~John's Lament: Sonnet 58~
That God forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th' account of hours to crave, Being your vassal, bound to stay your leisure!
O, let me suffer (being at your beck), Th' imprison'd absence of your liberty; And patience, tame to sufferance, bide each check, Without accusing you of injury.
Be where you list, your charter is so strong That you yourself may privilege your time To what you will; to you it doth belong Yourself to pardon of self-doing crime.
I am to wait, though waiting so be hell; Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.
imprison'd absence of your liberty. i.e., when you are absent it is though I am in prison. Here we see Shakespeare's battle to come to terms with his relationship with his flawed lover. Paul Ramsey explains: The struggle to justify or deny the evils of the friend was costly and virtually continual, taking its strongest and most startling form in lines 58.11-12. . . The friend is the standard; therefore he can do no wrong; when he does wrong, being the source and standard of good, he may forgive himself wrong; he may not be blamed, be he blameworthy or not. X
This is John's ongoing frustration, first with Sherlock, then Mary. Although for very different motivations, they have repeatedly left him behind, or out of the game. Even if it was for his protection, it chafes at his manhood, at his perceived abilities to help them. It crushes his ego. As hard as John tries not to be hurt by all of this, he just can't help it. This has only increased his feelings of distrust, and of somehow, not being good enough, resulting in the past, of attempting to distancing himself from Sherlock, even as he continued to miss him, and in regards to Mary, being distracted by another woman. He still cares deeply, but seems to have lost himself; his sense of utility.
There has also been some debate as to whether this sonnet and Sonnet 57 were addressed to a man or a woman.
Modern critics accept that the poems were addressed to a young man, and they view the language of class in the sequence from 56-59 in terms of a complex dynamic of class difference and desire. The speaker's metaphoric description of love as enslavement is complicated and enriched by the fact that here, the speaker is literally as well as figuratively subordinate to the beloved
David Shallwyck asserts that the sonnet "accomplishes the remarkable feat of simultaneously offering an apology and levelling an accusation." X
In sonnets 57 and 58, Shakespeare discusses how love is like slavery in its different manifestations. The object of the narrator’s love has a dominating power over the narrator, which controls him and guides his actions. line 9, the narrator says that the control over him by the lover is very strong, however he doesn’t seem to make any effort to resist these temptations and exertions of power, but rather resigns to them and accepts them as part of his life. The use of the word "tame" to describe himself in sonnet 58, line seven, suggests that the narrator doesn’t want to actively resist the domination by the lover but instead is resigning his will to the lover. As the narrator lets himself be enveloped in his love for the young man, he loses a part of his own willpower. In sonnet 58, line four has the narrator awaiting the leisurely needs of the lover, and again in line 13 "I am to wait" signifies the author waiting for the lover. X
You will remember, of course, this conversation between Sherlock and Mary in Morocco:
Mary Watson: Every movement I made was entirely random, every new personality just on the roll of a dice! Sherlock Holmes: Mary, no human action is ever truly random. An advanced grasp of the mathematics of probability, mapped onto a thorough apprehension of human psychology and the known dispositions of any given individual, can reduce the number of variables considerably. I myself know of at least 58 techniques to refine a seemingly infinite array of randomly generated possibilities down to the smallest number of feasible variables.
The statement Sherlock makes about 'feasible variables' is actually quite loaded, as it basically affirms that when it comes to predicting person's future behavior, based on their past, but this is also referenced in canon. From The Sign of Four:
"while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."
Also, in Psychology: "Human psychology is actually very predictable when you know a bit about how the brain works and this means that you can often spot when we have had a hand in something. While we might think we can make something look random, we actually fall into a number of traps that draw attention to our involvement. X
Last, but not least, in the dialogue on Gaming, which I guess, would be obvious. Gaming Theory is indeed dependent on Psychology and Mathematics, in building games, and especially on the conversation of Artificial Intelligence, which brought me to the following discovery, posted below. Read it carefully, then compare it to Sherlock's speech, above.
https://me.me/i/i-believe-you-are-wrong-as-no-human-action-is-1664945
That's the same speech, apart from just a few changes, including the number 27, changed to 58, which confirms the intent to link this scene with the sonnets. I don't know how many remember, but the site created for TSOT, Idatedaghost.com was taken over by a Minecraft Server, called Hive Games, soon after the airing. X
