Do you remember the poem Marianne recites in Sense and Sensibility? “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediment; love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds…” It’s Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, about which a very interesting discovery was made earlier this year.

Dr. Leah Veronese of Oxford University uncovered a copy of the sonnet among the papers of Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), the founder of Britain’s first public museum, which bears his name. The sonnet was found in a “miscellany,” a handwritten collection of texts by different authors. Shakespeare is not mentioned in the catalogue description, which was compiled in the 19th century. The fact that the first line was changed to “Self blyndeing Error seize all those minds” is probably why it was overlooked all these years.

This copy of the sonnet has seven additional lines and the opening lines and final couplet are altered. However, it is not the only manuscript of that version; another one is found in the Drexel Collection of the New York Public Library. The adaptation was set to music by composer Henry Lawes (1596-1662), who also wrote Psalm tunes and set many cavalier poems to music. In the Drexel manuscript Lawes’ score is included along with the text. The sonnet was probably expanded to create more verses to sing, but who adapted the text remains unknown.

Interestingly, the changes in the text also lend themselves to a political reading of the poem. (You can read the whole poem here.) Veronese writes, “The new copy of Sonnet 116 speaks to the political repurposing of Shakespeare by Royalists during (at least) the early 1640s.” The focus has changed from a reflection on love to a consideration of loyalty and the ability to discern truth from error.

The context of the manuscript is also enlightening. Elias Ashmole was a staunch Royalist and the miscellany includes his own panegyric [great word!] on Charles II (“Sol in Ascendente”) as well as poems by other Royalists and poems about Christmas, at a time when Parliament frowned upon the celebration of the holiday. “In the context of Ashmole’s collection, Lawes’ setting of Sonnet 116 reads as a political love-song in praise of Royalist political constancy during political turmoil,” Veronese writes.

During the Interregnum (1649-1660) theatres were closed and public musical performances were prohibited by both the Rogues Ban of 1649 and the Vagrants Ban of 1657. However songs from Shakespeare’s plays circulated during this period and Henry Lawes was one of the former court musicians who survived by organizing private performances. After the Restoration he regained court employment as a composer.

I’ll conclude with Veronese’s own closing words in her article for The Review of English Studies: “From the perspective of manuscript studies, however, this copy of Sonnet 116 in the Bodleian Manuscript, tantalizingly raises the possibility of other famous texts which might be lying unseen in unexpected forms in the midst of other miscellanies and manuscripts.”

Source

“A New Copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: A Cavalier Cover Version” by Leah S. Veronese (The Review of English Studies, Feb 3, 2025)