“Secret Shakespeare: Astonishing Discovery of a Previously Unseen Sonnet Sparks Debate Among Scholars!”
The discovery has reshaped researchers’ beliefs about the popularity of Shakespeare’s sonnets and introduced a rare example of how they were repurposed to fit a political agenda.
Discovering A Strange Copy Of ‘Sonnet 116’ In A 400-Year-Old Collection
Billy Wilson/Flickr One of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, where the handwritten copy of the sonnet was found.
Leah Veronese, a researcher at the University of Oxford, was sifting through manuscripts in the archives of the school’s Bodleian Libraries when she came across a handwritten copy of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” — but it had been greatly altered.
“As I was leafing through the manuscript, the poem struck me as an odd version of ‘Sonnet 116,’” Veronese stated in a press release from Oxford.
University of OxfordLeah Veronsese with the manuscript.
Published in 1609, Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” explores the constancy of love. Its first few lines read:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds…
In this recently-discovered handwritten copy, the sonnet reads:
Self blinding error seize all those minds
Who with false appellations call that love
Which alters when it alteration finds…
The new version changes Shakespeare’s opening and concluding couplet, adds seven extra lines, and sets the poem to music. While these changes may have been added to make the sonnet easier to sing, it is also likely that the advent of the English Civil War in 1642 encouraged the reworking of popular poems, songs, and other works to reflect the political beliefs of the person adapting them.
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