Not Time’s Fool: A Rare Version of a Shakespeare Sonnet Is Discovered

Europe|Not Time’s Fool: A Rare Version of a Shakespeare Sonnet Is Discovered

If you have already had the good fortune of encountering “Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare, you were probably at a wedding.

It is not, by most accounts, a sexy poem. It is not exactly a happy one, either. Instead, it celebrates commitment to devotion: “Love’s not time’s fool,” perhaps its most famous phrase, is held up as a toast to living together and aging together. It is one of the poems that, however often it is read aloud, still pricks tear ducts and quiets fidgets.

But during the English Civil Wars in the mid-1600s, the poem may have had a different resonance.

That’s, at least, according to research published last month in The Review of English Studies by an Oxford researcher, Leah Veronese, who found a rare, handwritten version in an archive.

Such discoveries are rare. “It’s incredibly exciting when somebody finds any manuscript trace of Shakespeare’s poems,” said a Columbia University professor, James Shapiro, an expert on Shakespeare who was not involved in the find.

And experts are celebrating the discovery as an early example of the ways that Shakespeare’s work has been adapted to meet a charged moment.

“Shakespeare has always been political,” Professor Shapiro said, adding, “People repurposed it in their own day — as in ours — for different political ends.”