The Gift that keeps on Giving

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

The first 17 poems of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence are often grouped together as “the procreation sonnets” because the speaker of the poems so frequently insists that the young man whom he is addressing should “breed another thee” (Sonnet VI, Line 7). While ostensibly, the speaker makes this suggestion to save the young man from becoming “death’s conquest,” (Line 14) the speaker’s promptings come into question when one considers that he seems to take on the voice of an accountant, referring to loans and investments in the same breath as he refers to breeding and posterity, setting up a type of sexual economy in which the young man is to invest himself by paying “the willing loan” (Line 6) and, in a sense, make returns through the wealth of his posterity. The speaker even talks of “beauty’s treasure,” (Line 4) as if beauty holds some kind of economic value that can be either horded or spent. While this concept seems somewhat foreign to the contemporary audience, Shakespeare’s audience would have been more familiar with the idea of such an economy.

Dr. William West illuminates this topic for us. West asserts that “In early modern England, sonnets and collections of poetry were commodities frequently given as gifts, and they frequently represent themselves as such.” In the Sonnets, particularly in the first 17, a gift economy exists, in which the speaker asks the young man to give up himself (invest), and there is an expected return – similar to the way in which people give gifts today, expecting some kind of future return. West emphasizes the unspoken obligation that always accompanies a gift. According to West, “In the Sonnets, there is no actual state of conserving, only states of giving to an other and giving to oneself.” Because of this system of constant exchange, the speaker is justified in entreating the young man not to horde because if he is always giving himself gifts, he will eventually be overburdened by the weight of obligation – in the young man’s case, his debt of mortality to nature, a debt he cannot repay. The speaker of the poems indicates that if he invests himself in his posterity, giving himself away, he will then gain immortality in the form of his children.

This concept is complicated by the speaker’s suggestion that the young man will also be immortalized within the lines of the poetry. West questions this proposition, stating that “In the end, it is the poet who has kept himself still—that is, his character as a poet—by giving himself away in verse.” West suggests that Shakespeare is the only one truly immortalized, since the young man is never given a name within the sonnet sequence. Through the gift economy system, Shakespeare gains immortality by investing himself in his poetry instead of hording that part of himself and not sharing his poetry with others. The Sonnets themselves are indicative of the concept of a gift economy because its “characters are produced from their exchanges with each other through the poet” (West). Exchange is the essence of the gift economy. In the procreation sonnets, love is just another gift that can be exchanged. In a gift economy, nothing is really up for sale, but everything has a price.

--Jason Hogue