The Charmed Pot: Sonnet 76

The Charmèd Pot

Let’s take a look at Sonnet 76, one of those more mysterious gems:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

Now, Solomon has always suspected that Shakespeare used some substances to help him with that old imagination factor that his outré language sense required. But Solomon does not think the Bard confined his indulgences to mere alcohol.

You see, Sonnet 76 mentions “a noted weed” that he keeps invention in. What on earth was he referring to? And in Macbeth, the famous ingredients of the witches’ potion are thrown in “the charmed pot,” and then, lo and behold, a hallucinogenic vision emerges.

Now, do we really think this is all just coincidence? That such musings are merely the product of OUR over-active imaginations, perhaps even a projected wish-fulfillment? Solomon thinks not. He thinks that our Bard did indeed indulge himself with smoking or ingesting the loco weed, and Sonnet 76 is his announcement of this fact.

Let’s not forget that an intellect as profound as his was surely capable of disguising the meaning of what he was saying, of inserting sly, overt, but ambiguous references to his peculiar little vices. And he surely would have delighted in parading his sins in front of the entire world with the knowledge that, though his sins could be seen by all, they could be proved by none.

Solomon believes that all geniuses of wit indulge in this perverse game. He is remind of one of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous stories, “The Purloined Letter.” In this old detective story, the police must find a letter that they know is in an apartment, but, after ripping the place apart, they cannot find. It is up to M. Dupin, Poe’s detective, to deduce that sometimes the best way to hide something is to put it right in front of your nose. In this case, the letter is right on the mantle, a place so obvious that it is overlooked.

Solomon believes that Shakespeare hid things—his identity, his sins, his peccadilloes—in plain sight where no one could possibly think to find such things. Surely “compounds strange” are other drugs that he would have had access to but chose not to use, sticking with his “noted weed.”

If disreputable drug use is laid out for us, what else might be sitting right in front of us? What other sins of the master are laid bare for us to see, if only we task ourselves to admit that the possibility that presents itself is really there? Our bard was nothing if not vain, arrogant, and so cocksure of his superior intellect that he could not only walk on the edge of the moral parapet but dance on it and not fall off.