The extended version of the poem was found hidden in a 17th-century manuscript.
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 remains one of the best-known poems on love in the English language, its steely reverence for marital commitment long making it a wedding favorite.
It is not a sweet or sentimental poem. It offers love as unmoved by time or tempest, a force that will endure "to the edge of doom." To some experiencing the English Civil War in the mid-1600s, however, doom may not have seemed abstract, and Shakespeare's words held an entirely different meaning.
This is a conclusion drawn by Leah Veronese, a researcher at Oxford University, in an article published in The Review of English Studies in February. Last year, while sifting through centuries-old hand-written manuscripts in Oxford's Bodleian Library, Veronese uncovered something unusual: a revised version of Sonnet 116. Shakespeare's opening and final couplet had been changed and an additional seven lines had been added.
The adapted sonnet had been made into a song set to music by Henry Lawes, a leading English songwriter of the mid-17th century. Though the Bodleian Library version only offers the text, the music belongs in a book of songs in the New York Public Library. One practical reason for the added lines, Oxford noted in an announcement, may simply be to create more verses to be sung.
The reason it had never been noticed before, Veronese thinks, is that the catalogue doesn't mention Shakespeare and the first lines (often used to index texts) had been changed from "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments; love is not love" to the far sterner "Self blinding error seize all those minds / Who with false appellations call that love."
The altered sonnet was found among the papers of Elias Ashmole, the founder of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, and dated to a period of extreme political turbulence in England when those in favor of the monarchy, the royalists, politicked and pitched battle against those who opposed it, the parliamentarians.
Ashmole was a committed royalist and the poem was found alongside politically sensitive texts, including banned Christmas carols and satirical poems on English political events from the 1640s. With this in mind, Veronese argued, the poem's focus shifts from romantic constancy to political loyalty. The royalist cause becomes the "ever-fixèd mark", the "star" that guides errant ships, and "the self-blinding error" the parliamentarian move to dissolve the monarchy.
"Like all good cover versions," Veronese wrote in the article. "Lawes's setting of Sonnet 116 is transformative, leaving its own signature on the sonnet and the history of Shakespearean reception."
The discovery challenges the current academic consensus that Shakespeare's sonnets didn't gain broad public attention until the late 1700s. First published in 1609, the collection of 154 sonnet was a commercial dud, a fate echoed in a 1640 edition. The Ashmole adaptation shows that, in certain circles at least, the bard's poems had resonance.
Given few figures have been more exhaustively researched and written about than Shakespeare, it offers scholars hope of further discoveries, Veronese believes.
"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."