Shakespeare’s puns on the word.
It was not only in the sonnets that Shakespeare—almost invariably with a glance at its sensual significance—rang the changes on this many-faced verbal token. In his earliest play, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (II. i. 97-101), after the princess has tauntingly assured the King of Navarre that he will break his vow to avoid women’s society, the king replies, ‘Not for the world, fair madam, by my will’ (i.e. willingly). The princess retorts ‘Why will (i.e. sensual desire) shall break it (i.e. the vow), will and nothing else.’ In ‘Much Ado’ (V. iv. 26 seq.), when Benedick, anxious to marry Beatrice, is asked by the lady’s uncle ‘What’s your will?’ he playfully lingers on the word in his answer. As for his ‘will,’ his ‘will’ is that the uncle’s ‘goodwill may stand with his’ and Beatrice’s ‘will’—in other words that the uncle may consent to their union. Slender and Anne Page vary the tame sport when the former misinterprets the young lady’s ‘What is your will?’ into an inquiry into the testamentary disposition of his property. To what depth of vapidity Shakespeare and contemporary punsters could sink is nowhere better illustrated than in the favour they bestowed on efforts to extract amusement from the parities and disparities of form and meaning subsisting between the words ‘will’ and ‘wish,’ the latter being in vernacular use
as a diminutive of the former. Twice in the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (I. iii. 63 and IV. ii. 96) Shakespeare almost strives to invest with the flavour of epigram the unpretending announcement that one interlocutor’s ‘wish’ is in harmony with another interlocutor’s ‘will.’
It is in this vein of pleasantry—‘will’ and ‘wish’ are identically contrasted in Sonnet cxxxv.—that Shakespeare, to the confusion of modern readers, makes play with the word ‘will’ in the sonnets, and especially in the two sonnets (cxxxv.-vi.) which alone speciously justify the delusion that the lady is courted by two, or more than two, lovers of the name of Will.
Arbitrary and irregular use of italics by Elizabethan and Jacobean printers.
One of the chief arguments advanced in favour of this interpretation is that the word ‘will’ in these sonnets is frequently italicised in the original edition. But this has little or no bearing on the argument. The corrector of the press recognised that Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. largely turned upon a simple pun between the writer’s name of ‘Will’ and the lady’s ‘will.’ That fact, and no other, he indicated very roughly by occasionally italicising the crucial word. Typography at the time followed no firmly fixed rules, and, although ‘will’ figures in a more or less punning sense nineteen times in these sonnets, the printer bestowed on the word the distinction of italics in only ten instances, and those were selected arbitrarily. The italics indicate the obvious equivoque, and indicate it imperfectly. That is the utmost that can be laid to their credit. They give no hint of the far more complicated punning that is alleged by those who believe that ‘Will’ is used now as the name of the writer, and now as that of one or more of the rival suitors. In each of the two remaining sonnets that have been forced into the service of the theory, Nos. cxxxiv. and cxliii., ‘will’ occurs once only; it alone is italicised in the second sonnet in the original edition, and there, in my opinion, arbitrarily and without just cause. [419]
The conceits of sonnets cxxxv-vi. interpreted.
The general intention of the complex conceits of Sonnets cxxxv. and cxxxvi. becomes obvious when we bear in mind that in them Shakespeare exploits to the uttermost the verbal coincidences which are inherent in the Elizabethan word ‘will.’ ‘Will’ is the Christian name of the enslaved writer; ‘will’ is the sentiment with which the lady inspires her worshippers; and ‘will’ designates stubbornness as well as sensual desire. These two characteristics, according to the poet’s reiterated testimony, are the distinguishing marks of the lady’s disposition. He often dwells elsewhere on her ‘proud heart’ or ‘foul pride,’ and her sensuality or ‘foul faults.’ These are her ‘wills,’ and they make up her being. In crediting the lady with such constitution Shakespeare was not recording any definite observation or experience of his own, but was following, as was his custom, the conventional descriptions of the disdainful mistress common to all contemporary collections of sonnets. Barnabe Barnes asks the lady celebrated in his sonnets, from whose ‘proud disdainfulness’ he suffered,
Why dost thou my delights delay,
And with thy cross unkindness kills (sic)
Mine heart, bound martyr to thy wills?
Barnes answers his question in the next lines: