Anne Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and free will
This is a draft excerpt from my forthcoming book “Shakespeare is a Woman (Anne Shakespeare’s feminism and her Sonnets).” (yet to be fully edited so any “mistakes” in grammar I fully own!)
An example, in what I think is a pivotal sonnet, number 129, can illustrate Anne’s belief in free will.
Sonnet 129
Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait, (7)
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Made in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreme,
A bliss in proof and proud and very woe,
Before a joy proposed behind a dream,
All this the world well knows yet none knows well,
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
I analysed this sonnet in Summers (2021, pp. 189-191) which focussed on the aspect of lust alone (and as evidence, given Anne as author, that William could not be considered as homosexual). Here I want to use this sonnet (as is possible for all sonnets to take multiple meanings from) to illustrate Anne’s conception of free will. As the sonnet is painfully pointing out, lust is a desire (in this sonnet, a desire by men) to achieve their goal of satiating their lust, once aroused by woman. While Anne is not specifically calling out the lust that she sees William as having toward the dark lady, it is an obvious allusion to him and the effect that lust has on the person lusting after another, and the effect of lust on the person once having achieved their goal of consummating their lustful intent and desire. Anne immediately identifies what effect lust has, ‘Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame’ (l. 1). That is, lust causes ‘shame’ and the price one pays for this ‘shame’ is the cost it imposes on one’s ‘Spirit’. But where and how does free will enter this equation? What Anne is depicting throughout the sonnet is the effect that lust causes and the obvious antidote to this effect is to choose, right from the start, to not allow oneself to be drawn into the lustful pursuit or consummation of their desires. Especially knowing, as Anne amply demonstrates, what the consequence of consummating their desire will be on their ‘Spirit’ which is ‘shame’ and a falling from a previous heavenly state (l. 14). If we return to what both Erasmus and Luther were stating in their arguments on what constitutes free will, we can see that what Anne is claiming as free will occurs in both arguments. That is, we have the Erasmian argument that man is responsible for his actions, but also the Lutheran argument that Satan drives the “fallen” human to make choices which are sinful, evil and do not lead to ‘heaven’ (l. 14). As Rupp & Watson (2006, pp. 16-17) note, that for Luther (in this long quote),
“Then came the Fall. Man fell into the clutches of Satan, who impelled him to make a declaration of independence over against God, persuading him that this meant freedom. How it was possible for the Evil Spirit to supplant the Holy Spirit in man, Luther cannot explain, though he is quite clear that it was not because man had “free choice” between God and Satan. He therefore simply takes man’s fallenness as fact, and understands it to mean that man is no longer moved by the Holy Spirit but by an entirely opposite Spirit. Man has turned from faith in God to unbelief (distrust) and for a thoroughly wrong and unnatural one. In Pauline terms, having begun in the Spirit, he has ended in the “flesh”; he is no longer spiritual but carnal; and this applies to the whole man, not just some part of him, so that it can be said that everything about him —body, soul, and spirit—is “flesh.”
Of course, fallen man remains man; he is not a mere animal, and still less a devil. He retains his powers of reason and will, and he still has some knowledge of God and his law. But both his reasoning and his willing are radically corrupt, being governed from the start by the false premises dictated by Satan. Satan is the antithesis of God, who is love, selfless and self-giving. Satan is the very spirit of egoism and self-love; and it is by this spirit that fallen man is moved and governed. In consequence, whatever as it were, through a distorting mirror. When the will of God runs counter to his own, it seems to him arbitrary and tyrannical, and if he does not simply flout it in blind self-assertion, he complies with it in calculating self-interest, with an eye to escaping punishment or gaining reward. He acts thus of necessity, inasmuch as he has no “will of his own” over against the Evil Spirit by which he is inwardly moved; and just for that reason he acts voluntarily, not under any coercion against his will. But he does not act freely, that is, with the spontaneity of genuine love; nor can he do so unless and until he is set free by divine grace.
Freedom, in the full and proper sense of the term, belongs in Luther’s view only to God. God is free as being subject to no other power whatsoever, and as acting therefore solely according to his own will. God’s will, however, is in no way capricious or arbitrary, but consistently righteous and good. For what God wills is consonant with his nature, which in Christ—and even in creation, rightly understood—is revealed as love. This it is that shows what real freedom means. It is the spontaneity of a love that is neither evoked by nor proportioned to the qualities of its objects—quite unlike fallen man’s loving, which is ordinarily both evoked and measured by what its objects are thought to deserve. God therefore acts with absolute freedom; he does not simply react, as men in their bondage to Satan do.”
As can be seen man, once “fallen” is subject to Satan’s machinations and that through these Satanic machinations, he is not free. It is only through opening himself to God’s grace can man enter the Kingdom of eternal life; until then man is in bondage to Satan’s desires, desires which are “carnal” in nature, such as lust and its actions and consequences. But where is man’s free will located in this lustful pursuit? According to Anne free will is to be found in man’s ‘reason’ (ll. 6-7); and this is where Erasmus claimed that free will emanates from, “reason, from which the will is born” (Rupp and Watson [2006, p. 48]).
Just as an aside to analysing this sonnet I have kept the original wording as it appears in the 1609 Quarto where in l. 9 it reads (in the original) ‘Made in pursuit and in possession so,’ whereas most editors change ‘Made” to ‘Mad’. My reason for keeping the original wording is that it makes more sense in that what Anne is speaking of is lust making the person ‘mad’ by his pursuit of it; that is, the person is ‘Made’ mad by his pursuit of his lustful object and through his ‘possession’ of it. Yes, he might be ‘Mad’ even in his pursuit of his lust, but I suspect that what Anne is driving at is that prior to him becoming ‘mad’ with his desire he may very well appear “normal”, and it is through his pursuit that he is made to appear as if his lust has ‘Made’ him ‘mad’. And this is another example that Anne is pointing to regarding someone exercising their free will; a man does not have to pursue his lustful desires through to their conclusion (consummation of their desire with the lusted after object), he could have chosen to stop and chosen not to pursue the woman and in so doing not ‘Made’ himself ‘mad’ with desire. That he has chosen to pursue his lust is a free choice he has made, and the Lutheran fact that he cannot stop himself is not down to God, but to Satan, but in doing so he has given up his claim to “heaven”. Or, alternatively, man, in pursuing his lust is acting freely because he has Erasmian freedom of will, to choose his actions. But ultimately, what Anne is stressing is that in choosing to pursue his lust (whether it is an Erasmian or Lutheran choice), he alone is morally responsible for his choice and must take responsibility for the consequence of that choice, which in this case is ‘To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.’ (l. 14), and which ends in ‘shame’ that is, a cost born by one’s ‘Spirit’ (l. 1).
However, what Anne is also driving at is that while everybody has ontological freedom purely through the fact of being human (regardless of gender), each and every one of humanity is subject to the facticity of their body; that is, they are situated in the ambiguous position of being both ontologically free to choose but at the same time they are immanently situated through the facticity of their body. And thus, they are bound by the situation that their body finds itself in, which can also be used to describe the position of one who is driven by lust; they have ontological freedom to choose (to stop or to pursue). However, situated in a body that may be stronger than the desire for freedom to stop they are then at the mercy of their lust (see Summers, 2022, for an explanation of the tri-partite selfhood of body, spirit, and soul). But this does not, firstly, mean that they could not stop if they wished to; secondly, the fact they did not stop but acted on their desires and lust is also a choice they make and thirdly, having made this choice, they are now responsible either way (if they did stop versus not stopping) for the moral consequence, both to themselves and to others for their choice.
In this sonnet Anne is also pointing toward that of transcendence and immanence. That is, in the man’s lust for the woman we can see his privileged position of exercising his right for transcendence, his privileged position as the dominant male. Yet, on the other hand, there is no mention of the woman who is the object of his desire and lust; she is reduced to the status of an object, to immanence. It is the man who is expressing his right to exercise his agency for free will; to be able to pursue his desires uninhibited for any responsibility of ethical or moral guilt, as it is his prerogative to do this. That ethical and moral guilt may arise from the consummation of his lust is not, initially, a barrier strong enough to stop him. However, for the woman, she is reduced to immanence, to be the recipient of his desires, of his lust, without any recourse to exercising her agency for ontological freedom and to not just resist his attempts at seduction but to make the choice for herself as to whether she wants or desires his lustful interest in her. Even when the woman (in this case Anne herself) spells out the consequences of lust which is that lust is ‘perjured, murderous, bloody full of blame,/ Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,/ Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight’ (ll. 3-5). That is, who is to blame for this state? None other than the woman herself ‘bloody full of blame’ who it would appear is blamed for inciting the man to lust through, presumably, her body, but perhaps also through her behaviour, her gestures, her being an object. That we are here talking of WS and the dark lady, may add some context to the situation; that it is the dark lady inciting WS to his lustful desires. But even if this is the case, it does not follow automatically that WS must act on these desires. And as Anne is pointing out, this lust that WS appears to have for the dark lady is not something spontaneous but appears to have been happening over some time, ‘Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,/ Past reason hated as a swallowed bait,/ On purpose laid to make the taker mad.’ (ll. 6-8). Anne is here accusing the dark lady of consciously laying herself as ‘bait’ to entice WS to pursue her. Is Anne making a statement to the effect that some women consciously set out to entrap a man? This raises two questions; firstly, did the dark lady know what she was doing? And secondly, what was her motivation for entrapping WS (if this was her intention)? Was the dark lady knowingly entrapping WS to cause Anne grief at losing WS or was the dark lady trying to secure WS for herself? But let it be said, man in his pursuit of a woman is not so blindly led on but as seeing this pursuit as a privilege; both as his privileged position as man allows him but also as a privilege for the woman that he feels that she is worth pursuing. That is, I believe that what Anne is demonstrating here is that of the privileged position of man qua woman, and the situation of woman qua man. As de Beauvoir (1949, p. 17) points out,
“Every individual concerned with justifying his [sic] existence experiences his existence as an indefinite need to transcend himself. But what singularly defines the situation of woman is that being, like all humans, an autonomous freedom, she discovers and chooses herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as Other: an attempt is made to freeze her as an object and doom her to immanence, since her transcendence will be forever transcended by another essential and sovereign consciousness. Woman’s drama lies in this conflict between the fundamental claim of every subject, which always posits itself as essential, and the demands of a situation that constitutes her as inessential.”
The woman lusted after (here, the dark lady) is constituted by the male whose lust he is trying to satiate as a mere object through which to satisfy his lust, and in so doing is positing the woman as object; an object for his lust to not just settle on as “worthy” of his attention, but also placing her in the position of immanence, the receiver of his attention, not as a freely chosen choice, ‘Had , having, and in quest, to have extreme’ (l. 10). And it is in the language Anne is using that posits the man as the dominate one; language imbued with meaning referring to the woman being “taken”, of being ‘had’ and of being pursued like an animal and being reduced, therefore, to animality, of being an object, something to be ‘had’, with no thought of recognising in the Other any consciousness, or any freedom to choose their own action, overridden by male desire. Ultimately, Anne’s vision for this sonnet was twofold: to depict male privilege and to show woman’s immanence. And like Erasmus, Anne takes the road of portraying man’s small attempt at exercising his free will, an attempt that sees him failing at controlling himself, but this ties his failure to control himself to a much larger question of Christian piety; that the shame arising from man’s failure to exercise his free will and control his carnal urges comes at a cost to his ‘Spirit’, even when he knows that such actions (and failure to control himself) mean that he will ‘shun the heaven’ that self-control and thus moral responsibility would preserve. But, to reiterate, his lack of control ‘leads’ him to the ‘hell’ which is the ‘shame’ such actions create for his ‘Spirit’.
That is, one cannot treat an individual (or a collective) as an end; the individual must be treated (and seen) as an end in themselves. That is, treating someone as a means to an end means that the person being so treated is denied any free will; they cannot choose their own existence because someone else is manipulating them for their own ends (the person doing the manipulating has in mind the achievement of their ends, their goal) and thus the person manipulating has a definite purpose or goal in mind and uses another individual (or collective) in attempting to achieve that purpose or goal. Which points to a man’s desire or lust for a woman being of such an order; in his lust he is treating the woman as an end, and in doing so denies the woman any agency in the sense that he is wanting to have her give up her agency to exercise her free will and to acquiesce to his demands to satisfy his lust/desire. That is, she is expected to give up her agency to make her own decisions to satisfy his desire and lust; she becomes a means to his ends. And such a position is untenable for both an Erasmian and a Lutheran conception of free will (individual or God).
