Sonnet 26 is a love letter written like a vassal's report to his lord
Sonnet 26 casts the poet as a feudal servant sending a formal embassy to his lord. He insists the message proves loyalty, not talent, and apologises that his words are too threadbare to dress his devotion. Until his luck changes, he says, he would rather stay out of sight than be tested.
The opening sets up a hierarchy borrowed from the feudal world. The beloved is the lord of the speaker's love, and the speaker is bound to him in vassalage, tied by the beloved's merit. What follows is described as a written embassage, a diplomatic dispatch whose purpose is to bear witness to duty rather than show off cleverness.
Humility then becomes the theme. So great a duty, the speaker frets, may look bare when expressed by a wit as poor as his, which lacks the words to display it. He hopes the beloved will supply what the poem cannot, taking the naked thought into his own soul and clothing it with some generous interpretation. The imagery of nakedness and clothing runs through the rest of the poem.
The third quatrain looks to the stars. The speaker waits until whatever star guides his course shines on him favourably and puts clothes on his tattered loving, making him worthy of the beloved's regard. Astrology here stands for fortune: his worth will be proved not by effort but by a change of luck. The couplet makes the deferral explicit: "Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee; / Till then, not show my head where thou mayst prove me."
Shakespeare himself kept his head down for years, at least as far as surviving documents show. Between the birth of his twins and 1592 he left so few traces that scholars call the period his lost years, broken only by his name in a Queen's Bench law case of 1588 and 1589. Nicholas Rowe, his first biographer, passed on a Stratford legend that he fled to London to avoid prosecution for poaching deer on Thomas Lucy's estate.
Source: Sonnet 26: Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
