Opinion The Third Edit: Rewriting Shakespeare, turning love into politics

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds — but what if these lines themselves find alteration? William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which speaks of the “marriage of true minds” and love as “an ever-fixèd mark”, is dear to romantic hearts today. A generation after the poet’s death, however, it was subject to cavalier treatment. Literally — think of the Cavaliers, the royalist faction that fought and ultimately lost to the Roundheads, or parliamentarians, in the English Civil War of the mid-17th century. It turns out that an unidentified person wrote a Cavalier version of Sonnet 116, in which “ever-fixèd” love means unshakeable loyalty to the king and the royalist cause.

This version of the poem was hiding in plain sight in a manuscript in Oxford’s Bodleian Library — with even the initial lines altered, and no mention of Shakespeare in the 19th-century catalogue describing its contents — until it was discovered by a doctoral researcher. It was found amid a collection of royalist literature from the 1640s, rebelling against a puritan-dominated age when Christmas was banned and toasting the king was illegal. To anyone familiar with the original sonnet, it’s a shocking genre shift: Stand aside, lovers, let’s talk “heretics”, “true scripture” and “flaming martyrs”. From the grave, Shakespeare was dragooned into fighting for the Cavalier cause even as a much-alive John Milton rooted for the other side and wrote panegyrics to the parliamentarian general and later dictator Oliver Cromwell.

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The discovery sheds light on the reception of Shakespeare in the early days and speaks to the living nature of texts and the irrepressible inventiveness of propagandists. Is it still Shakespeare? In an era before intellectual property, an author could be more than himself. Whether it’s still good poetry is quite another question.