will – you’re ignoring the stream of consciousness element in the poem. I.e: You’re as beautiful as a summer day. Hmm. Maybe not the best comparison after all because sometimes summer can be hot and unpleasant and then it doesn’t last very long even when it’s nice.
I took this to mean he was riffing on his metaphorical summer’s day and its pros and cons, without meaning to be cruel. But the poem is more carefully structured than that. It’s focussed on self-promotion.
Stream of consciousness is usually associated with more modern and less structured writing. Wikipedia suggests Laurence Sterne’s 1757 Tristram Shandy as the earliest example.
Shakespeare broke the rules and made them. He’s said to have used SOC in Macbeth. But can Sonnet 18’ssummers-day riff be seen as SOC?
In Sonnet 18 – the first of a series about poetry preserving beauty – Shakespeare briefly introduces a lovely young person, quickly moves on to how their loveliness will fade, and, having hammered that home in great detail, ends by trumpeting his poem’s immortality, bizarrely inviting the young person to share his exultation at their youthfull beauty being poetically embalmed.
There’s not much room there for stream-of-consciousness. I put this to Professor Buchanan. She replied:
I was using [SOC] rather loosely — more in the vein of “hmm, let me think about what I just said.”
I don’t want to be toohard on Will. Perhaps his summer’s-day riff can be seen – loosely – as a stream of consciousness rather than calculated cruelty.
He compares a lovely young person to a summer’s day, then – consciousness a-streaming – realises his charming metaphor actually leads to thoughts of ageing. Oops! He offers his ageless poem as loving consolation.
soothfairy 