Sonnet 8

8

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy;

Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds

By unions married, do offend thy ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear:

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,

Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,

Sings to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

General
This is the first sonnet about music and its structure reflects its subject matter. As HV says, it divides music into its three parts: 5-8, its sounds or aural effect; 9-12, its strings or medium; 13-14, its song or content.

WS also varies the rhetorical form: a single question, 2 proverbs, a double question, a hypothesis – well-known strategies in persuasive oratory.

I am also taken by the movement between words. By this I mean how one word metamorphoses into another with a corresponding shift in sense. Examples are lov'st to receiv'st not gladly(3); concord to confound (5 & 7); one to none (13 & 14)

Sense
First quatrain
You, who have a voice like music/ when there is music to hear, why do you listen to music without pleasure? Things that delight should not war with each other, joy/pleasure should delight in pleasure. Why do you appear to love music since you listen to it without pleasure?

1. Music to hear: You, whose voice is music. GBE thinks that this implies 'the youth is music itself, subsuming all the perfectly integrated qualities attributed to music in the following lines’. Note the use of the rhetorical figure of chiasmus here: music-hear-hear-music.
Sadly: without pleasure, mournfully.

2. Sweets…joy: i.e. things affording pleasure

3. cf Jessica in MV 5.1.69: ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’; and Spenser The Ruins of Time (1591), 613-14: ‘Of the strings…/ That wrought both joy and sorrow in my mind.’

4. receiv'st: to attend, listen, or give heed to
annoy: pain, irksomeness. IR (& JK) also link annoy with French ennui. CB: the paradox of enjoying the sadness of music is a commonplace of the period, from Jacques’ ‘I can suck the melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs’ (AYLI, 2.5.11-12) to John Dowland’s motto: Semper Dowland semper dolens (‘always Dowland always doleful’).

Second quatrain
If the perfect harmony of well-tuned sounds joined together by chords, offends your ear, they so but sweetly/affectionately chide you, - you who wastes / creates discord by being single / failing to take your part in part-singing.

6: Unions: chords cf Sidney’s New Arcadia - Cecropia's speech on marriage: 'And is a solitary life as good as this? Then can one string make as good music as a consort.'

7: sweetly chide: (a) rebuke affectionately / graciously (b) rebuke with sweet (well-tuned sounds). Cf Sidney, AS, first song, 18: ‘Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth cherish’ JK draws a comparison with MND (4.1.111-17), where Hippolyta describes the ‘music’ of the hounds in the field: ‘Such gallant chiding…So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.’
confound: destroys by mixing together, ruins by blending (cf 5.6) from the latin: confundere: ‘to pour together, topple in confusion, bewilder, disastrously mingle’

8: IR: ‘who, by remaining single, suppress those roles (of husband and father) which you should play.’

5-8: SB: ‘Sometimes Shakespeare’s own sentences can be demonstrated to mean nothing at all – even where readers understand them perfectly.' (!) He then goes to some lengths about these lines, looking at how the reader has to negotiate for himself a meaning that is not literally out – he concludes: ‘The quatrain is an emblem of the paradoxical conditions it recommends, harmony and marriage – unities made by literally ‘confounding,’ ‘pouring together,’ individual elements and potentially disabled by a confusion that results from failure to mix.’

Third quatrain
Note how each string, dear husband to the other, hits/strikes a deal in unison, resembling father, child and fortunate mother, who all combined as one, sing one pleasing note.

9-12: cf: Samuel Brandon, The Virtuous Octavia (1598), ll.2024-27: ‘When any one doth strike a tuned string: / The rest, which with the same in concord be, / Will shew a motion to that senseless thing; / When all the other neither stirre nor play.’ Also, St Paul’s ‘mystery’ of marriage, namely that two ‘shall be one flesh’ (Eph. 5.32-3).

The metaphor is of lute strings, which are tuned in pairs; when one is plucked, the other of the same pitch produces a sympathetic vibration.

Couplet
Whose wordless song although containing many parts, yet sounding as one, sings this to you: ‘You, single, will prove to be nothing’

13: speechless: wordless, i.e. instrumental rather than vocal.

14. Plays on proverbial idea that one is nothing – i.e. the young man will be a zero cf: 3.14: ‘Die single, and thy image dies with thee’ and 136.8-10 ‘Among a number one is reckoned none, / Then in the number let me pass untold / Though in thy store’s account I one must be.’ as well as Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 255-6: ‘One is no number; maids are nothing then, / Without the sweet society of men’.This idea is evidently revisited by WS on more than one occasion – this from MM 2.4.134-8: Angelo to Isabella – ‘Be that you are, / That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none; /If you be one as you are well-express’d / By all external warrants, show it now / By putting on the destin’d livery.’

Links with other sonnets
14. 3.14; 136.8-10

Links with other works by WS
3. MV, 5.1.69: See also ref to AYLI above.

7. MND, 4.1.111-17

14.MM, 2.4.134-8

Links with works by other authors
3. Spenser The Ruins of Time, 613-14

6. Sidney New Arcadia, 333

7. Sidney, AS, first song, 18

9-12: Samuel Brandon, The Virtuous Octavia, 2024-27

14. Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 255-6