What implications follow from such an idea? Why should an artist even bother, if he cannot, in fact, truly create anything new?
First Quatrain: “If there be nothing new, but that which is”
In sonnet 59, the claim, “there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9), finds expression in the speaker’s assertion, “If there be nothing new, but that which is / Hath been before,” and he says if this is true, how odd it is that we become enthralled after bringing forth a re-creation.
How odd, in deed, that we promote ourselves as the creator, when, in fact, we are merely repeating what someone else has done. Our “labouring for invention bear[s] amiss,” because our “beguil’d” brains are merely giving birth a second time to a “former child.”
Second Quatrain: “Oh that record could with a backward look,”
The speaker yearns to look back in some “antique book” and see the corresponding sonnet that came before his own. He wonders what the earlier version would be like, what people thought and said about the older version.
Since “mind at first in character was done,” he has to wonder how many returns of that sun, under which there is nothing new, perhaps “five hundred courses” or even more, might have elapsed since the similar artist created a similar verse, which now renders his own a mere “second burthen.”
Third Quatrain: “That I might see what the old world could say”
He muses on what “the old world could say” about the sonnet form, “wonder of your frame.” He wonders if his generation has improved on the form or if they were actually better at it long ago. Or there is also, of course, the possibility that the former and the latter are equal in stature.
The artist cannot help but wonder about the technical advances that he observes. He may be tempted to think his own modern methods are surely superior, but then he has no way of judging them, since records are deleted from the cosmos after several hundred centuries have passed.
The Couplet: “Oh sure I am the wits of former days”
In the couplet, “Oh sure I am the wits of former days, / To subjects worse have given admiring praise,” the speaker quips that his attempt to match wits with earlier forms of his art is not as impractical as one might first think.
He asserts that worse subjects have been admired, even praised. He finds solace in all of his musings, even if he cannot make absolute conclusions. He muse is still in tact, even if he cannot claim absolute originality in his creations.
Other Shakespeare articles: Who is Shakespeare?
Sonnet Commentaries: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 73, 96, 116, 126, 130, 138
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