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William Shakespeare's "Sonnet 126" is formally aberrational because its terminal couplet appears as two empty line, enclosed by italicized parentheses. Shakespeare's "missing couplet," an authorized working element in a playfully unique poem, warns Cupid or any handsome "boy" to fear the concept of nothingness.

Shakespeare's SONNET 126

O Thou my louely Boy who in thy power,

Doest hould times fickle glasse, his fickle, hower:

Who hast by wayning growne, and therein shou'st,

Thy louers withering, as thy sweet selfe grow'st

If Nature (Soueraine misteres ouer wrack)

As thou goest onwards still will plucke thee backe,

She keepes thee to this purpose, that her skill.

May time disgrace, and wretched mynuit kill.

Yet feare her O thou minnion of her pleasure,

She may detaine, but not till keepe her tresure!

Her Audite (though delayd) answer'd must be,

And her Quietus is to render thee.

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 126-shown above as it appears in the 1609 Quarto, the unique source for the sonnets-is formally aberrational because its terminal "couplet" appears as two empty lines, enclosed by italicized parentheses. Oddly, too, its substantive part comprises six rhymed pentameter couplets, instead of the usual three quatrains with alternating rhyme. Figuring out this poem, with its puzzling structural features, is complicated by scholarly uncertainty about whether the details of the Quarto reflect authorization. Editor Stephen Booth is a current authoritative voice:

[Sonnet 126] is not a sonnet in any technical sense; it is a sonnet in that it is a short lyric (note, however that its logical organization is by quatrains). The Q printer appears to have expected a sonnet to have at least fourteen lines whatever its rhyme pattern; he bracketed two final blank lines, apparently to indicate that he thought something was missing. (The poem's sudden quietus after twelve lines is-probably accidentally-an illustrative analogy that demonstrates the justice of the warning the poem offers.)1

Though trying to explicate two apparently nonexistent lines may seem odd, that is exactly my purpose here. My thesis is that the "empty couplet" in Sonnet 126 is an authorized detail, not just a printer's add-on effort to regularize the poem, and as I shall try to show, is consistent in tone with Shakespeare's known methodology in the Quarto; it is also a unique kind of pictographic communication-in a gamelike poem full of subtextual wit and bawdry.

Shakespeare's routine tendencies toward spin-off humor and "puerile" playfulness in the sonnets is well documented. Sonnets 135 and 136 include some twenty name-puns on "will" (cf. "will" here in line 6)-ten of which are in the emphatic form "Will" (analogous to "Quietus" here in line 12). (It may be original to observe that the emphatic initial capitals on the Quarto page where 135 and 136 occur spell out an eye-catching acrostic: WIT!) Shakespeare's routine spelling of "hour" as "hower" (for instance, in Sonnet 5.1and here in line 2) and many hundreds of small details in the Quarto point to a playfully iconoclastic spirit at work, managing minims carefully.

More specifically supporting my case for authorization are features of the only other two poems in the Quarto besides 126 that are formally aberrational and thus similarly problematic, Sonnets 99 and 145. In each of these other cases it is impossible to explain away the poem's violation of the conventional sonnet structure as some printer's invention. Sonnet 145 is odd because it is written in tetrameter (not pentameter) lines; surely these are the poet's own. As Booth observes, there are even insistent puns in 145 on the poet's wife's name, both on "Anne" and on "Hathaway":

13. hate away Andrew Gurr persuasively suggests a pun on "Hathaway" ("Shakespeare's First Poem: Sonnet 145" in Essays in Criticism, XXI [July 1971], 221-26). (Since And was regularly pronounced "an" [see Kokeritz, 271], there may be a pun on Shakespeare's wife's first name as well; line 14 may have sounded like "Anne saved my life . .")2

Here the Stratford-focused playfulness inside the poem shows the author's gamy spirit at work. Apparently "Will" just decided to shape his materials a little differently in this particular poem.

The other formally odd sonnet text in the Quarto is 99, which has an "extra" fifteenth line that turns the usual opening quatrain into a quintet (rhyming ababa). I believe it is original to show how the anomalous first line in Sonnet 99 actually embeds various puns on its own intrusion, including a plausible Roman numeral play (IC = 99, the poem's rubric) as well as puns that joke about how the poem's "forward violate" (the "disruptive opening statement," the "preface") obtrudes to "violate" the form-and tease and bother the reader. To hear these puns, one must regard the line as a kind of flexible phonic code, where Shakespeare's capacity for cacophonous "symphonic composition"-that is, for hearing divergent concurrent meanings in overlaid fashion-is at work:

THe forward violet thus did I chide; The "forward violate"[disrudtive preface] thus did [the reader's?] eye chide [...see hide].

thus did [No ) 99 [= IC] hide.

Thief, or "word violate"- ...thus did I cheat

[OED 1590

This ["f"' = eyepun"S"] "o'er-word" violate thus did itch [the] hide.

Since in each of the othe two aberrant poems (99 and 145) the content shows tbat the poem's unusUSI al form Is authorially managed, it seems much more plausible-even without examining the individual case very closely-to assume detailed authorization in Sonnet 126 than to assume accident. If we assume (as we must) that the odd, six-couplet structure of 126 is authorized, then logic leads us to think that any other insistently eccentric formal feature might be authorized too; the poet, as much as his printer, would have been uneasy with a poem two lines too short.

The truth, I think, is that Booth's own observation supports a conclusion opposite from his suggestion that the illustrative Quietus occurs "probably accidentally." The poem mentions "her [in context, Nature's] Quietus" and immediately presents an "artful" (though ironically "unnatural") formal quietus. Surely one suspects authorization in such an apt conceit. We first think of a "quietus" as "death" (OED 1602)-here, what Nature offers the "lovely boy" of the poem. Thus a "terminal blank space" nicely depicts eternity; its two-part structure even "renders" efficiently such ineffable dualities as heaven or hell, continued existence or nothingness, body and soul-all the various dichotomized states into which Nature at last is determined to render us all.

I propose that the last two substantive lines of 126 (i.e., 11-12) deserve much closer analysis than Booth or anyone has given them, because their unexplored punning details-like those in Sonnet 99.1-indicate conscious wit and authorized manipulation of witty elements.

First, the couplet is not only the pictographic "Quietus" of line 12 but also the "delayed Oddity" mentioned in line 11: "Audite (though delayd) anwer'd mult be." (Here even the parentheses seem like a predictive pun.) One meaning of this line is, "My reader must try to explain my terminal `Oddity."' Another pun occurs in the verb "to render" (12), which has three relevant meanings (OED). The first, "to repeat" (1565), seems connected with the punning phrase "two rendered he" (12) and with the couplet's "repetition." But the other two meanings are more interesting: "to melt (fat, etc.)" (late ME), and to "reproduce or represent, esp. by artistic means; to depict" (1599). These meanings join the tangled double entendres in "Enter [Endure, End here, And hear] Quietuses two [to] render thee" to suggest such readings of line 12 as "You're suffering melt-down over this couplet" and "Nature's two 'Quietuses' intrude here to depict you."

Given that "render" does mean "illustrate" or "reproduce for the eye," one explores the pictographic potentialities of 126.13-14 as a complex visual conceit, unique in the Quarto. The first clue that these "shapes" do indeed "depict" something real comes early in 126, in the phrase "time's fickle glass" (2): This final "rendering" shows us a minimal hour-glass! The concurrent detail "sickle hour (pun: 'whore')" (2) makes us see "sickle-shaped" curves with the hourglass bulges also picturing, humorously, a (fat) woman. If "[Nature's] Quietuses two render [represent]" the reader, each of us beholds an unpromising picture: time, with its invisible sands flowing. An out-ofshape body. An empty, unreadable eternity.

Because "to render" puns on "to rend err[or]"-that is, "to hack a flaw into pieces" (OED)-maybe the two pictographs in lines 13-14, as an "error rent," should be rejoined as ( ) C ) to show us a set of "cheeks"-those on our face, or the buttocks, even labia.

The last suggestion grows out of puns in line 11 and elsewhere (especially 3, 5, and 10) that identify the rather vague female of the poem ("Nature") with the poet's wife. Lines 11-12 encode such jokes as "Anne S. weird must be, / Anne dear, Quietuses two render thee"; and "Anne's weird, muffed." Other "Anne" puns include these: "sour Anne, mistress, our wrack" (5); "Is our Anne-mistress our wrack?" (5); "She mated, Anne" (10); "Her oddity... Anne's 'sword' muffed be" (11, a phallic/pudendal joke); "Hear [Here] oddity, Anne's word, muffed [muffled] be" (ll); and "Who hast by wayning grown, Anne, therein [that is, in the couplet] show'st" (3, with "Who Hast-byway" a nameplay). The "rendering" in 126, then, is in one sense a minimal wifely portrait. "Anne-her 'quietuses' two rend, earthy [tore, end earthy]" (12) is a concurrent pun that suggests, "Tear into Anne's unmentionable `ends."'

Because an "Audit" was originally a "hearing" (cf. L. auditus [OED]), one ironic idea here is that something silent (like the missing couplet) can be "heard" and "must be answered"-or can be "Anne's word." The pun "End here" (And her, 12) signals the poet's early ending in line 12, not 14. A different kind of runic wit occurs in the punning conceit "Enter Quietuses to [two]" where two abstractions-the empty couplet lines-hover like hooded figures in a medieval morality.

Astoundingly, the poet's initial-letter acrostic sequence in this playfully "TIAS-ing" poem communicates subtextual wit that has relevance, an authoritative ring, and even a sort of signature:

ODW TIAS MY SHA ((

Adieu-tease may shake [a nameplay on "Shakespeare"]-[or] shock, see.

Odd, witty ass [the pictographic "buttocks," bifurcated and tilted] may shake.

Odd wit eye, ass, ms. hack ["cut at with blows" (ME)].

Ode witty has mistake [with the word "misspelled" as MYSHACC].

Odd wit: [ ]iasmus hack [Chl. (a "hacked" pun on "chiasmus," figurative reversal)

Ought eyes ms. hack? Odd wit is my "SHACC" [Ms. Hag = Dark Lady].

Given all the previously "unaudited" features in 126, I am certain that Shakespeare's "missing couplet" is an authorized working element in a playfully unique poem, the one just before the 28 "Perverse Mistress" texts. In Sonnet 126 the poet warns Cupid or any handsome "boy" to "fear [Nature's] 'O"' (9), her "Zero," her nothingness-with overtones of misogyny in the pudendal joke. Each auditor or reader must "answer Nature's Audit." Nature's "Quietus" will "render" us all at last. "Enter Quietuses to rent, earthy," means, at bottom, "Explore awhile this pair of mounded graves."