Chamber Music : Elizabethan Sonnet-Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism [1 ed.] 9781442672826, 9781442614987

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CHAMBER MUSIC: ELIZABETHAN SONNET-SEQUENCES AND THE PLEASURE OF CRITICISM

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ROGER KUIN

Chamber Music Elizabethan sonnet-sequences and the pleasure of criticism

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4188-4

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Kuin, Roger Chamber music : Elizabethan sonnet-sequences and the pleasure of criticism Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4188-4 i. Sonnets, English - History and criticism. 2. English poetry - Early modern, 1500-1700 - History and criticism. 3. Sidney, Philip, Sir, 1554-1586 - Criticism and interpretation. 4. Spenser, Edmund, 15527-1599 Criticism and interpretation. 5. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR539.S7K841997

82i'.042O9O3

€97-931360-0

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Vll PREFACE

ix

i: Prelude a new intellectual art 3 2: Three easy pieces sonnet analysis 2626 3: Polyphony the plural of the text 4343. 4: Tempo/Sequenza textual time in Astrophil and Stella 56 5: Two-part invention love/minS/SHAKE-SPEARES

SONNETS

6: Theme with variations skin/deep: beauty 101 7: From the New World Will Archer's diary 114114 8: Ein Heldenleben courtier, text, and death

132

77

vi Contents 9: Death and the maiden architecture 150 10: Divertimento the text as desiring-machine 174

11: Four-part fugue indeterminacy and undecideability 191 12: Encore irregardless

218

APPENDIX: DISCOURSE AND ITS CHOICES 233 NOTES 239 INDEX 28l

Acknowledgments

This note was originally a list of names of the living and dead. I could not honestly, I felt, leave out the shade of Roland Barthes, to whom I owe the most; but if Barthes, why not Francesco Petrarca, and Laure de Noves? Reluctantly, I bowed to more mundane counsels. My thanks, then, go to Andrew Payne for first setting me on the track of the French thinkers whose work made this book possible. Arthur Kinney, Thomas Roche, and Gerald Rubio published previous versions of parts of the book in English Literary Renaissance, Spenser Studies, and Sidney Newsletter and Journal, respectively. Nicolas Barker I thank for his encouragement and advice about chapter 10; Peter Blayney for enlightenment on registration of MSS. Jacques Derrida was kind enough to read chapter 11, and Michael Riffaterre the entire manuscript, and I thank them for their comments and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge a grant in aid of publication from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities. My greatest thanks go out to three colleagues and friends without whom there would have been only an endless project. A. Kent Hieatt has been to this book the most stimulating of interlocutors and the most provocative of friends. His encouragement and criticism have been invaluable. Gerald Rubio has been a constant source of solutions to every conceivable problem, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Without his selfless giving of time, energy, and kindness nothing would have come of nothing. Anne Lake Prescott has unstintingly given content and form her kind and scrupulous regard, the perspicacity, sympathy, and tact of which have everywhere prevented errors and strengthened all that stands. Finally, my parents, Pieter and Willy Kuin-Harttorff, have been of incalculable encouragement and deserve more thanks than I can ever

viii Acknowledgments give; and my wife, Marie-Jose Danzon, knowing from her own work as an artist the long hard slog of creating something, has encouraged mine with more patience, affection, and humour than I had any right to expect.

Preface

Recent years have seen much fruitful study, thought, and criticism on the abiding mystery of the Renaissance sonnet-sequence. To this it is not my purpose to add. Lest that statement be misunderstood, let me say that for over twenty years I have studied, thought about, and interpreted various sonnet-sequences, and that out of that activity has grown this book. It does not, though, purpose to add. For its other source is a fascination with the possibility of a modern criticism, and a belief that such a criticism is both feasible and necessary. The present book is thus a hybrid, trying hard not to be self-conscious about its metissage. It is about sonnet-sequences: mainly those of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, though others come in from time to time. In the elegance of their artful intimacy, sonnet-sequences are chamber music: those studied here, the chamber music of composers better known for their grander symphonies: the Arcadia, the Faerie Queene, the plays. Sonnet-sequences, moreover, have no agreed-upon name, no agreed-upon features, no theory whatever, and resist all attempts definitively to pin them down. They are also, once one gets a taste for them, irresistible. Their mixture of emotion and craftsmanship, of passion and intellect, constitutes one of the great gourmet pleasures of Western literature. And so I have tried to approach them in ways appropriate to what I could discover of their elusive nature, and appropriate also to a modern criticism. The book itself is, I think, self-explanatory about what it tries to do; but I should perhaps explain beforehand some of the things I have not attempted. I have not tried to discover 'the truth' of the sequences, because if there is, or was, a truth to them we are almost entirely barred from recovering it, in any way that would be meaningful. I have tried instead to see them with eyes conditioned by our age to conceive of

x

Preface

multiple, simultaneous, and often contradictory truths, and to interrogate them accordingly. I have not tried to find in them comrades for a present-day social and political struggle, because that is a point of view which I respect but for which I have neither affinity nor sympathy. I have tried to meet them as I would meet persons who attract me and whose friend I would like to become: with courtesy, with an insatiable interest in the way they live, move, and have their being, and with the urgent need to become the co-creator, with them, of a relationship we can all live with. In doing so, I find I have made a book which is very different from those with which a librarian would class it. In many ways, this is because it took its form not only from its subject but from my readings of, and reflections upon, a number of European thinkers about literature. Of these, Roland Barthes has been the most seminal influence, for the independence of his mind, the intimacy of his voice, and the consistent humanity of his judgment. Michael Riffaterre, of Columbia University, has been another, mainly because of the extraordinary rigour and elegance of his semiotics of poetry. Jacques Derrida has been for me, as for so many other students of literature, a philosopher the crumbs from whose table have nourished us; the more since in recent works he has increasingly become a poet of thought. Maurice Blanchot's work taught me how (unpolitically) committed a critic of literature can be, and how such a critic's work can become, in Sidney's sense, 'poesy.' Georges Bataille was the dark angel with an aching lust to rid the world of penitence, whose thought may be the most risk-taking it has ever been my nervous privilege to encounter and be touched by. Other writers have, as it were incidentally, been seminal to this book by means of minor elements in their own work: Michel Foucault for his 'Prose of the World', Umberto Eco for his L'opera aperta, Paul Veyne for his caustic understanding of the ancient world, Paul Ricceur for his analyses of metaphor and time, Philippe Aries for his work on death, Jonathan Goldberg and Geoffrey Hartman for their courageous example in leaving the beaten path. Since, in modern art, form is not separable from content, and since this is also true for Renaissance sonnet-sequences, I have tried to make this book congruent with both. Like a modern work, therefore, its form is foregrounded: 'opaque,' not transparent. The beliefs concerning a modern criticism which gave rise to such a form are explained in 'Prelude.' Secondly, like a sonnet-sequence, the book is composed of units which are neither essays nor chapters, neither independent nor sequential; they

Preface xi can be read separately or together and will have, I suspect, a different effect in each case. The discourse itself varies from 'movement' to 'movement/ and ranges from the rigorously expository to the unexpected. Readers who find it hard to suspend stylistic disbelief regarding the latter are referred to the appendix 'Discourse and Its Choices/ where these matters are discussed in more detail. With regard to the writing generally, the book's voice can best be heard as an intimate one, comfortable, amused at times, sharing the excitement of thinking beloved texts in new ways. If I refer to myself in the first person singular, that is for reasons I discuss in 'Prelude'; if I occasionally address the reader in the second, it is because I am acutely conscious of the hands holding the page, and uncomfortable about pretending to murmur to myself alone.1 Finally, this is, in a sense, a French book in English. It attempts to cater not to the responsible acquisition of knowledge but to the challenging pleasure of thought. Pleasure is, ultimately, what it is about: a difficult pleasure, a committed pleasure, a risk-taking pleasure. We are an exploring and an interpreting race. We invent good reasons for those activities; but ultimately we engage in them because it is our pleasure. Sonnetwriters, loving in truth and fain in verse their love to show, I am convinced, did so too.

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CHAMBER MUSIC

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1

Prelude a new intellectual art

Mais alors, I'ceuvre serait done bien la merveille du commencement, en quoi I'indefini de I'erreur nous preserverait du travestissement de I'inauthentique?

But surely, then, the work is the marvel of beginning, wherein error's indefiniteness keeps us from the travesty of the inauthentic? Blanchot1

A. Contemporary criticism and early texts Propositions /Thesen: 1 There is no such thing as modern criticism. 2 It is time there was. 3 There has never been anything but contemporary criticism of early texts. What is new is the need to enshrine or to justify it. 4 The informed non-academic reader is on the verge of extinction; but may yet be recovered. 5 If our concerns do not include him, no imaginable future model of society will pay us for talking to each other. 6 Much contemporary professional scholarship is a mutant strain of Calvinism. By turns solemn and aggressive, it betrays the Renaissance through instruction without delight. 7 All thinking about sonnet-sequences belongs to teratology. 8 The truth of a metatext lies in its epigraphs. 9 No reading can proceed without asking what factors legitimize discourse. 10 Ceci est un dessin de moi: this is a book of you(rs). When Sir John Harington compares Homer with Ariosto; when Dryden's

4 Chamber music Eugenius answers Crites; when Bentley edits Horace, and Coleridge comments upon Shakespeare; the common denominator of their discourse is confidence in its own insights, values, and method. They in no way belittle their subjects, but - acknowledging both a historical continuum and conditions' changing within it - they do not question the appropriateness of discussing early poets in the language, the episteme, of a later time. This observation shows us that what is now called the 'literary phenomenon'2 consists in its basic form not only of the text and the reader, but of the contemporary reader and the earlier text. Time and its passin. are not only built into literature, they may well be its original reason for existing. The remaining unease which prompts us still to interrogate and selfconsciously to moderate3 the application of current metalanguages to early texts, therefore, does not originate in the oddity or novelty of a diachronic decalage between text and reader. It is important to realize this, for it raises the possibility that we may, this time, be dealing not with a relative but with an absolute phenomenon: perhaps brought about by history but not to be assimilated by it.4 This phenomenon arises from certain traits of our intellectual situation which, as they gradually penetrate our contemporary criticism, are radically differentiating it from its ancestors. The three most important of these - to which I shall return later: they underlie the whole of this book's argument and process - are pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertai. Paradigmatically speaking, the liminary phenomenon between our ancestors' 'contemporary criticism' and our own is structuralism.5 A re. minder of some of this movement's strengths and weaknesses will show why on the one hand it remains at the heart of our critical situation and why, on the other, we have (had) to move beyond some of its solutions. (I am treating semiotics/semiology as a branch of structuralism, a relation clearer now, in retrospect, than it sometimes was at the height of the fashion and controversy.)6 Structuralism's main strength has been its establishment of an open field where a number of disciplines could meet via a shared method. Founded on a tripod of philosophy, anthropology, and linguistics, at the peak of its fame it managed to include sociology, history, psychology,7 economics, and literary criticism. Moreover, its emphasis on synchronic and paradigmatic connections accomplished a

Prelude 5 long-overdue liberation from the tyranny of historicism, while the shared method ensured that contextuality was, in a different way, maintained. It taught or reminded at least two generations of scholars that to ask Why? is not necessarily the same as asking How? or Whence? It insisted that genesis and meaning were not the same thing; and it pointed out with some urgency that research is the servant, not the substitute, of thought. In discerning and describing pluralities and discontinuities present even within traditional contexts, structuralism fostered the traits of our radical difference. At its core, however, lay two weaknesses, closely connected. The minor of these is an obsessive fondness for systems. Superficially, this might be explained by both a fashionable scientism and a national idiosyncrasy of French intellectuals; but its roots lie much deeper. Structuralism's proliferating systematization grows out of, and is in a sense a repression of, its major weakness, which - when laid bare notably by the work of Derrida8 - severely damaged its influence as an intellectual movement. This weakness, simply put, is its inability to explain satisfactorily the philosophical nature of 'structure' as a concept, and its ontological location. No amount of Hjelmslevian insistence on 'an autonomous entity of internal dependencies'9 or Barthesian concentration on 'the rules accor ing to which an object functions'10 could prevent unbelievers from ask. ing 'according to whom?,' wondering if it was all in the mind, and having doubts about the Emperor's new suit. It was left to Derrida (off on his own separate quest in L'ecriture et la difference) to remind everyone, almost casually, that this problem origi nates in Dilthey and in Husserl's intentionalism, and is not vulgar in the least. In its philosophical form it bedevils almost all modern thought, and cannot remotely be regarded as solved. When applied to literary criticism, however, it appears on a more accessible level, where it should have halted all progress until disposed of one way or another. That it did not do so can be explained in part by the widespread concentration on late-nineteenth-century and twentiethcentury texts, i.e., those produced during and after the discovery (or the invention) of the unconscious. My concern being with early texts, I cannot pass it by. A good example of the problem can be found in Michael Riffaterre's admirable Semiotics of Poetry (partially developed in his later La produ tion du texte). Via a complex and beautifully articulated system of induction, he lays bare the 'structure of significance' of poetic texts as early as

6 Chamber music Ronsard and Du Bellay.11 Never answered, however, is the question whether the origin of this structure lies in the poem's architecture, the poefs unconscious, or the critic's mind. Barthes, a much more intuitive critic, commenting on Balzac, relegated such questions to the pre-existent network of culturally connotative codes inherent in language.12 This seems a neat way out, and has been convincing enough to become the reigning orthodoxy with respect to semiotics. However, it depends to a degree Barthes (if he realized it) never admitted upon the continuity of the text's code-network with the critic's. In the case of Barthes and Balzac this is assured by the text's relative proximity to the critic in historical time, prolonged by conservative French schooling; but I do not think Barthes himself would have tested his 'theory' on a text by Villon. Moreover, there is in this explanation a typically Barthesian sleight of hand. A connotation cannot, by definition, be inherent in langue, and changes fromparole to parole; how, then, should this not apply to the pattern of connotations we call a code? Once again, the question underlying this problem is that of the pattern's, the structure's, location. Nevertheless, the fact that we cannot (yet) answer this question does not invalidate the semiotic (and structuralist) enterprise. As in many areas of human endeavour, bricolage or tinkering precedes and, for a ti. at least, outstrips theory. Whoever attempts any of the available methods with an open mind creates a challenging and satisfying experience of the text, which presents itself as an 'understanding.' Just such a combination of perceived and satisfactory result with difficulty of theoretical 'explanation' led Levi-Strauss to affirm that a structure's dubious ontological status may not destroy its methodological value.13 What the lack of a theoretical answer does do is command our unceasing awareness that a fundamental question remains unanswered. Such an awareness does not, in the words I used above, 'dispose of the problem: but it allows us to tread with it, in the no-man's-land of paradoxa. All we achieve, all we create, is 'in the mean time,' in the threshold space between question and answer. We are the Provisional of the literary space. (Somebody objected, roughly at this point, to being confronted with a poor and potted history of structuralism blocking the entry into both the positive argument and a book on sonnet-sequences. I explained that this detour is essential for the positive argument. It establishes in the first place the need not to dismiss structuralism as prehistory; secondly the reasons why its practice is more valuable than its theory; and lastly my

Prelude 7 choice of such a practice over available, and currently more fashionable, poststructuralist ones of various kinds.) One of the secondary questions our para-doxic awareness urges us to consider is why literary criticism (particularly that of early texts) shows up the theoretical problem so pitilessly. The answer, I believe, lies in the neglected area of structuralism's efficacy in relation to its provenance. Its growth as a scholarly/critical instrument occurred in anthropology and linguistics.14 What these have in common is that the object of their study is in each case a gradual agglomeration of minuscule facts and events, built up by accretion over a great deal of time. The agglomeration, at any rate, may be described as involuntary (though some of its constitutive elements may well be deliberate).15 In these two disciplines, then (as in most other social sciences), we are dealing with objects of study which have not been deliberately constructed. It will be clear why, in such cases, the demonstration of their 'structure of meaning' may be both illuminating and uncontested. When, however, a method developed for the study of involuntary agglomerations is applied to consciously constructed and sophisticated artefacts, problems arise. These are not necessarily fatal or insurmountable: they stem from unintended adaptation. But to conceive the necessary and possible modifications, we must recognize the problem's causes. One cannot expect a sixteenth-century sonnet, constructed by means of highly conscious codes of rhetoric, poetics, and genre-tradition, to be simply susceptible to a method of analysis conceived for elementary structures of kinship. Or even for syntax and semantics: the real trouble, of course, comes from the inheritors of Saussure. It is tempting to believe in a methodological continuum comprising structures of morphology, syntax, semantics, rhetoric, poetics, and literary significance.16 Yet somewhere before rhetoric that chain is cut: the log has become a canoe. Derrida has shown the ultimate flaw of structuralism to derive from a dependence on metaphysics. Be this as it may (for the record, I believe it to be true but for our purposes mostly irrelevant), the critic of early texts needs to extricate himself from the dilemma in such a way as to preserve structuralism's gains while avoiding its illusions of certainty. Various 'post-structuralist' practices propose themselves at this point. Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism is no longer as taboo among AngloSaxon scholars as it once was, and a work such as Kristeva's Histoires

8 Chamber music d'amour shows that its paradigms can inspire perceptive criticism. As an alternative to structuralism, however, all it can offer is to replace scientistic doxa with theological dogma, which still leaves one searching for the One Truth. Derrida's deconstruction, pace its remaining literary-critical fans, is concerned with metaphysics and not with the interpretation of poetry. Unless we are prepared to become philosophers, we can only let ourselves be inspired (greatly) by his marginalia.17 New Historicism - which has to a large extent absorbed into itself the subspecies of cultural materialism, race-, class-, and gender-studies is united by, and thus dependent upon, the metaphysical presence it opposes, which one might call the Great White Father. Such a focal point, and the combative ideological stance it provokes, make fundamental acceptance of pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty not only impossible but reprehensible. The work of such European writers as Iser,18 de Man,19 and Jauss20 proceeds on a basis that accommodates some conceptual pluralism and uncertainty; while Jauss's redefinition of catharsis to include 'shared poiesis' appears to develop Eco's unjustly neglected The Open Work.21 None of these opera, however, concerns itself with early texts; nor, given the traditional form of their discourse, can one consider them to be, in any real sense, modern criticism. To identify some conditions for such a criticism, it is worth looking at both Foucault's L'ordre du discours22 and the career of Barthes. In his inaugural lecture at the College de France in 1971, Foucault (pleading for the freeing of discourse from the various and subtle forms of its control and restriction) urged, as one of his four principles, that of discontinuity there is no grand, underlying discourse of truth which we are by our labours to uncover and restore. 'Discourses should be treated as discontinuous practices, which meet and sometimes join, but which equally are unaware of or exclude each other.'23 Not unity but seriality. It seems to me that a full acceptance of this principle is of the utmost importance if we are to achieve a critical discourse which, beyond structuralism, genuinely incorporates the traits listed at the beginning of this prelude. The connotations of nearly all criticism of early texts imply just the assumption Foucault rejects: that there exists - many-faceted, certainly; often ambiguous, to be sure - an underlying discourse of unified truth, which the totality of our changing insights will, at some Point Omega, reveal.

Prelude 9 We cannot ignore the de facto plurality, and often the mutual exclusiveness, of our schools of thought. Traditionally, their relation was polemic: truth and heresy. Dialectic replaced this; yet the point Foucault makes implicitly (and Derrida explicitly) is that the apparent pluralism of dialectic is at worst a false, and at best a limited and (self-)controlled, pluralism, which maintains and even strengthens the axiom of underlying unity. The career of Barthes is my last example. As is well known, he began as a polemicist, passed through a phase of systematizing, and ended with a group of free-form works which remain creatively to bother us all. He was not a theoretician, in spite of his friends' well-meaning efforts to make him into one or to prove that he was.24 Even Systeme de la mode and S/Z are, from a systematic point of view, full of holes. I am not here concerned with his compensating virtues in general, or with the scraps of his own theory as such. My point is that, precisely in what are often regarded as his weaknesses, he was one of the very genuinely modern critics. Barthes knew within himself the pluralism usually confined to the dialectic of opposing schools. Gradually freeing himself from dialectic's reconciliations, he intuitively and in practice accepted the discontinuity without which pluralism is unfulfilled. To these two he added a radical uncertainty: not on principle but because he had no choice. What is exemplary in Barthes is the moral and intellectual courage that accepted the conjunction of these three dimensions and allowed it to shape The Pleasure of the Text, Roland Barthes, and Fragments of a Lover's Discourse. To my opening assertion that there is no such thing as modern criticism, Barthes is the exception; what he should, retroactively, become is the forerunner.25 'Contemporary' criticism is a modest term of temporal reference. What I want to sketch and plead for is a modern criticism. Deep in the supposed era of 'postmodernism/ this might seem a little late. Yet the latter named itself too soon: criticism has not yet had its modern revolution. Modernism in the arts comprised not only new concepts but a reshaping of form and discourse. Criticism contented itself with new concepts while, if anything, tightening the control and (self-)restraint of its discourse. The result has been like Poussin painting the Los Angeles Freeway. There is no such thing as modern criticism, least of all of early texts. I also said that it is time there was. This raises questions of How and Why, in that order. For obvious reasons I am not going to propose a

io Chamber music method: I prefer to sketch some of the traits a true modern criticism might be expected to display. The principles would be pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty, in their full and positive acceptance. The critical work is as individual as the dreamwork, and its plurality is coextensive with the number of readers. The concept of a Ibody of knowledge' is perhaps still to some extent pertinent: that of a 'body of insight' is not. The truths we arrive at concerning a text are multiple, discontinuous, and uncertain - and not only interpersonally but intrapersonally so. Moreover, they are not discovered or recognized, but accomplished: and they are accomplished in the person ofthercrit.26 It may seem paradoxical to stress this person of the critic when we have spent so much time and effort eliminating the nai've conception of the 'person of the author/ Yet as the one wanes the other should wax. For if we are going to accept that the plural is accomplished within one person, it is crucial that that person should admit his existence. The impersonal mandarin style we have all learned (of which the old 'critical we' still occasionally stands as the awkward symbol) is supremely inappropriate. As in (other) modern art, modern criticism will have to accept the existence of both a conscious and an unconscious within the person of the critic, and to allow both their places in the critical process. Again, no method is appropriate: but a study of the role of intuition and its use in Barthes's later work may be illuminating. To put it in the debatable but useful terminology of semiotics: the critic, being an author, is, like the primary text's author, a place where codes cross. A final crucial principle of the How will lie in the critical discourse. This is the test of our acceptance. One of the few places where Barthes and Derrida touch is in the notion of ecriture: and this will be my last, and very brief, detour.27 For the early Barthes ecriture is, we remember, the conscious moment of the writer.28 Between the societal horizon that has formed the language and the personal depths which shape his style, it is the locus of his choices. For Derrida it is the place - and the only place where, subtly and patiently, the subversion of the long-dominant metaphysical conceptually can be accomplished.29 A modern criticism would pay careful attention to its ownecriture(s). It is not enough to recognize, and demystify, the ideologies of one's own conceptual takings-for-granted: our writing too has preconceptions (neutrality and transparency, for example) embedded in it.30 A plural, discontinuous, and uncertain ecriture would give criticism its own instrument for the liberation of the 'order of discourse' envisaged by Foucault.31

Prelude 11 Clearly, at this point - between the How and the Why - this Illustrationion is going to have to be accompanied by some Defence. It is always dangerous to try to forestall objections; but I imagine that a major one might be that of unlimited subjectivism. Well, no and yes. No, because this is in no way a plea for simple-mindedness or the abolition of scholarship. Especially when dealing with early texts a detailed, factual scholarship, optimally communicated, remains the basis for all criticism.32 But yes: in the form of a greater separation of the scholarly and the critical activity. The recognition that criticism is an art, and can never be a science (or even a Wissenschaft); and that, as an art, it embodies all the personal potential and responsibility of the artist. Are we, then - another possible objection - to jettison the hard-won gains of Western rationality? Not at all: not to abandon, but to rediscover, as process. Criticism is an art, but it is an art of thinking. Glenn Gould's criticism of Bach's Goldberg Variations lay not in his writing or interviews, but in his two recorded performances and the twenty-fouryear distance between them. All hermeneutic is an art of thinking (in counterpoint with) a text. A modern criticism would communicate not so much (not only) finished thoughts about the text, as the thinking of the text by the critic. A third, more specific, objection might concern the applicability of a plural, discontinuous, and radically uncertain criticism to a text whose genesis, at least, is monoalethic, continuous, and certain. Part of this objection has already been met by the acceptance, in recent decades, of the view that a text's life begins with its genesis but is not limited by it. Further refutation can be furnished both by precept and by example. The rest of this book gives some examples of what a modern criticism can add to a reader's experience of certain Renaissance texts: here I will try to focus more specifically the three main principles. Pluralism, in this context, does not mean that a text has many dimensions (which is commonplace), but that its radical meanings can be many;y that this multiplicity is linked to, and depends on, the reader; and that this state of affairs is not only justifiable but inevitable, as it is in tune with what, to us, meaning means. It also implies that, on the basis of both scholarship and experience, we can simultaneously regard the text more honestly in its Elizabethan context and approach it more freely as citizens of our own world. Discontinuity involves our liberation from the tyranny of History as a as a linear, cumulative - or, for that matter, a dialectical - concept. It allowsow us to accept consciously and individually what, in our diversity of schools, we already practise collectively: the text's free and undecideable multi-

12 Chamber music plicity. When I (reader and/or critic) am thinking about love, the Astrophil and Stella is (really) about love; when I am thinking about poetry, it is about poetry; when I am thinking about politics, it is about politics. Evident enough: but, likewise and equally, when I am thinking about love, it is simultaneously (and speaks insistently) about poetry and politics; and so on throughout the permutations. Nor are these 'dimensions': the order of these three (out of many) discourses in the text is discontinuous and undecideable. Uncertainty, in its acceptance, is perhaps the key. It removes both the false burden and the illusory hope of Point Omega: the idea that a .googol3333 of interpretations will equal the One, the Certain, the Meaning.g We are breadcrumbs on the skirt of the text, which is itself a breadcrumb on the skirt of the world. Like human relations, our relations with the text are neither cumulative nor discrete. We can only know some of the universe, and we can only know some of what we know. And this is All Right. On the border between How and Why stands also the manner of criticism's thinking. In the acceptance of individuality, pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty, it is not a study but an interrogation of the text. This implies recognition that the text is not a passive object, but a twilight place where codes cross. It is a complex of voices, a complex voice, with a right to speak. And it speaks to us: not only to the us we admit to, but to the us we have learnt to repress. The naive us (how much of our ecriture is designed to say connotatively, 'I am not nai've'?), which, quite simply, is moved; the politically committed or confused us, which is comforted or outraged; the personally ambitious us, defensive about our 'luxury trade' and/or needing a job; and the teaching us, engaged for one hundred and twenty-odd days of every year in the undecideable mediation between the text on the one hand and young minds preoccupied with personal relationships, economic survival, and pinball, on the other. It will be obvious that we are now deep in the Why. Why should we bother with such a dubious discourse instead of, or in addition to, our existing one? It offers, at first sight, few comforts and a doubtful justification. I can only suggest reasons; and perhaps most honestly via four questions.34 First: how many people do we know, you and I, who are neither students nor teachers and who read Renaissance texts (with the possible,

Prelude 13 but less and less inevitable, exception of Shakespeare)? How many of your, or my, ex-students still read the Faerie Queene for its (and their) own sake? For the pleasure of the text? I am not now talking about simple, or simplistic, 'relevance' of the text's content - though that too could bear rethinking; but to how many people (including ourselves) in this late twentieth century have we been able to teach a relevant relation of pleasure between themselves and an early text? Second: how much pleasure do we take in our own discourse? Do we, as Renaissance critics, allow ourselves to wonder what Nashe,35 Sidney, Rabelais, or Pico might think of our efforts? Do we delight anyone? and if not, how shall we instruct? (They used to say, defiantly but nervously, of Barthes, 'At least he wrote well.') Most of us have favourite texts whether science fiction, spy stories, or the novels of Hugh Walpole which we read and reread with passion but (and) would not dream o permitting to influence us professionally in 'publications.' We might stop to reflect on the waste of such a refusal to let our passionate, our voluptuous intellect into our 'work.' Third: can we see, can we undergo, the art of a Rothko, an Appel, a Bacon, or a Bellmer, acknowledge that this is our world, and say honestly that our criticism, our discourse, is a part of this world? It is our world, and our discourse is not a part of it. We have not, as Castalians might, removed ourselves from it, but neither has our discourse accepted its freedom and its risk. Thus we, uneasy mandarins with private vices, are divorced from our voice. Fourth: how much longer do we really believe this can go on? Internally the waiting-lists of journals are growing longer, publishers are relying on anthologies, and the subsidies are running out. Externally, a helot-class of young wandering scholars has been created, 'rationalization' looms (and in some countries is already well under way), and our society is getting tired of us. Successive recoveries from successive economic recessions do not and will not change this: it is based on the citizens' (and governments') belief that neither we nor the heritage we effectively control36 have anything very worth while to say. It may eve. be that we, in our hearts, are beginning to believe it too; and that here lies the root of our unease and our justifications. What a waste of pleasure. An undergraduate student of mine, many years ago, responded to a Sidney-to-Eliot survey course by submitting a beautifully crafted and startlingly convincing intercalation of the Old Arcadia's last sonnet ('Since Nature's works be good,' OA 77) and Prufrock,

14 Chamber music called 'Double Exposure/ It was not, in the full sense, modern criticism of an early text; but it was filled with intelligence, pleasure, pain, honesty, and daring. It was, perhaps, a beginning. under/hand La Fiction releverait d'un nouvel art intellectuel (ainsi sont definis la semiologie et le structuralisme dans le Sy steme de la Mode). Avec les choses intellectuelles, nous faisons a la fois de la theorie, du combat critique et du plaisir; nous soumettons les objets de savoir et de dissertation - comme dans tout art - non plus a une instance de verite, mais a une pensee des effets.

Fiction would be a sort of new intellectual art (the definition of semiology and structuralism in Fashion System). With intellectual things, we simultaneously make theory, wage critical war, and create pleasure; we subject the objects of scholarship and dissertation - as in every art - no longer to a tribunal of truth, but to a consideration of effects.s. Barthes37

B. The pleasure of criticism Qu'est-ce qu'une idee pour lui, sinon un empourprement de plaisir?

What is an idea to him if not a flush of pleasure? Barthes38

If we can begin to imagine a modern criticism as an art of thinking (in counterpoint with) a text, we shall readily see that its relation to much contemporary (un-modern) criticism is deviant if not subversive. But as described so far it deviates in only one direction and so is not (yet) subversive enough. The last movement, above, concentrated on what Paul Ricceur in Temps et recit called 'I'amont' - the space 'upstream' of the (in this case critical) text: the relation between the literary text and the critical metatext.39 As its argument began to show, a reshaping of the 'upstream' relation will not leave undisturbed the 'downstream' area: the space and the relation between the text and its reader. Yet this last needs more attention. If the dominant critical discourse is to be effectively and usefully undermined, it needs to be attacked also on, and from, its downstream side. We need to ask the insistent question: what is it for? At first sight such a question may appear irreconcilable with the postulate of a modern art; but I hope to show that these extremes meet.

Prelude 15 What is criticism for? Many years ago Dame Helen Gardner, in her influential lecture The Sceptre and the Torch/40 summed up the development from eighteenth-century criticism, judging and ranking authors in order of excellence (the Parnassus Stakes), to its then-contemporary function of aiding the reader in his informed appreciation of the text. The latter view, closely linked to the practice of teaching literature, has been the de facto basis during most of our lifetime. Its matrix41 may be expressed in two statements: (i) 'x is a great work'; (2) 'I will help you to discover42 the reasons for its greatness.' In Ricceur's discussion of narrative's role in contemporary historiography,43 a good deal of the background concerns itself with the function of historical explanation. His treatment of the subject illustrates a parallel (not drawn by him) between historiography and criticism. Historians also, in effect, have proceeded in a majority of cases upon the same matricial assumptions: (i) 'x is an important event (c.q. personage,e,. era, society, phenomenon)'; (2) 'I will help you to discover the reasons for its importance.' Observed in this way, both matrices illustrate what is perhaps the classic pattern of Western rationality, scientific in aim if not in method. For not only are the two utterances (in each case) a statement followed by a (promise of a) rationale; they reflect, at a deeper level, an intuitive appreciation validated by an investigative justification. The genetic primacy of the non-rational is compensated by the ideological primacy of the rational. But each pair of statements also contains two variables that have gradually gained in importance. The first is the 'great/important' category; the second, the explanatory function of the rationale. Each of these, in fact, has become a variable, as the initial consensus about it has developed cracks. A 'great work/ an 'important event': these are statements involving a cultural consensus of which only the supporting rationale needs to be worked out or demonstrated. And, as Ricceur convincingly shows,44 the concept of explanation itself is, at least in the historical context, increasingly seen as far from self-evident and increasingly contested. For criticism, the implications of this deteriorating consensus are considerable. Few critics any longer feel comfortable using the term 'great work' without qualification or irony. It implies either a theoretical oversimplification or an unwarranted and often naive subjectivity. As for explanation, its implication is (a) that there is a stable object to be ex-

16 Chamber music plained, and/or (b) that our knowledge of the object is, or can be, adequate to do the explaining. Both these implications have come to be questioned: the former in the discussions concerning indeterminacy, the latter chiefly in the many, now almost canonical, refutations of the New Criticism. As a result, much critical attention has been diverted to literary theory, where such problems can be dealt with directly. Seen from another point of view, though, this development raises its own nagging questions. It would be futile to try to predict specific results of theoretical investigations; but we may legitimately ask what kind of result is foreseen. Assuming the work of the theorists is, by their own standards, successful, what will they have produced? The methodological nature of literary theory precludes a 'body of (new) knowledge/ It is It is. not my purpose here to mount an attack upon theory; but a number of Paul Veyne's incisive statements on the 'sublunary' nature of history as a discipline apply equally to literary theory's pretensions and problems.45 Earlier generations of theorists produced, in some cases, a nonscientific but rigorous alternative: a cultural consensus of insight. The prime example is French (neo-)classicism, whose insights not only became normative but (with the aid of Cardinal Richelieu)46 officially so. It represented a 'body of insight' with a vengeance, whose theoretical 'solutions' (as in the case of Boileau, for example) did in fact provide the working basis for generations of criticism. Yet no one seriously contemplates such a consensus for either today or tomorrow. Not only have the number and the range of ancillary disciplines (linguistics, poetics, semiotics, psychology, sociology) grown beyond expectation: our intellectual habits and attitudes have changed.47 In the unlikely event that our literary theorists did come up with a scholarly consensus, this would at once be fragmented by critics and readers accustomed to a pluralist world dominated by uncertainty. Such uncomfortable questions about the final cause, the 'ending end/ of literary theory lead us back to the equally awkward ones about criticism. For if we accept that theory will not 'solve' the problems of the text and of explanation, what is left of the 'business of criticism'? In a pluralist, discontinuous, and radically uncertain intellectual environment, what is criticism for? I should like to base a tentative answer on two elements of which, in much contemporary criticism, I experience the lack. The first is a sense of the text as something to be not appreciated but accomplished. The second is similar to what Barthes calls 'the grain of the voice':48 adapted to

Prelude 17 critical writing, this refers on the one hand to the individual (not necessarily personal) texture of a critic's language, the stuff of his words, his 'writing out loud'; on the other hand it involves the intimacy of his thinking, the felt movement of his discovery and his frustration, his excitement and ennui. In the previous movement of this text I referred briefly to the concept of 'accomplishing' plural truths (of a text). The original is in Barthes's essay Tar ou commencer?'49 and reads as follows: Je suppose [un etudiant qui veut entreprendre Vanalyse structurale d'une O3uvre litteraire] ... assez libre pour oser exploiter ce qu'il peut y avoir en lui de sensibilite structurale, d'intuition des sens multiples; assez dialectique enfin pour bien se persuader qu'il ne s'agit pas d'obtenir une '-explication' du texte, un 'resultat positif (un signifie dernier qui serait la verite de I'oeuvre ou sa determination), mais a I 'inverse qu'il s'agit. d'entrer, par I'analyse (ou ce qui ressemble a une analyse), dans le jeu du signifiant, dans I'ecriture: en un mot, d'accomplir, par son travail, le pluriel du texte.

I am assuming one [student who wants to undertake the structural analysis of a literary work]... free enough to dare to make use of whatever sensitivity to structure, whatever intuitive sense of multiple meanings, he has in him; finally, dialectical enough to be thoroughly convinced that the point is not to get an 'explanation' of the text, a 'positive result' (an ultimate signified which would be the truth of the work or its final term), but that, on the contrary, the point is to enter, through the analysis (or what looks like an analysis), into the game [or: play] of the signifier, into the writing: in a word, to accomplish, by one's work, the plural of the text, (my emphasis)

We shall see later on ('Polyphony/ below) how applicable this is to the Elizabethan sonnet-sequences; for the moment let us hold on to the allimportant distinction between recognizing a quality of the text (which.. may be something other than its 'plural') and accomplishing it. What I want to do here is develop that distinction in relation to the literary text as a whole. We base a good deal of our work as teachers and critics on the idea of informed appreciation. We teach the student or reader (who is usually the same) a certain degree of scholarly perspective and method in order to correct the 'naive response'; and encourage him to reintegrate the information thus produced into a new appreciation of the text. All too

i8 Chamber music often, though, this second stage of supposed reintegration is in fact neglected: it is left to the reader/student to achieve after the scholarly critic/teacher has done his duty. What is the result of this process and this neglect? The naive response is one of uninformed involvement: the reader is enthusiastic (often for the 'wrong7 reasons), furious (ditto), or simply bored with the text. The stage of scholarship modifies this response by adding information and changing the reader's perspective - in the direction, usually, of either history or theory. However, this stage produces an epiphenomenon: detachment. When a text is 'placed in perspective/ the reader is detached from it: the earlier, naive attachment is ruptured. And there, frequently, the matter rests. The reader remains informed, but he also remains detached. Since most critics are also scholars, they (we) do not see this as a very bad thing. Our attachment to literature is lifelong, and so fundamental, so assured, that it can support any amount of detached perspective. For just this reason, though, we are apt to forget that for many readers, especially young ones, the detachment we have operated may be terminal. They will have gained knowledge, but the impulse which made them read in the first place will, too often, have been lost in the process and not replaced. If this happens, the combination of scholarship and (scholarly) criticism has helped the reader to understand the text, but that understanding is manifestly not enough. What, then, is the alternative? In the first volume of his autobiography, former British prime minister Lord Macmillan recounts an incident in his experience of the First World War. Seriously wounded, he was forced to spend over twelve hours in the noman's-land between the lines before being found and carried back, that night, by stretcher-bearers. During this long and painful day, he recalls, he pulled from his uniform pocket his old copy of ^schylus's Prometheus and read it intermittently: it 'seemed not inappropriate to my position.'50 I suggest that, in one very specific sense to which I shall return presently, this account illustrates perfectly the accomplishing of a text which is the aim of reading and, to a certain degree, of criticism. Macmillan's classical education had most certainly given him an understanding of .^Eschylus; but beyond that, he had pursued his relationship with the text to the point where, even in a state of extreme stress, he quite naturally and instinctively interpreted his experience in terms of it - or at least in dialogue with it. The text had become, for him, a partner in the living of his life.

Prelude 19 But that, it may be argued, was long ago and in another country; and besides, what has it to do with criticism? It is true that such an experience is based on, and illustrates, a very strong 'cultural consensus'; it seems to us (and quite possibly did even to a number of Macmillan's contemporaries) curiously archaic. Yet we should not be diverted by the fact that the text in question was a Greek one, read in the original. For generations of Protestants far from the ruling class, the Bible was a collection of texts internalized to the same degree. When I write of the 'accelerating extinction of the non-academic reader/ it is the demise of this kind of relationship to a text that I have in mind. Beyond the usual causes advanced to explain the decline (which commonly take the form of whatever cultural phenomenon the middle-aged feel most threatened by, from television via rock-and-roll to video games), it seems to me evident that a major cause is the disintegration of cultural consensus. In circles where such a consensus still exists, however precariously, the humble aim of criticism should perhaps be simply to restore the relationship, as far as possible. But for the majority pluralism, discontinuity and uncertainty are facts of intellectual life; and there is nothing to be gained by deploring the demise of a cultural consensus which in life had quite as many warts as beauty spots. Nor will it be replaced by a new one: we live in a fragmented world, and our greatest task is learning to enjoy it. Is there, then, a version of the Macmillan phenomenon appropriate to, and possible in, such a world? Is it possible so to internalize one's relation to a text that one's lived experience is conducted, quite naturally, in dialogue with it? To make the question more difficult (and the answer, I hope, more convincing), I want to rule out, for the moment, those modern texts which reflect in themselves the fragmentation. Their relevance, in any case, is often partial and/or spurious: the majority of them are constructed upon a foundation of either bitterness or glee at the disintegration, and thereby betray their dependence on that which is being destroyed. No: it is with reference to 'early' texts that I want to pursue the question. They are the basis of our reading, and the most usual object of our criticism. When we 'accomplish the plural' of a text such as Shakespeare's Sonnets we may, for example, concentrate on the plural of feeling.51 We may learn to resist the lures of recognition (the naive response) and of detachment, and pursue the text's remorseless fragmentation of the emotion we thought we knew as 'love.' (In the process, any familiar meaning at-

2O Chamber music tached to the notion of 'love-poetry' is also severely damaged.) In such a pursuit, the reader soon becomes the pursued instead of the pursuer, and escapes from the text with his certainties in tatters. Such a result is far from the comfort Macmillan derived from JEschylus,s, or beleaguered Protestants from the Psalms. Yet in its admission of the text to our intimacy; in its interrogation of it; in its angry, desperate, delighted dialogue with it; such a process is an integration of the text into the reader's non-literary experience. And a peculiarly modern integration, which recognizes that (all scholarship digested and all homework duly done) the text carries as many meanings as it finds readers, that those meanings are not aspects of a continuum, and that the relationship of text and reader is at all times devoid of certainties. It is a relation marked, first of all, by choice. A modern critic should remember, not with gravity but with delight, the etymological link of his activity to crisis, and that both derive from krinein - to distinguish, tosh, to differentiate: to choose. Not to undergo; not to illuminate; not to explain; to choose. If there is one progressive pattern discernible in human history, it is that of a widening range of choice. An important part of modern ethics' problematic derives from the fact that we are faced with choices in areas where our ancestors knew only the stern comfort of necessity. And all too often we have responded by trying not to choose, or by pretending that one choice (which we disguise as a discovery) will do the trick. A critic begins by choosing one text over other texts (a primary choice rarely discussed except in brief Prefaces), and by this pattern is all too easily led on to choose one meaning over other meanings. He searches (we search) for one new meaning, or argue(s) that plurality is a matter of facets: our vision may be wider, but the object - the Meaning - is still one. It will no longer do. We choose our meaning: we choose our relation to this text or that. In full and frightening freedom. Yet each freedom brings, not only its own terrors but its own consolation, its own peculiar happiness. In the case of the kritikos this lies in the revocability of the choice. Uncertainty brings its own reward. I choose this dialogue with this text today; I engage myself in it totally; but I am free to choose a radically different one tomorrow. Nothing is more threatening to the academic critic than the possible impossibility of misunderstanding a text: it would vitiate his livelihood - if, that is, his livelihood were based on unlocking the door to the temple. But there is no temple, and we are all out on the hills. I choose - knowing that my choice is mine, and today's: your choice, or tomorrow's, may unmake (or rather, remake) all I have made.

Prelude 21 It will be clear that in no way is the modern widening of choice a negation of pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty: rather the result and the strengthening of them. It is the exercise of a freedom based on the simultaneous recognition of potential and limitation. Yet it will be equally clear that what I have discussed so far has been, if criticus, then lector criticus: the choosing reader face to face with the text. What of the critic - the one who intrudes on this tete-a-tete or, alternatively, tries to bring it about? If his activity is not one of explanation, what is his place in all this? I have argued above for a conception of modern criticism as a performing art. Yet now we are faced with the question of its use and purpose. If it does not claim to instruct the reader about the text, why should he bother with it? It is tempting to simply modernize Gardner's point. The answer, in that case, would be that a modern criticism attempts, not to help the reader understand a text or appreciate it (or, if we are to be brutally honest about our readership, write essays or answer examination questions about it),52 but to help him accomplish it. Yet this, too, will not do. Such an answer would betray the autonomy of the reader, which is a necessary corollary of pluralism. It would put the critical discourse covertly back in the very context from which it is freeing itself: the 'ordre du discours' which depends on a unitary conception of truth, the political discourse of a relationship founded on power.53 Moreover, such an answer would betray the postulated nature of modern criticism as an art. It is no longer reasonable to conceive of an art (including a performance art) as existing in order to help you do anything. At the same time, the consideration of this possible but fallacious answer helps to clarify something. From the beginning there was a sense of at best a paradox, at worst an incompatibility between the conception of criticism as a modern art and the question 'What is it for?' The reminder that, in one sense, no art is for anything is an indication that perhaps the question should be slightly modified. It might be better to ask, 'Given such a modern criticism, why (and how) would it be worth reading - in addition to the text?' What could I, as a reader, expect from the performance of an Elizabethan or a Romantic text by a hypothetical Glenn Gould of modern criticism? What, for me, would make such a performance worth while? The analogy is instructive, because it puts the problem in a different context. The large majority of the audience attends a performance (whether live or recorded) for pleasure. And it is with a deliberate allusion both to Gardner's The Business of Criticism and to Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text that I have called this movement 'The Pleasure of Criticism.' For the

22 Chamber music critical activity, as a modern performance art, belongs in the sphere, and in the lexis, of otium, not of neg-otium. What the reader ought to (be able to) expect of the critical text, as of any other text, is pleasure.54 Obviously the word will have to be qualified. (As Barthes already pointed out,55 pleasure has not, in recent centuries, had a good press; and we must observe the proper seriousness.) First of all, 'pleasure' does not mean the comfort that comes from having someone evidently intelligent reinforce your prejudices. Second, no analogous modern art leads me to believe that such a pleasure would be an intellectually passive one. Third, and perhaps most subtly, it would not in the obvious sense be the pleasure of being taught. (A word about that last statement. There is a pleasure in being taught, if it is done well, just as there is a pleasure in teaching. But one of the allimportant corollaries of regarding criticism as an art is to distinguish it [krinein] from scholarship. Scholarship - especially in relation to early texts - is, I repeat, the basis for criticism; but confusing the two helps neither. The pleasure of teaching and that of being taught belong to scholarship, just as does the pleasure of research. The pleasure of a modern criticism would be a quite different one.) After such negative definitions (always easier), let me try some positive sketches of criticism's pleasures. And here is where I come to the second element of 'felt lack': the grain of the voice. The pleasure of the performance. Criticism is an art of thinking (in counterpoint with) a text. Its first and simplest pleasure, then, is that of participating (for remember, this is a modern art) in the skill of a good performance and the individuality of the performer. Of feeling the touch, the brush, the breath of the performer's mind in the triple bond between him, the text, and yourself. That phrase, 'the triple bond,' brings me to another characteristic pleasure of criticism. One of the facts that tend - wrongly - to be forgotten or ignored is that the critical text is itself a text also, and as such involves all the text-reader relationships mentioned so far. The reader's pleasure, then, is that of experiencing two texts, simultaneously and in counterpoint. Of accomplishing two texts, and the space between them: for the critical text - and a modern critical text especially - invites the fully active participation which is 'accomplishing,' quite as much as the original. There is something vertiginous about this, true: but the vertigo is an effect of the analysis of pleasure. Nobody who listens actively to Gould playing the Goldberg Variations finds his head spinning because of the

Prelude 23 plural involved in participating in a 'Gould text' which is itself in a participating counterpoint with the multiple voices that make up the 'Bach text/56 Yet the words 'actively' and 'participating' should give us a further clue. For the analysis, and the temporary dizziness it brings, is a pleasure in itself. The vertigo is an effect of sudden thought: which can act, beyond sage and serious pleasure, as a 'pure perte/ the dazzling loss of control which Barthes defines as jouissance. It is part of the danger involved in accomplishing a text; part of the risk of moving beyond passive appreciation. And this sense of free fall is heightened by the specific modernity of such a criticism. For, like other modern arts', its discourse would be that of the 'open work.' In other words, while it accomplishes the text, the discontinuity between the critic and the reader would ensure that the latter is not 'given an interpretation.' Rather, he is challenged by a deliberately incomplete activity, which he is invited (provisionally: for today) to complete by his own accomplishing. In part, and upon occasion, this incomplete activity may be purposely provocative, and the completing of it may be a debate. Like the literary text, the critical one speaks and is spoken to. Like the reader of literature, the reader of criticism is invited to be a resisting reader.57 This last is itself an art, with its own peculiar pleasure. The pleasure, in this case, of not putting the book away. Of not dismissing a critic (a performer) you disagree with. Of knowing how to conduct a debate with a partner (a text) whose words are fixed, while yours are changeable; of knowing when to stop, for a moment, resisting, and when and how to let the text reply only to then take up the discussion again. And of knowing that all the time, beyond and below this activity, the original text's diapason continues its pattern with the achieved serenity of distance. These, then, are some of the features of a critical hedonism. Yet one voice is still silent. What can such a critic, such a performing artist, reasonably expect from his audience? Who, for me as a modern critic, is my ideal reader? Not, as I once thought, the ideal student. As a teacher, my aim is to make my work superfluous. As a critic - as an artist - my work is already, and by definition, superfluous. It exists for its own sake, and any pleasure it gives derives from this. So my ideal reader - though quite possibly a student; or a lawyer, or a housewife, or what you will - is not the same as is the ideal student to the teacher.

24 Chamber music He is someone at any stage of forming an individual relation of pleasure to a text (in the case of my own work, an 'early' text). Someone prepared to be humble enough not to impose his own prejudices on the text, yet confident enough to develop (to accomplish) his own pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty in relation to it. Someone prepared to let the text be a full partner in the unavoidable adventure of his life. To interrogate the text, and to listen to its replies. To be surprised by it, and to surprise it - in the act of being itself, i.e., different from him. Prepared, also, to take pleasure (perhaps a resisting or an angry pleasure) in my performance of the text: to treat the metatext of the critic as a delicious extra complication in the complex joi (in Occitan, both 'game' and 'joy') of reading. It is a curious fact that most of those critics who have preached the subversive liberty of discourse have done so in the manner of prophets pointing to a distant goal. What gives their work this character is perhaps precisely its emphasis on subversion. Derrida, for example, who has gone farther than most along this road, sternly warns his readers against acting as if the freedom sought had already been achieved.58 And even Barthes was held back, like one of Michelangelo's slaves half-emerging from the marble, by his antithetical relation to the 'bourgeois' culture he felt surrounded him.59 In the series 'struggle - libertinism - libertarianism - (liberty)' the last term remains parenthetical. Like Moses, he knew that the promised land was not for him to enter. Have things changed? Have we the right to enter where Barthes remained on the threshold? The answer, I think, is 'Yes; and so did he.' Not because our culture is any less a 'mass culture' or any less bourgeois (if that term still has any meaning) than that of 1973: it is, if anything, more so. But Barthes's greatest limitation was the youthful polemicism of which at least the memory, the shadow, never quite left him. He persisted in struggling with an enemy he might more effectively have simply outdistanced. The difference, perhaps, is that with every decade the notion of consensus is more irrevocably left behind. With every decade the intellectual wars - which, like their political counterparts, are vestiges of an age when (an imposed) consensus was felt to be both possible and desirable seem more senseless. We are condemned to freedom: to pluralism, discontinuity, and radical uncertainty. To choice: to criticism. We have no choice but choice. Of a certain kind of modernity, Charles Morgan once wrote: 'Only a

Prelude 25 fool thinks of himself as ... at the head of Time's procession/60 What we are experiencing is, in fact, the opposite. The notion of the procession, of progress, itself, like that of consensus, no longer applies. The frantic alternations of fashion, progress's parody and its epitaph, are doomed and spasmodic attempts to avoid the fearful pleasures of liberty, the terrifying freedom of pleasure. A radio announcer says, 'You have just heard the Guarneri Quartet play Hugo Wolf's Italian Serenade.' The true pleasure of criticism will be accomplished when we can read the review of a work in which 'Mr Aardvark Zygote plays Paradise Regained.' epi/graph Comment lire la critique? Un seul moyen: puisqueje suis id un lecteur au second degre, il mefaut deplacer ma position: ce plaisir critique, au lieu d'accepter d'en etre le confident - moyen sur pour le manquer -, je puis men faire le voyeur: j'observe dandestinement le plaisir de l'autre,j'entre dans la perversion; le commentaire devient alors a mes yeux un texte, une fiction, une enveloppe fissuree. Perversitede I'ecrivain (son plaisir d'ecrire est sans fonction), double et triple perversite du critique et de son lecteur, a I'infini.

How read criticism? Only one way: since here I am a reader at one remove, I have to move my position: instead of letting myself receive the confidences of this critical pleasure which would be a sure way to miss it -1 can become its voyeur: stealthily I observe the pleasure of the other, I move into perversion; and so in my eyes the commentary becomes a text, a fiction, a cracked envelope. Perversity of the writer (his pleasure in writing is useless), double and triple perversity of the critic and of his reader, and so on, endlessly. Barthes61

2

Three easy pieces sonnet analysis

La citation capricieuse ou serielle n'est pas, comme dans la perigraphie, ce qui est convoque, ce qui vient au texte depuis un dehors, I'intertexte, une reference et une bibliotheque, elle n'est pas la greffe propre, la fleur, le rehaut ou I'incrustation, mais la fleur vieillie dont le motif sombre deteint sur la peinture qui ne reussit jamais a oublier. La citation etait deja la sur la feuille avant que j'ecrive, une salissure, une tache ou une macule. L'intertexte, quand le texte le recouvre, est un buvard brouille par les vestiges de tout 1'ecrit dont il a eponge les bavures. Ou, plus exactement, c'est une surface creusee de sillons, laceree, erodee, griffee, alteree par tant de coups de plumes, c'est le reseau profondement grave dans toute surface d'inscription. Je me mets a ecrire, a tracer des signes sur cette surface, et je tombe dans une rainure, ma plume glisse, se prend dans un sillon deja la, elle ne peut echapper, elle suit jusqu'au bout, elle epuise le filon: Mme Bovary ressuscite sous ma plume, ou tout autre fantome deterre.

The capricious or serial citation is not, as in a gloss, what is called up, that which comes to a text from outside, the intertext, a reference and a library, it is not the graft itself, the flower, the welt or the incrustation, but the faded flower the dark pattern of which bleeds on the painting which can never forget. The citation was already there upon the page before my writing, a soiling, a stain or a blot. The intertext, when the text covers it, is a blotter bescribbled with the traces of the whole writing of which it has absorbed the crossings-out. Or, more precisely, it is a surface pitted with furrows, lacerated, eroded, scratched, altered by so many strokes of so many pens, it is the network of lines deeply scored in every bewritten surface. I start to write, to trace signs upon that surface, and I fall into a groove, my pen slips, gets caught in a furrow already there, it can get away from me, it follows to the end, it goes the whole way: Madame Bovary comes to life beneath my pen, or any other dug-up ghost. Antoine Compagnon1

Three easy pieces 27 The following studies were written out of regret that Renaissance criticism had not assimilated semiotics, and a desire to test a specific method by practical application. Their grammar and lexicon, accordingly, is Michael Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry,2 a discourse of method the elegance of which deserves not only to be known but to be employed. It is also the only semiotic theory specifically designed for poetic texts, and while Riffaterre himself concentrates mainly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry, his discussion of an image in a Ronsard sonnet (82-6) usefully prepares the ground for further work in this area. It is of course true that none of the purely theoretical problems referred to above (pp. 3-5) are solved by Riffaterre, any more than they are elsewhere: indeed, the more rigorous the method, the more awkward the lack of theoretical foundation. Yet counter-arguments exist, and in my view convincing ones: the results, and especially the praxis, of a Riffaterrean analysis present themselves as an (increase of) understanding, which a consciousness of theoretical vagueness does not invalidate; and there are many analytic practices in our world that yield modestly useful results while subject to continuing theoretical uncertainty, from education to economics. Uncertainty, indeed, is one of the three fundamental features of both modern life and modern criticism as postulated in this book. In that context, the Riffaterrean method and its application constitute an admirable example. A. Astrophil and Stella 29 This Sidney sonnet I chose almost at random, avoiding consciously only those too well known and/or too obviously 'masterpieces': it seemed fair to test the method first on a text not often analysed - the transmission uncluttered by contextual echoes. Like some weake lords, neighbord by mighty kings, To keepe themselues and their chiefe cities free, Do easly yeeld, that all their coasts may be Ready to store their campes of needful things: So Stellas heart, finding what power Loue brings, To keepe it selfe in life and liberty, Doth willing graunt, that in the frontiers he Vse all to helpe his other conquerings: And thus her heart escapes, but thus her eyes Serue him with shot, her lips his heralds arre: Her breasts his tents, legs his triumphal carre:

28 Chamber music Her flesh his food, her skin his armour braue, And I, but for because my prospect lies Vpon that coast, am giu'n up for a slaue.3

Since Riffaterre correctly insists that semiosis is a process which takes place in the reader's mind,4 it may be useful to present the sonnet's semiotic analysis in the order of the process. The reader is alerted to the presence of a structure of significance by his perception of 'ungrammaticalities' during the first, or heuristic, reading. In the case of A&S 29, the most salient of these is the series of catachretic metaphors in the sestet. While not as extreme a catachresis as Ronsard's sein verdelet (cited by Riffaterre, 82-6), these are nevertheless as a group (some more than others) sufficiently unusual to function as a sign, or a series of signs. It is in and through this group that the language of the text becomes most 'opaque/5 most 'unpredictable' (Riffaterre, 35f.), and thereby most closely restricts and controls the reader's decoding. Once alerted by this series to the presence of significance, the reader commences a second, hermeneutic, reading during which other ungrammaticalities, less immediately obvious, appear. The octave, the discourse of which at first seems relatively 'transparent,' yields a number of linguistic and semantic oddities. In lines 1-3 we find an enallage made notorious by a cigarette commercial: 'Like some weake lords ... yeeld.' Line 4 gives an antiptosis: the coasts are ready to store the kings' camps 'of needful things' instead of 'with' them. We have already been made aware, during the first reading, of the ambiguity which at first sight governs the antecedent of their in line 4. In lines 5-6 ambiguity reappears, this time in the form of an amphibologia: given the uncertainty of punctuation in Elizabethan texts,6 the identity of the antecedent for it selfe (line 6) is just sufficiently ambiguous to function as a sign. In line 7, willing is an anthimeria for willingly; while in line 8, conquerings is not quite an enallage, but nevertheless a surprising substitute for the expected conquests. Continuing this second reading through the sestet, the reader becomes aware of two further ungrammaticalities. The terms of the metaphoric series are not equal. The metaphoric identity of the eyes is left implicit: only their function is mentioned. The function as well as the nature of the flesh and the skin is different in kind from that of the lips, breasts, and legs. (I shall return to this very important sign below.) And the opening words of the final couplet, 'And I,...' while syntactically independent of

Three easy pieces 29 the series, are placed and arranged in such a way that we are likely to read them as the final term of the series until, in the last half of line 14, the main verb appears and sets us right.7 Finally, the sestet also yields a parelcon (for because) in line 13. The next stage of the hermeneutic process makes us regard the ungrammaticalities and attempt to trace the structure of which they are the visible signs. They come together in three main types: literal ungrammaticalities (which, in defiance of A&S 63:13, 'say nay' to grammar), semantic ambiguities, and catachretic metaphors. All these are unusual in the context of the sonnet as a whole and Astrophil and Stella in particular.8 At the same time, they are sufficiently 'overdetermined'9 t be wholly convincing even before the reader can complete the semiosis. As the signs in a text are all 'variants of an invariant' (Riffaterre, 3), our first clue to the nature of the invariant will come through the tracing of a common feature in the ungrammaticalities. In order to see such a common feature, we must first remember that a sonnet is a very highly coded form of text.10 The peculiarity of its code is that it combines to an unusual degree visibility of formal elements (due in part to its inflexible brevity) and an organized cumulative system of intertextuality. Keeping this in mind, we shall realize that the first thing the ungrammaticalities in A&S 29 have in common is that they break the sonnet code, which has a high degree of predictability. This is reinforced by Sidney's common practice of syntactically dividing the sestet into 4 + 2; but in this sonnet it is heightened even further by the sestet's rhymescheme cddece, which does not allow the reader to read it either as two tercets or as quatrain-and-couplet on the formal level. Thus the rhymescheme itself functions as one of the text's ungrammaticalities. For further clues as to the invariant underlying the signs, we must now turn to the sestet's metaphoric series. For ease of analysis I shall here represent the six metaphors, showing in each case the nature of the referent and the semantic group, as well as the code, to which the metaphoric equivalent belongs. It will be clear from the diagram (overleaf) that what we have here is a series of increasing ungrammaticality. The metaphoric equivalent of the eyes does not need to be mentioned, because the key to this metaphor is the conversion of the hypogrammatic darts of convention to shot, which establishes the modern warfare code. In the blason-convention, lips are so often used synecdochally that their description as Love's heralds raises scarcely a ripple in the reader's consciousness. The breasts form a

3O Chamber music nature

referent.t

verb

metaphor

group

code

(feature)

her eyes

serve

him with shot

(human/ servant)

(warfare)

(feature)

her lips

arre

his heralds

(human/ servant)

(warfare/ ceremony)

(feature)

her breasts [arre]

his tents

(object/ rest)

(warfare)

(feature)

her legs

[arre]

his triumphal carre

(object/ motion)

(warfare/ ceremony)

(substance/ her flesh feature)

[is]]

his food

(generic/ (life) sustenance)

(substance/ her skin feature)

[is]

his armour brave

(generic/ object)

(warfare/ ceremony)

slightly more visible ungrammaticality, being more visually congruent with tents, and pointing to the hypogrammatic convention of lying between the beloved's breasts or 'in' her bosom (the original intertext is the Song of Solomon 1:13). The legs are much more noticeable: they convert the blason hypogram, again based on the Song of Solomon where the groom's legs are described, with visual congruence, as 'pillars of marble/ But the climax of the series in terms of significance is undoubtedly the first half of line 12. It is distinguished, and the reader alerted, by (a) alliteration; (b) syllepsis (the implied verb changes to singular); and (c) a change in categories of the image-components (see diagram). 'Her flesh his food' is more than a simple breaking of sonnet-codes. It is superimposed upon a hypogram of great familiarity and great power: the climactic moment of the Holy Communion Service, specifically the Prayer of Humble Access where, uniquely, the word flesh is used." The sign in this case is clearly produced by conversion (Riffaterre, 63-7). It is not the true God's flesh which is the food of the faithful, but Cupid who feeds on the flesh of Stella. While the other metaphors in the series seem to leave her features not only untouched but possibly ennobled by their employment, this one implies her destruction. According to Riffaterre, 'conversion ordinarily involves long sequences' (65) and 'transforms the constituents of the matrix sentence by modify-

Three easy pieces 31 ing them all with the same factor' (63). He is, of course, describing the text's hypothetical production: the reader in the process of semiosis works in reverse order. Moreover, flesh ... food is a dual sign (Riffaterre, 86ff.) and as such anan interpretant: 'a sign that translates the text's surface signs and explains what else the text suggests' (81). It is simultaneously at home in the metaphoric sequence, which translates a woman's body into a variation of warfare code, and in the religious intertext. Pointing us to a text (the Communion Service) whose primary significance is that apparent disorder (paradox: man eats God; God dies, and is resurrected) is in fact the manifestation of Divine order, the interpretant is also strongly marked by conversion: apparent order is in fact the manifestation of 'divine' (Love's - Cupid's) disorder. Our hermeneutic reading, branching out from this nodal point to explore the other ungrammaticalities, finds them all, in various ways, marked with this conversion. In the octave, the ungrammaticalities subvert the order of grammar and of identity. The hypogram they point to is that of language as a manifestation of Divine order. The metaphoric series in the sestet is now also revealed as a conversion, pointing to the conventional blason, with its authority of the Song of Solomon, as a manifestation of Divine order: a paradigm, as it were, of beauty and fruitfulness, here overthrown. What of the final couplet? It unites all the ungrammaticalities of the foregoing text: subversion of grammar in the parelcon, ambiguity in prospect, and metaphor in the apparent link with the preceding series - as well as the subversion of the form, as manifested in the rhyme-scheme. In this way it simultaneously affirms the generic order of the sonnet, by performing its function of summary, and the structure of significance revealed by the semiosis. The signs in the text, then, are all perceived to be variants of an invariant matrix. The matrix may be read as 'Cupid is a false God.' The model - 't. first or primary actualization of the matrix, which governs the form of its variants in the poem' (Riffaterre, 19) - is disorder: the true God creates order the false one disorder. Having thus laid bare the structure of the sonnet's significance, we can see the appropriateness of Riffaterre's comparison of the text with a neurosis: 'as the matrix is repressed, the displacement produces variants all through the text, just as suppressed symptoms break out somewhere else in the body' (ibid.). On the mimetic level Astrophil is affirming, via

32 Chamber music an elegant invention, his helpless devotion to Stella; the significance, however, proclaims a dark malignity which prefigures the cycle's unhappy ending. Finally, a word about the role of rhetoric. As previously mentioned, all the ungrammaticalities in the text are covered by (can be expressed in) the system, the paradigm, of rhetorical tropes and figures. This fact in no way reduces or contradicts their function as ungrammaticalities. Without going so far as Todorov, who sees rhetoric itself as a system of 'opacities' compared to a hypothetical 'plain' discourse, we can see his point that rhetoric, which includes terms for disorder, is 'the first sign of man's consciousness of language/12 In a case such as this, the rhetorical system thus has a triple function. It reinforces the poet's control over the reader's decoding13; it exists as an additional hypogram, which underlies the entire sequence (in fact, the entire genre) and influences its total significance in terms of the relation between love and poetry; and it exists as a parallel commentary upon poetic language, available to the Elizabethan reader as the texts of the semiologists are to us. B. Amoretti 15 The reasons for picking this Spenser piece were more specific: the persistent sense among critics of the Amoretti's weakness, both among sonnetsequences and within Spenser's ceuvre, its clearly-defined source/4 its blason-material, and its subsequent development in the Epithalamion.15 Ye tradefull Merchants, that with weary toyle, do seeke most pretious things to make your gain: and both the Indias of their treasures spoile, what needeth you to seeke so farre in vaine? For loe my loue doth in her selfe containe all this worlds riches that may farre be found, if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine, if Rubies, loe her lips be Rubies sound: If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round: if Yuorie, her forhead yuory weene: if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground: if siluer, her faire hands are siluer sheene. But that which fairest is, but few behold, her mind adornd with vertues manifold.

Three easy pieces 33 In a first, heuristic or mimetic, reading the sonnet appears to be an apostrophe to the 'Merchants' of the first line, divided into four syntactic groups: the question to the merchants; the proposition concerning the beloved as the repository of the earth's treasures; the blason-catalogue illustrating the proposition; and the couplet praising her mind as the fairest feature, both crowning and qualifying the catalogue. Within such a first reading, also, the text reveals a number of ungrammaticalities. The most obvious of these is the first qualification of the merchants, the prominent neologism tradefull. A portmanteau word, made up of trade and carefull, it is perfectly apt, and thus peculiar only in its neologism: as such it draws attention to itself and to its meaning, which it represents in a pure and strongly marked form.16 In fact the relative clause which forms the second qualification of merchants functions as an expansion of the adjective. The two component semes of tradefull form the clause's semantic base; while in another sense the displacement of weary from the merchants to its metonymic collocation with toyle draws attention both to itself and to the neologism which has effected the displacement. The next curiosity lies in the question concluding the first quatrain. Since the merchants have not only sought 'pretious things' but, in spoiling the Indias of their treasures, presumably found them, why are they apostrophized as seeking 'so farre in vaine'? On the heuristic level, the answer is that it is not the seeking which is in vain, but the distance - as the following lines make clear. Yet how clear do they make the situation? No sooner is the reader informed that the beloved contains all riches in herself than another anomaly is created by the phrase 'that may farre be found': the riches, for all that they are in the beloved, are still and not a whit less in the Indias and in the holds of the merchants' ships. Both facts, mutually inconsistent, are stated with equal assertiveness: she doth containe all the riches that may farre be found. Like the previous ungrammaticalities, this ontological impossibility calls attention to itself, and eventually forces the reader to look for another type of meaning. On the heuristic surface, however, the text (as happens frequently in Renaissance poetry) presents a solution at once. The blason-catalogue appears to answer the paradox by presenting, through its repetition of syntactically elliptic metaphors, the beloved's possession of the world's wealth as metaphoric. Yet the reader is left uneasy. It all seems too pat; and in fact the blason-catalogue is oddly weak.17 This impression grows when we arrive at the couplet. For, while a turning to the spirit as the fairest feature in a blason-catalogue is not extraordinary/8 it seems within

34 Chamber music the invention of this sonnet quite out of place. It has nothing to do with the merchants - and indeed a glance at the Desportes original shows that he makes no mention of it, merely following his catalogue with the concluding promise that the merchants will be shown 'encor mille autres raritez, / Mille beaux diamans et mille perles fines/ We are thus left, at the end of our heuristic reading, with the following ungrammaticalities in the text: 1. the neologism tradefull 2. the metonymic transfer of weary 3. the ambiguity of in vaine 4. the paradox of the riches 5. the inconsequentiality of the couplet. As we commence our hermeneutic, or semiotic, reading, it becomes apparent that the effect of nos. i and 2 above is to emphasize the connection between trade and a seme of weariness (between travel and travail), establishing the semic context for the merchants' occupation at the very beginning of the text, even before the wealth code is introduced via pretious, and treasures. No. 3, in vaine, while nonsense or nearly so at the mimetic level, on the level of significance reinforces what has been established in line i. The reader has, in the merchant/trade context, on the semantic level been led successively to the semes of weariness, wealth, and futility. The order isis. important: it emerges as a succession of problems and solutions or rewards. The problem of weary toil is - in proper merchant fashion solved by the reward of wealth. Yet no sooner is this reward evoked than a new problem is posed by the statement that the search is in vain reinforced by the phrase's syntactic ambiguity. The following lines, ostensibly establishing semes of explanation (For) and fulfilment, solving the problem of in vain by revealing the true location of wealth, present themselves as the text's thematic and semantic centre. Yet it is as the problematic centre that they function: for no. 4, the paradox of the riches and their location, is the strongest of the ungrammaticalities. The blason-catalogue solves a strong problem with weak metaphors, hung around a prominent archaism (weene), and proposes semes of bodily (metaphoric) wealth whose ungrammatically is that they are

Three easy pieces 35 unusually unconvincing, eluctable, and (to coin a phrase) underdetermined. This non-solution, itself a sort-of-problem, is ostensibly solved by the triumphantly 'spiritual' couplet; this, however, by its inapplicability to the Merchants (the poem's principal invention) and its consequent introduction of incongruity between the last line and the first, closes the problematic circle. If we now begin, in the process of semiosis, to look for a common structure in the ungrammaticalities, we shall see that this displays the same features as the syntactic/semantic structure of the text itself, i.e., question/answer—expectation/denial. The invariant of which the ungrammaticalities are variants is organized as a structure of false solutions. Somewhere within this perceived structure lies the hermeneutic key; as always, we look for a sign that will function as an interpretant. However, the present text is unusual in that it divides into two at almost all levels, and provides not one interpretant but two. The first key is provided by the strongest and central point of the structure: the paradox of the riches (lines 5-6). The two phrases that together form the semantic inconsistency ('doth in her selfe contain ... that may farre be found') are joined by the phrase 'all this world's riches.' At the core of this central phrase are the words this world, clearly marked by the use of the demonstrative pronoun instead of the expected article. This phrase, the centre of a strongly overdetermined structure of ungrammaticality, is the first dual sign and as such the first interpretant. It points to the text's hypogram, which in this case is not a specific (inter)text so much as a semic tissue, a descriptive system19 scattered throughout an extensive intertextual network. The basis of this network is biblical; and the descriptive system, found throughout the New Testament and all Protestant texts depending on it, is activated always by the phrase this world. The most obvious illustrative text, which moreover brings together the elements crucial to Amoretti 15, is Matthew 13:22 (part of the Seed and the Sower parable): 'He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceit fulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful' (italics mine). We may say that this world, in the Protestant English sociolect, is in fact a negative marker, always implying its antonym. Its combination with a seme of riches connotes care, vanity, and a distraction of attention from the true riches, of the other worl.

36 Chamber music In its interpretant function, then, this world leads us to a matrix around which the first part of our text is produced by expansion:20 'the values of wealth are false values.' The model which translates the matrix into the text's structure of significance is that of the false solutions. However, there is more to the text than this. As I mentioned above, we are here dealing with a text divided into two at almost all levels; and it is precisely at the point least affected by the text-production-by-expansion just described that we must look for a second dual sign. We find this at the transition between the blason-catalogue and the last line, i.e., at the core of the expectation/denial movement that dominates the text's second half. Line 13 is a dual sign, which at the mimetic level of this text blandly introduces the virtue of its successor, but which is also a semic commonplace of blason literature. In this latter context (parodied in Sidney's famous counterblason sonnet on Mopsa - OA 3) it normally introduces, not the mind or spirit, but the hidden and entirely physical core of the woman's beauty and attraction. In fulfilling it with the actual last line, then, our text converts the hypogram of this commonplace, using a moral topos to defeat an immoral one. By so doing, it denies the experienced blason reader's expectation. It also retroactively criticizes the whole of the blason: the conversion is overdetermined by the blason-catalogue's own ungrammaticalities. Its lameness now appears as a sign of the falseness of its values - the values, by extension, of all blasons. The second part of the text, converting its hypogram, is generated by the matrix 'values of the body are false values,' and its model is that of the denied (or altered) climax... We thus see that we have to do with a double text and a double significance: the first part generated by expansion, the second by conversion. The question of the text's unity at once arises; and we are faced with the need to find a structure of which the two parts analysed above are substructures or intermediate stages. This process is facilitated by the fact that the text's two parts are at no point clearly separable, and overlap throughout, especially, the blasoncatalogue. To find the unifying element, we must return to the closing of the problematic circle - the connection between line 14 and line 1. The poem's two halves are then shown to be two hemispheres, meeting not only at lines 5-6 but also (like East and West) at the extremities. The

Three easy pieces 37 denial of the reader's expectation by line 14 places him in the position of the Merchant, who has with weary toil found the riches of the blason, yet found them in vain, because line 14 has exposed his values as false - just as those of the Merchants were. Whom does the sonnet address? Apostrophically, the 'Merchants/ Yet every poem addresses the reader. In this case, the text's significance lies in the fact that that the reader, avidly following the blason-catalogue to its expected conclusion, finds himself rebuked, and his values equated with those of the Merchants. The two addressees become, ruefully, one. Completing the analysis, we find in this circularity of problematic the key to the unifying structure of significance. The invariant of which the two substructures are variants is the matrix 'material values are false values' - whether of wealth or of body. The method of overall text production is expansion, with the second part's conversion built into the larger movement as a variation. The model which unites the sub-models of 'false solutions' and 'denied/altered climax/ as well as the circularity of the total structure, actualizes the matrix via the pattern of the fruitless search. We have, then, in Amoretti 15 a brief text generated in a pattern of striking complexity. We may justifiably ask what the final effect is of such a structure. Its strength lies in the duality that is never split or flaw. The significance consists, as it were, of a field of force organized around the two poles of the centre and the meeting extremities. By the insistence on two poles, and on the circularity of the structure, the poem creates a trap for the reader who, as soon as he enters into the text, is forced to undergo a profound questioning of his values. And the more 'skilful' the reader, the greater his literary competence, the more merciless the trap. A final note about the text's source in Desportes. Clearly the French text adds little to our understanding of Amoretti 15. However, once we perceive the semiotic structure presented above, we realize that the Desportes text functions within the challenge to the 'skilful' reader. For its significance in relation to Amoretti 15 lies in what it does not do; and the reader whose literary competence includes it will find himself involved in yet another 'fruitless search' which overdetermines the effect of the trap and the questioning of his values. The complexity of the structure thus justifies itself by its effectiveness in undermining the sophisticated reader's distancing from the text's moral impact and implications.

38 Chamber music C. Sonnets 61 A reading of a Shakespeare sonnet will necessarily differ from those of Sidney or Spenser, not so much for reasons internal to the text but because of a characteristic contextual surfeit. The existence of Booth's commentary21 in particular exerts a powerful influence on any analysis, blurring boundaries between heuristic and hermeneutic levels of reading and making any interpretation, in part at least, a dialogue with Booth. This, however, is not a drawback but an enrichment of the critical situation, to be welcomed and enjoyed as increasing the density of the resulting fugue. Is it thy wil, thy Image should keepe open My heauy eielids to the weary night? Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken, While shadowes like to thee do mocke my sight? Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee So farre from home into my deeds to prye, To find out shames and idle hours in me, The skope and tenure of thy lelousie? O no, thy loue though much, is not so great, It is my loue that keepes mine eie awake, Mine owne true loue that doth my rest defeat, To plaie the watch-man euer for thy sake. For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me farre of, with others all to neere.

A Shakespeare sonnet should never through its rhyme-scheme mislead one into reading it only or even principally as three quatrains and a couplet. While in certain cases, such as no. 73 (That time of yeere thou maist in me behold'), this is the main structure, in the great majority of the Sonnets it is accompanied by the parallel armature of the octave plus sestet. Sonnet 61 is a good example of this norm, with a strongly marked major volta between lines 8 and 9. As is often the case with the Sonnets, at the first or heuristic reading the text appears particularly transparent, forceful and convincing.22 Three rhetorical questions, which together make up the octave, are movingly (indeed, devastatingly) answered in a sestet which in its final couplet's summing-up makes powerful use of the proverb 'One friend watches for another.' And there, for most readers, the matter rests.

Three easy pieces 39 There are moments when such a reading is enough. I do not want to be a semiotician all the time; least of all with regard to such an immediately satisfying text. Yet even here, the question "What else does the text say?' will not be shut up. Meeting a text is like meeting a person. Even (perhaps especially) the most assured and authoritative performance by an attractive stranger awakes in us a perverse curiosity as to the tensions of his solitude. And so, paparazzi of significance, we set to work - neverthe less. I search, as always, for cracks in the heuristic structure. Where, closel. examined, does the text stumble? In the prescriptive architecture of its grammar (to grammar who says nay?) which are the ungrammaticalities. You will have noticed that the sonnet as printed above is not only in 'old spelling' but has retained the punctuation that George Eld, its printer, gave it or conserved.23 The reader engaged in the linear process of assimilating this text arrives, at some point during his following of line i, at the phrase Ts it thy wil, thy Image/ In suppressing the comma, Booth has silently suppressed the first of the text's ungrammaticalities. There is a moment, before the verb comes along to sort things out, when 'thy wil' and 'thy Image' are parallels - a situation instantly denied as the line and the sentence continue. It is just such a moment as we have learned not to let pass, but to remark and file for later hermeneutic integration. The reader notices, next, that lines 3 and 4 announce themselves as a restatement of lines i and 2 in slightly different terms. It is in the slight difference that the second ungrammaticality resides. This is made up of three dimensions. In the first place, a single Image is replaced (restated) by multiple shadows. Even if one accepts 'shadow' as a synonym of 'image/ the multiplicity is noteworthy. Secondly, the simple and solid possessive 'thy Image' gives way to 'shadowes like to thee/ which to even the slightest sustained reflection connotes a lesser likeness and thus a lesser force of identity. The third dimension is the typically Shakespearian one of position. As will be seen later (Two-part invention/ below), the way elements in Shakespeare texts are positioned in relation to each other is never innocent. The present movement is similar to that in sonnet 73's 'When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hang / Vpon those boughes which shake against the could.' Here also there is a confident proposition subsequently qualified, then requalified: 'thy Image/ 'shadowes like to thee/ 'thy spirit/ The ungrammaticality lies in the gap between apparent restatement and connotative difference. A strong and obvious problem exists in relation to line 8. Even on the heuristic level, every attentive reader comes up against The skope and

4O Chamber music tenure of thy lelousie/24 and what or who might be its antecedent. Booth duly appends a note which, alas, explains little and leaves connotative possibilities untouched.25 For the process of semiosis what is important is not so much the antecedent's identity (for the record, I think it is probably 'me') as the irritating and unavoidable fact of its ambiguity, which is not laid to rest by explanation but recurs as often as we read the poem. The next ungrammaticality lies in line 11. 'Mine own true loue/ as noted by Booth, is an ambiguous phrase: on one level it is a semantically valid expansion of the preceding 'my loue'; on another it is a common epithet or apostrophe. As with 'thy wil, thy Image/ this ambiguity is formally resolved by the end of the next line; but the eye-catching ambiguity remains to tease and bother the reader with its presence. In one sense this is less of an ungrammaticality, as the ambiguity is easily recognized and appears simply to 'enrich' the text: it is in this direction that Booth annotates it. For present purposes, though, it should be linked with the others, in the company of which it will be found to contribute to a different pattern. Finally we come to something which has become common knowledge at least since Tilley's work on proverbs: the dependence of line 13 on the saying 'One friend watches for another,' a proverb of care, suggested in the text by the words 'For thee watch I.' It cannot really be called an ungrammaticality, because the reader's eye does not stumble over it, nor does his linguistic or literary competence. Even the proverb's twisting in the line's completion is elegant rather than shocking, as is the gradual realization that the whole poem has been building up to this moment. What role, then, is left for this complex to play in the semiosis? For the moment I propose to leave this question hanging over us in all its urgency, and move back to the other ungrammaticalities. What unites them, first, is a sense of semantic instability, of illogic in the nature of substantives and relations. Will may (not) be Image; Image may (not) be shadows; keeping someone's eyes open may (not) be mocking his sight; a friend's jealousy may be directed at me or at my shames and idle hours is he jealous of my shame? what does that mean? Am I (to him) my shame? And if I am his, and I am Will26 and his Will is (not) his Image, then does that mean that he is my shame? The octave, clearly, is marked by a frightening ambiguity of identity. In the sestet there is (ungrammatical) talk of love. My love. Mine own true love. A person, of course - an epithet. No: an action - my loving. No a person. My love is not a person. That person is (not) my own true love. My love is true only as action. So let us leave behind the octave and

Three easy pieces 41 identity, and move into the sestet and action. Mine own true love defeat. my rest, plays the watchman for thy sake, and watches for thee while thou wakest elsewhere. Inexorably our joining up of the ungrammaticalitites in instability/ambiguity reaches the watching (and thus the proverb), where it spreads into the most overdetermined ambiguity of all. 'Watching for' a friend is an act of care. 'Watching for' an enemy is an act of suspicion. When the one blurs into the other, huge structures of inward sanity are undermined. 'Watching for' and its hypogrammatic proverb become the interpretant. They do so in an unusual way. For while we now sense that this text is produced by conversion, what, actually, does it convert? It does not substitute an antonym for 'watches for' in the proverb. Rather, it undermines the solidity of the verb, it activates within it a polysemy which the proverb ignored, and in doing so it undermines its own intertext. The proverb will never, we feel, be the same again. It has done so by activating a negatively marked meaning of 'watch for.' And if we now follow the thread back to the text, we shall see that in fourteen lines there are ten sight-related words, all of which appear in a negatively marked context: Image, eyelids, sight, pry, find out, skope, eye, watchman, watch, and wake. Moreover, it is clear that this impairment of sight is in no way a blindness. Very much the opposite: the poem's significance shapes itself as an awesome clear-sightedness. It is the proverb - the doxa, the wisdom of what 'everyone knows' - that has been undermined, and with it the doxa's assumptions of interpretation's reliability. Several doxical assumptions are here met and tackled: (i) Love is blind; (2) Love is irresponsible; (3) Love as blind and irresponsible is a literary conceit which may be safely played with; (4) in real life (real) love is wonderful. This compound matrix is converted, via the model o ambiguity: as we follow the text's undermining of identity and action, its shaking of all stable meanings, we become aware that (i) Love is not blind; (2) Love is responsible; (3) this is not a literary conceit but the real world; (4) Love as clear-sighted and responsible is not wonderful but a nightmare. What makes a sonnet such as this so difficult to analyse semiotically is the sense that at every turn it is ahead of you, doing the job itself. More than ever you are reminded, by a Shakespeare sonnet, that the aim is not to outsmart the text, to discover a meaning it is trying to keep hidden. Remember - it seems to say - that semiosis is the reader's praxis of the

42 Chamber music transformation: not the result of something done but the doing itself. Quite apart from the specific meaning(s) and significance(s) involved, the semiosis of a Shakespeare sonnet is a lesson in humility. Coda What, then, will these exercises have taught us? That Riffaterre's semiotics of poetry is a method which (unlike, say, Barthes's in S/Z) can be replicated and applied by others to other texts. That this process, while both instructive and entertaining, has a troubling side to it which will not go away. In the case, for instance, of the Spenser sonnet, a non-semiotic reader (a student, for example; a friend; a family member to whom one has explained what one has been spending all this time on; or a sceptical colleague, proud of belonging to the 'old school') will at once ask whether the structure of significance as I have described it was part of Spenser's intention or whether I am just 'reading it into' the text. The correct answer is, of course, 'neither/ but it is extraordinarily difficult convincingly to enlarge upon. Why, then, should we not let this deter us? Because anyone who has made the effort to learn Riffaterrean semiotics and to apply it is struck by the convincing and illuminating nature of the structures found. Because, in other words, it is a thoroughly satisfying way of reading a poem. Finally, it is of peculiar interest to readers of Renaissance sonnets. The sonnet is a highly rational form: brief and tidy and shaped, as it were, for argument and QED. Many of its great practitioners counterpoint this formal nature with a haunting pathos (Petrarch), a triumphant passion (Labe), or a desperate wit (Shakespeare) in the content. Yet still, we feel, this does not exhaustively account for the effect these poems have on us. There is always more to them than explanation can explain. What this kind of semiotics offers is a congruent way (one that is as neat and formalist as the sonnet itself) to extend the range and the type of interpretation.

3

Polyphony the plural of the text

la pluralite des verites, choquante pour la logique, est la consequence normale de la pluralite des forces.

the plurality of truths, while shocking to logic, is the normal consequence of the plurality of forces. Veyne1

il s'agit d'entrer, par I'analyse (ou par ce qui ressemble a une analyse), dans lejeu du signifiant, dans I'ecriture: en un mot, d'accomplir, par son travail, le pluriel du texte.

what one has to do is enter, by means of the analysis (or what looks like an analysis) into the play of the signifier,er, into the writing: in a word, to accomplish, through one's work, the plural of the text. Barthes2

Nowhere does 'accomplishing the plural of the text' seem less difficult, or less necessary, than with regard to the sonnet-sequences. Few texts before the modern era announce their plurality so flagrantly. Each is Manyin-One and One-in-Many, without ever giving us more than a hint of method or of paradigm. Each is printed in a certain order, the reliabitity of which is at once contradicted by whatever scanty evidence exists.3 Each addresses - or addresses itself to - a beloved and a reader, and proudly leaves us in the dark about their ontological status. Each is written in the first person singular, and provides an impeccable and carefully orchestrated confusion as to the identity of that person. Each refers constantly, via translation, allusion, and echo, to a long tradition which it simultaneously undermines. Is there, we might reasonably ask, any plural left to accomplish? The answer, I think, is Yes; and the key to the answer lies in the whole sentence of the epigraph. It is easy enough to recognize the plural of the sonnets: what is a great deal harder, and in many ways still remains to be

44 Chamber music done, is accomplishing that plural. Only the naive now search the sequences for biographical reportage; but there is still, in the panoply of annotated editions and explicatory scholarship, a stubborn drive to arrive at their truth. Increasingly, this drive is qualified by admissions of fragmentariness: what is illuminated, we are told, is an aspect only - of what? Implied, still, is a many-faceted crystal, turning in space, which is the truth of the text. If an infinite number of scholars write an infinite number of books, all the 'aspects' will be described and explained, and we shall know. But what Barthes's text points us to is not only that the truth of the text is plural, but that it is not to be discovered. It is to be accomplished. The truth of any text is a process to be undergone, a game to be played, a work to be done. And nowhere is this truer than in the sonnet-sequences. All the 'plurals,' all the confusions mentioned above are feints (lures) and signs. Lures, because they announce themselves as problems to be solved. That they did so even to early readers is shown by E.K.'s glosses to Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar and by Benson's reordering of the Shakespeare sonnets as early as i64O.4 Any survey of recent scholarship will indicate that they are still doing so. The 'plurals' are not only feints but signs. Signs as feints, and signs as plurals. Signs as feints: the presence of a feint is a sign of duplicity. No text is less 'sincere' than a sequence of love-sonnets. If this fact does not trouble us, we have left our innocence too far, and too easily, behind. The presence of duplicity (in the full sense, or senses, of that word: doubleness is the first plural) in a collection of love-poems should shock us at least a little. The plural of a love-poem cannot be accomplished without, at the heart of the process, a sense of an innocence lost, a singularity broken. The games we play are those of a fallen world. Signs as plurals. Trickling backwards from the analyses of modern literature has been a healthy tendency to recognize that ambiguity is a sign of ambiguity. Sonnet scholarship has either tried to solve the 'problems' or, more recently, agreed more or less tacitly to treat them as insoluble. The plural as sign, though, points, inevitably and joyfully, to us, the readers. All the 'gaps in our understanding' of the sonnetsequences are doors, invitations. They welcome us into the text as participants. For not only is the plural of the text to be accomplished; only we - only each of us - can accomplish it. It has been usefully pointed out that the literary phenomenon consists 'not only of the text, but also its reader and the totality of the reader's possible reactions to the text':5 that it 'lies in the relation of the text to the reader, and not in that of

Polyphony 45 the text and the author, or that of the text and reality.'6 The plural (of the) text fs Barthes's famous 'writeable text.'7 We - the readers - are to write it; to live it; to close it (knowing that it will always remain open); to accomplish it. The plural of these texts takes, as has been suggested, various forms. There is the plural, most noticeable perhaps, of identity (of both speake and addressee). There is the plural of feeling; the plural of language; the plural of genre and the plural of tradition. For example. A feminist critic has introduced the term 'the resisting reader' (cf. p. 23 above). The reade who fully accomplishes the plural of the sonnet-sequences will remember that docility is not participation. We are to perform, to play these texts: to d. so we must be both generous and suspicious, sharing and resisting, acquiescing and questioning. Is it coincidence that the accomplishing of their plural is as complex an exercise as love itself? The plural of identity presents itself at once. The first of the great sequences, Astrophil and Stella, gives us, exceptionally, not one pseudonym but two - not only that of the Lady (hallowed by tradition) but that of the author. Henceforth, we are to suppose that T and 'she' in the poems refer to these coded figures: Star and (Philip) Star-lover. Yet in three sonnets (24, 35, 37) there are riddling references to the Star as Penelope Rich; and in at least one sonnet (30) Philip Star-lover's father is equally unmistakeably shown to be Sir Henry Sidney. In one sense there is nothing new about this. Dante and Petrarch had from time to time taken care to point out, with names and dates, the 'reality' upon which their sonnets were based; and Ronsard's poetic T predicts that Helene (de Surgeres) will, in old age, remember that Ronsard loved her when she was still beautiful. What is remarkable, then, is not the fact that Astrophil and Stella are also Sidney and Lady Rich, or the fact (indicated by their biographies) that they are not, or even the fact that Philip and Penelope are also Astrophil and Stella (and that at some moments the former is almost, indeed, Philisides); what is insisted on, what is in fact one of the strongest controls of Astrophil and Stella upon the reader's decoding of its text, is the undecideability of the identities. Astrophil is (not) Philip. Nowhere are we so clearly forced to enter into a baffling plural. How far this goes beyond the normal coding even of poetry can be seen when we apply Roman Jakobson's linguistic diagram.8 Jakobson himself already hinted at a poetic expansion: 'As well as the author and the reader, there is the

46 Chamber music "I" of the lyric hero or the fictional narrator and the "you" of the supposed addressee of dramatic monologues, pleas, and epistles/9 Within Jakobson's paradigm, this gives us a double speaker and a double addressee, at least potentially, in every love-lyric. But what Astrophil and Stella insists on is the tension: the process and the relation (and the process of the relation) between its two speakers and its three addressees: Penelope, Stella, and the reader. At no point does it allow the reader to become unconfused (i.e., detached), to rest in one relation, one explication. Even the first-person author/speaker confusion (which is, after all, normal to the lyric) is not allowed to 'settle' in the reader's mind: the title10 at once insists on it, marks it, plants it firmly in our consciousness; sonnet 3o's entire significance consists in reminding us of it; and at the sequence's culminating moment, the Eighth Song, Astrophil is suddenly introduced in the third person by a speaker who also refers to himself in the first ("leaving him so passion rent ... that therewith my song is broken'). The supposed complications of identity in Shakespeare's Sonnets have obscured what seems a far simpler relation in Sidney's. Scholars have, manifestly, got bored with questions of Astrophil/Philip and Stella/ Penelope. Wrongly so. With the materials of a seemingly unambiguous ambiguity, Sidney has built up a palace of mirrors with an entrance but no exit. In this most specular of texts the reader is permitted no detachment. Baffled, he is involved. Bounced without respite from one identification to another, he cannot escape the sign that it is identity itself which is in question. Apparently invited to contemplate a 'tragicomedy of love' (Nashe) in a theatre with a stage and an exit, he is, instead, confronted with that most medieval, that most modern, and that most psychological of phenomena: the mirror.11 Not only the stage but the theatre is lined with them. And contemplating the play (which is a lyric - no, a group o. lyrics, a plural of lyric and lyrics), he is drawn, through his decoding, into the text. Who am I? says the speaker's voice, teasingly. The question is insistent but unanswerable: as baffling as Arnaut Daniel's 'I am Arnaut who harvests the wind -1 hunt the hare with an ox -1 swim against the current/ Who is She? the voice continues. We are not allowed to decide; and in the Songs (where She is addressed) the question is extended to Who areyow? Here is the key. The reader, pulled against his expectations, against his will, into the play of mirrors, cannot avoid the question of identity. Who are you? asks the text. The demand is set in the context and the code of love - or rather, of

Polyphony 47 love-poetry. And ceaselessly the troubled voices take up the confusion of identity. Often in topoi, in commonplaces: the lover (who is the love-poet: there is no other) loses or is abstracted from his reasonable self, his social self; he is defined by Love, re-created in Love's (Cupid's) image (as well as being Love's - the Lady's - victim). The Lady is the embodiment of Virtue, the architecture of Beauty, the 'lodestar of Desire' (viii). But within all these topoi, within the well-worn grooves of love-code, nags the question: Who is - all these things? And beyond that, a further question still: Who, reader, are you; and what is love to you? 'You' (say the voices: for there are many) are not distinct. You are one of the 'envious wits' (104); you (though you did not know it at the time) have told 'me/ and told me far too little, of Stella (92); you are Absence (88), Grief (94), Thought (96), Language (63), 'my' friend(2i) and perhaps 'my' lover too (59). T have enticed you here, to this scene of poetry, this scene of love-poetry. T am perhaps Love himself: T question 'you/ and will not let 'you' go. The plural of Astrophil and Stella, in terms of identity, is a vertigo of mirrors from which the reader, if he emerges at all, does not emerge intact. In fact the only emergence from this text is, precisely, to accept the task of accomplishing its plural. To enter into it, resisting all the way: participating. To become a strand of it, to weave yourself into the texture. The decoding does not send you back (to a source, to a literary competence); it sends you forward, into the vortex. Your identity is in question. That (says the text) is what Love does. The only way out is in: a Flucht nach vorne, an escape forward. Such are the dangers of reading signs; of asking not Whence? or How? but Why? Grandmother, what big ambiguities you have. The plural of the text is an accomplishment. By the skin of our teeth.

[Each plural is of course present in all the texts. If I choose one sequence to demonstrate one plural, it is for the sake of convenience. Its further application, its accomplishment, rests with the reader - with you.]

Nowhere is the plural of feeling, of affect, as insistent as in the Shakespeare sonnets. It is built upon the plural of identity, which here becomes a plural of subject. This term has furnished recent criticism with one of its

48 Chamber music most fertile polyvalences. Subject is topic; subject is speaker; subject is author; subject is object also. And, as we shall see, not only object but abject (in the Freudian sense). In the Sonnets the speaking subject's identity is not, in the Sidneian sense, in doubt. There is no pseudonym, and the speaker's first name (which is also, comfortingly, the author's) furnishes the basis for a number of justly notorious puns. In fact the subject-speaker takes, throughout the sequence, some care to emphasize the constancy of his identity: of his moral identity, that is. Surrounded by - involved with - others in whom inconstancy is the only reliable feature, T is the same, both as lover (his love 'remaines/ 74; his lover's breast is his 'home of love/ 109) and as love-poet (who writes still, like his Queen, semper eadem, 'all one, ever the same,' 76). Well and good; but who is he? He, the speaking subject, is Will. Once again, and more explicitly, Astrophil's injunction (A&S 10:8) has been fulfilled: Love has been left to Will. And Will, so far from being a stable entity, or id-entity, as we shall see, is the starting-point for the plural of the Sonnets. Will, to begin with, is not just a speaker, an author, a protagonist: he/it is the most condensed of metaphors. A name: the 'Ronsard' of the Sonnets.ts. A faculty: the central one in the moral microcosm, the one which, according to Pico and much of the Renaissance, formed the very basis of the 'dignity and excellence of man.'12 As such, in many intertexts from St Bernard to Spenser, a horse. And a part of the body: both very specific (the genital part) and strikingly bisemic (the phallus or the vagina).13 If, then, we say that Will is the subject of the sonnets, we are already dealing with a complex signifier, and with a metaphoric/metonymic identity. Bearing in mind Ricceur's important work on metaphor14 which locates its core in the 'being-like' rather than in its two poles, and which analyses this 'being like' as 'this is, and is not' (a relation here represented by the symbol V) - we are faced with all the implications of the following chain T V author V protagonist V Will (name) V Will (faculty) V Will (phallus/ vagina). It is from the last three elements in this chain especially that we can start to accomplish the Sonnets' plural of feeling. For if Love is left to Will, what will be left of Love? The answer to that question (which we are not yet in a position to give) is the matrix of the entire sequence's significance. For, so far from being a 'romantic triangle' or merely a drama of three human characters, the Sonnets are a deconstruction of the semantic

Polyphony 49 core of 'Love.' No hall of mirrors, this time: rather a 'pioneer's' tunnel, by which the heart of the love-sonnet, the sonnet-love, the feeling-base, is undermined, and explodes in the reader's mind. Will is a faculty. Within the individual's moral microcosm it is lodged between Reason and Appetite/Passion, and it is the object of their ceaseless civil war. It is the executive power, which alone can implement action - action which, if virtuous, is, in Sidney's words, the 'ending end' (the causa finalis) of all earthly learning.15 Its central position - similar to Man's in the macrocosm of Creation - assures both its importance and its vulnerability. Will is also ('is and is not') the phallus/vagina connection which is the core (though, in most non-pornographic and some pornographic literature, the repressed core) of love - and thus very much the repressed core of the love-sonnet tradition. Without going into the extensive psychoanalytic detail of Kristeva's Histoires d'amour^ we could say that much of this tradition (derived from the troubadours but importantly modified by Renaissance humanism) is performed in the psychic space of preOedipal Narcissist identification, where the Other (the addressee) is both domna and domnus, the bisexual 'father of personal prehistory' (Freud), who provides the identification that creates the lover as speaker.17 Why, then, does the Sonnets' bringing-to-light, their naming, of this duality trouble the identity of feeling? Because, precisely, the identity of 'Love' (which, to the Western mind, is 'love-poetry': Tamour, c,a se parle, et ce n'est que c,a. Les poetes 1'ont toujours su')18 had been based on this repression. What was repressed was the void into which Narcissus fell. All love-poetry, in a sense, is a turning around this void, an exorcising of it. In the Sonnets, the speaking mouth comes so close to the water that the surface is troubled, the image shattered, and the void beckons. Already in Astrophil and Stella and in the Amoretti there are signs of the ab-jection of the female (which allows the germ of a plural of feeling to appear). In song v Astrophil addresses Stella as 'ungrateful thiefe, you murdring Tyran you, / You Rebell run away ... / you witch, you Divill'; and a substantial minority of Spenser's collection centres on the beloved as a tigerish Caligula-figure who uses her innocent beauty 'that she the better may in bloody bath / of such poore thralls her cruell hands embrew' (31). In 'Will's' sonnets this fragmentation of the feeling explodes even the addressee. No one Other could carry such a plural, such a contradiction. We are thus presented with two addressees, a man and a woman. Each, however, has a Will: each, in fact, has all the Wills of which there is

5O Chamber music mention in the text. And since (the) Will is the root of the plural, the fragmentation of the addressee does not stabilize the situation. For each of the addressees in turn is involved in the plural of feeling. The 'fair' Friend is un-fair, and cankered like a rose. The 'dark' Lady, though excoriated, is his 'fairest and most precious Jewell' (131). Nor, of course, is (the) Will who apparently manipulates this multiplicity exempt. He cannot flatter without accusing, praise without damning, love without hating, or hate without loving. In the welter of uncertainties, every stable content is denied to the concept of 'Love.' How, then, are we to accomplish this plural? First of all, by recognizing it and admitting its full weight and force. The lures in Shakespeare's Sonnets are particularly numerous and subtle, culminating in one the author certainly could not have intended: their modernity, their contemporaneity with us. 'Ah yes/ we say, 'I know.' It is the very plurality, the love-hate, the fragmentation which, as moderns, we recognize. The Sonnets are perhaps the only sonnet-sequence that can still bring tears to the eyes of a modern reader. Where is the lure in this? Not in the point (beloved of scholars and teachers) that we do not know what we think we know: no amount of historical homework will safely distance us from these poems. No, the lure lies in the recognition. We are not to recognize the plural of the text, we are to accomplish it. In this case, then, the accomplishment is to be a 'resisting reader': to resist recognition in order better to participate. Two other lures are the tendencies to anthologize and to identify. To anthologize, both because so many individual sonnets are so much more spectacularly successful as such than in other sequences, and because the the sequence as a whole is so difficult of access (the baffled preoccupation with its order is a sure sign of this). And to identify: to classify its images, its identities, its sources and its philosophy as a substitute for accomplishment. Dodging (or returning from) the lures, then, we find positive ways to accomplish the plural of feeling. Yet here there is nothing for our comfort, because in doing so we find ourselves attacked in our very motivations as readers of love-sonnets. Not permitted scholarly detachment, we are mauled if we read them as lovers. For as lovers we search for echoes in poetry. We want the poet to express our exaltation, our melancholy We read love-poetry in the intervals of our loving/9 and we read it for support: support for our feelings. If this poet can 'express' my feelings (and, given his 'talent,' express them so much 'better' than I can), my feelings are justified.

Polyphony 51 The Sonnets do nothing of the kind. There is not one state or condition of our spirit that will not find itself assaulted by a reading of the text as a whole. By their very naming of the sexual 'thing'; by naming it with its brutally polysemic name of Will, of which the semantic field spreads like the waves of a stone-troubled pond to engulf an ever-wider area of the text; by naming, and admitting to the structural and emotive core of the text, the hate which is perhaps inseparable from, and possibly anterior to, Love;20 - by all this 'obscene' naming the Sonnets encode, within Eros, Thanatos. This is why Shakespeare's Sonnets is the most threatening and the most painful of all love-poems. In accomplishing its plural of feeling, we are confronted with all the wolves in the basement - in our basement. It is our Will which is, first involved, then led into a maze of metaphor, then attacked, victimized, fragmented, and put to Death. And with our Will, our Love. We cannot accomplish the plural of the Sonnets without undergoing it. The text makes of Love the sign of Death, and of Death the sign of Love. Its plural is our peril: its significance is our void.

At first sight, the plural of language does not seem evident in the sonnetsequences. 'Fair/ 'gentle/ 'cruel/ 'heavenly/ 'sweet': the love-sonnet code seems one of unusual uniformity. Like the Hellenistic mythology, the lexis appears to reiterate endlessly its function of self-reference. Over and over, the lexical signs say, 'this is a love-sonnet.' It is no doubt for this reason that Shakespeare, overtaken by Baroque, brutally expands the lexical range of the genre as well as its field of metaphor. Of the three great sequences the Amoretti, as has long been recognized, contains the lowest level of verbal energy. A useful index is the count of adjectives: while in the Sonnets 66 per cent of the lines contain one or more, and in the Astrophil and Stella only 56 per cent, the figure for the Amoretti is 71 per cent. If we extend the observation to the proportion of adjectives which function, in one way or another, as positive markers (such as 'fair/ 'true/ 'goodly/ etc.), the difference is even more startling: 23 per cent in Shakespeare, 29 per cent in Sidney, and 49 per cent in Spenser. All the hallmarks, it would seem, of a low-energia style of nearly unbroken praise. And yet it is in the Amoretti that the plural of language can be accomplished. Let us remember that one of the explanations Barthes gives for

52 Chamber music his phrase is 'entering into the play of the sign/ The plural is the play, the game, the jeu which for the troubadours (in the language of Oc) was inseparable from joy. And since we are to accomplish the plural rather than passively to recognize it, it is not to Shakespeare's puns that we will let ourselves be led, but to the apparent homogeneity of Spenser. Sidney, in speaking of sonnets, wrote of the mimesis of sincerity. But in mentioning Spenser, he spoke of language, of style-as-language. Well before the Amoretti, Spenser's linguistic signature was that which his friend 'dare not allow';21 and it is in following this slender thread of Sidney's reluctant condemnation that we enter into the game of the Amoretti's signs. For the key to their plural of language is archaism. Via this they interact symmetrically with Spenser's other work, discontinuously with all the other sonnet-sequences. Through the archaic lexis the Amoretti maintains itself at a crossroads, at a point of intersection: at a plural. Archaism as a literary sign has been described by Riffaterre as 'a relationship between two equivalent forms, one marked and one unmarked. The unmarked form antedates the text, the marked one does not.'22 Later he remarks, 'an archaic flavour is another index of poetic quality in the lexicon.'23 In the Amoretti, though (as in Spenser's work generally), it is not so much as a marker of poeticity that the archaism functions. In fact, its appearance in the sonnets is far more surprising than that in the Faerie Queene, where it has an obvious congruence with the exotic legendary past of romance. Within the Amoretti, it is the sustained archaism of the lexis which constitutes one of the work's main 'ungrammaticalities/ its anomaly, and thus its invitation into the play of the signs, into the plural of the text. In part, the archaism works as evocation of a hypogram: another text 'not present in the linearity' of this one.24 The 'other text,' in this case, is the whole ceuvre of the 'well of English undefiled': Chaucer. Spenser's archaic forms are virtually all fourteenth-century, all Chaucerian: this fact is well known. If we bear it in mind when pursuing the Why? of archaism in the sonnets we might well, for example, come up with Chaucer the love-poet, and specifically with certain of his texts - the Troilus, the Knight's Tale, and especially the Franklin's Tale - as intertexts which contribute to the Amoretti's significance. Yet such an explanation is, ultimately, unsatisfying. Perhaps because it is just that: an explanation. It accommodates us as pupils, as spectators, but it does not make us enter in. To join the play of the signs, to accomplish the plural of language, we must experience the archaism both more

Polyphony 53 fully and far more simply. It announces itself to the reader as a double sign: a sign of language and a sign of time. A sign of language, first. Being lexical it does not, like rhetoric, entice us into the relations of words: it signals the presence, the opacity, the noise of words themselves. The more 'unimportant' the archaism, the more insistently it performs this function: 'sith' for 'since,' 'mote' for 'must,' when not in rhyme-position, signal first of all a fact of language. Such a plural is, paradoxically, easier for us, as moderns, to accomplish: we are used to the obtrusiveness of language and have come, since Mallarme and Joyce, to regard it as one of the chief markers of literariness. But to Sidney - one of the most sophisticated of Spenser's contemporary readers - it was shocking; Guilpin noted in 1598 that 'Some blame deep Spencer for his grandam words'; and in his Preface to the Shepherd's Calendar E.K. goes to great lengths t. justify it. What effect does the consciousness of the language's presence have on us, the Amoretti's readers? For we are not dealing with the Calendar or the Faerie Queene, but with a sequence of love-sonnets. How does it invite us to accomplish this text's plural? By reminding us of the role of language in love. Love (as mentioned above, in the Kristeva quotation) is above all, to the Western consciousness, what is spoken, what is sung. From the Song of Songs, from Sappho and Catullus and Propertius, via the troubadours, Dante, and Petrarch, the school of love is the school of love's language. 'L'amour se parle.' 'Love' is the language that ceaselessly turns around the void of the Other (the beloved, who does not speak, or whose words are only reported),25 the language that names the Other in the impersonal codes of Beauty,26 the language that names itself. The true Other, in fact, is language: in the frequent association of the beloved with Heaven (especially frequent in the Amoretti) we are always to remember that for humans, what 'falls from heaven' is our Adamic task, our capacity, to name. For the troubadour, the joi (both joy and game) of love is the joy of the song, of the poem. For all love-poets it is the joy, the 'heavenly7 joy, of logos. The beloved, praised and unspeaking, is the verbum infans, the 'speechless word' of the Nativity paradoxes. Love is the word made flesh, the Word made word.27 But it is also, as archaism, a sign of time. First, of time in its specificity: history. As Paul Ricceur has said, 'History is a permanent enjambment of two mutually intolerant perspectives: the time of the world and the time of mortals.'28 The Amoretti's archaism forces the reader to recognize both these perspectives, equally, in relation to the language which is love.

54 Chamber music Such a language, I said, justifies our loves: via it, we enter consciously into the great and enduring Word of humanity, the time of the world. The language of love is that of another time as much as that of our own: it is a language diachronically shared. Yet also the time of mortals. History is also the 'mines of Time/ the memento mori. It is time that passes, Time that mows us like harvest. Much more subtly than Shakespeare's open warfare, Spenser's archaism in the midst of love confronts this tempus edax. The reader is drawn, with the plural of love's language, into the consciousness that the language we inherit is the language of the dead. We strut, briefly, in our predecessors' costumes. This, though, is not all. For beyond the specific time of history, the archaism, plural sign of language-and-time, signifies also the great topos of language against time. We, the lovers, die; the language of our love remains. This, of course, is the topos for which the Shakespeare Sonnets are famous. Yet it lives quite as strongly in the archaism of the Amoretti. And whether or not Spenser may have foreseen it, it has only strengthened in subsequent centuries. For to read the Amoretti now is to read a double archaism, and to accomplish its plural of language is to enter all the more fully into the joi of poetic immortality: the immortality of the love-that-speaks. It is this, quite as much as more obvious factors, which contributes to the peculiar joy of the Amoretti. In its way of pluralizing language, in the plural of this text, we accomplish both a confrontation with death-in-love and a deliverance from it. The peaceful flow of praise, the almost unbroken self-referential love-code that says 'this is a love-sonnet' finds, here, its own significance. This, if we accomplish its plural of language, is what a love-sonnet, a love-sonnet sequence, love-as-language par excellence, is.

Three examples. There are others. There is, in fact, an infinity of others. The plural we accomplish with regard to any one text is not a finite plural. If it were, we should be back to the crystal, turning in space. To adapt Ricceur's phrase, there is a 'plural of mortals/ a plural for each reader. When we accomplish the plural of a text, we accomplish our own plural. It is this, as much as anything, that provides, for a modern reader, the relevance, the wealth, of literature. Earlier I referred to the symmetry between the complexity of love-

Polyphony

55

poetry and that of love itself. If 'love' is to a great extent the language (the languages) of love, the histoires d'amour we tell ourselves even as we live them, it is also true that the texts of love-poetry are perhaps, in their plural, the most congruent of all literature. For it is in love - in its histoires vecues as in its histoires parlees (which are not different from each other) that we accomplish the plural of ourselves: of the tissue, the texture, of the text that is our life, our mortal time in the world.

4

Tempo/Sequenza textual time in Astrophil and Stella

for now hath time made me his numb'ring clock: my thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, whereto my finger, like a dial's point, is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans show minutes, times, and hours we should count time by heart-throbss

Richard II P.J. Bailey, Festus, v

presents — the only way I can write about the present is to write as you read, i.e., now otherwise I will only write about the present - about it and about, cocoon and kill it - and now for me is not now for you, and this is neither novel nor biography but criticism, which is at bottom a poetry of text -1 ask you to think about now, now - and if you have just done so you have just done so, which is not now but then - before we can go on to think time and tempo, sequenza and sequence, we must both feel them - close your eyes and take your pulse - hello again, did you feel time pass? - that was the time of your life passing, and it is emphatically (not) the same as the time of a text, for example this - still, to feel the time of your life passing is to stop pretending - it is to remember that you cannot ever touch time and come away unchanged - to touch the time of a text, and to let it touch you back, is to know that the text is written in your smallest veins - but now - is being written? - the present of the text is a gift full of

Tempo/Sequenza 57 danger - there is no now, ever, it is always already then - even now as I write (un)certainly we know but only our own blood can tell us - so pretend to be present presently:

'Sidney says ...' we used to write; and, taught by us, our students still do. I am not here concerned with the authorial fallacy, or with the verb's logocentricity (should we learn from the Moslems and the Jews? Citers of the Koran and of the Scriptures begin, 'It is written ...'), but with ys; which, in the phrase quoted, is a sign. Had it been id, those two words would have announced an anecdote, a story, part of a tale or a biography. The English equivalent of the passe simple, 'said' would have triggered our readerly expectations of narrative: true or false, story or history. But what we have instead isys. Knowing Philip safely dead and setting it in the context of our profession, we have no trouble recognizing the phrase as the incipit of a critical discussion about a Sidneian text. Let us not forget, though, that this is an act of interpretation: ys is, first of all, the sign of a code we call the 'critical present.' With or without the authorial fallacy we practise it; and we still teach it to our students who, by nature or the experience of childhood, prefer stories.1 It is, of course, extremely odd. 'Aristotle cites ... '; 'Sophocles calls ...'; 'Orestes says ...' It is a code, this critical present: a code whose significance lies in its connotative, not in its denotative, dimension. The point of the code lies precisely in its difference from that of story - in the fact that ys is not id. The critical discourse it announces is at pains not to be confused with narrative. It aims at not subordinating the reader to the implicit suasion of the tale or the history; at suggesting to him that this, at last or at least, is the discourse of truth. Doubly so: for the critical present on the one hand brings the auctor cited close enough to exert his auctoritas, while on the other it maintains a sense of the text as equal partner in a present dialogue. A further, and for my purposes more interesting, effect of the critical present is that it maintains the discourse permanently on the threshold between text and world. What follows 'Sidney says ... ' (or even 'the Defence discusses ... ') lies within the world of the text; yet the critical present preserves a constant connection with the now of 'you-and-mereading/ It announces the critical discourse as liminary, not only in the usual metatextual senses, but in time also. It includes all the text's time as well as yours and mine. I have opened the present movement in this way for two reasons. First, I want to make both of us conscious of the critical discourse and its codes.2

58 Chamber music From here on we shall share it; but not, I hope, without an unceasing subliminal interrogation. Not only is the critical text (also) a text: it is part of a game, the pleasure of which is increased by an ongoing awareness of the presence and nature of its codes. My second reason for opening with the critical present is to compare it with another. From Sappho's 'Mother, I cannot mind my wheel/ via Sidney's 'With how sad steps, O moon, thou dimbst the skies,' to Ted Hughes's 'We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold,' the chief code of the lyric, too, is a present - the lyrical present. Where the lyric employs a past, it is not that of narrative but a past of recollection, often serving as a prelude to the now. We cannot assume an identity of purpose between critic and love-poet; yet their discourses meet in the present. If we can unravel some of that seeming coincidence, we may find ourselves led into the curious way time functions in a sonnet-sequence and in its reading. The critical present valorizes both detachment from narrative (story or history) and the presence of text. In the case of the lyric, the present has an opposite effect: of suggesting immediacy, of creating the illusion that the reader overhears - that the reader, in fact, is present.^ The lyric present valorizes involvement with narrative and the dissimulation of text. And since what you are here reading is a critical performance of a lyrical text, the present is present in the present text in order that these two may continually re-mark each other in the margins of your consciousness: mainly in the opposition of their connotations and the conjunction of their (its) form. The present (tense) carries at all times the potential tension between detachment and involvement, between open and hidden text. Nor should we ascribe such a paradox to the natural ambiguities of connotation. The present's denotative structure holds no greater comfort. Sceptics and Stoics both concluded that the 'present moment' is both indivisible and without extension, and the resultant aporia has never really left us. Moreover, the capacity of 'present' to denote both 'here' and 'now/ fruitfully but confusingly linking time with space, has created further complications. Time/Plot Following Augustine's tortuous but brilliant solution to aporia (Confessions, book xi) via the distentio animi, and Aristotle's treatment of muthos or plot, Paul Ricceur's Temps et recit posits, for every text of story or history, a triple mimesis.4 'Mimesis i/ in many ways the most interesting,

Tempo/Sequenza 59 refers to our natural 'pre-comprehension' of the world of action in terms of intelligible structures, symbolic resources, and that world's own temporal nature. 'Mimesis n' is the name Ricceur gives to the text's actual structuring, its configuration of action in plot, its manipulation of time in historia. Finally, 'Mimesis in/ 'downstream' of the text, 'marks the intersection of the world of the text and that of the reader': it is the world of which the text has now become a shaping part, thus influencing the 'Mimesis i' of future texts and closing the circle. (Sidneians will, in this regard, recall with pleasure that 'the ending end of all earthly learning [best absorbed, the Defence insists, from texts of 'poesy'] is virtuous action'; and that virtuous action is, in turn, the basis for poesy's mimetic activity.) In temporal terms, Ricceur's work deals with the movement 'of a prefigured time to a refigured time via the mediation of a configured time'; and it is this mediation which I intend to pursue here. Such configurations Ricceur discusses in volume 2 of Temps et recit. His method is of limited usefulness as it concentrates entirely on the forms of prose fiction, while what concerns me here is the role of time in a collection of lyrics. However, his intimate association of time and plot is of the greatest possible value. It teaches us that, in order to analyse the role of time in a complex and composite lyric text, we must first resolve, to our own satisfaction, certain questions relating to 'plot.' Strictly speaking, plot is a feature of fiction: either drama or narrative, 'representing' (configuring) action. It may be thought of as the paradigmatic ordering of actions (to be) syntagmatically produced in the text. In this traditional sense the lyric has, by definition, no plot; a state of affairs emphasized by the code of the lyrical present. In the case of a sonnetsequence such as Astrophil and Stella, however, two factors combine to contradict the conventional interpretation. The most obvious of these is that this text distinguishes itself from others in its genre precisely through an unusual concentration of narrative and dramatic features, recognizable enough to early readers to allow Nashe to refer to it (however whimsically) as a 'tragicomedy/ with a prologue, an argument, and an epilogue.5 A second factor undermining the interpretation of the lyric as plotless is inherent in all lyrics participating in highly coded configurations of human emotion - among which love-poetry plays a leading part. Such configurations generate what I shall call a lyric equivalent to plot: an equivalent which depends less on action than on situation. In terms of narrative, this is closer to what used to be called the 'matter' (as in the

60 Chamber music 'matter of Britain/ which involved a series of interlocking situations as much as a collection of stories). Prior to the development of the sonnet, there is (in troubadour verse) the 'matter of the pas torela,' for example: a knight and a shepherd girl in a forest converse wittily about the unsuccessful seduction of the latter by the former. There is the 'matter of the alba': two lovers see and hear with dread the signs of the dawn that will enforce their parting. And then there is the 'matter of the sonnets': an ardent and faithful lover laments the 'cruelty' of his peerless but unresponsive beloved. These are the 'plots' of the lyric: as familiar and, in their own way, as satisfying as the oft-told tales of Ulysses or Huon of Bordeaux. This postulated, we may follow Ricceur and interrogate such plots as to their temporal elements. It might be thought that their static and situational nature does not allow for a temporal dimension. Yet I believe that if one analyses their time differently from that of a narrative, such a dimension is very much in evidence. Take the alba. The 'action' is static; yet it is everywhere penetrated by the acutest consciousness of time. The night is ending; the lovers must (soon) part. Time weighs heavily upon the poem: the lyric is, in its entirety, a reaction to it. In the 'matter of the sonnets/ a less dramatic but more subtle situation obtains. Time simply passes: its significance is precisely that its passing has no obvious effect upon the situation. Yet we cannot really say nothing changes in the Rime. One event occurs: Laura dies; but what happens is that gradually, bit by stubborn bit, the lover is changed.6 His soul emerges; his values alter. The 'plot within a plot' of such a sonnet-sequence is the change in a man. The situational nature of the lyric plot is exploited until it becomes the setting for what we might call an inner plot, whose diegetic dynamic runs in an almost imperceptible counterpoint to the deceptively uneventful passing of calendrical time. It will be obvious that both the consideration of narrative elements in Astrophil and Stella and the redefinition of plot (and, consequently, time in relation to a lyric poema refer to the diegesis (the 'story/ the narrative as a structure, the 'plot') of such a text. The text itself, though, is also of an unusual nature. As a (sub)genre, the sonnet receives, in early critical texts from Antonio da Tempo7 to Sidney and Puttenham, some analysis, however perfunctory. The sonnet-sequence, however, is marked by an extraordinary absence of early critical discussion. Consequently, any critical theory concerning itself with the sequence is perhaps freer to risk 'structural' readings than might be the case with other, more intensively

Tempo/Sequenza 61 debated, forms. This is not the place for a general analysis of the sonnetsequence; but before moving on to its temporal aspects, I do want to set out the assumptions with which I propose to work. Assumptions. I/The sonnet-sequence is a macrotext composed of an indefinite number of semi-autonomous microtexts.

To the relation between macro- and microtext I shall presently return: suffice it here to say that I take this relation to be one of indeterminacy within the sequence, each sonnet is (not) an independent poem. Further, the type of sequence here dealt with contains not only sonnets but longer microtexts, in Sidney as in Petrarch labelled songs (canzoni). 2/The ordering of the microtexts within the macrotext is neither linear nor random.

Subject to the First Law of Textual Criticism, we must deal with this ordering - inconveniently aporetic as it is - as we find it. •$/The order of the microtexts, being largely indeterminate also, makes of the macrotext an 'open work' (in Eco's sense).

The reader's natural response is to group the microtexts according to his own perceptions, and in doing so he in part completes (co-creates) the work. The sonnet-sequence is thus a form which every reader must (help to) define and reinvent. (Note the obvious relation between this activity on the formal level and Ricceur's 'Mimesis in': both show the sonnetsequence to valorize highly the reader's participatory response.) 4/The sonnet-sequence being a minimally coded lyrical macrotext composed of maximally coded lyrical microtexts, we may expect time to play as unusual and significant a role in it as plot.

I have referred above (Three easy pieces') to the sonnet's highly visible coding: I should like to add here the plot-coding mentioned above as the 'matter of the sonnets.' Method

On the basis of these assumptions we can now go on to choose a method for the analysis of time. Once again, most of the models for such a

62 Chamber music method were developed with prose fiction in mind, and must thus be bent to a certain degree. I propose here an adapted version of Giinther Miiller's distinction between erzahlte Zeit and Erzahlzeit.8 Although a literal translation of these would yield something like 'time told' and 'telling-time' respectively, I prefer to render them as diegetic time and textual time. The former refers to the temporal aspect of the diegesis: to the role and nature of time within the 'story told' in the work. The latter is, one might say, the temporal dimension of the literary phenomenon (text + reader), or of the 'act of reading' the text: and it concerns especially the way in which this dimension is structured and controlled by the text's formal elements. In so far as the Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet-sequence, its nature already requires an adaptation of these concepts in the light of the form's peculiarities. Diegetic time will have to be studied with the hybrid nature of the lyric plot in mind, particularly as realized in the form's primary model, Petrarch's Rime. Textual time, in any sonnet-sequence, is marked by (a) the frequency and the regularity of the macrotext's interruptions (the spaces between sonnets/songs), and (b) the semi-autonomous nature of the microtexts. This said, Astrophil and Stella is an especially interesting and appropriate text for such an analysis. In comparison to other sonnet-sequences it contains a high concentration of narrative; and in contrast notably to French models such as those of Ronsard and Du Bellay it has not dispensed with the omzom'-element, and thus maintains a factor of irregularity which I hope to show is crucial to its temporal structuring. - that was a very long introduction - necessary, though - we have to work ourselves into something like this, get used to the terms of the inquiry, change our minds, mark the landscape - I had to establish the method for both of us, explain what I'm doing, first to myself, then to you - but there's more -for some reason it was a very difficult movement to get going, and not only for external reasons - it was as if time were insisting on being recognized as (prosopopoeically) Time, resisting an intrusion into its (his) domain - after a time I gave up fighting this, and realized it was trying to tell me something -so I decided the feeling had better be shared with you - this way it will keep both of us aware of time in this text - it (he) doesn't seem to mind these interruptions, which allow us to meet in a different way, lyrically you might call it, to relax a little, and to feel ourselves being made time's numbering clock - not too long, though, because Astrophil is waiting to be paid attention to, and finds all this hard enough to understand as it is

Tempo/Sequenza 63 Textual time In so far as Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet-sequence, its textual time is one of interruptions, which are both regular (mostly) and unpredictable. Regular, because out of the 119 microtexts 108 are virtually equal in length (virtually: the few sonnets in alexandrines are marginally longer). This regularity is a feature the sonnet-sequence shares with the stanzaic poem, and on a purely formal level there is no intrinsic difference. Yet the nature of the sonnet as a largely autonomous microtext valorizes the interruptions; and, together with their regularity, it leads me to see the microtexts in a sequence as essentially modular. It is this very modularity, though, which makes the sequence's textual time (seen now less as Erzahlzeit, telling-time, than as Lesezeit, readingtime) unpredictable. The more modular the units, the more easily the reader may interrupt and/or select: how many of us read a whole sonnet-sequence at a sitting? Thus the modularity of the microtext minimizes the text's control of its decoding by the reader, and valorizes the reader's role in varying and controlling (co-creating) textual time. It is this combination of regularity/modularity and unpredictability which makes a sonnet-sequence's textual time the locus of its 'openness' and indeterminacy. In the case of Astrophil and Stella, this condition obtains uniformly among the first sixty-three sonnets, sporadically afterwards; and it is notable that readers' most common attempts at hermeneutic grouping generally take place within, or close to, this modular field.9 In so far, however, as Astrophil and Stella is a sonnet-sequence of the oznzom'-type - containing a certain number of longer, less highly coded lyrics - the modularity of its textual time is tempered by the length, form, and placing of these song-texts. In this regard, two departures from the Petrarchan model should be taken into account. Astrophil and Stella, first of all, combines features of the Rime's non-sonnet texts: joining the longer, more discursive nature of the canzoni with the stricter and more musicoriented form of the madrigali and ballate.w The result is a series of 'songs' which really are (potential) songs - as their rapid inclusion into the contemporary musical repertoire shows11 - with a median length of slightly over forty-one lines, i.e., approximately three times the length of a sonnet. Secondly, Astrophil and Stella's songs are not scattered more or less evenly throughout the macrotext, but bunched within its last 40 per cent, with four of them forming a continuous mini-sequence between sonnets 86 and 87. The effect of the songs' musical form is on

64 Chamber music the one hand to relate them more closely to the sonnets, sharing with these a regular metre; on the other hand to differentiate them more strongly and to emphasize the sonnets' non-musical nature. The effect of the songs' placing,12 as well as of their length, is to control the sequence's textual time at certain key moments. If an unbroken string of sonnets, in its modularity, increases the text's openness and valorizes the reader's role, the suspension of the modularity - the eleven songs share seven different stanzaic/metric forms - reduces the openness, and increases the text's control of the reader's decoding. One methodological point concerning textual time remains to be dealt with: its measurement. Miiller's discussion of Erzahlzeit is, I believe, hampered not only by his concentration on prose fiction but also by his attempt to distinguish between a universal measurement (in his case, the unit is the number of pages) and the actual time of a text's realization in the act of reading, which evidently varies with each reader's speed (Lesetempd).^ This distinction is based upon a confusion between textual time as a relative and as an absolute measurement. Since relative measurement is what matters, both to him and to us, this may very well be expressed by the absolute time taken by any one reader to read one regular textual unit (e.g., page, or iambic pentameter), multiplied by the number of such units per (micro-)text. The absolute time-per-unit will vary from reader to reader, certainly; but the relative time as a measure of the text's proportions will remain valid. In the case of Astrophil and Stella, then, I propose to follow this method; based upon my own speed of (reasonably deliberate) reading aloud, I shall use the following basic measures: 50 seconds per sonnet; 2 seconds-per-line (spl) for an iambic trimeter (song vii), 2.5 spl for a trochaic tetrameter (songs ii, iv, via-xi), 3.5 spl for an iambic pentameter (song i), and 5 spl for an alexandrine (songs iii, v, vii). Diegetic time In itself, diegetic time lacks the regularity and modularity of textual time. In the recounted world of the fiction it appears to be controlled by other elements, such as characters and events. In fact, a major part of fiction's illusory quality is its capacity to suggest a temporal movement as irregular and apparently uncontrolled as that of life itself. It is, however, erzahlte Zeit: part of the text and, as such, subject to the control of that text's production. In other words, it is 'temps configure': it is inextricably

Tempo/Sequenza 65 linked to plot - or rather, to plotting. (We might perhaps usefully translate temps configure as 'plotted time.') In Ricceur's model, plotted time belongs to the realm of 'Mimesis 11.' Its distinguishing characteristic is organization, and its link with 'Mimesis i' is that this organization is based upon our configurative pre-comprehension of our lives (and, consequently, of the time of our lives) as (hi)story. In any sonnet-sequence, diegetic time is subject to the peculiarities both of the lyric genre in general and of the form itself. The distortion involved in what I have called the 'lyric plot' frequently has the effect of removing diegetic time's passing from the text itself: the lyric is typically a 'moment's monument/ couched in a present tense which may, following Augustine's distentio animi, contain the past as the present of the past (i.e., memory) and the future as the present of the future (i.e., expectation). As for the sonnet-sequence, the nature of its textual time structures the diegesis via a series of regular interruptions, which cannot but influence the configuration of diegetic time. I have already alluded to the (almost) 'zero degree of plot' found in Petrarch's Rime. Following this model, later developments take one of two main forms. In the continental model, perfected by the Pleiade, the songs are mostly dropped and the text becomes almost perfectly modular, varied only by each sonnet's individual 'invention.' Consequently, diegetic time (together with diegesis itself) is de-emphasized with regard to the macrotext, and valorized only within certain microtextual inventions (such as Ronsard's Horatian speculations on Helene's old age). There is, however, in the Rime the germ of another attitude to diegetic time. While very little 'happens' in Petrarch's sequence, (diegetic) time not only passes but has its passing very carefully recorded in the text. Sonnets 79, 107, 118, 122, and 271 record the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and twenty-first years respectively of the poet's love; sonnet 211 gives the exact time and date of its inception; while sonnet 364 totals up the elapsed time as twenty-one years during Laura'. lifetime and ten years since her death. The configuration of the Rime's time is such as to valorize (indeed to create) its significance: minimal diegetic development plus maximally recorded passing of diegetic time spells the sequence's 'plot' - the 'matter of the sonnets,' i.e., constancy. Astrophil and Stella develops this seminal presence of diegetic time by adding to the 'matter of the sonnets' a strong element of narrative. The 'lyric plot' is extended to include not only character-development (it is

66 Chamber music significant that the male protagonist also receives a senhal or pseudonym) but events also, plotted in sequential and developmental patterns. Consequently, - as I write this, I'm increasingly aware of a diglossia which fragments experience - writing such language is like writing Russian or Italian, and something in me rebels - I'm aware of drift - the tension of any text is its life as a battlefield between thinking and the drift of experience - a battlefield also between grammar/syntax, linear, ordered, and the lateral drift of language - but how to valorize, to incorporate the drift? - Barthes wrote that a teacher is someone who finishes his sentences - but words want to move sideways: temporal drifts to tempt - counter that with temporary and it comes back with temper and indeed with tempest - and even when tempered and its temperature lowered it leads you to a temple where time loses temporality in eternity - the most honest way to deal with this, or so it seems, is to let it interrupt -from time to time -

the configuration of diegetic time takes on a far greater importance. It is necessary to remember that it does so, inevitably, in what we may call a dialectic with textual time: for in no genre does the latter impose so many predetermined constraints as in the sonnetsequence. Unrestrained importation of narrative into such a text threatens to swamp these constraints, and to reduce the microtexts to the status of stanzas. As the essence of the sonnet-sequence is the indeterminate status of the microtext (neither stanzaic dependence nor anthological autonomy), the text must contain a way of preserving this balance. Astrophil and Stella does so by two means: the irregularity and the interruption of diegetic time. While each reader groups the microtexts in his own way, any grouping of Astrophil and Stella reveals the irregularity. The activity so engagingly embodied in the text's first half is largely a microtextual one; the action is confined to the second half. Stella does not reply to Astrophil until sonnet 61. Subsequently, the narrative - which has created, via the 'hope sonnets 66 and 67, a degree of intratextual suspense and, via Stella's declaration of love in 69, an intertextual one by upsetting the reader's generic competence14 - is broken by a long series of frflsza-variation and an alternation of jealousy and travel. The climactic song viii, though 'properly' followed by meditations upon Stella's absence, does not 'lead' to the final (non-) closure without a number of more or less irrelevant peregrinations. In no sense, then, can the organization of diegetic time be said to be either linear or regular. Moreover, its irregularity extends to

Tempo/Sequenza 67 what, in a narrative genre, would constitute the 'inner logic' of the plot: it is only by supplementing a great many temporal indeterminacies that the reader can, out of this sonnet-sequence, make 'sense' (sens - linear direction also) and create, as did Nashe, a well-made play.16 The irregularity of diegetic time is to a considerable extent produced by interruption. Once again, we should recall Ricceur's intimate association of time with plot (and of 'Mimesis i' with 'Mimesis n'). The erzahlte Zeit of a text interacts with our experience both of Tife-as-(hi)story' and of the order we seek to impose upon it. Based perhaps on our awareness of time, such order (such plotting) almost invariably involves linearity. Even our chains of logical causality are linear in extension. Because of this, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of the text are equally affected by interruption: interruption of the linear flow (perceived as order) also fragments the paradigm, the structure, the plot. When, after Astrophil receives the monarchy of Stella's high heart, he steals a kiss (song ii), his subsequent meditations on it interrupt the diegetic time. While the kiss itself is integrated into the narrative logic (prepared by the 'Desire'-sonnets 71 and 72), the six 'kiss'-sonnets are not. They create a logical interruption via the intertextually present basia-topos, as they do a temporal one by their diegetic stasis (nothing 'happens'). It will be clear that such a structure of diegetic time as (dis-)ordered by interruptions cannot but relate to the structure of the sequence's textual time. I have referred to the latter's predetermined constraints; I believe, however, that just as the sonnet-microtext's constraints of metre, rhymescheme, volta, and length are consistently turned to opportunity in the dialectic of the sonneteer's art, so also the constraints of the sequencemacrotext - principally the modularity of its microtexts and the paradigmatic regularity of its interruptions - are (to be) reinterpreted as opportunities in the dialectic of their interaction with diegetic time. I propose, then, to analyse briefly this interaction in the case of Astrophil and Stella. Analysis Let us begin by looking at the most modular section of the sequence, sonnets 1-63. Here the treatment of diegetic time is confined to individual microtexts, and modularity is thus valorized. This said, however, it is equally clear that what we are here dealing with is in no sense a Continental, modular sequence of variations on a theme. Almost from

68 Chamber music the first, the character of Astrophil exploits to the full a diegetic distentio animi, and conveys a strong sense of his love as story. 'Not at first sight... Love gave the wound which while I breathe will bleed; but true love did in mine of time proceed ... Now even the footstep of lost liberty is gone... '(2). In this second introductory sonnet we meet praeterita, praesentia, and futura, all contained in the present of consciousness. The more fanciful inventions follow the trend: both sonnet 8 ('Love borne in Greece...') and sonnet 20 ('Flie, flie, my friends ... ') recount the beginning of love as a story, with Astrophil the victim and protagonist. The first appearance of Stella (22) is given the same narrative character: victrix rather than victim, she is nevertheless equally the protagonist of an anecdote. In sonnet 33 ('I might, unhappy word ...'), not only is the narrative trope of ironia employed but its built-in decalage is specifically structured upon a temporal basis: the 'present' Astrophil, knowing what he knows 'now,' indulges in a flashback to a time when only his 'then' ignorance prevented him from achieving what is 'now' denied him. Further 'games with [diegetic] time'17 pervade this section. In sonnet 45 ('Stella oft sees the verie face of woe ... ') Astrophil, himself the sequence's protagonist, envies the actors in a tale the reading of which moves Stella to the tears of compassion he seeks in vain; but the tale is a 'fable ... of lovers never known,' and such historian are set in a dim and distant past. Two further flashbacks, 41 ('Having this day my horse, my hand, my launce ...') and 53 ('In Martiall sports ...'), combine time and (anecdotal) plot. The section ends with three sonnets (61, 62, 63) in which the reader is told Stella's reply to Astrophil's entreaties, in indirect speech. Although, then, the regularity of a sonnet-sequence's textual time, and the consequent modularity of its microtexts, are preserved in this section, the manipulation of diegetic time supports the very strong narrative counter-current with which this text from the first self-consciously subverts the traditional codes of the (sub)genre. The balance between the two in this form is aimed at the intertextually competent reader: by its valorizing of modularity in textual time the text insists on its membership in the sonnet-sequence subgenre, even as the narrative and dramatic elements, supported by a lively manipulation of diegetic time (though, so far, only within individual microtexts), announce to him that the subgenre's codes - and with them his generic competence - are bein redefined..'188 Song i, flanked by sonnets 64 and 65, opens the sequence's second half, in which the regularity is abruptly discarded. Not only do sonnet- and

Tempo/Sequenza 69 song-microtexts alternate quickly and irregularly (the longest unbroken run of sonnets in this section numbers no more than twelve, from 93 through 104; song iii is followed by two sonnets, song iv by one, after which songs v through ix form an uninterrupted series); the diegesis, and the flow of its time, is varied and interrupted. As both Miiller and the historian Fernand Braudel19 have pointed out, diegetic time in historia should be measured not only by 'short' vs 'long' but also by 'rapid' vs 'slow/ Nowhere is this more true than in the second part of Astrophil and Stella. The diegetic movement, lively as a tale from 66 ('And do I see some cause a hope to feede ...') through 72 ('Desire, though thou my old companion art...'), is then interrupted by the largely static basia. Jealousy (78,83) might be said to 'lead' to Stella's 'change of looks' (86), this to the climactic dialogue of song viii, and the aftermath thereof (ix) to a separation (87-92); yet this movement itself is constantly interrupted, and the 'absence'-microtexts themselves reintroduce a stasis of diegetic time. No sooner do two new incidents (92, 93) occur than this movement is again brought to a standstill by a series of melancholy soliloquies (94-100), after which the sequence fragments to its non-closure in 108. - Astrophil, my old friend, has your time made me his numbering clock? you are not what you were, any more than I am - we have changed together over these many years - ars is no longer longa, though vita is almost as brevis as ever - I cannot read you now as I read you twenty years ago, and 'you' have changed with 'me' - in that mine of time I have been where you were, and recognized you - Ricceur is right about his Mimesis III - but, more than that, you are now where I am-we have a history together -1 play you now in today's way to new eyes — yet that's not the whole story — for you belong to the time of the world, and I to that of mortals - perhaps you are a dream dreaming me

It would be easy to point, at this stage, to an apparent congruence between the irregularity and interruptions of diegetic time on the one hand and the rapid variation of textual time (manipulated via the songmicrotexts) on the other. Such, in fact, was my original intention. However, it gradually became apparent to me that the congruence thus produced would be a false one, based upon an invalid premise. I was, in fact, falling into the common trap of writing about a model of Astrophil and Stella, a kind of index, which reads '82, 83, iii, 84, 85, iv, 86, v, vi, vii, viii, ix, 87, 88, 89 ... ' etc. In such a model, a song is given the same prominence and space as a sonnet. But in the realization (and thus in the

jo Chamber music measurement) of textual time, such a paradigm is worthless, as it does not take into account the temporal individuality of the song-microtexts. Accordingly, it became clear that, while in this section (unlike the first) the patterns of diegetic time were lively and clear, those of textual time needed a new and closer look. A timed reading yielded, roughly, the measuring units I have referred to above, as well as the vague but insistent sense of unusual patterns almost appearing. It was not until I transferred these measurements to spatial dimensions (representing time) and translated them into a proportionate graph (to scale) that the guessed-at structures became clear. I reproduce the resultant diagram here (figure i). Figure i

The first thing this scale reveals is a very different set of proportions to the Astrophil and Stella macrotext. Whereas in the 'index' model the sequence can only be seen as one of 108 sonnet-units, with a paltry 11 song-units bunched toward the end, the textual-time model shows the songs to take a more prominent place; especially the two long (and significant) songs v and viii. Much more interesting, though, is the conjunction of this textual-time model with the diegesis. A number of fruitful experiments could be performed: for example, if one wanted to test Nashe's 'tragicomedy' reference, one might divide the textual-time axis into five parts (acts), and analyse the diegesis accordingly. (The results are fascinating.) Here, however, I will limit myself to the moments in diegetic time marked with arrows in figure i and representing the one-quarter-, onehalf-, and three-quarter-way points of the sequence. At the centre of the textual-time axis stands sonnet 69: this extraordinarily valorized position is occupied by Stella's grant of her high heart's monarchy to Astrophil (who, we should not forget, is the sequence's ostensible architect). The three-quarter mark is song viii, in which the turning-point of the diegesis is the movement of two pairs of hands between two speeches. Finally, the first-quarter mark falls somewhere around sonnet 33, with its bitter retrospective irony ('And yet could not by rising Morne foresee / How faire a day was near ... '), and sonnet 34/8 self-questioning modernity ('Thus write I while I doubt to write'). I do not intend to tread the thorny

Tempo/Sequenza 71 paths of numerology,20 nor do I claim for the text's temporal organization an exactitude that would be foreign to any aspect of a sonnetsequence; but it is interesting to see how Petrarch's calendrical management of diegetic time has been replaced by an organization more 'event'ful and more dynamic, which uses textual time not only as a congruence but to valorize certain key microtexts by their temporal positioning. Congruence The most important feature of Ricceur's Temps et recit is its imaginative collocation of time's organization with that of plot. Likewise, I believe that an analysis of Astrophil and Stella in terms of textual and diegetic time is less important in itself than in the suggestions it engenders concerning the relation of these dimensions in a sonnet-sequence text, and thus concerning the nature and structure of a sonnet-sequence. I should like to pursue these 'structural' points further, in terms of a triple congruence. The first congruence is that between textual and diegetic time themselves. As Miiller and Ricceur have shown, such a congruence exists in all narrative texts; from the foregoing discussion it seems reasonably clear that, if care is taken with the adaptation, it can apply to lyric texts as well. What is a specific feature of this 'Congruence i' in the case of the sonnetsequence is the regular nature of the textual time's interruptions, as well as the potentially modular and semi-autonomous status of its microtexts. These are paradigmatic givens: the subgeneric constants with which the variables of each individual sonnet-sequence's diegetic time must interact. It is notable, in this respect, that the major English sequences adapt the Petrarchan model by availing themselves of non-sonnet (usually longer) texts as a means of modifying the constant: songs in Astrophil and Stella, Anacreontics and a major ode in Amoretti, and the Lover's Complaint in Shakespeare's Sonnets. By doing so, they bend the rigidities of the form's textual time toward the flexibility of its diegetic time, just as the latter adapts to the former through the valorization of its interruptions. 'Congruence i/ therefore, is one in which each of the two major temporal aspects is modified by the other. In approaching the second congruence it is important to remember that mimesis, though lately out of favour, is not dead. With regard to the sonnet-sequences, I suggest that what I have called 'Congruence i' is itself an important part of Ricceur's 'Mimesis H': the literary configuration of time on the basis of 'Mimesis I's pre-comprehension. 'Congruence I,' in other words, is itself congruent with the human experience of time.

72 Chamber music The latter is based - as is the sonnet-sequence text - upon a number of perceived and inalterable regularities: heartbeats, days, months, seasons. Interacting with these are the variables of (apparently) random 'events;' while beneath these interactions lies the great one between the 'time of the world' (which may be a model for concepts of eternity)21 and the 'time of mortals' limited by the closure of Death. 'Congruence n' is thus the structural relation of the sonnet-sequence's inner temporal harmony with the temporal perceptions of human experience. (Cf. figure 2.) Figure 2 Textual time Diegetic time

Congruence i Human experience of time

Congruence n

The third congruence is more complex. To isolate it, we must extend the relation with experience along another axis: that of language and meaning. Language is a linear form of communication based upon the sequentiality of time-experience. Its production of meaning, however (i.e. its reception as significant communication), is retroactive: the semantic unit is not 'understood' until it has been at least partially completed. Turning now to the literary text (in this case the sonnet-sequence), we observe at once that the same is true of the reader's form-perception: both microtextually (a lyric is not formally recognized as a sonnet until its close,22 though the probability is established from line 5 on) and macrotextually (though less so since the sequence is a minimally coded form). A further and more interesting dimension, however, is possible. One of the curious facts of sonnet-sequences is that their relation to experiential reality is always ostentatiously ambiguous. Astrophil is (not) Philip; the story of his love is (not) 'true.' It seems clear that these texts are at pains not only to construct a fictional world but to preserve, at the same time, an important link to extratextual reality: for instance, the poet is careful to identify himself at least partially with the protagonist, and to stress his 'loving in truth/ Combining this fact with the remarks, above, on meaning-production, I may perhaps be allowed to hazard a theory of sonnet(-sequence) text-production which will illustrate 'Congruence m.' Remembering the interaction of time and plot, we should look at the action of plotting. The sonnet, we know, is a 'moment's monument,' and it

Tempo/Sequenza 73 is important for it to remain responsive to the daily vicissitudes of experience. On the other hand it is, almost from the beginning, produced and released in the context of a larger whole - its context is usually a macrotext. What I suggest, therefore, is that the composition of a sonnetsequence, like the meaning-production of (its) language, is retroactive.2^ Out of a number of individual sonnets - each composed in response to an 'event' - grows a sense of diegesis, of 'plot' (with all the lyric adaptations of that term). This growth is retroactive; but the seminal diegesis thus produced henceforth influences further production of microtexts. In other words, the text-production of a sonnet-sequence is itself a kind oidistentio animi, which (unlike narrative fiction) does not proceed from a 'foreconceit' but from a continuing interaction of unpredictable experience with retroactive textual organization. 'Congruence in/ then, joins not only the temporal nature of the sonnet-sequence with that of experience, but also the temporal dimension of its text- and meaning-production with that of language itself. (Cf. figure 3.) - well, Philip, how does it feel? - it's been a long time now since even a dead auctor lost the last shreds of his auctoritas -you must have noticed how careful we all are to hide you under 'the text' - yet here I am, having just smuggled you in again - in disguise, mind you - the 'authorial fallacy' is still a very sharp sword - but any skilful reader can find you under your cover of 'text production' - actually you crept in yourself, without any intention from me - but the thing is, I really do believe I'm starting to understand the way your sequence grew and took shape - what has been bothering me for many years is that none of you ever wrote about sequences - though you obviously took enormous care composing them - not necessarily 'writing' them like the Arcadia - but at least taking sonnets and putting them in their 'proper' place - and from time to time writing a few more because what was becoming the text seemed to need them - did you not theorize about sequences because you had no terms for such a process? Eliot ironized about talking with you in Heaven - but I can think of a few of us who have a couple-three-four questions we wouldn't mind asking you - just hang on, we'll be there - in time Reading The triple congruence brings me back to a feature of textual time hinted at earlier: its relation to the act of reading. Miiller was, you recall, worried about the individuality and unpredictability of each several reader's Lesetempo. It should by now be evident that the temporal configuration of

Tempo/Sequenza 75 reading a sonnet-sequence is a structured validation of these factors. No other long text allows the reader so many coded points of (re-)entry into the text: none so encourages him to create his own intermediate and hermeneutic groupings within it. Yet at the same time few other texts provide such a foundation of congruences upon which this co-creative freedom may be exercised. The contrapuntal relation of Astrophil and Stella's time-dimensions has the further effect of inhibiting the reader's identification with the diegesis. To be sure, the microtexts individually may exhibit the energia of 'moving' - of "persuading their mistress that they were in love;'24 but the macrotexfs curious paradigm of textual time continually refers the reader back to itself as text, and to a self-consciousness regarding the phenomenon of 'him reading/ Again, the effect is one of balance and congruence: in this case, between suspension and maintenance of disbelief, and (by implication) between the two audiences of every love-poem - the beloved and the reader. These two observations come together in another conclusion. Not only does the sonnet-sequence provide the reader with multiple points of entry: these are also points of exit. Above, I wrote of the element of drift in a text, and in the act of reading. What the sonnet-sequence does is enable that drift, encourage it to take place. By doing so it adds an extra(-)time-dimension to the text: the dimension of what we might call 'time out.' Below ('Four-part fugue') I discuss the 'white gaps' between and around microtexts as liminary spaces between text and world. Here I should like to suggest that in their role as (notated) silences they are liminary in a temporal sense as well. Textual time, after all, belongs to (the time of) experience. Its interruptions complete this rapprochement and strengthen the continuity between the reader's literary and his extraliterary experience. Finally? 'Sidney says ...' What of the present (text)? Critical and lyrical: time of detachment, time of involvement. Time of ys. Time without extension: had, having and in quest to have, elusive. I have tried to write this movement in honest voices, critical and lyrical. Yet I am aware that to write in a Voice' is always already, unavoidably, duplicitous; and that what was the act of (my) writing has now become text. It is a partner in

76 Chamber music your act of reading, and I shall be elsewhere. In time, though, we shall meet. The time of our lives touches the time(s) of the text. They are woven together into another text, always in(to) another time. How can we be detached? We are time's numbering clock. We count time by heartthrobs. The time we spend with (the time of) the text is the time of our lives. It will have changed us. However infinitesimally, it will have modified (every moment of) our living. If our discourse is not a lover's, time will always already have wasted us.

5

Two-part invention love/ruinS/SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETSTS

Pour former I'hypothese de I'autoportrait du dessinateur en autoportraitiste, et vu de face, le spectateur ou I'interprete que nous sommes doit imaginer que le dessinateur ne fixe qu'un point, un seul, le foyer d'un miroir en face de lui, c'esta-dire depuis la place que nous occupons, en face a face avec lui: cela ne peut etre I'autoportrait d'un autoportrait que pour 1'autre, pour un spectateur qui occupe la place d'un unique foyer, mais au centre de ce qui devrait etre un miroir. Le spectateur remplace et obscurcit alors le miroir, il rend aveugle au miroir en produisant, en mettant en ceuvre la specularite recherchee. La performance du spectateur, telle qu'elle est essentiellement prescrite par I'ceuvre, consiste a frapper le signataire d'aveuglement, et done a crever du meme coup les yeux du modele ou a lefaire, lui, le sujet (a la fois modele, signataire et objet de I'ceuvre) se crever les yeux pour se voir et aussi bien pour se representer a I'ceuvre.

To create the hypothesis of the selfportrait of the draughtsman doing his self-portrait, and full-face, we as spectators or interpreters have to imagine the draughtsman as staring at one point, one only, the focal point of a mirror facing him, i.e., in the spot we are occupying, face to face with him: it can be the selfportrait of a self-portrait only for the other, for a spectator who occupies the place of a single focus, but at the centre, in the middle, of what ought to be a mirror. So the spectator replaces and obscures the mirror, he blinds the mirror while producing, bringing into play, the looked-for specularity. The spectator's role, as essentially prescribed by the work, is to strike the signatory blind, and thus by the same token to put out the model's eyes, or to make him, the subject (at once model, signatory and object of the work) put out his own eyes to see himself and equally to show himself at work. Derrida1

78 Chamber music Let us assume something. Bear with me, follow me into the half-light of a possibility. Imagine a poet looking into a mirror. What does he see there? A man? A poet? Another man? Another poet? Or a lover, or a landscape? A story? An infinity of stories? (Not to be read as a series of rhetorical questions. Not to be read quickly. Please to go back and read it again. This time, taking time. After each question-mark, taking the time to envisage the process just mooted. To think about it.)

A draughtsman, says Derrida, when he looks into a mirror, sees himself fading.2 Slipping away. So quickly that he draws feverishly, to hold on to himself (to his self), to get himself back. What he gets is a ruin; but a ruin that was never anything else. What he gets is a self-portrait - a ruin as self-portrait, a self-portrait as ruin. How do we know a self-portrait is a self-portrait? Because (Derrida, still) we are told. On or beside the frame, in the catalogue, it says 'SelfPortrait/ and that is how we know. Not - in other words - through anything intrinsic, but through an extrinsic element. Theoretically, then (a bold conclusion, but perfectly logical), you could put that label 'SelfPortrait' upon (a picture of) anything. More practically, and more honestly, you could, you might well perhaps, put it on (the picture of) something that has deeply affected you, something that has made you what you are, something that has become you. 'Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.' I am not what I was (under the rule of Cynara the Good). I am not what I was when I began to write this sentence. I am slipping away. How shall I draw myself, if not as a ruin? How shall I draw myself, if not as the lived days and weeks of my heart? How shall I draw the days and weeks, if not as a ruin? How shall I draw a ruin, if not (as) a text? If I draw Cynara's picture, can I place beside it a label saying 'Self-Portrait' and my name? In any case, it means crossing her portrait with my name, crossing her text with mine. A portrait; a ruin; a text. If I draw my life with Cynara - those moments of smoke and fire, when I waited for her, when I pleaded foolishly, when she would not look at me, when she looked at me, when she told me she loved me, when she pushed away my hands, when she lied to me, when she wasn't back by three a.m., when she left me - and call it 'SelfPortrait/ will you understand? And if I give all of us other names, what

Two-part invention 79 will you do? My life with Cynara is a landscape of ruins. As I revisit it, groping for a path, I know that it was always already a landscape of ruins, that it was never anything else. We lived and loved and hurt one another amid the ceaseless mutter of tumbled stones. Of other stones. We read ourselves as a doorway between ruin and ruin, a text repeating other texts. So strong was our feeling that we heard very little: that country, though, was full of voices. If I draw my self-portrait as text, my text as ruin, what do I draw it on? When a poet looks in a mirror, what is behind him - and upon what paper does his hand rest? The last thing you learn is that there is no empty page. The ruin is in part a ruin because it is always already built with the stones of other ruins. They have been so roughly cut that they might almost be small boulders; but make no mistake. This does not mean that in such a ruin Cynara and I cannot live, love, and leave one another. If you not only knew this; if not only you knew this, but your students, your professors, your aunts, and your friends; not only, I say, knew this but were fully and entirely aware, they - you - would not be able to touch certain ruins without coming away contaminated, and limping with charred hands. Because it works both ways. Cynara - being Good knew that, loving, we lived and moved and had our being in ruins that were inhabited. But now and at any time, poking about there awakens fire. At whom (Derrida again) is the self-portrait looking? What - or whose - place do you occupy when you regard it? So now, as we gingerly approach that architectural dissemination labelled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS, we know that the white of th. is there solely to keep out the crowding of the Ten Thousand Things, and that it has always already failed. The white is filled with invisible ink, made invisible as a hand began to write 'From fairest creatures we desire increase' (1:1). Not only what was written there interests me, but also what happened to it; and what the hand that, writing, seemingly erased it was doing. Self-portrait by a blind man. Caption: 'this is my picture/3 Texte remarquable a ce qu.e (id exemplairement) jamais le lecteur ne pourra y choisir sa place, ni le spectateur. La place en tout cas est pour lui intenable en face du texte, hors du texte, en un lieu ou il

Extraordinary text, in that (and here it is exemplary) the reader can never choose his place in it, nor can the spectator. The place, in any case, is untenable for him facing the text,

8o Chamber music pourrait se passer d'avoir a ecrire ce qui a lire lui paraitrait donne, passe, oil il serait devant un ecrit deja.

outside the text, anywhere where he could manage to do without having to write that which, if he had to read it, would seem to him something given, something past, where he would be facing something written already. Derrida4

Why - somebody by now is asking - am I going about it this peculiar way? Why can't this auctor just be normal and write eruditely and illuminatingly about sonnets, so that I can read him or not read him, at least having a good idea what it is I'm skimming, and if it will help me with my essay, my lecture, or not? The reason is that you - I - cannot read SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS reasonably however hard we try5 and tha there is a reason for this. If, today, you go to climb the Matterhorn having read Whymper's account and been duly impressed with the majesty and horror - you'll find (as one guide put it) 'a pile of rotten rock with three hundred and twenty-eight people lined up at the start of the Hornli Ridge route, all tricky bits equipped, and more fluorescent Cordura than edelweiss.' If, on the other hand, you go to the Bouffes du Nord in Paris to see Peter Brook's Tempest, you come away like Whymper - very quiet. This is the way the world ends. The Bouffes du Nord is in a shabby urban neighbourhood, and it's a dilapidated space. It hasn't been restored because there was nothing to restore it to. This originary ruin, in other words, has become the selfportrait of Peter Brook, a blind man who with Ethiopians, a Japanese, an Indian waif, and an athletic English monster has drawn a self-portrait and captioned it, 'this is my picture. W. Shakespeare.' If we can learn to understand why and how Peter Brook is a blind man we may come to realize why this text about SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS reads the wa. a blind man climbs the Matterhorn, he will not see the fluo backpacks, and he will feel all the majesty and horror of the way the world ends. One of the existential games for learning trust is to blindfold yourself and let yourself be led; a game more dangerous and more rewarding is to blind yourself, to fold yourself (back on yourself) and set foot on the mountain. The games we play, admittedly, are those of a fallen world; but we have no choice in the moment of our birth, and The Tempest in such a language is not less and perhaps more. The path you feel winding beneath your mind is twisting us closer,

Two-part invention 81 you and me, to SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS. You see? we need to be blind. We need to touch the stones of ruins, to draw without seeing, to live among self-portraits. The marriage of true minds' is now Anne Hathaway's Cottage, visited only by tour-buses. 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' is not even parodied any more. And as for the sophisticated (here's two on's), this is what they write (about no. 20, 'A woman's face'): 'Oddly enough, the superimposed pattern fulfils Roman Jakobson's requirement of a "contrapuntal symmetrical trichotomy" (6+2+6) in the sonnet, but is an unfortunate example of it, since it manages only to conceal the original groundwork underneath a wealth of supersubtle elaborations.'6 Generations have tried to persuade us that with this key Shakespeare did not unlock his heart, that Wordsworth was writing romantic (as well as Romantic) drivel, and that whatever Renaissance sonnets were, they were not keys to their authors' or to anyone else's hearts. Yet plump, intelligent, unhappy Louis xvi was contented only when in his workshop, fashioning locks and keys. Did anyone stop to think that Wordsworth was many things but not a fool and that Mozart, our formal sophistications notwithstanding, unlocked his heart with the key of G Minor? In spite of all this - you see - we do not know what it was that Francesco was doing. But neither do we know that the imposing bearded head with its aquiline nose is Leonardo by himself. If we are willing to accept the one as a self-portrait, is there a good reason to deny the other? Francesco - writing blind - : 'a pena riconosco omai me stesso' - now I hardly recognize myself. Hardly: he is slipping away, he is a ruin; but he does. This is my picture. F. Petrarca.' This is the originary landscape of my ruin. This is (the picture of) the only thing that has ever mattered to me (flanked by God and Renown): this is a self-portrait. In the face of such high seriousness, is it not nugatory to wag our old, respectable bald heads and bleat, reprovingly, 'No, it's not'? It would be better to ask ourselves questions (if we must) about the ruins; to think about them; to wonder in chastened but impudent voices about the shape of the stones and the colours of the invisible ink. With lovers' voices, and only with them, may we insinuate ourselves into the spaces of such a portrait and, by crossing it, become one with it; becoming one with it, ask it at last what it has done with the portrait the canvas bore before, and with the ruins from whose heaps its stones were drawn. Sometimes, of course, they were handled mainly to learn the handling

82 Chamber music of stones; sometimes to demonstrate to an admiring audience of connoisseurs with what economy and elegance one ruin may be transformed into another (into an other). This is my picture. Ph. Desportes/ Desportes, we bathe in your neatly-banked river Which gives off sweet murmurs on pretty gravel And gets its limpid water from many a little spring.

de Bai'f

But if we accept a small, neat sequence as the self-portrait of a small, neat mind (with, at most, a murmur of small, neat loving on pretty gravel), why are we at such pains to deny the gigantic disseminations signed Will? You see - I say again - we are moving out of the twisting valley with its mists, its torrents, and the riches of its leafmould, and the mountain is huge before us. You can feel the breath of its majesty and its horror's chill on your cheek. I have written all you have read so far to create, first a busy intersection shadowed by the Metro's viaduct, a couple of seedy bistrots, a crowd of impatient scooters, honking taxis, and parked cars; then a nondescript bleak entry, a short concrete staircase; finally too few modern seats and a few low platforms facing what looks like a leprous segment from the Aya Sophia: the Empty Space. Our empty spaces are deep inside the anonymity of noise, the scrawl of tagged urbanity. Now that we are here, with no curtain to go up, no lights to come on, there is only the event of someone walking forward to face us. Sooner or later he will begin to speak. He may, however, begin by tilting a tube filled with dried peas slowly from side to side. Looking, we connect this with nothing; but as we start to listen, we discover with delight that this black man in a white robe (who is not yet Ariel), slowly tilting his great wooden tube, is calling up our memory of the sound of breaking waves. Or, as it might be, he is producing on the paper stage strewd with pearls the regular sound/sight of texts which, after a moment, calls up our memory of sonnets in sequence, and all that that implies: a lover, ardent, tortured but constant; a lady, fair and cruel, distant and voiceless; sighs and tears, witty arguments, equivocal conclusions. For whether I am dressed in ruff and doublet or in sweater and jeans, if I am lucky enough to have been given access to the 'gift of the dead'7 this regular sound/sight will evoke delicious and familiar ghosts. Text that I am, the voices which produce themselves before and within me at once cross all the murmurs of other voices in the drowsy smoky space that is my

Two-part invention 83 moment. Blindly, they speak across one another, producing from time to time patterns clear but utterly bizarre, at other moments a shadow in a fog that whispers distinctly an urgent phrase. There is a constant deja-vu, frustrating and inescapable. One of the properties of ruins is that they remind you. From fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty's rose might never die ... But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, making a famine where abundance lies. Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose un-eared womb disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? If the true concord of well-tuned sounds, by unions married, do offend thine ear, they do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds in singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear. Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye that thou consum'st thyself in single life? This, admit it at once, is the very last opening scene we should expect from a tragicommody of love or sonnet-sequence. The procreation of children? It is hard to think of a subject more rigorously taboo in a tradition which, since Guittone d'Arezzo, has no more considered, let alone mentioned, it than did the Symposium. Reading is a sequential act, like playing Bach or watching The Tempest. Sonnet-sequences allow you to modify this linearity by coming in and leaving when you wish (as the audience can do in John Krizanc's Tamara, produced in mansions, where different scenes are played simultaneously in different rooms). Nevertheless, the great sonnet-sequences are also books, with a beginning and (at the very least the denial of) an end. A sonnet-sequence - the type, the paradigm, the abstract model readers had in their heads - began with an apology or an introduction or an account of the beloved's first appearance or 'in medias res.' This beginning, to the law-student or courtier buyer in Paul's or Dunstan's Churchyard, was (and still would be, if 'Shakespeare' were less thoughtlessly self-justifying to most readers) absolutely disconcerting. Here, then, is something else that can happen in the Empty Space. Not a brief strangeness followed by delight and recognition, but immediate challenge. A painting of Stonehenge: 'Self-Portrait. W.S.' Notice that I am not trying to explain why this is happening. You and I are not ready for that, least of all with Shakespeare. What we need to do first is to let it echo in our minds, to allow it its full resonance of anomaly. To imagine

84 Chamber music the Bouffes du Nord, shape it in our head, introduce there an expectant audience - ourselves, you and me, side by side - then, in this hushed bright emptiness, let the absolutely unexpected slowly happen, occur, unroll, take place. I want us to be maximally bothered, in other words, by all this text's peculiarities, of which the present one is only the first. To become so, we have to be fully conscious of its extent. The procreation of children, and incidentally marriage, is a coherent pattern assembled with - for - seventeen sonnets, until it is seriously starting to get our attention. Then it's dropped, and for the remaining 137 sonnets and 47 stanzas it is never heard from again. This is equally peculiar from the point of view of the argument as from that of what I have called 'code.' If you want to remind yourself of just how odd the effect is, compare these texts with the first fifteen or so sonnets of, say, Petrarch's Rime or Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, which set the stage for what's to follow, introduce the themes, and generally get the audience settled. These sonnets, on the other hand, leave us in our seats, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, unsettled and, throughout at least a part of what follows, waiting for their theme's, and their code's, return. (Only those who have seen, and remember, the Shrew might react differently.) Also, scrabbling for answers is at this stage useless. Forget Thomas Thorpe the scapegoat: we know that in all Renaissance sonnet-sequences the order is uncertain, but we also know that authors took great pains over it, and we must treat it as we find it. [Which ought to make us think about the appropriate response to the sort of disconcerting that is happening here. How are we supposed to react to an abnormal work masquerading as a normal one - whether sonnet-sequence, exhibition of drawings, book of philosophy or critical essay - while it's going on? Do we safely graze, protected by an 'institution of public usefulness/ as the French call it? Do we crossly close the book? Do we consume it prudently like the curate's egg? Remember, if you are reading this, this is your self-portrait. It is the ruin looking at you. And it is the time of your life passing. It is, thus, worth thinking about.] Jump, now, to the end of the sequence. The last two sonnets (153-4) are not about marriage: they are, sort of, about love and chastity, which puts them superficially in tune with the rest, at least as far as 'argument' is concerned. In terms of 'code,' though, they are even more utterly alien to the sequence than nos. 1-17. Let us recall what comes before. The audience, having gone through a slowly tightening emotional mangle, has at last arrived at the greatest horror conceivable in love-poetry: 'For I have

Two-part invention 85 sworn thee fair - more perjured eye, To swear against the truth so foul a lie.' And then, suddenly, a sprightly voice pipes up: 'Cupid laid by his brand, and fell asleep. A maid of Dian's ... ' and there ensue two little fables of flawless Hellenistic cuteness, based on an epigram by Marianus Scholasticus in the Greek Anthology. Once again, something utterly anomalous is staring us in the face. A blind director has chosen to bring in a chirpy Hortensio, a twangling Jack, immediately after Lear's entrance with Cordelia's corpse. Why? we murmur. Once again, we should perhaps not try to answer that right away. Let it build up in our minds: get angry at it. Be sophisticated, but not too sophisticated. Allow ourselves to feel betrayed by a change of code so abrupt and so deflating that it is bathos - always bearing in mind that bathos in a writer like Shakespeare is never pure and rarely simple. One possibility suggested by our unsettling is that there are more ruins in play than we thought. Faced with Stupid Cupid and his ilk in this place, I am facing the ruin of what I thought this sonnet-sequence was: the ruin, thus, of this sonnet-sequence - which also was never anything else. This is my picture, Stupid, [signature illegible]' The signature is probably Cupid's - who, I remember with sudden unease, was (is?) blind. This glimpsed possibility is so unnerving that I am going to defer it - see below. Why is it so unnerving? Because Cynara was real, and though I may scarcely recognize myself, I am still here. Is the Empty Space's honesty only apparent - is it really full of dark corners where blind things lurk? However unsettled we may be, we do not walk out from the christal walls, you and I, but stay in our seats, mesmerized. And yes, there is more. 'From off a hill whose concave womb reworded A plaintful story from a sistring vale ...' And on, and on, and on. Forty-seven stanzas of Rhyme Royal: A Lover's Complaint. In the old days (our old days, not the text's) it was considered 'poetically inconsiderable, and dialectally unlike Shakespeare' (C.S. Lewis). Nowadays it has become 'this beautiful and neglected poem' (John Kerrigan).8 Either way, it manages to go on bothering. I am going to share with you my own unease, so that by the contact yours may spring forth. First of all I was bothered because the poem was (to me) so mediocre. Not truly awful: it is not in the class of some of the age's fourteeners or in that of the anonymous sonnet-sequence Zepheria, written in what might be called unsprung rhythm. But bad it is: lengthy, unexciting, couched in lumpy, pseudo-Spenserian stanzas, it bumbles its pretentious way through a tale that is merely depressing. It does have one or two good lines: 'O

86 Chamber music father, what a hell of witchcraft lies / In the small orb of one particular tear!' - but the overall effect is one of, for Shakespeare, almost spectacular bathos. If only, one thinks, it was not meant to be there; perhaps not even by Shakespeare ... But the bibliographical evidence is inescapable: it was meant to be there, with SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS, paired snugly b covers of one slim quarto. So it is (for our purposes, and to the best of our knowledge) by Shakespeare; it is intended to follow the Sonnets; and it is of an entirely surprising mediocrity. The appearance of John Kerrigan's Penguin edition of 1986 had, for many readers, the effect of turning this unease into a problem and then solving it. Various scholars, it reminds us, dispute among themselves the discovery that since Samuel Daniel's 1592 Delia there had been a number of books, each comprising a sonnet-sequence; something short and Hellenistic in form, content or both; and a longer poem, often a Complaint.9 Upon closer study it is not quite as watertight as it appears; but there is a pattern, a few books do fit it, and it seems to have been created by Daniel. What this did for me, though, was create new unease. What did Daniel think he was doing? Why did a number of people pick his of all models, rather than the fabulously popular Sidney's? Why are most of them bad? And why - finally, and most naggingly of all - why did Shakespeare pick this model, and conclude a searing sonnet-sequence with a lumpy blandness? None of these questions, incidentally, has been answered; but the one I want us to stay with is the last. To answer it by saying that sonnets 153-4 and the Complaint are there in order to give the work what Kerrigan calls a 'tripartite Delian structure' is like Victor Borge's explanation that, on a grand piano, 'the pedal in the middle is there to separate the two other pedals.' It will not do - at least not in the form of a circular argument. Each of these three elements - the procreation-opening, the Hellenistic closing, and the relentlessly banal Complaint - is really a 'crux.' A crux is not a problem: it is, precisely, a cross. A place of crisis: a crossroads, urging upon the reader a choice; at the same time a place of pain, where the reader is crucified by being prevented from making that choice. Further, a place of intensity (where four directions meet) and of possibility (from which four directions depart). And finally, a sacred place: a sacred sign, urgent with mystery, that cannot be 'solved' yet will not go away. What creates this intensity, of course, is what I have so far been avoiding: the main body of the stupendous ruin that is SHAKE-SPEARs SONNETS. Venturing here is done at one's risk and peril. No ruins are more

Two-part invention 87 lethal. The space around and between the sonnets ought to be marked uxB.10 A fine coating of ash lies everywhere. The rain tastes of rust. They look into the beauty of thy mind, And that in guess they measure by thy deeds; Then, churls, their thoughts (although their eyes were kind) To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds... And simple truth miscalled simplicity [simplemindedness].... whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, from me far off, with others all too near. Dull explosions sound, far or near, you cannot tell. Sometimes your foot crashes through a rotten plank into a crater. Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan. If eyes, corrupt by over-partial looks, be anchored in the bay where all men ride ... Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be. And yet it all began with a summer's day: Then happy I that love and am beloved / Where I may not remove nor be removed/ Mysterious, terrifying, it stares at us with gaunt eyes until our skin crawls. We are human: we cannot simply respond as ruin to ruin. Our fingers must grope upon the skin of these bitter stones until - what? Until we can make sense. Until we can create at least a personal, wholly provisional answer to questions no one has formulated; until we can, somehow, live in, live with, this sombre splendour. We are a questioning and an interpreting race. 'You are a hedgehog on a motorway; you are blind; nevertheless you must struggle.'11 Struggle for what? Not for advantage; not for survival; for meaning. Not just What? but Why? So, questioning, interpreting, struggling, we take hold of this mystery. Where? Which piece can we try to use to understand the others? Which part will be the 'interpretant'? I suggest Cupid. After all, he seems the most obvious interloper, Delian structure or no; yet he is the tutelary deity of all that is supposedly going on in this text. He will, of course, not make things easy. The simplest probe, for instance, is to look for the original epigram - which is singularly unhelpful: Beneath these plane trees, detained by gentle slumber, Love slept, having put his torch in the care of the Nymphs; but the Nymphs said one to another: 'Why wait? Would that together with this we could quench the fire in the hearts of men.' But the torch set fire even to the water, and with hot water thenceforth the Love-Nymphs fill the bath.'12

Researching Cupid in general is no better: he brings in his train three entire, more or less distinct, mythological codes (the Classical, the Hellenistic, and the Renaissance) and innumerable intertexts. So instead I am going to let Cupid generate (as Riffaterre would say) his full descrip-

88 Chamber music tive system: the cluster of connotations the name 'Cupid' calls up. Look, now: not only Diana, her maids, a spring and an Arcadian landscape, but also his blindness, his bow and arrows, his mother Venus, and his victim the heart-sick lover. Beyond Marianus, he has produced for us the world, the genre, of the Greek Anthology: the always faintly menacing charm of the Anacreontic miniature. There he sits: smiling dangerously, like Leonardo's John the Baptist, in the middle of Shakespeare's text, pointing at something. Do we know at what? Certainly, says Kerrigan's Penguin: at the Delian structure. In the works using this, the sonnets are often followed by an ode in the trochaic metre known as anacreontic. As a connection, this is a bit thin. Daniel's Ode, for example, is charming but perfectly in tune with his sonnets: 'Now each creature joys the other, Passing happy days and hours ... Each thing pities my despair, Whilst that she her lover kills.' No Cupid; no Venus; no torch, maids, bow, arrows, blindfold, or bath. In none of the 'Delian tripartite structure' works are the concluding (or separating) poems Anacreontic in anything but the occasional name of their metre. Except one. Where else - to elaborate the question - can you find an Anacreontic (in the full sense of the word) irrelevance placed, as a functional pedal, Whatchamacallit, Gawdhelpus, or Snark, between a collection of sonnets and a subsequent longer poem associated with them? Good God. Slowly but surely another ruin, with several identical features, is appearing behind the one we're looking at. Behind SHAKESPEARES SONNETS stands, with a very different smile, the shape of Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion. This is all very well, a voice protests: you have pulled a neat rabbit out of a dubious hat, and it's eating lettuce. But have you not, this way, brought us back to penguins, to 'literary exercises' and all the dreary demonstrations of influence? Where is the ruin as self-portrait; where is the writing of the blind? Not at all. I did suggest that we ask the self-portrait what it is painted on; and what it has done with the portrait the canvas bore before. Now, perhaps, is the time for that. The last thing you learn is that there is no empty page. Every text is written over - written across - another (and another, and another) text. Every driver becomes, in his turn, a hedgehog. Now that I have read glimpses of the Amoretti beneath the Sonnets, I have to go back and re-member the Amoretti so that I can then go forw. and read the Sonnets in their terms. Spenser - let us give Kerrigan's Penguin its due - used Daniel's model

Two-part invention 89 (which he may well have discussed with Daniel himself: they both moved in the circles of the Sidney Circle) to write across Sidney's text, which had itself been written across Petrarch's, the great Model, the permanent Generator. What Sidney had done was show the formalized, neatly melancholy, well-banked river of the Continental sonnet-sequence tradition to contain one huge and hungry crocodile: the inevitable and (in the traditional circumstances) insoluble conflict between Honour and Desire. He had also made it possible once again for the sonnet-sequence to become a disseminated self-portrait, though never a single or an innocent one. Spenser, for his part, seems to have temperamentally detested unsolved problems. Moreover, his personal situation enabled him, like Petrarch before him, to conceive of a single bold stroke that would kill the crocodile (who was blind and winged) and create a masterpiece. And so in his poema the sonnets grow fewer, the canzoni are replaced, as in Daniel, by a long final poem; but this time the sonnets become almost a prelude, and the long poem a vast and gorgeous marriage ode - his own. And in the middle, not only as a formal nod to Daniel's 'anacreontic' ode but as a wink to the whole Hellenistic landscape of pseudo-'Love' he was leaving behind, the four Anacreontic epigrams - meaningless in their context if you take them literally, but rich in connotation: a 'pedal in the middle' with a difference, an interesting kind of text-as-space (see below, 'Four-part fugue'). After which the poor silly sinful characters called Poet-Lover and Beloved-Other, hitherto caught always in the unending frozen chase-postures of Keats's 'Grecian Urn,' can now at last unfreeze themselves to become the Bride and Groom of a marriage as deeply and satisfyingly symbolic as it is conformable to the Divine Text. In the great festal Ode that is the Epithalamion, the promise of the Easter sonnet ('Most glorious Lord of Life/ 68) is fulfilled, and even the slanderers, the lauzengiers who at the end of Amoretti still troubled the couple's 'simple truth and mutual good will,' have become mere croaking frogs. This sounds like a temple, not a bit like a ruin which mirrors Shakespeare's. Yet Cupid led us here, and is still watching us grope, with a blind and enigmatic smile. 'This is my picture, Stupid, [graffito: illegible]' So we grope; so we look. We look - being a stubbornly interpretative race - for the look these ruins exchange between themselves, the look that is a crux, a sacred sign. The sign they share with each other and with no one else is a sacrament (outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace) and its purpose. Nothing in SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS is more extraordinary, more code-breaking than the emphasis on procrea-

9O Chamber music tion. In no other sonnet-sequence, I said, is it even thought about. Except, of course, the Amoretti. Hills peep o'er hills, and questions always seem to engender new ones. (If they didn't, we shouldn't be doing this, you and I: either all we like sheep should safely graze, or we'd be watching television.) If we want to know about palimpsests, about the canvas, about the way a new ruin grew out of an old one, about what happened to the old one, then we should look carefully at the ruins, touch them and interrogate what they say about procreation - not textually but structurally. In Amoretti, procreation is, quite literally, the end: not only the 'ending end,' the goal, the causa finalis, but the finis itself. From the invocation of Juno and Genius for the blessings of a 'fruitfull progeny' and the 'timely fruits of this same night' (Ep. 403-4) to that of the heavenly powers to bless the Poet/Groom and his Bride with a 'large posterity' to inherit the celestial tabernacles and swell the number of the Saints (4iyff.), the theme provides the climax of the Ode, which itself is placed as the culmination of the sonnetsequence. The Solemnization of Matrimony had, of course, insisted upon the procreative function as first among wedlock's blessings; but there is more to it than that. The 'triumph of our victory' (243) is also the triumph of a love-poet over a great but (from his point of view) fatally flawed tradition. This is the true 'bon'amors/ He has, in fact, won on every count; and Cupid - did you notice? - has been dismembered into a hundred 'little winged loves' that flutter like butterflies around the marriage-bed, where procreation is even now being worked at. Heavenly. This is our picture. E. Spenser/ In the facing ruin, procreation comes first. It is the first man walking into the Empty Space, the substance of the first words spoken there in SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (as we might say 'Fellini's Western'). Such an opening un-settles. It bothers those who know their sonnet-sequences (I've not missed one since Astrophil first came out: twenty-seven of them I have on my shelves');13 those who know their love-poetry in general ('Is it not evill that such a Devill wants homes?' A&S 78:14); and those who have come here fresh from the Epithalamion, believing amor to be now religatus (and thus religiosus). Sonnets 1-17 follow the wedding ode as the buffoon follows the burgher, miming his actions but announcing for them a new code, a different structure of significance. Notice that the words now being used are words of linearity: 'first/ 'opening,' 'follow.' The self-portrait that is a sonnet-sequence is not (only) a picture, it moves in time. You follow its progress, as you follow that of The Tempest. Having followed the line of the Amoretti from 'cru-

Two-part invention 91 elty' via mutuality to marriage to procreation, we now arrive at a new voice, a new event, a new line which we choose to follow in turn. Blind men ourselves, we follow a voice, projecting on our inward screen the landscape - the ruin - our mind, our memory, assembles from the voice's data. Whose is the voice? We do not know, but have been told that it is SHAKE-SPEARES.

Following it through procreation, we are led at last to love, as a tilting tube might lead us to the sea. A lovely and temperate beloved; a poet/ lover properly proud of the triumph of his eternizing mimetic art. Until 19:11, when 'my love' is characterized as 'him/ and we are pulled up short. Like procreation at the first, this is a terribly important moment. Not because homophile love or love-sonnets were unknown; but their rarity, the grave ecclesiastical sanctions, even the deliberate flaunting of a Marlowe, all ensure that this him, and the following sonnet 20, function as a new un-settling, as a deliberate sign of code-breaking. Sonnet 20 denies what we may shamefastly call physical relations between the T and 'him/ but denies nothing else. So doing, it establishes the love described as 'pure': conformable to the ideals of Socrates as portrayed by Plato. A Womans face with natures owne hand painted, Haste thou the Master Mistris of my passion, A womans gentle hart but not acquainted With shifting change as is false womens fashion, An eye more bright then theirs, lesse false in rowling: Gilding the object where-upon it gazeth, A man in hew all Hews in his controwling, Which steales mens eyes and womens soules amaseth. And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a dotinge, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she prickt thee out for womens pleasure, Mine be thy love and thy loves use their treasure.

Whatever a poet sees when he looks into a mirror, it is a mirror-image. He parts his hair on the left: 'he' on the right. He writes with his right hand; 'he' (eh?) with 'his' left. And if he looks and sees a landscape? Writing the landscape, does he mirror it also, with windmills turning clockwise? We should not exclude the possibility that the poet writes, in

92 Chamber music part, in order to mirror; in order to turn around, to reverse, to make stories end the way they should - or the way they shouldn't, but do. When a poet looks into a book, it may be to him what a mirror is to a painter. He may find there his own landscape, in reverse. He may draw, like the painter, this reverse of himself - this rapidly fading reverse of himself, this reverse ruin that was never anything else - and attach to the frame his name and the label 'Self-Portrait/ But he may also, if he is very cunning, very excited, or very angry, observe and reverse the reversal, drawing the windmills so that, whatever the direction of their spinning, they are his windmills and not a mirror's. 'I may be straight though they them-selves be bevel' (121). If (with a lover's eye and a lover's discourse, for only so is it both fitting and efficacious) we insert ourselves in the space between Amoretti and SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS at the point where the former ends and the latter begins, we see procreation on both sides. Taking this as our starting-point, we follow the space, looking to either side, this way and that. And soon we notice that the space we walk in is gradually widening. The Sonnets are still a mirror-image; but not exactly. They move in the opposite direction, from the issue and justification of love (progeny) to (the noblest form of) love itself. But while the noblest form of love in the intertext (the Epithalamion) is social, its inward and spiritual grace expressed in not one but many outward and visible signs, its counterpart in the Sonnets is intensely private (T may not evermore acknowledge thee,' 36:9), unexpressed in ceremony, and sanctified not by a divine Presence but by the surreptitious gliding of a text (the Symposium).14 The gap, from here on, gets wider and wider. The Amoretti''s second plot15 is marked by an increasing and hitherto unheard-of mutuality of experience. In the Sonnets, such a mutuality is attempted near the beginning: Then happy I that love and am beloved, Where I may not remove nor be removed' (25). Yet the Amoretti's triumphant 'we,' which was the mark - the sign - of this achievement, in the Sonnets turns up under negative and suspicious circumstances:' - yet we must not be foes' (40), and 'in our faults by lies we flattered be' (138). In the same way, the 'absence' topos in Amoretti, while sad, is as innocent as it had been in Astrophil and Stella;16 in the Sonnets, on the other hand, it is entirely explicit and thoroughly sinister - 'from me far off, with others all too near' (61). The Spenserian sonnets on the loss of liberty (65, 71, 73) are serene and affectionate in tone. They have their Shakespearean counterpart in the abuse of a liberty maintained (Those pretty wrongs that

Two-part invention 93 liberty commits/ 41), but disseminate into whole groups of texts: those sections known as the Friend's Fault and the Poet's Error17 exist only by virtue of their continual counterpoint with - their mirroring of - what, in the intertext, we might call the Couple's Assurance. So much for matter; how, though, do you mirror energy? One way, we saw, is through blindness: in walking a path along a mountainside, in climbing the Matterhorn, the blind man has no trouble capturing the energia of extreme experience. In drawing his self-portrait, the artist facing a mirror communicates the energy of his attempt to arrest a vanishing. So what about the poet? In any mirroring ruin, in a widening space of tension between text and intertext (where we, lost lovers, move within a sightless web), the energy itself is not in doubt, though its precise nature remains to be determined. The means of transmission, if we could find them, might give us a hint. Avoiding the lurking smile of Cupid - for whom we are still not ready - we might go back to the theatre, the stage (even of paper), the walls (even of christal), and the chief actor who, at least in Nashe's preface to Astrophil and Stella, was the Muse of tragedy. Melpomene does not smile; but the frozen wail of her mask intimidates, and her too we must defer. So we try, in the Empty Space, to produce for ourselves our interpretation of the Theatre of Cruelty. In Artaud's manifesto, and even more in his letters,18 cruelty is not (just) the infliction of suffering. It is also and especially the piercing of the audience's carapace by a theatre that will not blether about the moods of the uninteresting but shake us with the presence of great thoughts and great fears, vast triumphs and chill terror. All action is cruelty, says Artaud; the desire of Eros is cruelty: it burns all that is secondary. Spenser's text had treated cruelty with extreme sophistication. Naming it ceaselessly (with a startlingly high count of 'cruel' and 'cruelty' words and semes), the Amoretti nevertheless does not once suggest its presence or its reality. Not because it is powerless, but because its power is the opposite of Artaud's. Employing what you might call an emotional retrospect, from the heights of the Epithalamion's double triumph, these sonnets deliberately increase our distance from 'cruelty' by exaggerating it and insisting on it - in the early part of the sequence. The pungency of experience Artaud named cruelty is elsewhere. In the Amoretti it lies, unusually, in happiness: the achieved felicity of those aware that they have beaten evil at its own game by doing the Will of God.

94 Chamber music SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS - the Will of Will - show no signs of having recognized this refinement of distancing, and no likelihood of sympathy if they had. They have, on the other hand, a malign and deeply moving sophistication of energy-transmission all their own. In lengthy chains of sonnets, they insist on naming only the Friend's good qualities: never once is he referred to as the 'cruel fair' of sonnet-code. Yet at the same time, and often in the same sonnet, his very real, and increasing, cruelty is shown at every turn. That God forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought controule your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th'account of houres to crave, Being your vassail bound to staie your leisure. Oh let me suffer (being at your beck) Th'imprison'd absence of your libertie, And patience tame, to sufferance bide each check, Without accusing you of injury. Be where you list, your charter is so strong, That you your selfe may priviledge your time To what you will, to you it doth belong, Your selfe to pardon of selfe-doing crime. I am to waite, though waiting so be hell, Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well. (58)

The effect is, as in Brook's Tempest and all other great performances of the human heart, to let the audience itself come to the conclusions embodied by the text. Other mirror-images abound. The Amoretti's praise of the beloved's 'proud port' (13) and the loving debate on her self-assurance (58, 59) are represented in the Sonnets by the famous, and much more dubious, They that have power to hurf (94). The blason of Amoretti 15 ('Ye tradefull merchants' - see above, Three easy pieces') becomes the counterblason of Sonnets 130 ('My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne'); the suppression of desire's 'unquiet thought' (Am. 2) and 'filthy lustfull fyre' (84) turns into the obsessive indulgence of Th'expence of Spirit in a waste of shame' (Sonn. 129) and the 'Will' texts (135, 136); and the entire enterprise of mutuality founders, first on a savage triangle (42, 133-4) and finally on the absolutely disillusioned acceptance of T lie with her, and she with mee' (138).

Two-part invention 95 Into what kind of mirror is a poet looking here? the mirror of Narcissus? the mirror of the fairy-tale? the mirror for Magistrates? the mirror of Richard n? the mirror of Tintoretto? the shaving-glass of William Shakespeare? the shaving-glass of Edmund Spenser? 'Self-Portrait, [signature illegible.l' One thing seems certain: the mirror is a cruel one, in both senses of the word. It inflicts suffering (only the mistress, one suspects, remains untouched because untouchable). And it displays the implacable rigour, the irresistible grasp, of life itself which is the cruelty of Artaud's theatre. It is as if Will had taken (Edmund's) tragicommody of love and produced it chez Artaud (who intended, incidentally, to make Elizabethan situations into one of the Theatre of Cruelty's staples).19 The mirror criticizes, subtly and consistently. The two 'plots' of Amoretti ('cruelty' code heightened to irony, followed by a new code of mutuality and fulfilment) are subverted in reverse order and assigned, at least in part, to two separate Beloveds: the 'higher' love for the Friend is followed (in the text) by the leaser' love for the Woman. And not only that: even the former is undermined by its own text. The supposedly noble and Platonic emotion is shown to be an abject, suffering passion for an increasingly unworthy object. And gradually, and more and more, the gap widens, not only between text and intertext but between the text and the whole Western code of love's purification, from Plato through Plotinus to Castiglione. The mirror criticizes: it produces, in what it mirrors, a crisis. Where there seemed a seamless and triumphal unity, it has created a critical mass. It is not the Sonnets which will explode, it is the Amoretti: the Sonnets are the Amoretti's explosion, as our universe is the Big Bang. 'Self-Portrait. E.Gpenser. W. Shakespeare.' Perhaps. Ye learned sisters, which have oftentimes ... From off a hill whose concave womb reworded ... And for short time an endlesse moniment... And new pervert a reconciled maid.

Here, it seems, the mirror is clearly shattered, the face lies in a hundred

96 Chamber music shivers (but can we still rely on the sense of 'lies'?), and we are back in the sour grey rain of ruins. Here and there a Kerrigan's Penguin wanders disconsolately, muttering 'tripartite Delian structure' over and over. Beside the particular ruin that is A Lover's Complaint a worn and disregarded sign still reads 'UXB.' Groping as blind men do, we necessarily ignore it. The only way we can deal with such a ruin is to try to discern its shape, running our questing fingers lightly, interpretatively, over its worn and broken stones. Doing so in our situation discovers newly odd bumps. (Why -1 said - Peter Brook is a blind man.) If - discarding for a moment the colours of the argument - we hunt in our blind memory for a Spenserian equivalent to a text of forty-plus stanzas in rhyme royal, all we can come up with is the Four Hymns: the noblest expression, Spenserians feel, of their poet's Neoplatonic ideas on love and beauty (44,41, 41, and 43 stanzas respectively).20 This does not at first seem promising. Instead of a noble text praising a noble love, the Complaint offers us the mediocre narrative of an appalling seduction. Yet what if, semiotically, this were what matters? What the Complaint does is marry the markers of (noble) Spenserism to those of banality. Like the maid, though in another sense, it is 'shrieking undistinguish'd woe' (20). It provides an elaborately mysterious, Giorgione-like introduction, full of undecoded signs, to the tale of a vulgar jilting; while, in contrast to the grandeur of Lucrece's suicide, this reconciled maid ends her tale, and the poem, with the declaration that, were her monstrous young man to return, she would be more than willing to be newly perverted. No greater contrast to the Epithalamion is imaginable. Precisely. That is, exactly, the significance - in the semiotic as well as the ordinary sense of the word - of the Complaint. The first shall be last, and the mighty are fallen. It is extraordinary. Everything is criticized; everything is mirrored; everything is con/sub/inverted. The Amoretti's positive markers - e.g., the semes of fidelity, mutuality, unity, religious and social integration of (sonnet) love, and an upward movement culminating in a decorously high style (the Epithalamion is, after all, an Ode) - are all mutated into negative ones: infidelity, isolation, duality, a love religiously condemned and socially subversive, and a downward movement with at its nadir of disillusionment and banality a decorously (and parodically) clumsy ecriture. There is more. Because in the conversion - the inversion, the perver-

Two-part invention

97

sion - of its intertext, the terrible force that produced SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS included the critical conversion of the form itself. Ostensibly using the recognizable and reassuring 'tripartite Delian structure' (which in its details is quite as much a Spenserian one), it then in the reality of the text inverts the Amoretti/Epithalamion's own peculiar movement. Where the intertext is an ascent from conventional sonnetry to the heights (and hoped-for fruits) of sacramental (i.e., semiotic) human love, the text begins on the heights of hope that harboured the intertext's closure, and continues as a long day's journey into night. For every gain and upward movement of the intertext, the text substitutes a loss and a downward step; for every verisimilitudinous joy and assurance, an equally mimetic mourning and terror; and for the crowning ceremony of cosmic and sacramental signification, a bald and unconvincing narrative of mendacity, banality, and despair.21 But where am I leading you? We have a ruin, and another ruin. We have a text written across another text. We have, very nearly, an infinity of mirrors. We have hints of a theatre of extreme cruelty. And we have, placed beside this nest of intertwined and crawling palimpsests, a label 'Self-Portrait. Will.' Or Something. And behind the picture glimmers an enigmatic smile beneath blind eyes. 'This is my picture. Ceci est un dessin de moi.' [I am, increasingly, convinced that our minds tend to use the wrong codes and the wrong language in dealing with poetry. You can no more discuss poetry than you can drive an orange. I'm not sure there is a verb adequate to this activity. We should, however, read Borges's 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' with great attention.] Bear with me, follow me into the half-light of a possibility. A poet, let us call him Will, looks into a book, let us call it Amoretti. In this mirror he sees the reverse of everything he knows, triumphantly constructed. What does he do? Remember, this is not the first time such a thing has happened to him. He has looked into Copland's Tale of a Shrewd and Curst Wife, lapp'd in Morel's Skin,' and his answer was the Shrew. He has looked into Marlowe's Jew of Malta, and his answer was Shylock. He has looked into the Spanish Tragedy, and his answer was Hamlet. But now the feelings are personal, as Dante's had been, as Petrarch's had been, and Sidney's: such engagement belongs to sonnet-sequences, as it does not to plays. The Amoretti and Epithalamion, what is more, are very great poetry. Will, being a very great poet, picks none of the easy solutions. He blindfolds himself, and walks into the minefield. He blindfolds himself, and

98 Chamber music draws his memories. The breath of majesty, the chill of horror, are on our cheek as they are on his. The blind tip of his quill effaces the intertext, yet maintains its spectre. The intertext is cancelled (like a cheque). Its construction is not destroyed: it is, you might almost say, deconstructed. The text - the Sonnets - appears to accept the intertext's form, reassuring everybody. Then, though, the blind man's magic takes over, as it does in the Bouffes du Nord after you have gone through the comforting motions of 'going-to-the-theatre-to-see-a-(Shakespeare)-play/ Then the triumphant values are inverted, and all the age-old bluffs are called. Then the self-portrait of God's Children exulting with one foot on Cupid's neck is patiently undermined and dislocated with carefully controlled chaos. Small, knotty mysteries abound, as they do in that other Tempest directed by Giorgione. Finally, we are faced with two ruins, looking at each other, looking at us. [Le discours de I'impossible] vient de 1'experience qui est au-dela du linguistique, et se meut dans des inscriptions blanches (un langage egal a zero), incantatoires oufragmentairesquijouent a la fois de la repetition et de la derision (comme affirmation de la difference) et recusent toute possibility de serieux, de logique ou de mise en scene (scene du sens, de Vorganisation semique, du referentiel...). II est, au sens fort, ob-scene, en dehors de la scene de la representation. Ne de la nuit il en crie, dans la catastrophe, la supplication vide.

The discourse of the impossible comes from the experience which is beyond linguistics and which lives, moves and has its being in neutral inscriptions (a language equalling zero), incantatory or fragmentary these play with both repetition and derision (as a statement of difference) and deny all possibility of seriousness, of mise en scene (scene of meaning, of semic organisation, of referential!ty ...). It is, literally, ob-scene, outide the scene of the performance, of the representation. Born of the night, it cries, in the catastrophe, night's empty beseeching. Arnaud and Excoffon-Lafarge22

And we? What do we do? Because this is the point where normally a critic would leave you, as a lecturer walks out of the hall. We, though, are coming out into the street, and there is a bar next door. Part of the theatre's pleasure is reminiscing over a drink. What is it we have been doing? This is one of the underlying questions criticism rarely asks and even more rarely answers. So let us try. Whatever it is, it can be 'true,' if at all,

Two-part invention 99 only in the discontinuous, plural and uncertain sense of 'Prelude/ above. If in any way, shape, or form I were to believe that I have uncovered and revealed to you the true meaning of Shakespeare's Sonnets, I should be justly swallowed up in the black hole of Bataille's laughter.23 On the other hand, if I did not believe that what you and I have just been doing is more than a pastime, I should not have bothered. I could go back and repeat that we have been 'accomplishing the Sonnets' plural' (see above: 'Polyphony'), and that would be perfectly true; but there is perhaps more to it than that. It has, possibly, to do with the idea of a game. Those of us who, in our attempts to practise criticism differently, have let ourselves be inspired by 'all that modern stuff'24 are always being accused of playing games. I tend to react to this by agreeing, if only to annoy the accusers. But even on a more 'serious' level, I think they are right. Above I have referred to criticism as a performance art ('An Art of Thinking'). Here, I want to add to that the idea of criticism as a game. The point of a game is that it is unconcerned with the outside world, yet is pursued with deadly seriousness as long as it lasts. This makes it a fragile yet tenacious entity subsisting in the space between the essential and the contingent. If you confuse it with external reality you will, at the least, be a bad loser; if you consider it trivial you will destroy it altogether. It is in this space that 'criticism' exists. It is a game played with human hearts and minds and literary texts. What is peculiar about it is that all attempts to fix its rules invariably fail after quite a short time. I should like to suggest, as its only true rule, one it has hardly ever recognized: the commitment, temporary but absolute, of its participants. A lover's voice; a lover's discourse. A blind man's hands. Such a point of view - point of touch, rather - brings out new answers from the sonnets and from the Sonnets. For all sonnet-sequences derive their peculiar language, their odd and intractable way of dealing with experience, from precisely the ambiguity that rules at your chessboard or bridge-table. What SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS do is turn this into Ringolevio.25 This is why expository discourse - en clair, academic language - is not really adequate for such a shared experience. It may fit; it may provide a most excellent and memorable game; but only if it is optional, and known to be so. I chose to use it in 'Three easy pieces,' for instance, because there I had selected Riffaterre's semiotics as, if you like, the rulesystem, the paradigm, for that particular game, and one element of its

ioo Chamber music essence is an extreme rigour of method. Here, on the other hand, we are dealing with a sonnet-sequence so awesome that it made me reluctant to use any sort of standard expository language except occasionally when a specific and complex idea presented itself. If you have read Derrida's Memoires d'aveugle you may have another objection. Aren't I using a pastiche of his language and concepts here? Yes and no. Of course, Memoires is the book I have used to cross the Sonnets with. But my reasons for using a similar language are quite different. Derrida uses it as an example of a discourse that cannot be summarized, only experienced. I use it as an example of a discourse that cannot be used to distance yourself from the text; and also as a challenge to the still-dominant critical discourse which encourages, indeed commands, you to do just that. We need to rediscover the seriousness of poetry, and the value of an engagement with it. The profoundest aspects of a civilization are its games. We have played SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS, you and I. Go and play it your way, alone or with others. Invent new rules. But play it for all you're worth.

6

Theme with variations skin/deep: beauty

... her beauty made The bright world dim, and everything beside Seemed like the fleeting image of a shade.

Shelley, The Witch of Atlas

Such is the nature of both death and eros. Both in fact escape: they escape at the very instant they reveal themselves ... Bataille1 Death is in the vulgar sense inevitable, but in the profound sense inaccessible. Bataille2

Between these quotations lie Stella and Elizabeth, the Friend and the Dark Woman. They lie at the still centre of their texts, deep in the place where codes cross, in the noisy silence, the periphrastic self-evidence, that is Beauty. Our access to Beauty's code is through a rapidly closing door. We cannot read it, much less interpret it, until we first recognize that the word itself is obsolete. There is scarcely a contemporary literary text that uses it as a serious concept. The history of beauty is the archaeology of a migration, a series of displacements: from philosophical to artistic discourse, from artistic to popular, from popular to virtual extinction. The effect of this displacement has been to silence the debate and the interrogation that have long formed an inseparable part of its semantic field. We should not regret the fact. That in our world beauty is silent (and that its adjective has become a mildly intensified form of nice) allows us to see, to hear, more clearly its behaviour in our texts. However, having dodged in through the closing door, we must first detour an obstacle: our

1O2 Chamber music memory of its last living role. At the turn of the present century it was a marker of poeticity - from Lionel Johnson's 'his death / By beauty made amends' to Madison Cawein's The germ that gropes through soil and sod / To beauty, radiant in the noon' - and nothing could be farther from its function in the sonnet-sequences. The semiotic enterprise, the attempt to read a text's significance as well as its meaning, forces us to recognize the semantic slippage of cultural change;3 it does not let us indulge in naive misunderstanding. As a sign in a Renaissance poetic text, beauty is a marker not so much of poeticity as of philosophicality* As we shall presently see, it provides the junction of love-code with philosophy-code, and this junction especially has been the locus for much of the debate and interrogation mentioned above - which we shall need to recognize but try to traverse in order to reach a curiously still centre. All the words about Beauty are words about it: words around it. Traversing the debate means, as always, sticking to the texts. It means not regarding them as partial attempts to say something else, or as partial deposits of what has elsewhere been said more fully and more adequately. A worthwhile beginning is to make one's own concordance of beauty from the three sequences, and to contemplate the result carefully with an open mind. From such a concordance, features emerge. The first is frequency: both the Astrophil and Stella and the Sonnets use the noun, on an average, twice as often as the Amoretti. We do not at this stage have any way of evaluating the significance of the frequency-element, but will file it away as a factor to be taken into account later. The second is variety. Beauty can be singular or plural; a divinity, a concept, or a possession; it can be named directly or detoured via an enumeration of features; it can be a principle of unity or of division; it can be a simple agent or occasion an infinitely regressing chain of metaphor. It can attract and repel, be supremely powerful and utterly vulnerable. It belongs to the body and to the soul, to Nature and to Art. The third feature is self-evidence. Negatively expressed, this means that 'beauty but beauty is/ that 'sweet beauty hath no name.'5 Positively, beauty never receives, perhaps because it is never thought to need, definition.6 It appears as a perfectly shared code, which can be interpreted, reinterpreted, denied, turned upside-down, played with, because its semantic core is regarded as completely understood. What are the differences? (Through them we may come to difference.)7

Theme with variations 103 In the Astrophil and Stella, rich in prosopopoieas, Beauty tends to independence: 'Beauty's mine/ 'Beauty's throne/ 'Beauty's worth/ 'beauty's treasure/ 'rain from beauty's skies.' Yet it is doubled, in this text especially, by many plurals: 'armies of thy beauties/ 'rich in all beauties/ 'beauties proud, 'beauties so divine.' In the Amoretti, though 'soverayne/ it is equivocal: torn between 'grace' and 'disgrace/ between 'wonderment' and 'pride/ an 'image of the Maker's beauty' always in doubt. In the Sonnets, finally, it is characteristically a possession or an attribute: no text speaks so consistently of 'thy beauty.' And it is as vulnerable as in the Astrophil and Stella it is powerful: 'beauty liv'd and died/ 'beauty's dead fleece/ 'Beauty's summer dead.' What are the similarities? Beauty 'draws the heart to love'; thoughts prey on the 'sweet spoil of beauty'; beauty is 'tempting.' Its power is that of attraction. True beauty' is virtue, 'the inward beauty/ 'truth in beauty dyed.' Yet beauty belongs to Love, not to Virtue (A&S 52), it is idle and boastful (Am. 41), and grows like Eve's apple (Sonn. 93). Before we end this topography of beauty and begin to look for the concord (and the discord) in the concordance, let us just signal two special cases (Am. 15: 'Ye tradefull merchants' /Ep. 167-80: Tell me ye merchants' daughters'; Sonn. 130: 'My mistris eyes') where the texts themselves take over the topography. One is positively marked, the other negative; one apparently naive, the other knowingly sophisticated; yet both map beauty detail by physical detail, and map it by similitude. The technical tradition to which these poems belong will be discussed below: for now, it is worth bearing in mind merely that their treatment of beauty is both analytic and comparative. What we have so far, you will have noticed, is a series of confusions and a collection of repetitions. This is a Good Thing. Already, in a few short paragraphs, we have come a long way and are far from our own self-evidence. First of all, the repetition of the word beauty, in the topography just sketched, dulls the mind to the word itself (compare the "\).' etc. in the index to a dictionary of quotations), and makes us focus on its environment in particular cases. And in doing so we realize that we had up to that point been taking things for granted and that the texts, attentively read, will not allow us to go on doing so. We are noticing varieties, oddities, ungrammaticalities. We begin to wonder if, after all, we know what beauty means. We resist this, and assure ourselves that, experientially, we do. But then we are led back again to the confusion that occurs when we try to translate this inchoate experience. And in this way a

104 Chamber music tension is created; which is a Good Thing. For now we are not recognizing the debate and interrogation that always surrounded beauty when it was a living word: we are experiencing it and, by experiencing it, accomplishing it - traversing it. Furthermore it is, as always, the ungrammaticalities which will guide us to the significance. Earlier I said that through the differences we may come to difference. Through the differences in the texts, by way and by means of them and only thus, can we map the similarities. When these are absorbed, a new set of differences shows itself: the differences from paradigm, from expectation, that we call ungrammaticalities. And only through these, through the reading of them as signs, can we come to difference: to the recognition that what a text differs from, what it does not say, is as important as what it does say. Every poetic text, says Riffaterre, is a detour around a repressed matrix.8 In this case we are not regarding an integral text but following the isotope of one word, one sign, through three texts. Yet, as we shall see, this word too is a poema; this also is, in all its appearances, an endless detour around a matrix. The still centre and the repressed core are one and the same. It is better, in this case, not to follow the developments text by text but rather feature by feature. Let us move, in the approved manner, from the Many to the One. Begin, that is, with the multiplicity of beauties, then move to beauty's duality, and finally locate and explore the one still centre that lies at the heart of self-evidence. Many In noting the variety of beauty's topography, we saw that it could be singular or plural: and it is with the plural that I want to begin. Not with Beauty, but with beauties. Beauties we find almost exclusively in the Astrophil and Stella, and at first sight there is nothing abstract or philosophical about them. Astrophil remembers seeing them, 'of manie Garrets fine' (16:2), and being attracted to them before he found Stella; the sun parches the 'hid and meaner beauties' while leaving Stella untouched (22:12); Stella's husband can 'with foule abuse such beauties blot' (24:11); through the breach of Astrophil's conquered eyes 'whole armies of thy beauties entered in' (36:4); Stella is the 'nymph of the garden where all beauties be' (82:1); and near the end she suggests that he will 'new beauties see' and be attracted to them in turn (xi:2i). The garden, here, is a glancing reference to philosophy-code, of which

Theme with variations 105 more below.9 But what of the other citations? They initially appear thoroughly straightforward: beauties is a metonym for beautiful features or qualities. Yet on a closer look we remark two further aspects. In the first place such a process of metonymy is not self-evident but itself a fact of style, which effectively leads the reader away from descriptive to hermeneutic language, from the particular to the general, from body to concept. Secondly, three of the loci quoted - the first, the second, and the last are complex and ambiguous metonymies, allowing themselves to be interpreted either as features or as persons.™ The effect of this ambiguity (which, like all ambiguities in literary texts, should not be 'solved' but accepted, and read as itself a sign) is to make the signifier beauties generate an unstable synecdoche between person and feature (the respective final terms of the two possible metonymies).11 These instances thus install a fundamental doubt as to not only the referent of beauty but the unity of the body (the unspoken term uniting features and person).12 Tracing the lines of the beauties back to their convergence in what they do not say, we find that they lead away from a united, loved, described body. A similar movement is to be found in the other main movement of multiplicity concerning beauty: the blason.13 The blason is not primary in the sonnet-sequence, but its dispersed traces appear everywhere. One example from Astrophil and Stella will serve as transition between beauties on the one hand and the blasoncatalogue14 on the other: 'Some beautie's peece, as amber colourd hed, / Milke hands, rose cheeks, or lips more sweet, more red, / Or seeing jets, blacke, but in blacknesse bright' (91:6-8). In the opening phrase, 'some beauties peece/ the semantic instability (now of the metonymy between concept and person) is maintained; but it is at once analysed, taken apart, and the instances are 'peeces/ This analysis appears even more clearly in the two straightforward blason-catalogues mentioned above: Amoretti 15:7-12 and its expansion, Epithalamion 167-80. In dealing with these (and equally with the counterblason of Sonnets 130, 'My mistris eyes are nothing like the sunne') we are faced with two aspects, which reflect the two codes that meet in this hybrid form. The code of the blason proper provides a technique of framing: isolating a detail from a context normally perceived as integral and, by concentrating attention upon it, conferring upon it the status of a separate sign. By itself, this activity is synecdochal and symbolic: by lavishing upon one feature all the praise (or, in the counterblason, all the vilifica-

106 Chamber music tion) ingenuity can devise, the blason-text lets the feature 'stand for' the body (and thus, by implication, the body for the person), i.e., the whole of which it forms a part. The blason-catalogue apparently counteracts this effect by accumulating features. But the accumulation in no way negates the isolation, the framing: rather, it intensifies the result. In taking the body part by part, it takes the body a-part. By the successive (obsessive?) cumulative naming and praising of details, the blason-catalogue in effect (not in intention) dismembers the beloved's body. And it does more: for how are the features praised? By metaphor and simile - by what Shakespeare calls 'compare.' The process is one of, in each case, referring the feature-object to another code, and thus leading the reader's attention away from the feature toward the other code.15 If it is the feature's beauty that is being praised, the comparison is hermeneutic: beauty is interpreted in terms of something else. As I said above: the blason-catalogue is both analytic and comparative. It may also be instructive to remind ourselves of what Barthes says about the form in S/Z (ch. 51). The blason, for him, is the assembled body's return to the dust of language: 'the total, the sum, are for language promised lands, dimly seen at the end of the enumeration, but once this enumeration is accomplished, no trait can put it together: if such a trait is produced, all it does is add itself to the others.' And later: 'As a genre, the blason expresses the belief that a complete inventory can reproduce a total body, as if the extreme degree of enumeration could tip over into a new category, that of totality.'16 We may, from our perspective of the pursuit of beauty, add something to this: the blason-catalogue, by dismembering and metaphorizing the beloved body, prevents us from finding beauty's referent in its physical integrity. The multiplicities of beauty divert us from the body's wholeness. To the significance of this we shall return.

Two We now move to another set of clues, which will point to another trail. In our topography of beauty in the texts, we found mention made of 'true beauty.' Let us refresh our memory. Here is Sidney: 'True, that true beauty virtue is indeed' (A&S 5); 'Vertue's great beauty in that face I prove' (25); 'how virtue may best lodged in beauty be' (71). Spenser writes of 'chast desires on heavenly beauty bound' (Am. 8); of 'the inward beauty of her lively spright' (Ep. 186); and of 'the trew fayre, that is

Theme with variations 107 the gentle wit, / and vertuous mind ... That is true beautie' (Am. 79). Even Shakespeare, who does not often deal with this theme directly, gives us 'Oh how much more doth beauty beautious seeme, / By that sweet ornament which truth doth give' (Sonn. 59). It is at this point that we take up the thread of beauty's code. For we are always dealing, not only with the text's generating its own code, but with the text as a place where voices meet, where codes cross.17 Above I said that in a Renaissance (poetic) text beauty is a marker not of poeticity but of philosophically. It is this function which, via the classical tradition, has furnished most of the debate surrounding beauty, and which we must now examine. Sources are not always easy to pin down, for the thought here expressed is one of the most widely recited commonplaces. Plato, obviously;18 Plotinus, of whom more presently; but equally his adversaries, the Stoics.19 All agree that moral beauty is truer than physical; some go farther. Plotinus, after a moving panegyric of the beauty of virtue (Enneads 1.6: 5-7), rises beyond it. As the individual purifies himself progressively of everything determined by the body, his 'Soul will come first to the Intelligence and will survey all the beautiful Ideas therein and will avow their beauty, for it is by these that there comes all beauty else... What is beyond the Intelligence we affirm to be the nature of good, radiating beauty before it' (i.6:9).20 The ultimate beauty is, in the Platonic tradition, united with the Good and the True, a divine trinity Plotinus also refers to as the One. The theme that 'true' Beauty is to be found only in rising beyond the body, while it informs all Renaissance Neoplatonism, is given its most generally influential expression in Castiglione's Courtier. Bembo's splendid speech in book iv is too well known and too long to quote here, but a few snippets will serve to remind us: The body in which beauty shines is not the source from which it springs'; ythe body is something altogether distinct from beauty, whose perfection it diminishes rather than enhances.' Finally, the soul reaches 'divine beauty itself and 'flies to unite itself with the angelic nature' - 'the source of supreme and true beauty, the fountain of all other beauty which never increases or diminishes ... this is the beauty indistinguishable from the highest good/21 Of the three sequences, Shakespeare's is farthest from this kind of rapture. He echoes Castiglione only in the negative sense, regretting that the Friend's beauty does not in fact conform to the paradigm of congruence. Sidney, interestingly and most sophisticatedly, splits the responsibility: Astrophil repeats the doxa but transgresses it, while Stella (especially in the crucial song viii, where she appears directly) embodies it. Only Spenser, who (as

io8 Chamber music we have seen) uses the word less frequently than the other two, is clearly filled with not only the paradigms but some of the passionate attachment of Bembo and Plotinus: only he writes of 'heavenly beauty/ and only he, in mentioning 'beauty's wonderment' (Am. 24), echoes Plotinus's 'Such emotion all beauty must induce - an astonishment, a delicious wonderment, a longing, a love, a trembling that is all delight' (1.6:4). It will be clear that, in the code we are dealing with here, beauty is not only a marker of philosophically, but is also the junction of philosophycode with love-code. Beauty-as-sign announces a philosophic discourse of love (which is Bembo's) and an amorous discourse of philosophy (which is Plotinus's). To a twentieth-century reader this seems strange: in this case, the cultural slippage has affected the semantic field of the term philosophy. As Paul Veyne has remarked, philosophy is in our world an academic discipline, cognitively and/or linguistically oriented. The effect of this is that when we approach ancient and Renaissance philosophy (and their modifications) we tend to ask the wrong questions. In our world philosophy does not engender consolation (as it did for Boethius), much less rapture (as it did for Pico). For a Pico, a Bembo, it is truly the love of wisdom/ and equally the wisdom of love. It is concerned less with how we know the world than with how we can live in it with grace and dignity by recognizing, and conforming ourselves to, its divine coding, its inner structure. Behind beauty-as-sign, then, lies a world of this philo-sophia. And yet, if (as we must) we stick to our texts, we find that their discourse is not really the double one we might expect; and we must ask ourselves why. In the first place there is the matter of genre. The love-sonnet has its own code which, no matter what its duplicities, has Petrarch's full authority22 for speaking the language of a human love for a flesh-and-blood woman - a protestation emphatically repeated by Sidney (A&S 28). It is this code which, meeting the others in the place where codes cross, quite naturally assumes the principal role. Genre-code, by activating a major constellation of expectations in the reader, functions as the primary element in his decoding. Yet we cannot ignore the fact that, in the naming of beauty, its own amorous-philosophic code, the hypogram of its own descriptive system (in Riffaterre's terms), is also activated; and this creates another effect. In one sense all three sequences are the embodiment of a failure. This, particularly in relation to the Amoretti-Epithalamion with its triumphal close, seems odd at first sight. Yet the discourse of all three texts is

Theme with variations 109 generated by the failure, and the conscious failure, of another discourse: and the discourse which fails is precisely that of philo-sophia. Astrophil, we know, cannot, after his dutiful nod to 'knowne worth' (2), speak Stella's language - quite literally, as is made exquisitely clear in song viii. Will, though closer in gender to Platonic discourse, never really attempts it. And even Spenser, whose discourse is no less sage and serious, and whose enthusiasm no less profound, than Bembo's, has steered the sonnet into an alternative code.23 In their various ways, all three texts are tributes to precisely that which philo-sophia rejects: the human bo And the moment we recognize this, we realize that we have a question to deal with: that of beauty and its code, of beauty-as-sign. Let us first make clear what does not happen. The function of beauty as a marker o philosophically is not negated, nor is it suppressed. It is, if anything, simultaneously conserved and cancelled. Conserved, because whatever goes on in these texts 'under the name of Beauty' (under the name) depends on the code's conservation, on its resting (at a certain level) intact. This might happen, in the reader's mind, even if it were explicitly negated; as in the command, 'Do not, whatever happens, think of a blue horse.' Yet our texts do not go even this far. The hypogram of beauty-assign is nowhere overtly contradicted; indeed it is in several places apparently affirmed, yet always in impossible ways - 'true, that true beauty virtue is indeed;... true, and yet true that I must Stella love'CA&S 5). And cancelled because the operation of the texts involves, simultaneously, its impossibility in the now. If it is 'true/ it is true elsewhere, for others, or for the protagonist at another time. Yet even more: it is true now and here; and yet it is, in all its truth, which will not go away, over-ridden by a contradictory truth. 'True, and yet true The effect of all the naming-which-is-not-naming of beauty-as-sign, of the conservation/cancellation of the 'true beauty7 hypogram, is to awaken, first of all, a consciousness of the false beauty which is its reverse. In the naming of the true the false is concealed, yet simultaneously revealed. If the true beauty is that of the soul, the body's beauty is false. If the body's beauty is celebrated, what takes place is a celebration of falsehood. If the discourse of beauty-as-sign fails, and in failing generates a new discourse, that new discourse has a knowledge of 'false' at its heart. This dual consciousness has some complex implications which should be explored. Why is the soul's beauty truer than the body's? Because the body is vulnerable, as is its beauty. Ronsard's warning of age and its effects is merely a softening of Horace's.24 The deterioration of the body's beauty is a sign of the decay of the body: sign of Death. Death is the unsaid of

no

Chamber music

beauty-as-sign. It is this unsaid and its urgency which allows the ungrammatical contradiction in philo-sophia's simultaneously binary and continuous paradigms: the (beauty of the) body is both posited as a valuable sign(post) leading us to higher stages, and (more or less violently: more in Plotinus, less in Bembo) rejected as false and a lure. In the sonnet-sequences the opposite happens: the body is maintained, with a wary recognition of this maintenance's subversiveness. The texts are the texts of this recognition. The beauty of the body is a false beauty: the body is above all a dangerous body. Dangerous because it is erotic: Bembo's discourse on love is designed to lead delicately, kindly but firmly away from sexuality. And dangerous because it is 'the body of this death/ i.e., this body of death, which Plotinus was said by his biographer Porphyry to be ashamed of having. The code of beauty-as-sign, then, is the code that either/both deprecates the body's beauty as the first and lowest in an ascending order, or/ and negates it as false and corrupt(ible). This code constitutes the doxa, yet it obviously institutes, equally, the para-doxa. Through the differences (under the name) we come to difference. A text is constituted by its difference from all that is not it. Yet this all is also present. In Astrophil's transgression of the code, in Spenser's alteration of it, and in Will's fragmentation/negation ('fragging') of it, false beauty is the difference. False beauty; the dangerous body: nevertheless affirmed. Failure/False/Fault. The failure of the code's discourse opens the way to what was deferred in its difference: the 'false' beauty of the dangerous body. The status of the code as a moral code gives the failure of its discourse the status of a fault. And it is in this fault, on this fault, that the new discourse of the sonnet-sequences is generated. .

One

We go back, then, to Beauty, for the sequences are full of its sound. We go back to Beauty to try to decipher, to decode, the new discourse. And to do so, we go to Beauty on the most obvious level. We have seen it detoured, negated, in different ways; both are, nevertheless, affirmations. The references to 'true beauty' on the one hand, and the blason-code on the other, affirm the body to be a dangerous body, safe only when deprecated, denied, or dismembered. Now let us go back to one of the features highlighted in our original concordance, our early topography of beauty in the texts. This is the feature of self-evidence. 'Sweet beauty hath no name.' I called it there a

Theme with variations 111 perfectly shared code, which can be played with because its semantic core is completely understood, and which receives no definition because it is thought to need none. By now it will be clear that there is more to beauty's self-evidence than this. And here I want to introduce another statement by Barthes, too intriguing not to quote extensively: Beauty (as opposed to ugliness) cannot really be explained: it can be spoken, affirmed, repeated in each part of the body, but not described. Like a god (as empty as he) it can only say: I am who I am. All discourse can do, then, is assert the perfection of each detail and refer 'the rest' to the code on which all beauty is based: Art. In other words, beauty can only be claimed in the form of a quotation ... by itself, deprived of all anterior codes, beauty would be dumb. All predicates are refused it: the only possible predicates are either tautology (a perfectly oval face) or comparison (beautiful as a Raphael madonna, as a dream of stone, etc.); in this way, beauty is referred to the infinity of codes: as beautiful as Venus? But Venus? As beautiful as what? As herself? ... One way only to stop the selfreference [replique] of beauty: to hide it, to give it back to silence, to the ineffable, to aphasia, to return the referent to the invisible ... to assert the code without realizing (without compromising) its origin. There is one rhetorical figure which restores this blank of the referent [compare] ... catachresis ... [which] speaks around an empty referent: figure of Beauty.25

The relevance of Barthes's statement begins with the non-description, for this we have seen to be true in what I called self-evidence. This leads us to believe that the apparent lack of need for description is in reality based upon an inability to describe. It is in fact remarkable that our texts very rarely use either Barthes's 'tautology' or, as explicitly as he does, his 'comparison.' I suggest that the blason-catalogue's dismemberment is their minor, and their complex relation to beauty's philosophy-code their major, substitute for these. They are both instances of Barthes's suggested solution: catachresis.26 Let us take the blason first. What I am suggesting here is that not only (as Riffaterre has shown with regard to Ronsard's sein verdelet) does it contain catachretic metaphors for intertextual, verbal reasons; I propose that the blason-catalogue as a whole (no matter how 'decorous' its parts) is from the beginning a catachresis which fills the 'empty slot' of Beauty's indescribability. The second suggestion goes deeper, and has to do with the discourse of beauty-as-sign; the discourse which fails in the sonnet-sequences. All

112 Chamber music the philosophic discourses of Beauty suffer from the indescribability, and attempt to remedy it by what is in fact a combination of Barthes's repudiated methods: tautology ('so perfect in its purity/ 'all one radiance of beauty/ Plotinus) and comparison (in its invariable final referral to Goodness and Truth). What, then, of the new discourse generated in (on) the fault? Repudiating in various ways the solutions of the philosophy-code, its effect is to restore the catachresis. To do so, it reassembles - in its difference - the body by showing, and playing with, its dismemberment; and it admits - in its difference - the 'falsehood' of the body's beauty by its failure to maintain the code, and by its building upon this failure's fault. The discourse of the sonnet-sequences is that of the differences between Stella's embodiment of the code and Astrophil's naming and transgression of it; between the code's rejection of the body and Edmund's Christian marriage; between Will's love of the Friend's corrupt beauty and his love of the Woman's beautiful corruption; and of the difference between its linear, mimetic meaning and the significance of its matrix, revealed in its ungrammaticalities. It is the discourse of 'beauty but beauty is ... true, and yet true/ of 'heavenly beauty' which leads to copulation and copulation which leads to progeny, of beauty which 'grows like Eve's apple' and beauty which has no beauty yet is 'as fair / As any she belied with false compare.' In dozens of ways, the new discourse of our texts discovers the repressed body.27 In the beauty of the repressed body lies the matrix around which lies the catachresis of the texts. The restoration of the catachresis (which liberates the sequences' discourse from the empty tyranny of tautology and comparison) is achieved through the rediscovery of the repressed body and its beauty: its affirmation in full awareness of its vulnerability, its sexuality, its danger. It is a discourse built on a fault. On a geological fault, which is a fold:28 a split, a division, a dividing space. It is in the fold that the two truths meet - always separate, always joined. It is in the fold between pure eroticism on the one hand and pure mortality on the other, that Love has its language. At the heart of this playful, guilty, catachretic discourse of beauty we have found, in the repressed body, the silence. The poem, says Riffaterre, is a detour. At its heart lies the repressed matrix. At the heart of the sonnets' beauty lies the silence of the erotic, the death-ridden, the beautiful, whole, very human body. By restoring the catachresis, the sonnet-sequences also confront and

Theme with variations 113 repudiate the 'solutions' that have traditionally filled the silence and cancelled it. By restoring the catachresis of Beauty, they restore the emptiness of its meaning. Thus they restore it to the company of sex and death, the company of the open sign.29 And so, through differences, we have come to difference, and through difference we have come to the restored silence at the very heart of beauty. We see the texts' success in cancelling the debate and interrogation surrounding beauty and arrive, led by them, at the still centre of their significance. A still centre where lie, forever, Stella, Elizabeth, the Friend, and the Woman. In that still centre at the heart of catachresis, and only there, in the silence of the fold between life and death that is the core of all language, do we find the signification of beauty's wonderment.

7

From the New World Will Archer's diary

Les verites sont deja des imaginations, et ... I'imagination est au pouvoir depuis toujours...

Truths are already imaginations and the imagination has always been in power. Veyne1

Loin d'etre un triomphe de la raison, I'epuration du mythe par le logos est un programme tres date, dont I'absurdite surprend ... cette attitude devant le mythe a dure deux bans millionaires.

Far from being a triumph of Reason, the purification of myth by the logos is a very dated program, of surprising absurdity ... this attitude toward myth has lasted for more than two millennia. Veyne2

Ne criez pas a I'invraisemblance. Ce qui va suivre est faux et personne nest tenu de I'accepter pour argent comptant. La verite nest pas man fait. Mais 'ilfaut mentir pour etre vrai.' Et meme aller audela. De quelle verite veux-je purler? S'il est bien vrai queje suis un prisonnier [un amant, un dieu - RK], quijoue (qui sejoue) des scenes de la vie interieure, vous n'exigerez rien d'autre qu'un jeu.

Don't huff about improbability. The following is false and no one is expected to take it at face value. Truth is not what I'm doing. But 'you have to lie to be true.' And even more. What truth do I want to talk about? If it is true that I am a prisoner [a lover, a god - RK], who plays (to himself) scenes of the inner life, you won't ask me to do anything other than play. Genet3

Thursday In youth before I waxed old ... No, I must stop confusing myself with men. There was never a time when I, a blind and aged child, was not old,

From the New World 115 nor will a time ever come when I shall not be young. Men are born, live, love, and die. I act, I suffer - yes, it happens, myth and appearance notwithstanding - and these actions and sufferings take place in time (they also take time in place, but that is another Histoire). Yet I am young and have been old always, and I am blind nor shall I ever see. How can I talk of time? (How can I write without a poet?) The world of men, which thinks it has forgotten me, drives me now to explain me to myself. Blindly, in a time not our time. I stumble on the words 'I am.' I am - I dare not speak them, for a greater than I has pronounced them His name. (He too, though, in their time is beginning to share my fate, but that is another Histoire.) I am - not Who? but what? I am - a god, a child, a 'grand aveugle/ a muthos: an intrigue, a plot, a story. A myth. How odd to be explicitating myself. Friday Am I - perhaps the biggest question they can think of - created by their belief? Was there a time when I was not? Every now and then they ask themselves this. I, of course, know; but why should I tell? I remember many things, and living in shaggy minds among the wild thyme is one of them. The pale calculators, the jogging sophisters who now forget me cannot begin to imagine what habitations they were, those brawlers by the wine-dark sea. Simple and hollow as caves, dense with a few bright images, flaring with discovery. How they wept - how they slaughtered how they bellowed with laughter. And, oh warmth of memory, how they imagined me. In those days I was a surfer, riding the breakers of their earliest thought, always there, always already old, blind, young, and troublesome. Sometimes in a forest clearing we'd dance together, far from their prying eyes and always in the same order: on my left Priapus the hoary grinner, waving his eternal membrum virile like a flagpole; on my right my beloved Psyche, closing her eyes at times not to see better than I. Dancing, yes, to the Muses' music; the Saturday Interrupted by Mother. She has taken to this age better than I: she is, in fact, enjoying herself. There has always been a sadistic side to Mother's nature which goes well beyond my own evident and admitted faults. Of course she was proud of Maro, for nobody ever showed her in a better light; but she has told me on several occasions that the only man to

n6 Chamber music understand her was Euripides - a fact which was not, then or later, an unmixed blessing. Nobody, though, seems ever to have grasped our relations. Oddly enough, it was perhaps the intellectuals of Florence who came closest, even as they tried to twist our meaning out of all recognition and all sense. Since I 'was' Love and she 'was' Beauty, it was obvious that I should be her offspring. Most of those who tried to be subtler, or cute, succeeded merely in rendering us both incomprehensible. Mother reserves a special vengeance for those who follow Plato in giving her a supposedly worthy twin - Aphrodite Ourania - and distinguishing herself with the nickname Pandemos: worldly, of all the people, vulgar. I can see her point: after all, there was a time when I was insulted in the same way, depicted even by painters (the Caracci brothers, for example, in Farnese's Roman palace) as struggling - and losing, needless to say - against a 'heavenly' twin who, the Powers be thanked, was in every sense a pure invention. Sunday To whom, though, am I explaining what? I am not used to this. I uttered formerly through poets, and have found other transcribers since poetry became to all intents and purposes extinct. I have derived much amusement from directing directors of what they call 'films' and which I, of course, cannot see. But this man, this kritikos, this decisionless decider of the undecideable - what should I do with him? He is, I know, using me as an ally in his private guerrilla against the language of his profession; yet I cannot believe him insincere in his attachment to me and to my works. Perhaps I can, in helping him, use him as Haile Selassie used Wingate - to recover my kingdom. So I will employ his hand and its fountain-pen to write this Journal; I will reminisce, as he has requested, about the days when I dealt with poets; I will remember the good fights we fought with that compact, deadly weapon, the sonnet. The bow is bent and drawn - make from the shaft. Blind Archer and his crew: what times we had. What mayhem. What joy. Monday Imagine, then (I would say), a forested and Northern isle where only my effects were felt: consciousness - a seeing of structures, of constellations, of causes rather than the mere results - was long in coming. And when it came at last; when the vast wave men amusingly called Rebirth finally

From the New World 117 unrolled a small and final ripple on that distant shore; they reacted, I recall, as they did to my cousin Death. They denied me! And when, eventually, their minds would not let them, they counterattacked with the foolish, head-on determination of their sermonizing kind. No, no, they said, and moralized me at once. Not being French, they did not go so far as to fit me up with a (false) halo and present me as the Infant Jesus; Bembo was more their kind, the Italians being generally at that moment better liked than the French. Archer, to be sure; but a higher Archer - which to these Northern curates meant 'nobler/ which in the context meant 'more spiritual/ which as always, in almost any context I know of, means 'less physical/ You can imagine how we reacted to such stuff. I say 'we/ because we were by this time a small but useful team, a sort of 'commando' don't you call it? One of the few poets to think he spotted us together was your Edmund Spenser, who envisaged us fluttering like bluetits round his marriage-bed. His only problem was that he thought of us as tiny - whereas we are, of course, a good bit larger than he, and a squad of us flying round a bed, leave alone a marriage-bed, would have sent the occupants running, screaming and crossing themselves in a terror-reflex from what they fondly thought of as the 'old religion/ (Nonsense, my mythmaking, myth-breaking, myth-interpreting, mythologizing friend: I am the Old Religion, and don't you forget it.) Tuesday My, how I run on. To recommence: you can imagine our reaction faced with all these foggy, provincially Neoplatonic attempts morally to kick us upstairs. Do you have any idea what fun it can be, being Archer? Tha year - 1527, wasn't it - we got ourselves a King, and a King of England, yet. For the second time, actually; the first, Edward iv, had in one sense been more satisfying in that he was such a splendid, head-over-heels mooncalf. I like that kind, myself: they make me realize why I do what I do; they live, as you might say, the myth to the hilt. This one, of course, was different: more like my old brawlers, in some ways. I inhabited him, not like a cave but like a chariot. I drove that man - blindly, but that was half the fun. My friends and I would board his mind, grinning maniacally, I behind the wheel. He didn't know what hit him. Being an Englishman, he had strong appetites, guilt-edged, and untroubled by the whisper of a Mediterranean imagination. (I always feel uneasy, for instance, with a Lorenzo de' Medici, who knew me almost as well as I knew him: one does like to have the upper hand.)

n8 Chamber music Wednesday Rereading what I wrote yesterday makes me think. More precisely, it makes me remember. Re-membering Anne: putting her together again, because none of this would have happened without her, and besides, she was mine. How does a blind god remember a woman? (He read me Derrida's Memoires d'aveugle the other day, and I was surprised that a work I'd had no hand in should so densely describe my mind.) Of blind gods, you might say: 'Like ... blind men, they have to come forward, i.e. to expose themselves, to run the space as you run a risk. They apprehend the space with greedy hands, wandering hands also, they draw in it both carefully and boldly, they calculate, they reckon with the invisible' (Memoires). And so I apprehend Anne in your mind as I apprehended her, learnt her, in mine, with my ancient uncalloused fingertips. She is thinner than her contemporaries, dark and whippy. There is a hint of bone in her shoulder. She moves like a flame. I loved Anne. If I had been a creating kind of god, capable of producing something beside havoc, she is what I should have made. She moved through the world as if she were my arrow. And found her sighted way to the great brawling heart of this man, this king, her sister's lover, who was not nearly as gross then as you remember him. Big, yes: a monster mass of joie de vivre on the move, ambition, energy, calculation, a huge and lazy daring. Small men, I've noticed, don't react like that. He was a Churchill with sex. Anne aimed herself at him toute seule, and then I loosed the bowstring. And the kingdom, like so many of my realms before it, was never the same again. Thursday I know that part of you is impatient with these Memoirs, chatty as the old are and the young. You did not pick up this book to hear me drivelling about Histoire(s) and false romanticisms, but to study sonnet-sequences. Fools - you did not know, did you, that in these your late degenerate times this harmless text is a tiny Claymore in Will Archer's armoury. You cannot escape me, ever. You can close this book, but I shall be lodged, again, in the crannies of your lives, in the ram of your apples, in the memory that randomly accesses you. But all right, I will tell you my reasons as well as my rhymes. I will, because this my text was leading there in any case, because I want to, because it is my pleasure, lead you in the winding way to our three serpentine poets.

From the New World 119 For Anne, my girl, my flame, my arrow, my woman, did as you know stick in the roof of this king and set him and his land on fire. There are so many moments you missed! A strong and graceless man I liked a great deal told me his own flash of lightning in that weltering reign. It was the moment he came face to face with Anne on the arm of the King whom he had warned against her. The huge and heathen smile she hurled at him not only pierced him but went through two friends, a servant and three soldiers behind him. Wyatt, my friend, I told you no good would come of the warning. Stick to your workshop, I said: you are running my most valuable weapons-lab in this sanctimonious island, and what good is turning a king if you've not the tools to finish the job? He had stolen this very elegant design in Italy and was now trying to build copies with English materials and, what was worse, with an English mind. I confess I didn't believe in it at first. They have a ghastly penchant for earnestness, these Northerners - how can I do my work here, I used to worry, when they have no duplicity? They love like bulls or dogs, they couple and howl, they breed and toil and die. Later, of course, I knew better - or should I say I taught them better? Anyway, I did invest some energy in Thomas and his little enterprise, and I have not had a moment's regret. The synchronization was off - that wasn't solved till later - but the power was considerable, and the range was of course increasing daily. Friday Wyatt wisely kept Anne out of the sonnet-wing. Much as we both loved her, the gadget was at much too early a stage to let her touch it, let alone get in. What she did do that's germane to this Histoire is have her girlchild, then die under a glittering and fearful edge. Where she went then where she is now -1 will not tell you. She was, is, and ever shall be, mine. And so this child, this 'Liza, who spreads herself over the matter of this my discourse like a neon sky. What shall I, this Friday, say of her? What shall I breathe to my kritikos, and tell him to write? That she was Lorenzo the Magnificent, but with a worm of terror? That she understood me perfectly and was content to further my designs, on condition only that she herself be spared? Not that she believed me - she knew me too well for that. Bu although I made her suffer (it was the least I could do, you cannot be blind and a god and not make suffering: others are sighted, mortal, and make love), we did strike a bargain. I did not rive nor destroy her kingdom but made it a brief and brilliant banner of my glory; her I did not lead by the

12O Chamber music nose in any dance of foolishness. In exchange she licensed me to carry and employ any arms I saw fit among her subjects. Instead of my woman I had, for a passing moment, my nation. I lived in their minds as in a great Cleopolitan city, taking my ease, strolling, flying, playing the elaborate and showy games I do so dearly love. Saturday And so, you see, we have arrived at our beginning. We have an island shaken, pressed down and ready to run over; we have a queen collaborating faithfully; we have a nation of minds fit for a blind and ageless hero to live in. (One word more about these dwellings. Unpromising as they seemed at first, I soon came to see their uses and even their qualities. The guilt and sincerity put an edge on their experience that the old and guileful Mediterraneans never had; and when they had learnt what I could teach them - the drill, the technique, the virtuosity of play - they applied to it the energy of their images, their passions and their poetry and became, oh yes, one of the greatest of all my regiments. Did you not think I was a salamander upon the fire-ships?) Now all I needed was the poets. Sunday He had his sanctimonious side, my first warrior: in some ways he was everything that gets up my nose in his race. He had religion; he had principles; he was guiltful and guileless; he wanted to change the world, and be noble as well as famous. He wanted to itch and have the kudos of not scratching. To tie himself to the mast and sail through with his ears open. Oh, Philip. To your credit you did see very quickly how foolish an idea that was. And I must say, nobody could have done better what you did for me and with me in those rich and heady days. Do you remember how we met? Venice in October is a rainy and a misty place. The showers hiss and clatter in the canal as you huddle under the gondola's canopy. When you arrive at the Ca' dei Miracoli, you scurry inside and make gratefully for the great fireplace. Others are there; your Italian is improving but Lodovico/Lodowick still comes in handy as translator and tame Mediterranean mind. Your last insular suspicions gradually evaporate with the damp of your clothes. The house was mine, as were its miracles. (The church of San Toma,

From the New World 121 nearby, had fewer visitors and much less interesting ones.) How is it you do not see me, you who are sighted and perspicacious to boot? Or do you catch a glimpse, as through a blind, of my stalking form with its opaque reflections each side of a long nose? I am standing behind her: behind your hostess, the peerless Veronica, one of my very best servants in this city of fearless pleasure. Signer' Filippo! She is - you can believe me genuinely moved: far too wise to be impressed by your gravity, she sees a well-knit long-nosed youth from a far country, a charming smile on a face far younger than his nineteen years. As the evening wears on, and Venice spends what Venice earned, I steer you to her side, and speak - an old and comfortable habit - through her lips. And so, the next day, you come again, alone; and so a number of miracoli are deliciously and lingeringly revealed to you; and so you and I are allowed to begin our league and partnership. Monday Among the miracles (and the others they will have to imagine for themselves) were poems. Now Latin verse you knew from a child, and English also; but it was Veronica who, with some judicious egging-on from Lodovico, taught you the poetry of Italian, and the Italian of poetry. Her own, of course, but also her - and every Italian lyricist's - great master's. Laura's name sang out to you there, in a window over a small canal, in a fitful burst of October sunshine, as the wind ruffled the water. And I, tending the fire, blind and unseen, smiled reminiscently, recalling my years with Francesco, that plump ambitious poet whom I allowed to obtain his desires on condition only that he serve me all his days, that he lose what he loved most, and that the best fruits of his green and summer spirit be mine. Veronica read them with a soft Venetian sincerity: not yours, but close enough. These late days - hard soft times, not soft hard times as then - there are those who wonder that Venice, and Veronica, never appear in your life and your writings after. Why should they, though? It was nobody's business but yours; and there were, after all, so few in your circle who might have understood the dove-grey Venetian equipoise. But I had spotted you, my friend, and I stayed with you; and even after your russet rogue of an uncle had hurried you home a year later, I would from time to time paint colour-washed pictures of the Zattere or San Zanipolo upon your English chamber's walls.

122 Chamber music Tuesday Everybody knows the story that followed. Or thinks he does. He didn't give me the credit Francesco had: he didn't actually say that he was writing at my behest. Called me names, even. But it's clear enough from the text that the Astrophil and Stella is wholly mine, and indeed as pretty a tribute as a much-neglected god could wish for. I don't need to tell you what 'happened' - he's done that beyond possible mistaking. On the other hand, I should like you to be able to see it from my side. You're so accustomed to thinking of me as being a point of view that it comes as a shock, I know, to learn that I have one also. Which brings me back to the beginning of this Journal, when I declined to tell you my ontology. So that you may the better understand how I operated with Philip, Edmund, and Will, I will now grant you a glimpse of - if not my origins, at least the beginnings and Histoire of my, of our, relations with your kind. You must use your imagination, for no exterior knowledge can do more than supplement what is stored in your deep rams. You are, then, a hunter and/or a forager who lives with a clan in whatever shelter is handy. You are still very close to the deer and the boar and the birds that surround you, and you live in immediate ways. Being primate, you notice 'things': phenomena, such as the cracking of a nutshell when hit with a stone, such as lightning and snow. Being human, you re-mark them; and about the ones you cannot control - sun, moon, spring, earthquake, death, rain - you ask questions, which you answer. And now notice carefully, because this is something you've partly lost (I know because I've seen you change over the years): you answer the questions not with concepts but with stories; with Histoires. When faced with a phenomenon you cannot control, you discern a tale, a plot, a narrative. Perhaps because you live (in) a tale of persons, motives, actions and passions, you postulate, behind the phenomena, another tale of persons, motives, actions and passions - the phenomenon-to-be-explained being then the intersection of the two tales. And since the biggest and most obvious of such phenomena occur above you or below you - sun, moon, lightning above, volcanoes and earthquakes below - above and below became the locations for your tales. Clearly, one of the subtler of uncontrollable phenomena was the force that drives a man to a woman (and vice versa, and in any permutation you care to try). Envers et contre tout: against and in spite of everyone and

From the New World 123 everything. I, you might say - I, you did say - am the tale of that force. Notice that the remaining question whether I 'really' existed or whether your ancestors made me up is one I still decline to answer. Look into my blind eyes and tell me I do not exist... Wednesday Philip, in one of his prettier inventions, had his Astrophil-persona write 'I am not I, pity the tale of me/ I, then, am a tale: and the relation between our Histoires and yours is a long and amusing one. There came a time when you were dissatisfied with stories - we have, after all, a disconcerting habit of not staying still, of moving under your minds, so that with us you cannot build. You needed stones, not rivers: concepts, not tales. The name you mostly know me by, whether Greek or in Latin translation, belongs to this era. It was an attempt to pin me down, to freeze me, to give a name to the force and not to the tale. Such a name is an abstract noun; and such were the names Astrophil called me, significantly unfolding my Greek name into two English ones. (It was not my first name, of course. What that was I will not tell you. Nor will it be my last. Who am I really? Will Archer do?) Thursday I stopped there, yesterday, because I had to think, and to calm down. To think how best to tell you this, how to make you see the point of view of a blind god. To calm down because the memory of that time of my renaming can still leave me confused and angry beyond all reason. What you have to realize, and what I to this day do not fully understand, is that my becoming (as they thought) a concept was both consequence and cause of fear. Consequence, because as story I rode them like mules and drove them like oxen; arrived at the 'thinking' stage, they thought they could control me by giving me the stasis of idea - by changing me from a tale to a picture. And cause, because they shortly found their efforts vain. The best they could do was run down the true and urgent faith in us that you'd had when you hunted and foraged. This they persuaded you, over the generations, to replace, not with their precious concepts and their ideal to be sure, but with what you would call a more 'literary' sense of us. We became neither real gods to be anxiously placated nor mere figures of fiction and flummery to be con-

124 Chamber music sumed and discarded, but a 'tertium quid, neither true nor false' as your contemporary Paul Veyne puts it - the sort of thing your age has known in the tales offered by Freud, Marx, and Einstein. They failed lamentably to understand that such manoeuvres left us undaunted. I shall never forget Mother's uncontrollable giggles the day Plato completed his Symposium. We were picnicking near Lake Mareotis, then still undisturbed by Alexander. 'Do you realize/ she snuffled, as the wind lifted her hair and confused the water, 'that this ghastly man has done us a service unequalled in his race's history?' Oh dear, I remember thinking. I settled my wings more comfortably and turned my face to the breeze. 'Yes, Mother?' 'Listen, wretch. Half of them will henceforth think we are concepts or symbols and thus under control; and the other half will think we are literature and thus inconsequential. We shall continue to divert us as we please; and the sacrifices they once brought willingly they will now pay, in full measure of suffering, to what they will call bad luck.' Mother underestimates humans, chronically. It wasn't quite so easy, then or later, because there were always a few who understood and fought us with determination and structures of the mind. And since those are often also the articulate, the brains of their time are apt to listen to them. Friday You'll understand, now, why I took such care of my Philip. He was a pearl beyond price: an undeniably earnest and moral brain, properly educated and exposed to all the structures, taught Plato in order to 'tame his coltish gyres/ who turned out to be a poet, a lover, a charmer of generations, and whom it needed only a small push to transform into a legend. He was my ace in the hole, my secret weapon. I had Lodovico privately translate his little difesa della poesia into Italian and send it to Veronica (I don't think he ever told Philip). I was at the Ca' dei Miracoli when she read it, and felt her smile with pride and pleasure. What he had done, of course, was this: seeming merely to defend literature against the puritan killjoy misomousoi, he had in fact struck a blow for us - for the muthoi, the tales that live, the understanding-as-/n'sfozre. And, given his personal preoccupations and the spectacular sonnet-sequence that was shortly to reach the same recipients, among these muthoi it was for me, blind Archer, that he had won a historic victory. 'With a tale/ he wrote of

From the New World 125 the poet, 'with a tale he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner/ Structures, he delicately hinted, are hard and boring. In History (the other histoire) the villains tend to win. What's left but tales? What's left but muthoil What's left but us? Saturday So what about those sonnets, that text I claimed as mine? It was an updating of Francesco's marvellous moving sculpture: not quite as flexible, but then the island minds were much less subtle. Far faster, though, and with greatly improved striking-power. From my point of view, what it accomplished was, first of all, to be a tale, the tale of me. Not a story in the simple narrative sense, you understand; via that invention of Francesco's (and mine) he could create a muthos that was implicit and insinuating, diffuse and dangerous. It was a dispersed but insistent tale, of which only fragments showed. The reader was left - and challenged to complete it for himself. In so doing, his mind was switched from passive to active, and he became a participant. And voila: there he was, seduced and inveigled into a form of understanding completely subversive of everything he'd been taught, and as potently enchanting as it had always been. The second component of this victory lay, not in the manner but in the matter. What is the tale (by) which the reader understands? Diffuse and implicit, it appears (once 'deciphered') at first sight to reassure. There is, it seems, a moral: unusual in its sensitivity of expression, nevertheless Proper and Platonic (perhaps even Protestant). Astrophil the anti-hero, whom Desire has ironically (reader please note) rendered incapable of receiving the desired love once offered, since in the form in which it is offered (Platonic, though moving) it is no longer desired. Result, insoluble melancholy paradox for Astrophil, moral enlightenment for the reader. My (blind) eye. Enter blind Archer, the tale of energy, the energy of the tale, the muthos that fights back. This text is my tale. For, having seduced the reader on to my ground of method (Tom Tiddler too is an ancient name of mine), having inveigled him into a muthic method of reading, active, participating, completing; I leave him (ha!) with the length and density of that activity. I do not leave him: he will have, living inside him, the sway and combat and ferocity and tenderness and confusion of my tale. For in my tale, Astrophil's love and Stella's are not opposed to

126 Chamber music one another at all: they are part of the same tale. Blind Archer was never without tenderness or without purity, my friends. The difference is that in my tale, in the tale of me, they are a gentle, delicious, Venetian part of the game itself. And knowing that no islander was capable of receiving such delicacy overtly, I gave them Philip, to subvert and seduce their angular spirits into my exquisite blind world. (And Stella? you ask. And Penelope? How should I know? I'm blind. I hear she was pretty. I am, of course, being disingenuous. I knew her, and Robert Rich, and Charles Mountjoy, better than you. But that is another Histoire. I don't feel like writing about her. Tant pis.) Sunday [a series of scrawled drawings of a tall, bony, naked man with empty eyes and huge wings. In one, he is carrying a hunting-bow at the trail, with some steel-tipped arrows; in another, one hand absently holds a pair of sunglasses. 1 As you can see, I've been taking 'Sunday' off, amusing myself with imagined self-portraits - not bad for a blind draughtsman, in my view. (To you they probably look like a cross between Saint Sebastian and an angel - an error many have made, to their cost.) But I have realized there is something even more appropriate to deal with on a Sunday. There's an element in Philip - and even more in Edmund, whom we're about to visit, you and I - that needs attention, for you joggers have chronic trouble with it. I am - and there it is. Who? I am. What do I have to do with that Other. What do I have to say - not to Him, but around or even away from Him. In this time, in these texts, that we are talking about, you understand. Anything further would lead us very far, and we don't want that, now do we? If I seem uneasy, it's because I am. Well then. Back to Philip. You may have noticed that in his text I was doing something fundamentally perverse. We tales exist to create meaning in men's minds. Yet I never let Philip (who was probably an invention of Astrophil's) complete that process, and together he and I made a tale that denies meaning, in which I am the unstable core, the catalyst that destabilizes the solutions of life and decomposes identity. I am, in fact, the anti-God, the god who makes the divine impossible. (He starts out by calling me a carved idol, but harmless statuettes are soon left

From the New World 127 behind.) I am not the Verbum infans, the speechless Word that lies in a manger, but the Antilogos that lies in text. They weren't in the same class, but Edmund knew Philip and ostentatiously dropped his name. And when he (Edmund) got his hands on the sonnet-weapon, I knew there would be trouble. Edmund, you see, was more of a craftsman and far more ambitious; he was much more learned; but he was also a simple and sincere church-goer who liked things tidy where it mattered, and tolerated conflict only in solution. No anti-god was going to last long in his world, obviously. He had, he thought, seen through me from the start. So he girds up his Whole Armour of God (Poet's Version) and prepares to defeat me once and for all. It is to laugh. He Who is (what) I am (not) has chosen to let me live and play in this world, a parallel tale who must, one supposes, fulfil some obscure plan of His also. He and I do not see each other often, which suits me perfectly. Meanwhile I go on - not quite as before, more self-consciously, with more art, more sophistication; but go on I do, and no pious would-be Virgil, learned though he be, was or is going to stop me. Monday Edmund's title was, he thought, masterly: at once a tribute, a charming fantaisie, and a declaration of war. Amoretti are many, but they are also little, sweet, and harmless. Amoretti is - amoretti are - the end-product. Watch how he does it. There is, first, the opening volley. I am addressed directly, as 'Unrighteous Lord of Love' (10) in a highly dubious cursing prayer which almost every reader has remarked as being not a bit like old E. Moreover, this address is then triumphantly counterbalanced and outweighed by a symmetrical apostrophe to the 'Most glorious Lord of Life' (68) - more of which presently. I then reappear, shrunken to my usual putto-sized chubby-infant shape, in the Anacreontics; neither here, as you might say, nor there. And finally, it is in the wedding-ode that I'm definitively dismembered (as he saw it) into a hundred 'little loves,' all of us sons of Mother, of course, and allowed, with great magnanimity, to flutter around the nuptial couch and watch Edmund and Elizabeth at play, making saints. I am, so to speak, deconstructed like the maleficent metaphysical mistake he thought me to be. Now watch what happens to this noble plan, in my hands. He had placed me, by a symmetry of words, over against that Other. In making

128 Chamber music me 'Lord of Love' and Him 'Lord of Life' he has also - surely not intending it - placed Love and Life in opposition. He then, or so he believes, dismembers me and passes, in his sonnet-sequence, with bag and baggage from one Lord's service to another's. But I, whom he has repressed, have become the unstable core of his sequence too. I guide his quill to make the exaggerated, ironic early sonnets just a little too violent; I take my usual harmless pleasure in stoking his lustful fire and thus provoke a thoroughly indecorous outburst (83) against himself; I nudge the Anacreontics into being even more inconsequential than he intended them. And as for the Epithalamionl There I was, heavily disguised, whispering into his inward ear how elegant it would be to repeat the 10/68 symmetry in having the angels fly around the altar as the amoretti do around the bed. He went for it; and Archer and his crew smiled, seraphically. In one neat Invention he had both dignified us and besmirched the angels with the same 'compare.' And so, in the end, trivialized, dismembered, and assigned a place in Edmund's 'Glorious Lord's' universe, what I really do is invade language instead: I become the Venimous tongues' of the Blatant Beast and the croaking of the rebel Irish frogs. And so I was revenged upon Edmund. In retrospect, I suppose it was inevitable. And yet I'd had hopes of the man. His Hymn to Love (which was not quite as juvenile as he later claimed - it dates from the early days of the Faerie Queene) was a very sound piece of work, I thought. Just what I needed, well put, a very proper tribute. As a reward I sent him Elizabeth, who was very beautiful, and a lot more like Acrasia than Edmund liked to admit (did you ever wonder why Acrasia's features are never described?). But then this really very talented poet, who had started out so gratifyingly, who had called me 'GREAT GOD OF MIGHT' and 'Lord o truth and loialtie,' thought that his faith in the Other gave him a licence for hubris, and that he would be my conqueror; and that, of course, I couldn't have. Tuesday To tell the truth, I've been longing to get to Will. Now there was a man who knew me but (and) didn't even try to master me. Indeed, he went further even than his queen, and did not attempt to make a deal. He knew me for what I was, knew that anyone who serves me - who will make me (cross) his tale - is assured of enough energia to give him immortality. Philip may have been my first warrior, but Will was a

From the New World 129 whole bloody army. I said that briefly I'd had my very own nation? Well, Will was its soul, its strong and troubling voice. And when I quoted Derrida and told you that blind gods, like blind men, run space as you run a risk, this fearsome monster, this mined human no-man's-land, was what I had in mind. Will's text - Will's Sonnets and Lover's Complaint - is the perfect and ultimate example. You wouldn't think so: not only don't I seem to be there much in name, but there doesn't appear to be much muthos in this poem at all. Detrompez-vous, as the French say: undeceive yourself. My destabilizing has been so successful, his space so open to me, that no, I am not in his text: his text is in me. There is no longer any alternative (such as Philip's Reason, or Edmund's Lord of Life) to me as a meaningstructure. The whole of the Sonnets constitutes my will. You see, as long as I was still interrogated, insulted, or even dismembered, I was within the space of assignable meaning (though even there I never stayed put). Only in the Sonnets has the poem become my space of meaning. My absence is my (omni)presence; my triviality (153, 154) is my importance. Wednesday As you can tell from that last entry, every now and then this kritikos of mine tends to get away from me and slip atavistically back to the discourse of his kind, the murmur of innumerable bees. All the easier in this case because writing as I wrote about Philip is definitely Not Done these days; and - which is worse - it has already been done, often and badly, in earlier years. Also, everybody wants to know where Will and I first met, and everybody would be disappointed if I told them. It was nowhere miraculous, like Venice. Do you want a clue? Remember the women who wring your heart in his plays without being there to make too obvious a point. Rosalind, Jessica, Cleopatra, Kate maybe. Conflate them into one and put her - somewhere in ordinary England. Stratford? Bishopsgate? St Helen's Church? Perhaps. The difference was that Will saw me. He looked in his heart, saw me, sighed, and wrote. I know. You've questions about the Friend, too. (I wasn't going to tell you any of this, and still may not...) What about him and me? you ask. In truth, that memory makes me chuckle. You see, I wasn't supposed to be (in) that tale at all: it was intended to exclude me and be the sort of thing Socrates used to go on about. Other tales might be invited to that banquet maybe; but surely not I, the blind crowder with his song of David and

130 Chamber music Jonathan. Yet that young wastrel with his awesome beauty (he looked, I was told, like Leonardo's John the Baptist in doublet and hose), that Sebastian Flyte of the nineties, was as much my creature as Anne had been. And so the best-laid plans of would-be Platonists went once more agley. He was irresistible, and Will, indeed, did not try to fight it. But he was also one of my more troubling youngsters and, for them at least, the game went rapidly beyond a joke. Personally, I found it amusing; but then I was seeing a goodish bit of Mother at that time, which may have warped my sense of humour. Thursday You and I have nearly done. But I wonder if you understand me better. Think this: you may not have this chance again. I am showing you what most never see. But you will not understand it if you are not here also. When you read this, you are not a scholarly and disembodied mind. You too, my friend, have a blind and naked god stalking through your life. Do not think yourself too old, for I am older far than you. Do not think yourself too married, for I have upset greater apple-carts than yours. Do not think yourself too holy, for He Who is truly holy has left me the rest to play with and put to the test. Do not think yourself too intelligent, for greater brains than yours have crawled and slavered under the storm of my arrows. So - to sum up - remember these things about me and my kind, about Blind Archer and his crew. We are not concepts. We are not characters. We are not people. We are tales that live. I am not a person: I am a tale that cuts across yours just when you are almost asleep at the wheel. I am a survivor from the days when tales were all there was to explain the inexplicable and ineluctable. If this seems hard to grasp or primitive and far away, let me direct you to your Halloweens. Those nights of primeval dread, from which you old and new historicists have banished true goblins, ghouls and witches, are now ruled by the ever-new and everlocal story of the man who (always just last year) hid razor-blades in the apples he gave to children. That man (who is not I: I play other games) is a tale that lives. As a tale, I am an attempt to understand, to make sense of, to give meaning to, an observed phenomenon. My unity, my individuality, is the form of a semantic structure that unites many subsidiary phenomena. But - and this is what makes me different - in my case it is an equivocal structure, and this is my significance. There is no 'sense' in the

From the New World 131 structure. I am a structure of irony. Omnipotent Child, subduing wantonly the mighty. And finally, I am the tale that talks back, that reacts, a meaning that refuses to be a meaning, a face that defiantly reties its own blindfold. I am Blind Archer, the god of old and bold, of eyes and cries (and lies), the tale of your unwise, unpacified, unreconstructed heart.

8

Bin Heldenleben courtier, text, and death

Interpreter un texte, ce n'est pas lui donner un sens (plus ou mains fonde, plus ou moins libre), c'est au contraire apprecier de quel pluriel il est fait.

To interpret a text is not to give it a meaning - more or less justified, more or less free -; quite the opposite: it is to comprehend of what plural it is made.' Barthes1

Philip Sidney was in turn courtier, poet, and hero. The first two are comprehensible to us: his latest biography is subtitled 'Courtier Poet/ Heroes, on the other hand, we are not good at. So let us try to do it differently - let us try to come to the hero (and to the poet) via the courtier. The courtier (and the) text. On 10 March 1575, Sidney's Continental mentor Hubert Languet advised him in a letter whom to cultivate in public life (William Cecil for convenience, Francis Walsingham and Robert Beale for friendship), and added: I write you all this as you will be living at court. In that sort of life you will experience greater difficulties than your peers who can already dispose of their inheritance: still, it would be improper for you to live at leisure while you are still a dependent son. In a word, whoever wants to live free of scorn in the courts of mighty kings should temper his emotions, swallow many vexations, avoid with extreme care all occasions of controversy, and cultivate those men in whose hands supreme power lies. But I shall not trouble you further, since you understand all that better than I.2 If we can look at this life at court' differently, we may perhaps come to comprehend the structure (and the plural) of Sidney's career. This struc-

Bin Heldenleben 133 ture's duplicity has bothered his literaturhistorische biographers3, who are troubled by his sprezzatura about his literary masterpieces, his manifest devotion to a clearly unsuccessful political career, his death in what they like to see as an unimportant skirmish,4 and his extravagant funeral, which has been increasingly represented as a political media-event.5 More recent regards find it no more comfortable: while accepting political ambitions as central, they in turn stumble over the admiration accorded Sidney and the unwavering idealism which seems to have in part inspired it. In other words, while the poet's biographers are bothered by the courtier, the courtier-poet's are disconcerted by the hero. In playing a little with the word, with the text, of the courtier - with his upper case and his italics - we may shake loose some of the categories that prevent our lateral thinking. Since, as Barthes teaches us, it is through doxa that we may come to paradoxa, it is there that I will begin. The doxa of courtiership lay in Castiglione's Cortegiano, translated in 1561 by Cecil's brother-in-law Thomas Hoby as an educational manual for the establishment. In view of its vast influence, we tend to see the Cortegiano as a seminal work; but I propose here to treat it not as a work but as a text. 'Whereas the Text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign, the work closes itself upon a signified.'6 In approaching semiotically two aspects of the Cortegiano - one rarely discussed and one all-too-of ten commented -1 will not only 'regard it in relation to the sign' but penetrate its silences, shake it and push at it: ask it, in short, awkward questions. My first interrogation concerns the title. One of the perils of a text's 'seminal work' status is that it becomes what Alan Sinfield has called a cultural token: not only does everyone try to appropriate it but all its features become self-justifying.7 Thus we tend to overlook the fact that the Cortegiano''s title is by no means obvious, especially for the kind of text, for the kind of discourse, it introduces. To make this clearer, it may be helpful to look at some contemporary texts and their use of the words 'Court' and 'courtier.' Guicciardini's History of Italy, for example, uses the word 'courtier' not at all, and 'Court' only to refer to the entourage of the French king, Charles vm. In relation to the Italian princes he writes, not of courtiers but of consiglieri di principi; even Naples and Sicily, royal rather than ducal, have signori and baroni but no cortegiani.8 Machiavelli's Prince refers to ministri, consiglieri, and adulatori (flatterers); but there are no courtiers.9 In Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography, finally, 'Court' is once again used of the French, though extended also to cover the entourage of

134 Chamber music the Pope. 'Courtier' here is used just once, when he mentions the 'goodfor-nothing courtiers' of the Cardinal of Ferrara.10 From these three popular and influential early sixteenth-century works, then, it is clear that 'Court' is not an obvious designation for the seat, or the company, of an Italian duke, but rather for the entourage of greater, usually foreign, monarchs; and that such dukes are surrounded rather by lords and counsellors then by courtiers. Plainly, the Cortegiano's title is not selfevident but reflects an act of choice. If we turn from historical circumstance to the semiotics of discourse interrogating this choice of title as sign - the first thing to remember is that nothing in this sign would have led the bookstall browser to expect it either to be original or to belong to a positively marked code. To write of courts and courtiers in the 15205 was to insert oneself into a discourse not of praise but at best of debate; and it was a debate in which, if one had good things to say, one's opponents held the floor. Scholars such as Pauline Smith11 and Claus Uhlig12 have usefully exposed the debate's heritage. The tradition of criticism of courts - of their inclusion in a strongly negatively marked code and in a satiric discourse - goes back to John of Salisbury, who subtitles his Policraticus of 1159 'sive de nugis curialibus,' which we may loosely translate as 'of the idiocies (or, of the nitwits) of courts' - a term with which he castigates the entourage of Henry n for the benefit of Thomas Becket.13 A Renaissance Italian connection is provided in 1444 by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini's De curialium miseriis.^4 This excoriation (based, like John of Salisbury's, on personal experience) of courts as the hotbed of lust for honour, power and riches, of distraction and perdition was popular enough to have gone through eight printed editions before i^oo.15 Its discourse is confirmed, slightly later, by a letter of Ficino's to his friend Giovanni Cavalcanti,16 in which he sees the principal qualities flourishing at courts as being lying, jealousy, deception, slander, and flattery. Aulica vita became, in the commonplace books, one of the standard negative headings, following adulatio and ambitio.17 If, then, in this climate of discourse, a positively marked, even idealistic, and immensely influential text announces itself as the Book of the Courtier - Liber aulici - what is the semiotic effect of such a title? In the first place, the text at once establishes itself as not originary but reactive: as, in fact, a Defence. It is a defence and a rescue of a term; a transcoding, a translation of a word from one discourse to another. This transcoding is achieved by an astute appeal to an alternate area of the reader's literary competence: he is led away from the associative cluster - the descriptive system - of the Hofkritik code to an equally ancient and

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etymologically justified alternative: the medieval code of cortesia. The aulicus, the text continually insists, is (to be) a courtois: which helps to explain the considerable space given to women and the even larger, and climactic, one devoted to love. With this transcoding of the words 'court' and 'courtier' a further effect is achieved. Never directly stated but always implied is the homage to the recently deceased Duke Guidobaldo and his Duchess Elisabetta, produced by applying the now cleansed and transcoded term 'court' (which normally belongs to mighty kings) to their tiny city-state of Urbino. This is the subliminal compliment Castiglione's text pays throughout to his beloved and nostalgically remembered masters. But it is time to open the book, and turn from the title to the text itself.18 And this at once challenges us in another way. Ostensibly - indeed ostentatiously - educational in purpose, it disconcerts by both the range and the nature of the demands it makes upon the newly transcoded courtier. As regards the range, the text's letter of dedication anticipates the objection and offers several defences. But what causes modern readers of the Cortegiano the greatest unease is not an impossible perfection but what one editor describes as 'the most shameless opportunism under the cloak of a tiresome refinement.'19 Remarks such as this - though often less nastily worded - are a commonplace of modern discussion20 and reflect the critic's distance from, and sometimes disappointment with, the book's 'questionable values.' If, however, we cease to submit to the Cortegiano as a work, and instead interrogate or play it as a text, other and more interesting patterns emerge. It is instructive to follow a cluster of key words through the text: we soon see that its tissue, its texture (especially in books i-m) is held together by the words 'show' (mostrare), 'seem' or 'appear' (parere), 'wonder' (maravigliare), 'demonstrate' (dimostrare), 'known' (conosduto), 'prove oneself (valersi), 'view' (conspetto}, 'value' (estimare), and 'onlookers' (chi vede or spettatori). As we follow this thread, it is hard to escape the impression that here is a - perhaps the - common denominator of the courtier's role. Everything he says, everything he does, is designed and coded to be read. Here, to start with, is a famous passage: ... and when the courtier finds himself involved in a skirmish or pitched battle, or something of that nature, he should arrange to withdraw discreetly from the main body and accomplish the bold and noble exploits he has to perform in as small a company as possible and in view of all the noblest and most eminent

136 Chamber music men of the army, and above all in the presence, or if possible under the very eyes, of the prince he is serving.21 Leaving aside for the moment the almost irresistible light this throws on the Battle of Zutphen and Sidney's behaviour during and after it,22 we do notice that the courtier's behaviour, even in the heat of battle, is to be read. Even modesty - which one might imagine to be the 'zero degree of show' - exists to be read: sprezzatura in any action not only reveals the skill of the person doing it but also very often causes it to be considered far greater than it really is. This is because it makes the onlookers believe that a man who performs well with so much facility must possess even greater skill than he does ...23 Even love is treated in much of the text as a semiotic process. Here is Bibbiena: the lover 'must demonstrate his love so clearly ... that the woman he loves cannot conceal that she knows she is loved.'24 The Magnifico's discourse, which follows, treats almost entirely of signs and their decoding; and even in Bembo's book iv speech it is beauty - which Barthes in S/Z brilliantly showed to be the empty category, the sign without referent - which is 'the true trophy of the soul's victory.'23 In short, everything the courtier says and does implies awareness of a code and a number of addressees. The scrupulous care the text recommends in relation to all accomplishments is a care, first, that his behaviour shall be read, and secondly, to control maximally its decoding by its readers. Every act, every gesture, every garment, every word, every game, is a sign: aimed at the avid, skilful, if not always benevolent, readers that surround him at all times. Pursuing this argument, I find the Cortegiano's common denominator, its semiotic structure, to be the courtier's existence as a text. And since what is stressed is always his own responsibility, his own 'self-fashioning/ we may consider the courtier not only as a text but as a self-written text. He is at once his own text and his own auctor (and thus, paradoxically but most importantly, his own auctoritas). This textual nature of the courtier is borne out by the various statements concerning his purpose. He should know how to refresh and charm the minds of his listeners, and move them to merriment and laughter with his agreeable pleasantries and witticisms, in such a way that, without ever being tedious or boring, he is always a source of pleasure.26

Ein Heldenleben 137 In the private company of his prince, also, the courtier should 'defer serious things for another time and place, and engage in conversation which will be pleasing and agreeable to his master.'27 Skill in music will allow him to entertain both his prince and his peers. Yet his more serious purpose, as Ottaviano Fregoso devotes most of the first part of book iv to expounding, is not entertainment: 'So we can perhaps say that the courtier's final aim [his 'ending end'l is to become his prince's instructor.'28 Can we easily, or properly, avoid the parallel with the literary text which, in Sidney's words, has 'this end, to teach and delight'? For the courtier-as-text's semiotics, though, we need to go back to the nature and coding of his behavioural text. The constant nature of his (its) every aspect as sign leads us, quite naturally, to inquire what these signs are signs of. Of what is the courtier a text? Or, to put it another way, if he is a walking collection of signifiers, what is their signified? Trying to answer this question - which is really trying to decode the courtier's semiotic system - leads us to one of those curious plis or folds in the text where it turns back on itself: 'Without the fold ... there would be no text' (Derrida).29 For the signified of the courtier's signifiers appears to be understood, and is certainly implicit (folded in). To the question, 'What are his signs signs of?' the most apparently satisfactory answer is Virtue'; yet it soon becomes clear that, for all practical purposes, virtue is (to be) equated with honour, honour with glory, and glory with reputation.30 And thus the ostensible signified turns out to be a metonym of the signifier. What the reader reads, finally, in this selfwritten text, is reading: what the text writes is writing. The courtier's self-written text is thus essentially and peculiarly a modern text: an endless play of signifiers without a signified. That this is not merely a pleasant conceit on the part of a modern literary critic will become clear as soon as we examine the careers of Sidney and other 'real' Elizabethan courtiers, in which the fundamental and structural deferral of the signified is an essential, and in Sidney's case a tragic, element. To prepare the transition from the Castiglionean intertext to the Sidneian text, I shall first apply what we have learned from the Cortegiano - what we have derived from its decoding - to an intermediate model: the career of a paradigmatic courtier at a real, later, and larger court, such as Elizabeth's. To continue our literary hermeneutic, we shall begin with genre-theory. The paradigmatic courtier-text is a genre; and before we try to decode an actual variant it may be worth examining the characteristic structural codes of the paradigm in order to discover, as Barthes calls them, 'the rules according to which the object functions.'

138 Chamber music In the paradigmatic text of the Elizabethan courtier I discern five major codes: Family, Faction, Fashion, Function, and Favourite-status. Let us look at them, briefly, one by one. family, one might say in Saussurean terms, is the langue of which the courtier is the parole: the body of language of which his text is the selective speech act, or act of writing. It has its paradigms (the familytree,31 so important to Elizabethan courtiers), and its underlying structure. More than any other factor, it is the originary enabling of his text. In defining him by his name, it confers on his text its primary and originary sign.32 Theoretically, it was possible and permissible for anyone of the rank of gentleman and higher to write himself as a courtier-text;33 but when Edward de Vere came to Court in 1571 his text was founded on the originary sign of his being not only Earl of Oxford but the seventeenth Earl. It took only that and the (very Castiglionean) sign of a literally spectacular performance in the tiltyard34 for his text to find its (Royal) addressee. It was not until later that his readers discovered him to be, in the Elizabethan sense, a 'lewd book.' However much importance we attach to stresses, conflicts, openings, and the vicissitudes of power, we should do wrong to forget the enormous semiotic importance of Familycode in the self-written text of the Elizabethan courtier. The second code, Faction, is in many ways the opposite of the first. Unlike Family, Faction is par excellence a locus of choice. As such, it stands to Family as (in Barthes's Writing Degree Zero) style and ecriture stand to language. As with style, the courtier's choice of faction belongs only in part to conscious calculation: another, and important, part belongs to the kind of character he is, the kind of person he has become. Moreover, Family-code also plays a part in determining the choice: just as a writer's mother-tongue, by its tradition, makes certain styles more, or less, available to him. The style of a Voltaire or a Barthes is far less available to an American than to a Frenchman; just so the Protestantactivist faction (Sidney's Faction-code) was less available to a FitzAlan than to a Hastings or a Dudley. And just as certain major writers may, at some point in their careers, change ecritures with impunity (one thinks of Jean Giono in France), so a major courtier such as Leicester can be found favouring the Catholics - even Philip of Spain - in 1561, and emerging as the leader of the extreme Protestant faction only six years later.35 On the other hand, the austere and intellectual Fulke Greville maintains both a steady style (Faction) and a certain distance from the paradigm unchanged for over half a century. Two other points are important. In the first place, Faction-code is as

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informalas style. This ensures that, in the true manner of the signifierlevel, it is determinate by difference. A courtier-text's Faction-code is recognized by its difference from other texts', rather than by a specific signified - though, like styles, Faction-codes may coalesce around certain symbolic or practical centres, like the Queen's marriage or the war in the Netherlands. Secondly, it is Faction-code that reminds us of the courtier's necessary relationship with another, and greater, text: the Royal one. In the language of Faction-code as I have described it, the Royal text may be seen as exhibiting - by definition almost, but certainly by choice - a 'zero degree of style.' The relationship, however, suggests something further: that the courtier as self-written text is perhaps also, or primarily, a metatext - a gloss - to the Royal text. From the earnest choices of Faction we turn to the apparently trivial ones of Fashion-code. Here are gathered a good many of the lighter nugae curiales, duly condemned (often in revealing detail) by moralists. Here we find the latest style of shirt ('after the new trick' as Langham, the Mercer, appreciatively puts it),36 the fad for black-and-white garments, the modish aping of Italians, the writing of good, bad, or indifferent sonnets, and at least some of the turn-of-the-century melancholy. Yet the existence of a massive analysis such as Barthes's Systeme de la mode should put us on our guard: Fashion is a discourse, and is always kind to semioticians. In terms of the courtier-text, Fashion - unlike Family, and much more than Faction - is a code of movement. It is not so much the content of fashions that matters, but their change: without that they are transcoded and enshrined as Custom. With 'variation and quicke change' as its essence, Fashion-code is a commentary on time. By moving faster than is (seriously) thought proper - by its nature as transgression - it moves faster than time (for 'time' is only the consciousness of time); and by moving faster than time, it hopes to arrest time. In Fashion-code, the courtier-text avoids being made Time's numbering-clock'; in its attempt to arrest time, it creates the transgressive and blasphemous illusion of mastering time - the ultimate 'mannage' or horsemanship. Moreover, Fashion-code, in its attention to trivia, reveals most clearly the courtier-text's nature as a play of signifiers: here it is most obviously a 'modern' text, most clearly divorced from the transcendental presence of the signified. The sign, in Fashion-code if anywhere, is sign of nothing but itself. 'English ladies of distinction have lately,' writes Emanuel van Meteren in 1575, 'learnt to cover their faces with silken masks or vizards, and feathers - for indeed they change very easily and that every year, to the astonishment of many.'37 The astonishment was probably part of the

140 Chamber music point: Barthes's Systeme, which is really a semiotics of fashion-writing, reminds us that perhaps the most important role of Fashion is as itself a signified for other signifiers - which should lead us to read with new attention the lingering and descriptive condemnations of it in the writings of moralists and satirists. Of all five codes of the courtier, Function is the most unusual and controversial. For while on the one hand it defines the final cause, the goal-quality, of the text, on the other it causes that same text to selfdestruct. Beyond certain careful limits, Function becomes the anti-code of the courtier's self-written text. The apparent aim of the young courtier, beyond simply finding the right reader(s) for his text, is to be rewarded (but for what? the absent signified again) with a position - to insert his text into Function-code. Elements of this code range from Sidney's role as one of the Queen's Cupbearers, via Hatton's position as a Gentleman Pensioner, to Leicester's important function as Master of the Horse. However, beyond the level of such positions, a new law prevails: in so far as the courtier rewrites his text in Function-code, he ceases to be a courtier. Although William Cecil and Francis Walsingham spent their whole working lives at Court, and were arguably two of the most powerful and influential men in England, they were not thought of, and are not remembered, as courtiers?* At this level, then, Function-code is a code of exclusion - of difference - which is especially valuable in helping us to understand the term 'courtier.' Denying our tendency to see the term as a sign with its proper complement of signified and referent, it establishes it instead as a signifier which refuses such a complement, and which self-destructs when the supplement is forced upon it. Once again, I want to stress that this interpretation is far from being a semiotician's fancy: it was to become one of the principal factors in the confusion of discourses - of codes which, in the most Elizabethan sense of the word, prevented, forestalled, the success of Sidney's self-written text for ten years. The final code, Favourite-status, is in a sense the fulfilment of the courtier's text as such. It marks the highest position to which a courtier as courtier can attain, and is therefore, precisely, an alternative to Functioncode. Unlike the latter, it is wholly informal and thus congruent with the essence of the courtier-text. It is useful also to remember that within Favourite-code there is room for a good deal of variety: not only in type but in duration. The reign's Great Favourite, Leicester, held intermittent sway for thirty years; but there were - and concurrently - ephemeral Favourites, such as Oxford and Blount, and what we might call intermediate ones like Raleigh and Hatton. If we regard Favourite-code as a code,

Ein Heldenleben 141 rather than as a collection of historical and biographical data, we can see that its essence is a relationship. As the superlative of 'courtier/ 'Favourite' connotes the relational code of a dialogic text between courtier and prince: a code with a few constants and a great many variables. No two Favourite-texts were the same: a fact which Essex, for one, notably failed to understand. This final code poses a number of questions, and yields (I believe) some important insights. The first question is this: How can a status which for the great majority of courtiers represents only an unattainable dream be said to constitute a code of the courtier's text? The answer, I think, is that within the courtier's text it provides, even more than does Function, the goal-dimension: the point to which all the text's lines of perspective tend and which thus organizes the text's structure. (That its attainment in no way depends upon the courtier himself, or upon any predictable factor, creates an element of risk and freedom entirely congruent with the other codes and with the Castiglionean intertext.) Another question might be: What distinguishes the Favourite-text - one in which Favourite-code is dominant, though not exclusive - from the courtier-text? Here, the answer lies in an aspect of what we should now call 'reader-response.' The courtier's self-written text, though hoping always to reach the Royal Reader, is in the meantime aimed at a large and relatively varied audience.39 This fact gives it a certain independence: since it cannot adapt itself precisely to each individual reader, it may combine its codes as it thinks best. The Favourite's text, however, has attained its single Reader, and is henceforth relational in a direct and daily way. This changes the text's conditions: it must, in the light of the relation, be ceaselessly rewritten - if necessary in the same words. It is a text without closure and without stability. A study of the successful author/texts in this code shows with what skill this 'scene of (re) writing' was accomplished. The greatest of all, once again (and fatally for some of the others), was Leicester, whose mastery of Favourite-code never had a serious rival.40 Yet Hatton also shows a talent for this code's exacting writing which, while as different from Leicester's as Herbert's poetry is from Donne's, is no less moving and proved little less effective.41 And now at last - armed with our experience of semiosis in the Cortegiano and with our five codes - we come to Sidney and to the moment, marked by Languet's letter, of the beginning of his life at Court. What I propose here is a critical reading of his self-written text - including its indeterminacies, its confusions, its variants, and its transcoding. In the summer of 1575 Philip Sidney is twenty years old, and has just

142 Chamber music returned from three highly formative years on the Continent. At seventeen he was honoured by Charles ix of France with the title 'Baron de Sidenay'; three weeks later he was being trotted round Paris by the Duke of Nevers to watch thousands of Protestants, some of them his recent friends, being slaughtered in the St Bartholomew's Massacre. Together with Languet and a Protestant printer, Andreas Wechel, he escaped to Frankfurt. He has spent a year or so in Padua as a student, been painted by Veronese, and seen Venice and Genoa. He has travelled in the German states, and made friends with a number of Continental Europeans, most of them of a certain type whom I shall call, with a deliberately German word, Fiirstendiener:*2 middle-aged humanist scholar-diplomats in the earnest service of mostly minor and Protestant princes. With these he has had an extraordinary personal success; and from them - with Languet as the principal influence - he has learnt not only their political but their spiritual values. Now he is back, with a young Bohemian protege in tow, at Court. The summer's festivities at his uncle's castle at Kenilworth are the context for the opening pages of his self-written text. Let us, then, try to read Sidney's text of the next eleven years in the light of our five codes. I have said that Family-code confers upon the courtier's text its primary sign in naming him: it provides, as it were, the title. Yet in Sidney's case this primary sign is complicated - undermined, denied, and deferred. Undermined, because his name is his father's; and Sir Henry Sidney was an honest functionary who was persistently and most unfairly neglected, even disliked, by the Queen.43 Denied, in the sense that his great and undeniable advantages in Family-code come not from his name but from his non-name: Dudley. I am a Dudley in blood, that Duke's daughter's son, and do acknowledge, though in all truth I may justly affirm that I am by my father's side of ancient and always well-esteemed and well-matched gentry, yet I do acknowledge, I say, that my chiefest honour is to be a Dudley ...44

So he wrote in his Defence of the Earl of Leicester, his uncle. What this means is that in respect of Family-code his 'readers' needed a commentary to decode him: a commentary, a gloss, which was usually forthcoming. A very explicit example is in Languet's introduction of Sidney to the Hungarian humanist and diplomat Andreas Dudith in October 1574: His father is the Viceroy of Ireland ... His mother is a sister of the Earl of Warwick

Bin Heldenleben 143 and of Robert the Earl of Leicester, the most favoured at Court: since neither has children, this gentlemen will probably be their heir. His father's sister is married to the Earl of Sussex ... His mother's sister is the wife of the Earl of Huntingdon, who is related to the Royal family.45

This same Earl of Leicester, Sidney's 'godfather' at Court, was decisive in determining that Sidney's should be a courtier's text rather than, say, a functionary's career. Yet Sidney's status as his heir - removed a few years later when Leicester remarried and had a son, then restored when the boy died46 - means also that his text's primary sign is not only undermined and denied, but deferred. The point of all this is that, compared to, say, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford's, the Family-code in Sidney's text, while making the choice of a courtier's text inevitable, is at the same time marked by indirection and instability: it is both an enabling and a disabling element. By contrast, the Faction-code of his text is entirely clear, consistent, and unwavering. Largely because of his formative Continental experiences he became, with his subsequent father-in-law Walsingham, the backbone of the Protestant-activist faction at Court: a faction so strong and so committed that it is virtually a 'party.'47 If Faction, like style, is the locus of choice, then Sidney's text is characterized by an unusually consistent style. Here also, however, there are clues to a certain problematic. In the first place, I have said that Faction-code normally is determinate by difference rather than by a specific signified. In Sidney's case, what we see is precisely the constant pressure toward a signified. The centre around which his text's Faction-code coalesces is not ephemeral, symbolic, or opportunistic: it is the unwavering referent of an alternative foreign policy. As such, on the one hand it undermines Faction-code from within by constantly displacing it in the direction of ideology-code; on the other it brings his text, which as a courtier's is necessarily a metatext, into frequent conflict with the Royal text. As the latter is marked by inconsistency, the distance between them changes and Sidney's style often meets with an unsympathetic Reader. For the Fashion-code of Sidney's text our evidence is of a peculiar kind. From descriptions such as Goldwell's of his appearance in the 'Foster Children of Desire' pageant48 and from documents such as an lou to his tailor for forty-two pounds,49 it is clear that he was in no way out of the running; and his impact on even minor courtiers was such that after his death, as John Phillips wrote, 'it was accounted a sin for any gentlemen of quality, for many months after, to appear at Court or City in any light

144 Chamber music or gaudy apparel/50 His one reliable surviving portrait51 shows him well but not extravagantly dressed by comparison with contemporary portraits of, say, the Earl of Oxford or Sir John Pakyngton.52 Yet in all that is written about (around) him, Fashion is a code of absence; and his text, though possessing 'a sweete attractive kind of grace' (Roydon), is treated almost as its denial. When we consider the nature of Fashion-code, and its importance in the courtier-paradigm, it is clear that this absence or denial is itself of semiotic consequence. The most obvious - and doubtless the most intended - effect is a denial of triviality: most of Sidney's commentators and eulogists insist on what Greville calls his 'lovely and familiar gravity.' In this way, Fashion-code's role as a generator of writing functions even in its 'degree zero/ As for its nature as a commentary on time, I have named this as an essentially transgressive mastery; its absence, then, signifies a non-transgressive constancy and patience, in which time is left to its one true master - God. Function-code in Sidney's text is represented by four widely spaced signifiers. His first function, in November 1575, is the mildly honorific and courtly one of Queen's Cupbearer (the semiotics of being Ganymede to a woman might bear exploring). The second, in 1577, has more of a political signified: special Ambassador to the Emperor, with a commission to investigate the possibility of a Protestant League. It was the collapse of this signified which led to Sidney's virtual disappearance from Court for a number of years, and to his literary career. The third function is his co-appointment with his uncle the Earl of Warwick to the Mastership of the Ordnance, as the Queen's policy reluctantly moves closer to war; while the last function, wholly political and military, is not courtly at all: in 1585 he becomes Governor of Flushing, one of the Dutch cautionary towns offered in exchange for English military aid. In the pattern created by these four functions we see amply borne out what I have said before about the paradoxical nature of Function as a code of exclusion in the courtier's text. In so far as Sidney succeeds - succeeds in his constant attempt to force upon his courtier's text the supplement of a signified and a referent - in so far as his functions gradually acquire a more referential reality, and allow for Virtuous action/ his text ceases to be a courtier's. Like Fashion, Favourite-code in Sidney's text is one of absence. This should make us stop and think: for its absence is by no means selfevident. He did not, theoretically, arrive at Court with fewer trumps than did Essex a little later; indeed, as many contemporaries noted, Essex - who inherited Sidney's sword, marched in his funeral, married his

Ein Heldenleben 145 widow, and later bought and lived in Essex House in London - selfconsciously modelled his text upon Sidney's intertext. Yet not only did Sidney never succeed in inserting his text into Favourite-code, he never even came near it. Even more than in the case of Fashion, this 'degree zero' is a semiotic event of the first magnitude in our decoding of Sidney's text. Several interpretations might be offered, of which none is without a certain validity, In the first place there is the alteration of his Family-code with the birth of a son to Leicester. This made inoperative the chief gloss on his namesign: how sensitive he was to its effect is shown by the fact that at the next Tilt his impresa, or device, unusually did not comprise an image but was emphatically verbal: the word SPERAVI (T have hoped') crossed out cancelled.^ Another interpretation is based upon his early death, suggesting that his text, given time, might have become accepted as a mixture of, say, the 'Puritan Earl' of Huntingdon's and the chivalrous Sir Henry Lee's. A third possibility derives from an astute reading of the successful Favourite-texts - Leicester, Hatton, Oxford, Raleigh, Blount, Essex - in the light of the Queen's psychological reactions: this interpretation sees Sidney's much-praised charm as that of a man's man, and notes that it succeeded far better with grizzled humanists and young poets than with the Queen, who liked her courtiers' texts spicier and sexier. I believe all of these - but I do not believe that they give us the crucial semiotic key to the failure of Sidney's self-written courtier-text. What it points to, I believe, is a very important confusion of codes - of genre-codes especially - in Sidney's text. It is this confusion that causes both Sidney's failure as a courtier and, paradoxically, his success both as a writer and as a soldier. When we look at the realization of the various codes in his text, we recognize that they were all, as much as was consciously possible, twisted toward completion of the signifier - toward the addition, the supplement, of a signified. I believe the origin of this to lie in a confusion of genrecodes, greatly enabled by the paradigm of the Cortegiano, It was his uncle Leicester, the great Favourite, who introduced Sidney to Court, and made sure that his text would be a courtier's. This is Family-code; and it must have seemed acceptable to the idealistic 'gravity' of his youth because of another element of Family-code: the widow of Sir Thomas Hoby, the Cortegiano''s translator, was a close friend of his mother's, and even though Lord Willoughby could still refer to courtiers as 'reptilia/54 the Cortegiano had transcoded the term, allowing the courtier's text its full gravity of instruction. The courtier-genre, however,

146 Chamber music was soon crossed with another. As his choice of style - of Faction-code grew more assured, his text touched that of Walsingham, one of the Great Functionaries. Entirely untouched by the nugae curiales, this text this genre - clearly exercised an intense attraction upon Sidney. While recognizing that Family-code barred him from it, he nudged his text continually in its direction, and deliberately associated himself with it by the highly semiotic act of marriage with Walsingham's daughter. For the third genre-code which continually worked upon, and against, his courtier-text, we must go back to his three formative years on the Continent. For in Languet - whose influence upon him was continuous from 1572 to Languet's death in 1581, and posthumously far longer - and in the men to whom Languet introduced him (who remained his friends and correspondents throughout his life),55 Sidney discerned what was obviously to him the ideal genre-code: that of the Furstendiener. It was this which, paradoxically (and literally so: it was his paradoxa), more than anything, undermined his courtier-text. For the Furstendiener was, apparently, a courtier: he could be read as a Protestant and humanist fulfilment of the Castiglionean paradigm. The attraction - fatal to Sidney's text - was that the Fiirstendiener-genre provided the supplement of a signified: humanist learning allied to ideological commitment. Why then was this admirable genre, and the confusion of codes it initiated and fulfilled, fatal? First of all, because it belonged to another context: that of small, relatively unimportant German courts, which were Courts only in the complimentary sense which Castiglione gave to Urbino. The English Court, by contrast, was large, sophisticated, and uninterruptedly involved in superpower politics. In such a context, the Fiirstendiener's unifying code is necessarily split into more specialized ones: courtiers, functionaries, and non-Courtly scholars. Fate - in the form of Family-code - had made Sidney's text a courtier's; yet how little this agreed with the Furstendiener-code can be seen in this comment of Languet's after his visit to England in 1579: It was a pleasure for me, last winter, to see you flourishing in favour, and much respected by all; yet I cannot help but tell you that the habits of your Court seemed to me less manly then I could have wished, and most of your noblemen appeared to me to seek praise more by a kind of studied civility than by those virtues which are wholesome to the State and which best suit noble spirits and men of high birth. I was sorry, therefore, and so were other friends of yours, to see you wasting the flower of your life on such things, and I feared that that noble nature of yours might be dulled, and that from habit you might be brought to take pleasure in things that soften our spirits.56

Ein Heldenleben 147 The second reason why the confusion was fatal is that, by nudging his text toward functionary- and Fiirstendiener-codes, Sidney was in effect alienating his readers by rewriting a genre based on a free play of signifiers with the supplement of a signified: by rewriting a modern text as a classic one. The effect upon a sophisticated 'readership' is like that of a modern novelist's writing (seriously) like Trollope: admirable but doomed to critical failure. Which brings us to his most important reader, the Queen, and the third reason for failure. Her Majesty, who liked courtier-code, knew little of Fiirstendiener and cared less; and Sidney's Furstendiener-mspired hankering after responsibility she misread as Ambition-code. T see her Majesty/ wrote Walsingham sadly to Leicester about Sidney, 'very apt upon every light occasion to find fault with him/57 And Sidney himself lamented to his father-in-law, in a letter from the Netherlands, How apt the Queen is to interpret everything to my disadvantage ... I understand I am called very ambitious and proud at home, but certainly if they knew my hart thei would not altogether so judg me.58 It is not my purpose here to discuss Sidney the writer; yet in making the transition from courtier to hero we cannot omit entirely the relation of his courtier-text to those that have assured his immortality in English Departments.59 Remember that in the Cortegiano Ottaviano Fregoso claims that 'the courtier's final aim is to become his prince's instructor.' Remember also that the Fiirstendiener were humanists, and always interested in the literae humaniores. Add to this, quite simply, a personal interest in literature. And recall, finally, the words of his Defence of Poesy: 'know whether she [Nature] have brought forth ... so right a Prince as Xenophon's Cyrus ...' With the Letter to Queen Elizabeth, Touching her Marriage with Monsieur of 1579, we see Sidney beginning to turn from being a text to writing one. Yet, like the previous year's Lady of May, this text is still very much a courtier's, though more of a Fiirstendiener's than is the masque. With its signal lack of success - Alenqon's wooing continued for another three years, with every sign of encouragement from the Queen - his literary activity begins in earnest. Its order is revealing. 1580, in all probability, sees the composition of both the Defence and the Old Arcadia;60 1582 that of most of Astrophil and Stella-^ 1582 to 1584 the uncompleted revision we call the New Arcadia;62 and 1585 the Psalms and the translations of Du Bartas and Mornay. In the Defence we see him setting his thoughts in order for his new role; the Old Arcadia and the sonnets are

148 Chamber music very much marks of otium; while in the revision he is making serious progress toward an alternative to a courtier-text. Its abandonment - with no sign of regret - coincides with his resumption of Function-code at the Ordnance, shortly followed by his departure for the Netherlands. Decoding his role as writer in relation to his courtier-text I suggest that it is the story of a division. As a courtier, his self-written text had clearly failed in its purpose of instruction, without which any delight it might have given was without importance. So, in search of auctoritas, Sidney ceases to be a text and becomes an auctor. At first for delight: later, increasingly, for instruction. For here, as the Defence so eloquently proclaims, he can, 'lifted up with the vigour of his own Invention/ shape the world: he can make stories end the way they should63 and, by 'moving' at a distance, instruct those who might not listen viva voce. It is clear from the poets' elegies at his death that his texts succeeded; yet having read his self-written text, we may perhaps read with less sense of conventional sprezzatura his persona Astrophil's words: In truth, I sweare, I wish not there should be Graved in mine epitaph a Poet's name:

A&S 90:7-8

And indeed, if we leave the poets and look to the Court's, and the politicians,' reactions to his death, we do not find 'a Poet's name.' Yet neither do we find a failed text. What we do find is a hero. Clearly, a further semiotic is needed. In the first place, from 1585 on, the now inescapable impetus toward English participation in the Dutch war had, for Sidney, created a new genre-code which at last dispelled the fatal confusion of the old ones. His text was now revived and clarified in the ancient, unambiguous, referential code of the Just War. Here the free play of the courtier's signifier was otiose and odious; here humanism was irrelevant; Sidney's self-written text was transcoded, transformed, and triumphant. And it is precisely this absence, at last, of indirection, of ambiguity, that prepares Sidney for his final text as a hero. Note that I write 'prepares': Sidney's text in the Netherlands is the prologue to a hero's.64 A hero's text is not self-written. As he commands the regard of others, so he is defined by them. And always he is defined by death. Until the new, democratic sprezzatura of the twentieth century, there are no retired heroes. It is Death that enables the hero as text - a text that is always already posthumous. The characteristic modern unease with Sidney's heroic text stems from a century of irony as the intellectual's chief mode of seeing. We are closer

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to Lytton Strachey than we think. Yet if we try, for once, to distance ourselves from this manner, we may not find such texts so inaccessible. If all heroes are dead heroes, then all heroes are tragic heroes. To them, and to our regard upon them, the catharsis of nobility applies. Philip Sidney so wrote his courtier-text that, failing, he fell into writing. Recovered through war, he briefly became God's warrior; then Death rewrote him as the text that remains to disconcert us, light half-believers of our casual creeds, who admit no heroes but the humble. Let me end with two eloquent commentaries by readers of his final text. The first is Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, the Queen's cousin, writing to Leicester: With great grief do I write these lines unto you being thereby forced to renew to your remembrance the decease of that noble gentlemen your nephew, by whose death not only your Lordship and all other his friends and kinsfolk, but even her Majesty and the whole realm besides do suffer no small loss and detriment. Nevertheless, it may not bring the least comfort unto you that as he hath both lived and died in the fame of honour and reputation to his name in the worthy service of his prince and country, and with as great love in his life and with as many tears for his death as ever any had, so hath he also by his good and godly end so greatly testified the assurance of God's infinite mercy towards him as there is no doubt but that he now liveth with immortality free from the cares and calamities of mortal misery. The second, briefer and more intimate, is by his closest friend Fulke Greville, in a letter to Archibald Douglas: I go no whither, therefore I beseech you pardon me that I visit you not. The only question I now study is whether weeping sorrow or speaking sorrow may most honour his memory that I think death is sorry for. What he was to God, his friends and country, fame hath told, though his expectation went beyond her good. My lord, give me leave to join with you in praising and lamenting him, the name of whose friendship carried me above my own worth, and I fear hath left me to play the ill poet in my own part.65

9

Death and the maiden architecture

Mais la mort, se retirant, laisse le sol qu'elle quitte marque par elk et c'est toujours sur un sol mortifere que s'eleve le discours

But death, as it withdraws, leaves its mark on the ground it quits, and language always builds on deadly ground. Arnaud and Excoffon-Lafarge1

Mais il reste - et c'est ce qu'il y aurait aveuglement a oublier et lachete a accepter - il reste que ce qui 'est' a precisement disparu: quelque chose etait la, qui n'y est plus; comment le retrouver, comment ressaisir, en ma parole, cette presence anterieure qu'il me faut exclure pour parler, pour la parler?

But there remains - and that is what it would be blind to forget and cowardly to accept - there remains the fact that what 'is' is precisely what has ceased to be: something was there, which is there no longer; how to find it again, how to lay hold once more, in my words, of that earlier presence which I must exclude in order to speak, in order to speak of it? Blanchot2

Shortly after 6 a.m., a slow hand closed her eyes.3 The room smelt of incense, and of smoke from the great candle they had helped her to hold while the liturgical prayers were read. The priests and friars filed out, and walked down the stairs into the crisp October dawn. Now it was the women's work. They washed her body, disposing carefully of the soiled water. A portable camp-bed was set up, and covered with a cloth of gold. The body, shrouded but with the fine-boned white face left uncovered, was laid reverently upon the bier. There were no loud, unseemly lamentations, as in the old days: the family, dressed in their costliest magnificence, mourned with restraint

Death and the maiden 151 and dignity. All that day the city's notables stopped by to pay their respects. She had been twenty-four, no longer a girl; yet hardly of an age to die in ripeness. There was a widespread feeling that some light had fallen from the air, that autumn this year was going to be dedicated to. her memory. Next morning the priests and friars - Augustinians, Carmelites, Dominicans, and Franciscans - returned and took charge. At the town house's entrance the procession smoothly organized itself. The bier, with the body now in its lidless wooden coffin, was carried through the streets, surrounded by clergy and followed by poor men and women dressed in the cowled black mourning gowns they had received together with a gift of coin. As they arrived at the church, where masses for her soul's journey had already begun, the choir's great voice launched into the Salve Regina. The bier was placed in front of the high altar, and covered with another rich cloth. Solemnities proceeded; her husband, her family, her friends, the notables, and a small crowd of onlookers prayed earnestly as the professionals of death and salvation guided her soul on its way. Many imagined it, a small sexless child, borne upward by angels: few doubted that this lady would be quickly received and welcomed in an expectant Paradise. Eventually the catafalque was dismantled and the glittering bier carried to the graveside. Here the priests once more sprinkled her with holy water: a few stray drops remained to gleam on her lips and eyelids. Then her face, at last, was covered till the end of time. Armed with a final Absolution, she was lowered into the ground, and the procession dispersed to further Masses and a meal. Messer de' Bardi went home to a house filled with folk but empty of her smile. Nearly sixty years later and a few hundred miles to the northwest, this scene was repeated in a very different city: luxuriant and uneasy, decadent and swollen with self-conscious grandeur. Here, amid the terror of a new and apparently irresistible epidemic, in the mass of Masses for everything and everyone, the springtime death of a lately married fortyyear-old woman passed almost unnoticed, and the news took all of six weeks to reach Parma in Northern Italy. Two deaths among tens of thousands. Two voyages to the beyond: Purgatory? Paradise? Two grieving husbands, Simone de' Bardi and Hugues de Sade. Two modest monuments in busy medieval cemeteries, visited as parks and crisscrossed by casual pedestrians.4 Two supreme

152 Chamber music endings to the singular and unrepeatable lives of married women who would no longer manage their husbands' households or converse over embroidery with their best and smiling friends. Two single ears of corn in Death's vast, uncaring, and immemorial harvest: I had not thought Death had undone so many. Two souls among the numberless white choirs of Paradise, lost in the hosts that sing eternally the brightness of God. Two final breaths, four darkening eyes, four slender hands crossed on the breasts. Two corpses, rolled round in earth's diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees. Two mysteries. To each, once, something decisive had happened: they were seen, with a quite peculiar and manic intensity, by the goldsmiths of a rising language. What is it, we should ask more often, to be seen by a poet? They would have done well to be afraid, like certain nomads faced with a camera - their souls, henceforth, were no longer quite their own, even under God. Perhaps unnoticed even by themselves, something of their lives passed into other hands. At the younger woman's last Mass, a gaunt twenty-five-year-old man averts his eyes. His mind is filled with devout acceptance, but his driven heart and shaping brain already grope for plausible avoidances. In Parma, a forty-four-year-old travelling celebrity, sleek and intelligent, will not avoid and cannot repress the shock - twenty-one years of a love that underlay his life and enabled his literary fame, cut off by casual Death, tear from him an 'Oime!' which his artist's mind decides to harvest, in her honour. (There is something about Death, faced in and from our era, that prompts an avoidance of avoidances also. Many of these chapter-movements see 'Four-part fugue,' below - are the result of crossing the sonnetsequences with other texts. In any strict sense, this one is not; yet no meditation on Death's role in texts about love can fail to call up the shades of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, whose heroic struggles5 blur, impressively, the division between text and metatext. In so doing they challenge our discourse, reminding us that Death does much the same: our careful academic style thus stands revealed as a system of avoidances, to the inappropriateness of which a text like Derrida's Feu l cendre6 bears witness.) The role of the Beloved's death in the sonnet-sequences, it will be clear, is inextricably bound up with the status of the Beloved herself. An obvious result of recognizing this would be a traditional and necessarily speculative discussion on the reality and identity of the ladies in question: such

Death and the maiden 153 debates tend currently to be short-circuited by cursory remarks about their irrelevance, which is a way of dodging the question. It is, in fact, their death which makes their reality relevant. A semiotic reading which attempts to decode the literary death, and to establish its significance in and for the text, must consider the question whether this literary death is straightforwardly mimetic or not. The simplest answer consistent with the known facts has a privileged position; and if Beatrice's and Laura's extratextual reality and identity could be regarded as acceptable and accepted, the simplest answer would be that the literary death is there in the Vita Nuova and in the Canzoniere because the ladies referred to did, in civil fact, die. As always in the case of a sonnet-text, the answers are ambiguous and uncertain. The identification of Beatrice with Beatrice, daughter of Folco Portinari and wife of Simone de' Bardi, and of Laura with Laure de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade, cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt. However, modern scholarship tends, with reservations, provisionally to accept or at worst to remain neutral about the claims;7 and nothing we know about sonnet-sequences and their ways of dealing with extratextual reality contradicts them. Why, for instance, should Petrarch be at pains to make clear the verifiable identity of his friend Giovanni Colonna8 in the context of a sequence dealing with an imaginary Beloved? I propose, therefore, provisionally to accept these identities also: to submit, in the absence of clear indications to the contrary, to the primary thrust of the texts. For it is clear that both the Vita Nuova and the Canzoniere depend for their effect in great measure upon the reader's acceptance of the Beloved's - and therefore of the love's - reality in living and mortal flesh; as they do also upon the acceptance of the identity of the Lover and the Poet. Thus far, it has usually been the calendrical structure and references which have been advanced as evidence for this: the emphasis on precise dates of meeting and, in Petrarch's case, on the recurring anniversaries of the coup de foudre.9 I submit, however, that what much more convincingly establishes the impression of mimesis is, in each case, the Death. Unlike a private encounter, death is a public and a social fact. In 1348 as in 1290, it is accompanied by an elaborate institutional ritual, sealed by a monument (not infrequently incorporating a portrait), and prolonged by an indeterminate sequence of more or less public liturgies. To note in writing the date and time of this event - publicly as in the Vita Nuova, privately as in Petrarch's note in the margin of his Virgil - is to create the strongest possible persuasion as to its extratextual truth, and t

154 Chamber music impel the reader's decoding in the direction of its acceptance. The only non-mimetic way in which such acceptance could be secured would be through an extrardinarily elaborate structure of deliberate mystification, for which no adequate rationale has ever been advanced. Altogether, then, the semiosis of the Death in Dante and Petrarch produces as its first result the reality of the Beloved. This is an event of the greatest importance for the archaeology of the sonnet-sequence as a literary form. It establishes the probability that one of the form's salient features was its transformation of the troubadour tradition by insistence upon the extra textual reality of the woman behind the senhal.™ Dante's senhal (Petrarch's also), while if anything more, not less, symbolic than those of Jaufre Rudel or Bernart de Ventadorn, significantly coincides with the lady's civil name, and thus subverts its original function of concealment by indicating a verifiable person. In doing so, moreover, the text points outside itself: the separation between text and world, dazzlingly created and upheld by the troubadours, is here cancelled -aufgehoben - and each is allowed (indeed, encouraged) to invade the other. Conformable to its role in contemporary philosophy, Death here is not a determinator but a transition - more actively, even, a mediator - between two worlds. And, congruent with the Christian roots of that philosophy, the corporal experience is freely insisted upon since only its reality can provide an adequate basis for its eventual transformation.11 The valorization of Death-as-sign implies the resurrection of extratextual reality within (into) the text. And just as prayers and visitations maintained a two-way communication between the pre- and postmortal dimensions, so this now-textual reality maintains a privileged channel of communication with the extratextual world in the hands and voices of which it will henceforth live. There is a further effect of Death's semiosis in the Dantean and Petrarchan texts, which also throws light on the structure of the sonnetsequence's formation. This second element has to do not only with its nature as sign but with its character as sign-post, as milestone - in other words, with its positioning. If we accept the theory that both Dante and Petrarch were cumulatively concerned with the transformation (and thus the transcoding) of a troubadour tradition, not only their inclusion but their placing of Death within their texts offers a major clue to the nature of this transcoding. In contrast to Death's inclusion as a sign pointing to extratextual reality, its positioning is a self-referential sign within the codes of the text itself. Its first significance is as a sign of organization. Internal evidence in Dante's case, external as well as internal in Petrarch's, makes it clear that

Death and the maiden 155 organization, that architecture, is one of the chief features of the new form we call the sonnet-sequence. Compared to the scattered cansos of the troubadours, compared to the equally incidental sonnets of thestilnovisti, both the Vita Nuova and the Canzoniere overwhelmingly reflect an architectural impulse which, once again, clarifies for us something of what a sonnet-sequence is. Our recognition of this architecture shows us that the sequence is an unprecedented attempt to transform the lyric - and not the Ode but the brief lyric: the love-lyric - into a major literary genre,12 without losing any of the situational immediacy which (whether 'real' or 'feigned') traditionally constituted its chief appeal. Of this audacious project, Death is a prime constituent. It is Death around which, in an architectural sense, both the Dantean and the Petrarchan texts are built. The percentage proportions between the pre-mortem and the post-mortem sections in both cases (roughly 66/34 Per cent m the Vita Nuova, 70/30 per cent in the Canzoniere) would be perfectly acceptable as the proportions between the respective lengths of nave and choir in a contemporary cathedral;13 and whereas the High Altar is of course the focus of spiritual attention, the crossing-point of nave and transepts is the structural and organizational centre. (This is not, of course, to say that Dante and Petrarch consciously modelled their structural proportions upon those of cathedrals; but that in any age, certain proportions are more thinkable than others.)14 The success of this organizational centre is shown by the widespread copying of the In Vita/In Morte division by other Italian sonneteers who show no sign of understanding Dante's and Petrarch's other, far more subtle, structural solutions and who almost certainly violate their use of Death as a sign of their Beloveds' reality. inter/graph Plus le triste range mon foie ainsi que fit le vautour Au violateur enchaine, et plus le visage de Dieu Est convert de mes propres larmes; Plus ces larmes ont soifde couler en paroles de la tribu ou j'aurai derobe I'amour; Plus ces larmes ont soifet brulure d'etre eau salee et dictame Qui lave un metal barbare avec I'eau seche du salut; Ainsi mieux, ces larmes d'Absence Elles ruissellent vers le But.

The more what is sad gnaws my liver as did the vulture To the chained transgressor, and the more God's face

156 Chamber music Is covered with my own tears; The more those tears thirst to flow in words of the tribe Where I have stolen love; The more those tears thirst and burn to be salt water and balm To wash a heathen metal with salvation's dry water; The better, thus, these tears of Absence Trickle toward the Goal. Pierre-Jean Jouve, 'Elegie'15 We have forgotten Dante's grief; and our forgetting, understandable though it is, does not become us. For only with its full weight upon our imaginations can we weigh his crucial silence. Only when we feel his tears of absence can his absence of tears move us. And I realize that this is a lesson for semioticians tempted to a freedom we have not earned: the search for connotations does not necessarily lead away from pain but may well guide one into its core. At Beatrice's funeral Mass, Dante's mind was shaping avoidances. In so doing, it shaped a text. The Vita Nuova, with Death squarely at its structural centre, reacts to it with a loquacious refusal to speak. As Dante, more than any troubadour, has exalted Love while denying Eros, so he exalts Beatrice's death even while his text denies it. 'I do not intend to speak of it here,' he says (sonnet 28), consciously denying the reader's wish and expectation; and gives witty reasons that have justly bothered seven centuries of scholars.16 Denial is a two-edged sword. We can see, even now, his point: the elaborate setting, the ornamental frame, containing an emptiness of specious argument denies Death its victory by denying its importance emphasizing instead the importance of this unimportance. With peculiar audacity, Dante allows his text to be enabled, to be produced, by a central silence: thinking thus to wash Death's heathen metal with salvation's dry water, that the tears of Beatrice's absence, become the dialect of the tribe, might trickle toward the Goal. 'I hope to say of her what was never yet said of any woman' (42). And yet we can see also an ungrammaticality which, however satisfyingly decodable, remains implacably to undermine the text. inter/graph Adieu. La nuit deja nous fait meconnaissables. Ton visage estfondu dans I'absence. Oh adieu

Death and the maiden 157 Detache ta main de ma main et tes doigts de mes doigts arrache Laissant tomber entre nos espaces le temps Solitaire etranger le temps rempli d'espaces; Et quand I'obscur aura totalement range La forme de ton ombre ainsi qu'une Eurydice Retourne-toi afin de consommer ta mort Pour me communiquer I 'adieu. Adieu ma grace Au point qu'il n'est espoir de relier nos sorts Si meme s'ouvre en nous le temple de la grace.

Farewell. Already night makes us unrecognizable. Your face has dissolved in absence. Oh farewell Detach your hand from my hand and your fingers from my fingers tear Letting time fall between our spaces, time Solitary, strange, time filled with spaces; And when the dark has gnawed to oblivion Your shade's form like a Eurydice Turn back to consummate your death To let me know farewell. Farewell my grace So far that there's no hope to join our fates Even if in us should open the temple of grace. Pierre-Jean Jouve, 'Adieu'17

How strange that it should have been Petrarch the ambitious, Petrarch the plump, Petrarch the crowned, the everywhere received, who sensed in Dante this deficiency. His anxiety of influence is well known; he claimed (mendaciously) never to have read the Commedia;^ yet when, on 19 May 1348, the news of Laura's death reached him in Parma, how can he not have thought, almost at once, of Beatrice? We cannot know Virgil's mind except by tracing the graph of his distances from Homer. Just so, from now on, evidence about sonnet-sequences becomes cumulative and intertextual. Fate, or God, dealt Petrarch a hand frighteningly like Dante's: its playing I read in the Canzoniere and in the graph of that text's distances from the Vita Nuova. The semiotics of reality, first of all, he retained. Indeed, from our posterity's - point of view it is strengthened, by the fact that the Death's calendrical notation (its guarantee, as it were, of civil fact) was now written, not in the public text itself - poets, after all, are liars - but in the margin of the book which was perhaps even then already destined to support his own dying head. Laura might be the breeze, the breath of his

158 Chamber music inspiration; she might metonymically be (covered with) the gold of imperishable value; she might, more personally and more ambitiously, be the laurel of his literary fame; but these symbolic entities were not what died on 6 April 1348, and for which Masses were said in Avignon. Death, once again, is the gauge of reality, the mediator between text and world. Secondly, the semiotics of architecture Petrarch not only retained but extended. Most current scholarship, both Dantean and Petrarchan, is concerned to stress the differences between the two works; but from this point of view, the Vita Nuova is like a sketch transcended in its vast and complex imitation. The new text has not only dropped the too-Boethian prose but swollen to almost eight thousand lines of verse; and the sixth of April 1348 has become the cardinal point of the entire structure. In terms of proportion - to pursue for a moment my fanciful cathedral metaphor the nave is longer; but the Death is more than ever the crucial locus of the edifice. Intriguingly, even Dante's creation of a frame for the Death itself is maintained. Where in the Vita Nuova it was foreshadowed by the death of Beatrice's father and by the important canzone 'Donna pietosa/ in the Canzoniere it is prepared by the canzone Tvo pensando' (which in Petrarch's previous plan was to open the second section)19 and by sonnet 266, addressed to Colonna and summing up the poet's love for both him and Laura. It is then followed - the frame's completion - by the canzone 'Che debb'io far' (268) and the symmetrical sonnet (269) on Colonna's and Laura's deaths, 'Rotta e 1'alta colonna e'l verde lauro.' Yet here the divergences begin to grow. The preparatory canzone in the Vita Nuova is a vision of the Death, and to it (as witnessed, for example, by Templer's discussion)20 much of the real Death's weight is proleptically transferred. Petrarch's Tvo pensando' is a moral preparation on the poet's own part, less conscious but more damaging in its aporia. And no contrast could be greater when we come to the frame's contents. Instead of Dante's prose - and prosy - refusal to speak and strategies of avoidance, in the Canzoniere the frame is filled with one small single sonnet (267). This sonnet begins with the word which Dante had rigorously suppressed. 'Oime!' It occurs four times in the first quatrain, once more in line 5. The sonnet, which ends with the wind carrying away the words of hope and desire, is a cry of pain, of grief, of immediate human mourning. It is this moment of pain which is allowed into the Petrarchan text, this human mourning which modifies the semiotics of the sequence's Death. For the crucial point now becomes, not an empty space to be passed over for the glory of God, but the crucifying point of

Death and the maiden 159 articulate bereavement. And as the pain is admitted into the text, so (and thereby) is Death admitted. Its admission, of course, strengthens Death's role as mediator. Whatever its cause, Laura's death coincided with the year of the Black Death. The widespread popularity of the Canzoniere and of its In Vita/In Morte' division must owe something to 'two worlds become much like each other': the poignant and (as we shall presently see) convenient legend must have found a fair number of echoes in experience. I have been trying to avoid avoidances: to pursue the semiotician's search for connotations, for gaps, overtones, and contradictions, beyond the texts and into the doxa of our view of them. Yet now, on the threshold between Cisalpine and Transalpine considerations, I can no longer refrain from the semiotics of love and death in the sonnet-sequences which (though in different form) has been the preoccupation of earlier and greater scholars. Let me begin by quoting, reluctantly, the admirable Valency: If in the ideal love of another man's wife there still lingered some trace of troubadour sensuality, certainly it was blameless to love the beauty of a disembodied spirit. Death terminated the marriage contract. Love was eternal. From the poet's point of view the idea was stupendous. It can occasion no surprise therefore that, after Dante, the rate of mortality among angelic ladies should rise abruptly and alarmingly. In terms of the stilnovist conceit, obviously, the best thing a lady could do for her lover was to die. It became familiar practice to write love-songs to the lady in morte after having courted her, more or less unsuccessfully, in vita.21

This is convenience stated with a vengeance; but in its caustic elegance it skates lightly over an exceedingly serious problem that beset not so much the new morality as the new architecture. With the composition of scattered love-poems into a major and scrupulously crafted structure, the question of closure becomes important; with the addition of an underlying, intermittently glimpsed narrative it becomes urgent; and when this architectural and narrative model is, moreover, combined with a characteristic insistence on the Beloved's (and thus the love's) reality, it becomes crucial - and, given the genre's values, virtually insoluble. Consider for a moment the alternatives: how else might such a situational 'plot' end? i / The Beloved might definitively reject the Poet/Lover. This, in view

160 Chamber music of her sovereignty, is theoretically possible; but it would be difficult to justify. If she has tolerated his attentions for an entire sonnet-sequence, and if during all this time he has remained perfectly constant (an important emphasis, especially in the Canzoniere), what reason could she have for ultimate rejection? 2 / The Poet/Lover might reject the Beloved. This is clearly unthinkable within the parameters the sonnet-sequence is creating. Its occurrence would instantly transcode the genre, turning it (as milk 'turns') to satire: for if even a scrap of the Beloved's value were left, the Poet/ Lover's own integrity as such would be destroyed, and the text would disintegrate. 3 / Some third force might happen by to end the story. This is also unthinkable, since the texts invest so much in their creation of an impeccable Poet/Lover that no third force could possibly destroy his deathless love. The reason why I stress the importance of the reality-dimension is that, although in part a narrative, the sonnet-sequence as Dante and Petrarch developed it takes great care to point out that it is not a romance - it is not fiction. Theoretically, even a first-person-singular relation might have been fictitious: within a medieval context, the short lyric and the dreamnarrative come to mind. But these connotations are contradicted by elaborate structures on the one hand and emphatic reality-codes on the other, so that there is no way out. The love is (to be seen as) real and existent, the Poet is the Lover, and the Lady is flesh and blood. In terms of values, what this insistence on reality semiotically accomplishes is an intense magnification of personal risk. It is not usual to discuss sonnet-sequences in such terms: together with the boriamors tradition they modify, they are normally seen as risk-free jeux d'esprit. I am convinced that to regard them thus is a profound and crippling misunderstanding - a misunderstanding occasioned by the second-rate epigones within the tradition itself, strengthened by the contemporary habit of treating them sprezzaturically as 'toys,' and perpetuated in our own time by several generations of academic critics frightened of regressing into Romantic or Victorian 'naivete' and projecting their own risk-avoidances on to the texts. We should not, I think, be misled by such posturing. The sequences of Dante and Petrarch, and those of their most serious and talented followers, are an unprecedented attempt at creating the feeling subject as a literary theme: at making the private public. This in no way precludes the exercise of self-conscious artifice, but it does

Death and the maiden 161 impose upon the Poet/Lover a demand of complete emotional integrity. And in response to this demand, the Death - a 'real' Death, and thus a 'found' element - is also, providentially, the only valid ending to the earthly relationship. The fact that it does not end the text is the Poet/ Lover's response to the challenge it creates: his affirmation of (his) love's transcendence. inter/graph J'etais dans une de ces forets ou le soldi n'a pas acces mais ou, la nuit, les etoiles penetrent. Ce lieu n'avait le permis d'exister, que parce que I'inquisition des Etats I'avait neglige. Les servitudes abandonnees me marquaient leur mepris. La hantise de punir m'etait retiree. Par endroit, le souvenir d'une force caressait la fugue paysanne de I'herbe. Je me gouvernais sans doctrine, avec une vehemence sereine. J'etais I'egal de choses dont le secret tenait sous le rayon d'une aile. Pour la plupart, I'essentiel n'est jamais ne, et ceux qui le possedent ne peuvent I'echanger sans se nuire. Nul ne consent a perdre ce qu'il a conquis a la pointe de sa peinel Autrement ce serait la jeunesse et la grace, source et delta auraient la meme purete. J'etais dans une de ces forets ou le soleil n'a pas acces mais ou, la nuit, les etoiles penetrent pour d'implacables hostilites.

I was in one of those forests where the sun has no access but where, at night, the stars pierce through. This place was permitted to exist only because states' inquisitions had neglected it. Abandoned slaveries showed me their disdain. I had lost the obsessive need to punish. Here and there, the memory of a force caressed the grass's rustic fugue. I ruled myself without doctrine, with a serene intensity. I was the equal of things whose secret was no greater than a wingspan. The essential, mostly, is never born, and those who possess it cannot exchange it without harming themselves. No one agrees to lose that which he has conquered with the edge of his effort! Otherwise all would be youth and grace, source and estuary would have the same purity. I was in one of those forests where the sun has no access but where, at night, the stars pierce through for merciless hostilities. Rene Char, Tenombre'22

When, about 1579, Philip Sidney decided to compose what would become Astrophil and Stella, what did he think he was doing? This seems, I know, like the sort of question we are taught no longer to ask, and very far from a semiotician's concerns. Yet it is one which, in the absence of

i6z Chamber music what we are pleased to call 'hard evidence/ can only be answered by the semiotic enterprise: by the discerning of structural codes and intertextual semiosis in a given phenomenon. In spite of his 'English Petrarke' sobriquet, it is equally uncommon to postulate a close relation between the two, separated as they were by nearly a quarter of a millennium and well over a thousand sonnetsequences in various languages. Yet there was no generic name for what he thought he was doing; the nearest any contemporary writer comes to one is Sidney's own reference in the Defence to 'that other kind of songs and sonnets'; and it seems clear that to a large extent what we call a 'sonnet-sequence' was defined in sixteenth-century minds, rather vaguely, as 'what Petrarch did.'23 Moreover, Sidney himself had, only a few years previously, spent the better part of a year in Italy and - as proved by both his correspondence and his library - read Italian. I have a private theory about transmissionchannels, occasioned in part by a letter from Jacques Bochetel24 which reached Sidney shortly after his arrival in Venice from Vienna, and which contains the following passage: Je vous dirai que madame noire hostesse a estai bien courroucee de ceque ne prinstes pas conge delle quand partistes, sans cela je estois delibere de vous servir de Lieutenant en vostre absence mais depuis je nai ausai aller la voir, ie croi que maintenant en avez perdus les souvenances pour les changementz que avez trouvez de par delta, ie vouldrois estre avec vous pour vous y faire conpanie.

I must tell you that our hostess was much incensed because you did not take your leave of her when you departed. Had this not been the case, I had intended to serve as your replacement during your absence, but I have not dared to visit her since. I believe that by now you must have forgotten all about it, in view of the new delights [lit. changes] you have found over there. I wish I were with you to keep you company in them. From Vienna, 10 December 157324

If, as seems entirely probable, the 'new delights' included one of the Venetian 'hostesses' accomplished in poetry as well as in other matters,25 some such context is the most likely foundation for Sidney's undoubted knowledge and understanding of the Canzoniere. The extent of this acquaintance, and the depth of his comprehension, should not be measured, as is usual, by similarities: rather, as with Virgil and Homer as well as Petrarch and Dante, by tracing the graph, and

Death and the maiden 163 especially by decoding the significance, of the ecarts, the distances. Here, too strong a concentration upon moral and amorous content-value plays us false. The excitement of Renaissance readers and poets alike is known to have centred, to a for us almost incomprehensible extent, upon what we should call 'formal' features and techniques.26 If we can manage not to divorce these even slightly from 'content/ it is through them that we can measure the 'English Petrarke's' interest and achievement. Sidney, then, began - as his sequence begins - by acknowledging the reality-dimension. He started, in other words, by 'loving in truth/ And then, 'fain in verse my love to show/ he commenced to 'do what Petrarch did' - mutatis a great number of mutandis. He initiated, that is, the construction of a major and complex lyric edifice, on the basis of a fragmented but clear narrative, which would 'figure forth' the (real) feeling subject as an important literary theme: 'with a feeling skill I paint my hell' (2:14). Of course a modern, Transalpine, Protestant courtier as 'feeling subject' could not be expected to show the same reactions as a fourteenthcentury Catholic literary professional from Arezzo, however their respective ladies' perfections might resemble one another. And if, in Petrarch's model, the architecture corresponded so perfectly to the subject's feelings and the situation's events, how best might it be adapted to this very different climate? That Sidney was concerned about this is shown, inter alia, by the uncharacteristic uncertainty with regard to his canzoni. Having decided to adapt them to a simpler, more modern and more directly musical form than Petrarch's, he seems to have vacillated in their precise positioning.27 However, the chief architectural problem facing Sidney lay in that crucial and virtually irreplaceable element, the Death. Here, truly, he confronted a major decision. Nature had, uncomfortably, not provided him with a parallel - indeed, after producing the providential effect twice, she could not be expected to favour a third major poet with so convenient a bereavement. Here we come to an important indication as to Astrophil and Stella's nature. Were it fiction, nothing would have prevented Sidney from adopting the Death (altered, perhaps, to suit a Protestant sensibility) to fulfil its habitual structural function. The fact that he did not do so and that we are in his text faced with an unprecedentedly insistent 'zero factor' is, I am convinced, a strong indication that he intended, and managed, to maintain at least the principal features of the reality-dimension. Unlike Laura, Penelope did not die. This simple, and to a lover no doubt pleasing, fact created a serious architectural problem.

164 Chamber music In principle, all the factors governing alternative solutions obtained, in the form discussed above. For the text to get out of this impasse, something had to give: some factor in the equation had to be abandoned. It is exceedingly significant that what Sidney, in this artistic crisis, chose to let go is the integrity of the Poet/Lover. In creating a Lover who is not only morally fallible but terminally so, he went against the contemporary semiotics of the entire sonnet-code. Since, obviously, the Poet could not be seen to abandon his integrity also, this choice produced by necessity the innovative split between Philip and Astrophil; and it freed the Poet to let the Lover, by his failure, 'teach and delight' the reader, thus anchoring the expanded lyrical structure in the values normally applied to more exalted genres. The Beloved's honour is safe; the Lover's constancy is not in doubt; but he is rejected (in song viii) for a reason, and in a manner, that reminds us of what might have happened in the Canzoniere had Death not taken Laura. The 'interpretant' (in the Riffaterrean sense) which allows us to find the correct Petrarchan intertext is, precisely, song viii. Stella's exquisite and regretful denial of an Astrophil who is by now far from what he was when he fell in love with her 'knowne worth' (2) leads me back, not to the Canzoniere but to the Secretum. There Francesco (Petrarca), asked by St Augustine why this virtuous lady had not led him to virtue also, ruefully replies: In so far as she could, she did. What else was she doing, indeed, when, unmoved by my beseeching and unconquered by my caresses, she preserved her woman's honour? When, in spite of her [youthful] age and mine, in spite of the many and various circumstances that could have bent a heart of adamant, she remained unmoved and unconquerable? Undoubtedly, this womanly soul of hers taught a man his duty: as Seneca puts it, in my pursuit of virtue's practice she furnished at once example and reproof. Finally, when she saw the reins were broken and that I was running headlong toward the precipice, she preferred to abandon rather than to follow me.28

The final sentence of this passage, especially, gives one an unusually solid sense of the Astrophil and Stella's text-production as (to use once again Riffaterre's terminology) the expansion of a Petrarchan intertext. This being the case, and the architecture's importance being what it is, I cannot help but ask myself what, in the English sequence, replaces the missing Death within the architectural - as opposed to the moral - dimension. To find the answer, let us go back to the proportions of the Canzoniere. There, the Death occurs at approximately 70 per cent of the work's

Death and the maiden 165 overall length. If, now, we investigate those proportions in the Astrophil and Stella, what do we find occupying the crucial space of the Cisalpine death? The Fifth Song, that perennial embarrassment to readers and students of the Sidneian text. The canzone which (as the Muse's revenge) treats Laura's descendant - 'Honour is honour'd, that thou dost possess / Him as thy slave' (35) - as a 'shrewd girl/ and proceeds to beat her with implacable hostilities: "ungrateful thief/ "murd'ring tyrant/ 'foul rebel/ Vagrant/ 'witch/ and 'devil'; following these epithets only with the very lamest and most unconvincing of potential recantations. Stella, we recall, did not die. It might have been better if she had; Astrophil might then have had a chance at redemption. As it is, it is Astrophil who dies - morally: and song v is the sign of his demise. That this is he to whom, only a little while before, Stella had given the monarchy of her high heart only makes the catastrophe more poignant. As in the Dantean and Petrarchan sequences, the text does not die with the Death. In Sidney's case it is the dead man who lives on, his love (alas) as imperishable as Petrarch's. All the words, henceforth, are his, and to be read as such; with the significant exception of song viii, the definitive rejection, where (for reasons now clearer then ever) the Poet, uniquely, steps in to tell the story himself. For this most important of all the canzoni, his is the only voice the reader can trust. It is impossible to overestimate Sidney's achievement. To have comprehended so precisely both the moral and the architectural implications of 'what Petrarch did' was in itself remarkable in a literary culture which contained no precedent. Having understood, not then to imitate it but to adapt it to an entirely new and different set of values was a triumph. The measure (in a very literal sense) of this triumph is afforded us via the semiotics of the missing Death. inter/graph And he cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the tumult, and them that wept and wailed greatly. And when he was come in, he said unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put them all out, he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that were with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying. And he took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise. And straightway the damsel arose, and walked; for she was of the age of twelve years. And they were astonished with a great astonishment. And he

166 Chamber music charged them straitly that no man should know it; and commanded that something should be given her to eat. Mark 5:38-43 So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. Ephesians 5:28-31

Still and still more cumulative, the evidence rises slowly, as one Troy is built upon another. So influential was the English Petrarch that, for twenty years after Astrophil and Stella's posthumous publication, a sonnet-sequence to English poets was primarily 'what Sidney did/ Once again, I should stress that this does not imply imitation on the others' part: rather that we should interpret the later texts by the graph of their distances from Sidney's. And in some cases the counterpoint becomes multiple, and the Sidneian distance-graph is superimposed upon, say, a Petrarchan. Nowhere is this more clearly the case than in Spenser's Amoretti/ Epithalamion, which creates and maintains an extraordinarily complex relationship with both its primary intertexts. It is this dynamic tension, usually missed entirely by modern readers, which provides much of the Amoretti''s force. 'See,' the text murmurs throughout, to those that have eyes to hear, 'see what I am (not)!' I am (not) Petrarch's Canzoniere: it is rare, even for readers and editors who acknowledge Petrarch's influence, to compare the two sequences without the mediating presence of the developing tradition.29 I am (not) the Astrophil and Stella: how many disappointed moderns, coming from the Sidneian text to the Spenserian, see only a diminishing of energia, and do not remark that the two are to be read together, almost like the two columns of Derrida's G/fls?3° Like Stella, Elizabeth Boyle did not die before her, or the text's, time. Like Astrophil, only more so, Edmund is concerned that his love(-poetry) be accepted as 'true.' Deprived likewise of Death as guarantee of such reality, the Amoretti shows a Petrarchan recognition of the Death's importance and a Sidneian ingenuity in creating its replacement. In doing so it deftly and delicately turns the entire system's codes upside-down. Elizabeth did not die; and Edmund could not, either temperamentally or philosophically, live as an Astrophil. At the core of the new poema, the

Death and the maiden 167 gap left by the Death is filled instead with a birth: the birth of a new flesh, sacramentally created out of the 'old' man and the 'old' woman joined now in the by Petrarchan standards utterly subversive state of 'simple truth and mutual good will' - words that a Florentine would have regarded with pity or derision. When Amoretti 68 ('Most glorious Lord of life') outrageously conflates eras and agape in an Easter prayer, a realitycode is created which has the strength of a solemn oath in an age when oaths had meaning. What is almost miraculous, and perhaps the greatest tribute that can be paid the Amoretti, is that the text of a sonnet-sequence can accommodate such a reversal of the system's sincere but closed value-code and not be destroyed, not be silenced. Death is not overlooked in all this, but caught up in the conflation and itself transcoded. Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory? Death, thou shalt die. Nevertheless, what of Death as a public reality-code; Death as a societal event, an institution which signs the love-sonnet sequence with its descriptive system otecclesia, cemetery, monument, and Masses? This question too is answered; this Death also is replaced. The sacrament - the 'outward and visible sign' - of Unction, the Viaticum, is replaced with the sacrament of Marriage; the monument of stone with the monument of progeny; the Masses for the soul of the departed with prayers for the new flesh's voyage of a godly marital life. Thus far the conversion of the Petrarchan intertext: what of the Sidneian? Astrophil and Stella had recognized a flaw in the tradition and cracked it open to a breach, creating in the process a moral death of the Lover. Amoretti recognizes the truth of this conflict but cannot rest in it: it is a poem of re-ligio and must join together what Philip had put asunder. The moral death is inevitable unless the situation's very foundation is changed. Then what will die is the old man; what will rise is a new one, resurrected in the grace of an amor re-ligatus. In such a radical alteration, the architecture of the work could not remain unchanged. Clearly, the emphasis must now be on the choir and its High Altar: the middle-style sonnets culminate in, and the middlestyle canzoni are replaced by, a mighty high-style Ode in climactic position. In such a structure, what was to be done with the former crucial point, the old space of the Death? In the gentle retrospective irony that marks so much of the Amoretti, a solution was found. Lyke as the Culver on the bared bough Sits mourning for the absence of her mate:

168 Chamber music and in her songs sends many a wishfull vow, for his returne that seemes to linger late, So I alone now left disconsolate, mourne to my selfe the absence of my love: and wandring here and there all desolate, seek with my playnts to match that mournful dove. Ne joy of ought that under heaven doth hove can comfort me, but her owne joyous sight: whose sweet aspect both God and man can move, in her unspotted pleasauns to delight. Dark is my day, whiles her fayre light I mis, and dead my life that wants such lively blis.

89

Readers are often puzzled by the low-key, inconclusive ending of the Amoretti, and I have earlier (Two-part invention/ above) given a different interpretation of it. In the light of present preoccupations, though, another view suggests itself. Sonnet 89 occupies precisely the 70 per cent position of the Petrarchan Death. In no Elizabethan poet's work is this less likely to be a coincidence than in Spenser's. What better unobtrusive, structurally elegant sign of the 'old' Lover's death than a plaintive, flawlessly traditional 'absence' sonnet to mark the end of the sonnettext? Finally, what is most notable in the 'new' Death is perhaps its role within the emotional field. The personal risk resulting from the insistent reality-codes has now, characteristically, become a literary one. To take such liberties with a dominant and vulnerable code; to allow not only one's own love but one's own marriage to take precedence over 250 years of genre-doxfl; to do so, moreover, as a poet professionally ambitious enough to be concurrently engaged in the vast project of becoming the English Virgil - the personal risk, the professional risk, of this is breathtaking. Amoretti/Epithalamion accomplishes, to a degree undreamt-of in Astrophil and Stella or in the intervening sequences, the transcoding of the private into the public - the establishing of the feeling subject (religatus) as the thematic for a major work. In this transcoding, the (transfigured) Death plays a part no longer crucial: instead it has become on the heuristic level an indispensable stepping-stone, and on the semiotic level an interpretant which evokes the cumulative intertext in order to emphasize its conversion. In Vita/In Morte has been changed into In Morte/In Vita.

Death and the maiden 169 inter/graph J'ai joue un pen de piano pour O., a sa demande, sachant des lors que j'avals renoncea lui; il avait ses tres beaux yeux, et sa figure douce, adoucie par ses longs cheveux: un etre delicat mais inaccessible, a la fois doux et distant. Puis je I'ai renvoye, disant que j'avais a travailler, sachant que c'etait fini, et qu'au-dela de lui quelque chose etaitfini: I'amour d'un garqon.

I played the piano a little for O., at his request, knowing from that point on that I'd given him up; he had his lovely eyes and his gentle face, softened by his long hair: a being delicate but inaccessible, at once gentle and distant. Then I sent him away, saying I had to work, knowing that it was over and that, apart from him, something was finished: love for a boy. Barthes, Incidents^1

Comme d'un cerceuil vert en fer blanc, une tete De femme a cheveux bruns fortement pommades D'une vieille baignoire emerge, lente et bete, Avec des deficits assez mal ravaudes:

As from a green tin coffin, a woman's head With brown hair thickly covered in pommade Emerges from an old bath, slow and stupid, With defects rather poorly taken care of:

Puis le col gras et gris, les larges omoplates Qui saillent; le dos court qui rentre et qui ressort; Puis les rondeurs des reins semblent prendre I'essor; La graisse sous la peau parait en feuilles plates;

Then the neck, greasy and grey, the broad shoulderblades That stick out; the short back that goes in and out; Then the loins' roundness seems to rise and rise; The fat beneath the skin shows in flat layers;

L'echine est un peu rouge, et le tout sent un gout Horrible etrangement; on remarque surtout Des singularites qu'ilfaut voir a la loupe...

The spine's a little red; the taste of the whole Is weirdly ghastly; above all one remarks Oddities to be looked at with a magnify ing-glass ...

170 Chamber music Les reins portent deux mots graves: Clara Venus; - Et tout ce corps remue et tend sa large croupe Belle hideusement d'un ulcere a I'anus.

Tattooed upon the loins two words: Clara Venus; - And this whole body shifts, presenting its broad rump Hideously resplendent with a sore on the anus. Rimbaud, 'Venus Anadyomene'32

Wenn meine Schmerzen schweigen, Wer sagt mir dann von ihr?

If my pain is silent, Who will speak to me of her? Wilhelm Miiller, Die Winterreise^

(I am multiplying quotations - the second hands, as Compagnon says34 - to defer having to deal with Shakespeare. Throughout this book I try to treat him as a sonneteer: perversely ignoring the doxa that makes him, to every generation, a cultural token to be appropriated. But in the face of Death he will not let me. For some lovers, Death - their own, or the Beloved's - would be a relief. See the Sonnets as the text of a sursis: a stay of execution, made writing.) Dante at the beginning - Shakespeare at the end. (Or: Petrarch at the beginning - Shakespeare at the end.) At the dawn of the love-sonnet sequence, of this peculiar literary life-form, a Vita Nuova, a new life. A new life centred around a Death over which it claims to triumph. In the light of this Death, I need now to turn to another: the death of the lifeform itself, and the Death within that death. For Dante and Petrarch the Death was the privileged sign of their love's extratextual reality, as well as the crux of their texts themselves. Sidney, deprived of Nature's Death, discerned a moral one and signed reality otherwise; Spenser followed his deity in turning this Death into a vita nuova, signing reality with another ceremony, a different sacrament. The most extraordinary feature of Shakespeare's Sonnets /Lover's Complaint is that, in spite of the overwhelming impression it creates of an extratextual reality, not one reliable sign of such reality is afforded the reader. What we receive instead is a remarkable collection of false signs, of feints, which appear to mark a reality but never do so at all. There is, first of all, the name. Or rather, there isn't. Beatrice was Beatrice, Laura was Laure, Stella was Rich, Elizabeth was Elizabeth: in all cases, the major sonnet-sequences were marked by a refusal of the impenetrable senhal. In Shakespeare's text there are two Beloveds, of whom the woman is not named even indirectly. As for the Friend, 'Your

Death and the maiden 171 name from hence immortal life shall have, / Though I, once gone, to all the world must die' (81) - and yet not only is the name in question nowhere pronounced, but there is not even one reliable clue to it: as centuries of vain and foolish scholarly labours prove.35 The Poet/Lover's name, on the other hand, is named - no 'Astrophil' here, or a conflation with the simple 'I.' It is accurate - the poet's 'real' name - yet the reader is again confronted with a mischievous gesture: comme par hasard the Poet's name is also (like Eros's) an abstract noun, and an appallingly polysemic one at that. Not only is it, 'sardonically/36 used as such; it functions also as an interpretant, leading the reader back to the Sidneian intertext's 'leave love to Will' (A&S 4). One calendrical marker (Three winters cold ... Since first I saw you fresh/ 114) does not make a Canzoniere; and the notorious no. 107 ('Not mine owne feares, nor the prophetick soule') provides us with an apparent reality-marker which, once more, turns out to be a conundrum. And finally, of course, no Death, except in speculative anticipation. Nevertheless, there is no sonnet-sequence in which the reader's sense of an extratextual reality is so overwhelming. In my pursuit of the Death's fate in this text of the dying species, I am driven to ask Why, and above all How. I trust, in this case, the average reader, whose instinct is perfectly congruent with the little we know about the major sequences. I too am subject to this impression, which I believe to be both intentional and accurate; I am convinced that this sequence also reflects a 'loving in truth.' Shakespeare, however, has shown this love in verse by replacing the external reality-code with an internal one - so all-enveloping that the reader accepts it, without benefit of traditional clues, as not (based on) a fiction. We do not suspend disbelief: we believe, and are 'moved.' The Sonnets accomplish this principally by their continual subversion of doxa.37 Above, in Two-part invention/ I have shown how this text is produced by conversion of the Spenserian intertext. Here I want to go further: the entire doxa, the code(s), of both the sonnet-sequence and the love it reflects function(s) as the plural intertext the Sonnets convert to produce and establish their para-doxical text. By the late 15905 the (feeling) subject had been created and developed sufficiently for a new treatment of the sonnet-matter to be possible; only Drayton and Shakespeare showed themselves aware of this potential (Donne's Holy Sonnets were still in the future).38 But while Drayton and Donne used paradox as a sign, a marker, of 'wit/ Shakespeare exploited its full range as an insistent guarantee of reality. (A contributing factor, for which many of the plays give corroborative evidence, is an individual tendency on Shake-

172 Chamber music speare's part to see the real as always paradoxical - see the Shrew, the Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet in relation to their respective doxa.) An important part of this procedure is mystification. Shakespeare, one might say, mystifies the sonnet-sequence even as he demystifies its matter, by creating an alternative reality that is not fiction.39 'See/ insists this text's Poet/Lover, 'who I am (not)!' The Death, already several times transcoded and in the minor sequences forgotten, does not escape this bold and incisive process. Neither Beloved dies physically, nor does the Poet/Lover die morally; marriage, though it opens the sequence, is hors de question. Yet Death, not content to provide a centre and a fulcrum, expands: it fills and contaminates the entire text. The Shakespeare Sonnets are the text - in the strongest sense of the word: text to a sermon, text to a meditation, text to an experience - of the death of Love itself. This being the case, Death is no longer a sign that warrants the love's reality; on the contrary, the love and its 'truth' now warrant the reality of (their own) death. From marriage to a Platonic (Symposial) love, through the gradual corruption of this love via the subversion of all the code's conventions of cruelty and indifference (shown, now, in their horrifying and indecorous reality), to the closure of that love's text and discourse, the first part of the Sonnets is the histoire of Love's death and (as) constancy's reward. The second part replaces the defunct emotion with Desire, i.e., as it takes care to explain, with Death itself ('and I desperate now approove / Desire is Death, which Phisick did except/ 147); while the third part, the Lover's Complaint, substitutes a fiction of cynicism and banality for the Masses said for Beatrice's soul (in 'life') and for the promise of the Divine Comedy (in the text). The architecture of Shakespeare's text, then, is a desecrated cathedral, where a moribund procession comes to rest in a bare ruined choir. And it should, accordingly, come as no surprise that at the Death's classic position within the structure's proportions we find thevolta, the 'turn/ of the text's sonnet-part: the transition from the Friend to the Woman, from Love to Desire, from Life to Death. The progression from In Vita to In Morte thus finds itself restored; but with growing dismay the reader is forced to recognize that it is the vita Amoris which is here so lingeringly and discursively snuffed out. Earlier I wrote that, contrary to the usual view, the author/protagonists assume an awesome personal risk: that in creating a major lyrical genre around the core of the feeling subject, basing that genre on a guaranteed

Death and the maiden 173 extratextual reality, and allowing Death a crucial place within both the genre's world and its architecture, they elected to dance on the edge of the abyss. It is only Shakespeare who saw and accepted the full implications of the enterprise: only he suffered, indeed encouraged, his text to become the abyss itself. - Comment vous defendez-vous contre la solitude? - Monsieur, je suis devenue la solitude meme. Charles Morgan Epi/graph Mon angoisse est enfin I'absolue souveraine. Ma souverainete morte est a la rue. Insaisissable - autour d'elle un silence de tombe - tapie dans I'attente d'un terrible - et pourtant dans sa tristesse se rit de tout.

My terror is at last the absolute sovereign. My dead sovereignty is on the streets. Elusive - around it a silence of the grave - cowering in the expectation of something dreadful and yet in its sadness laughs at everything. Bataille40

10

Divertimento the text as desiring-machine

Nous avons longtemps cru ...aun croisement de la theorie et de la fiction: mais cet echange s'etait fait alors au detriment de la fiction. Le temps est venu ou I'echange est propose par une fiction plus assuree de ses pouvoirs demonstratifs, cognitifs. Les positions se sont inversees. Nous savons maintenant que la fiction pense: et que c'est la fiction qui vient enrichir la theorie, et non le contraire.

We have long believed in the possibility of an interchange between theory and fiction; but at the time that exchange worked to fiction's disadvantage. The time has come where it is fiction that takes the initiative for the exchange: a fiction more assured of its demonstrative and cognitive powers. The positions have been reversed. We know now that fiction thinks: and that it is fiction which is enriching theory, rather than the other way round. Sallenave J

A 'problem' like that of the Astrophil and Stella's first three quartos - the pedigree of the first, the mere appearance of the second, and the economics of the third - focuses attention upon the neglected 'downstream' aspect of the sonnet-sequence text: its distribution, its consumption, and (in some cases) its status as object of desire. It stimulates that side of research which resembles police work,2 and encourages us to explore ways in which traditional scholarship and modern critical practice may be of mutual society, help, and comfort. The story of this sequence's printing - unlike, say, that of the Arcadia's - is the story of two worlds, their inevitable conflict and their equally inevitable interdependence. It is the story of a Circle widened to breaking-point; and it is, ultimately, the story of the Defence of Poesy's noble

Divertimento 175 sentiments tested in the light of common day. Like the 'story' of the sonnet-sequence itself, it is available to us only by hint and by trace, a fact we should not regret - despite our hunger for wie es eigentlich gewesen but embrace as a challenge to our preconceptions. Briefly to recapitulate, the questions in the case are these: How did the text of Astrophil and Stella find its way to Thomas Newman? Why did he issue it in the form (or forms) we know as Qi? Why was it recalled almost as soon as issued? Why, and how, did he at once reissue it as Q2? And why did Matthew Lownes in 1597 produce Q3?3 I should like us to be conscious of the fact that I do not know the answers to these questions; that literary history (even when based on bibliography) is 'story'; and that my evidence is all circumstantial. I have reviewed all the accessible evidence as carefully as I could, and it has shown me traces of a story slightly different from those currently accepted. This story I should like to tell, if only as a day in the life, as a chapter in the biography of text. The tale begins some twenty years before Qi's appearance, at Shrewsbury School, Thomas Ashton's nursery of Protestant humanism. The Sidney family was a presence at this time: although we may discount some of Greville's and Moffett's hagiography,4 it is not hard to believe that the memory of Philip - the Lord President's impressive and charming son, the Earl of Leicester's heir-presumptive - lingered, among the masters at least. His younger brother was still there, and Sir Henry paid the school an occasional visit. At some such time, his attention was drawn to a bright and bookish boy I shall call A, in whose progress he appears to have taken a continuing interest.5 In 1576 A, who may have enjoyed some financial support from the Sidneys at this time, left Shrewsbury for St John's College, Cambridge, where he was matriculated pensioner on 26 May. Two-and-a-half years later he was accepted as a scholar on Lady Margaret's Foundation. In March 1579/80 he proceeded BA and acted in two of the College's Com mencement plays, Hymenaeus and Dr Legge's Ricardus Tertius. The following year he was elected a Fellow of the College, where he remained until he received his MA in 1583. During this time he had written a Lati play himself; encountered Philip Sidney and been enduringly impressed by him; plunged enthusiastically into the new intellectual fashion (rampant at St John's) of Ramist logic; constructed a logic of his own with examples drawn from contemporary literary practice, which he dedicated to Philip's older friend Edward Dyer; compared Ramus's logic to Aristotle's for Philip's benefit; and, finally, met an irrepressible young

176 Chamber music undergraduate who hated Ramism, enjoyed the kind of stage-shows A thought undignified, and whose friendship introduced A to a disquieting but attractive milieu of College low-life. This youngster was a sizar, paying his way by serving his betters, and it is entirely possible that he was appointed A's servant. During the three terms they knew each other at St John's, A received a glimpse of an irreverent, Rabelaisian, and Aristophanean company he would not forget. By 1583 A had made his way to London, where on 5 June he was admitted to Gray's Inn. Unlike many young gentlemen there, he had a profession to learn, and worked hard at his law-books. But his Cambridge attempts at writing were also bearing fruit, and the Inn's literary atmosphere so far influenced him as to carry him to St Dunstan's Churchyard in Fleet Street, where he met a young bookseller called Thomas Newman. Newman was at this time in the process of becoming a freeman of the Stationers' Company after eight years' apprenticeship to Ralph Newbery, and buying Henry Middleton's shop and stock of books for £i5O.6 At the same time, A was frequenting Baynard's Castle, the London house of the Earl of Pembroke, where Philip Sidney came often since his sister Mary had married the Earl in 1577. A clearly respected the young Countess to whom her brother had introduced him, and may well have been made welcome also at her country estate at Wilton. When Philip died in 1586, his protege was the more appreciated by the Countess for having known and honoured him; and when, the following year, he prepared his first book for publication, its dedication was to her. The book itself was a translation of a translation: Thomas Watson had, following an Italian voyage, rendered a pastoral work of Tasso's into neoLatin verse, and it was Watson's version that A now Englished - without mentioning its provenance. There was never any question as to who would handle the publication. Thomas Newman, after six years of simple bookselling, was ready for his first venture,7 and teamed up with his younger colleague Thomas Gubbin to do so. For its printing they engaged the egregious John Wolfe, formerly of the Fishmongers' Company, who was now - three years after the end of the printers' revolt against monopoly patents in which he had been the ringleader - settling into lucrative respectability.8 This book must have sold well, because the following year (Armada year) Newman and Gubbin not only had it reprinted, this time by John Charlewood, but ventured on no less than three more of A's titles. The first two - a recasting of A's Ramist logic in the light of his new career

Divertimento 177 and a Latin treatise on imprese - were issued simultaneously, and so given to different printers: the first to William How, the second to a contemporary of Newman's, Thomas Orwin, whose shop was close to young Gubbin's in Paternoster Row. Orwin, who had succeeded to George Robinson's business by the common expedient of marrying the latter's widow and had just been given permission to print again after some trouble with the Star Chamber, seems to have become a trusted and enduring associate of A's, for he printed all A's subsequent work. The third book of A's to appear in Armada year was entered by Newman and Gubbin on 11 June, and again printed by Orwin. It was this work, a characteristically trendy melange of philosophy and literature macaronically dedicated to the Countess, which was to bring A what little fame posterity has accorded him. At some time during this period A also had a sight of the sainted Sidney's works in manuscript, including the Astrophil and Stella. The first MS he saw was the Countess's own (which Ringler refers to as X).9 From this he was allowed to copy some passages he needed for a work he was preparing. However, you will recall that he was also, like his acquaintance Edmund Spenser, 'in some use of familiarity' with Edward Dyer, to whom he had dedicated an early manuscript. And at some point he borrowed Dyer's manuscript (Ringler's Z), from which Sir John Harington - another of Dyer's acquaintances - had copied his version (Ringler's Z1) A made his own copy of Z, which I shall call Z2, and added to it some other poems: at least one by Thomas Campion, whom he had known at Gray's Inn10, one by Fulke Greville, and later some recent sonnets by Samuel Daniel, whom he had met through Greville.11 Now there arrived in London the alarming, ferociously cheerful young ex-sizar from St John's, with a Bachelor's but no Master's degree (wicked tongues suggested that a cloud had come along and he had left under it); with a manuscript in his pocket; and more than ready to live by his pen and his wits. He was of course Thomas Nashe;12 and within months he had persuaded the elderly bookseller Thomas Hacket to produce what would be Hacket's final venture: the Anatomic of Absurditie, printed by John Charlewood.13 A meeting with Robert Greene then brought Nashe a commission: the older writer helped the younger by asking him to write a Preface for Greene's new Menaphon.^ And around this time - perhaps in the shop of Charlewood, who was just then reprinting Newman and Gubbin's first successful venture, or in Or win's, who was printing Menaphon - Nashe ran into none other than A, whom he had not seen for five years.

178 Chamber music I must dwell for a moment on this meeting. It is of course imaginary: in the realm of scholarship I have no proof that it occurred. Yet it is also true; and it was to have momentous consequences. So how are you and I to deal with it? The answer (which I cannot give you) is a test of all our attitudes to our profession. It reminds us - to expand upon what I wrote above - that literary history sometimes cannot choose but be closer to literature than to history. May we, for instance, imagine A and Nashe in a Thames-side tavern on a rainy December day, sipping sack and sugar, catching up on 'news'? Or do we, fleeing from the forbidden shade of Sir Walter Scott, dutifully resist such 'rosy images of a merry Elizabethan England peopled by quaint harmless eccentrics'?15 And if we do, what does that tell us about the Order of our Discourse? Be this as it may, a link was re-established (let us, austerely, say) between the two men; and in this way a link, also, between two worlds. A carried with him the world of the Sidney Circle, as we have learnt to call it; which really consisted of two concentric circles. In the inner ring the Countess and her husband, Robert Sidney, Edward Dyer, and Fulke Greville; in the outer, such figures as Robert Beale, Nicholas Breton, Lodowick Bryskett, Samuel Daniel, Dr Moffett, Daniel Rogers, Hugh Sanford, Edmund Spenser, and of course A himself. What bound them was the inner Circle's extreme devotion to the memory of St Philip and his ideals: ideals that were pursued with each year a little more absolutism and (deprived of Philip himself, of his urbane charm) each year a little less sense of humour.16 Their principles, one senses, were of the very highest, their taste was exquisite if narrow, and their humourlessness seems at times to rival that of the middle-class Puritans from whom they were in other ways careful to distance themselves. The Countess was the centre, and such appears to have been her intransigence that even the most faithful among the others, such as Greville and Daniel, could not indefinitely abide the climate of her dedication.17 In the December tavern we may (not) imagine, this world, through A, touched Nashe's: a world of English Aretinos, living by its wits, always in trouble and occasionally in gaol. A world where the pen was not a hero's sword but a ruffian's dagger, where literary and political controversy was conducted with the zest and the violence of a Hell's Angels party. Nashe told A the inside story - so far as he knew it - of the Marprelate brawl;18 he had just been approached by Someone Who Shall Be Nameless and told, on the Government's behalf, to hold himself in readiness for the office of a counter-thug. Printed missiles were gleefully taking shape in his mind - An Almond for a Parrot, Mar-phoreus - : each

Divertimento 179 could be ready within a fortnight of Their asking, and he would be well paid. Meanwhile, he had got to know Tom Watson quite well, who was writing some lines of Latin puffery for Greene's latest snippet on Cicero's youthful love-life; did A know that Watson was joking about dreadful revenges he would take for A's unacknowledged translation? All perfectly legal, A replied, uneasily. How about the Gascoigne/Turbervile book on hunting?19 Of course, of course, said Nashe, with a twinkle in his eye ... Speaking of Latin, he went on: he was just reading some translations of Ovid's elegies by a Cambridge friend who had come down the year before: did A remember Marlowe of Corpus? He had become a great friend of Watson's. A did, all too well, and hurriedly changed the subject. He himself was about to be called to the Bar, and since he was ambitious and his patron - or, should we say, his patron's husband - the Earl of Pembroke was now Lord President of the Marches, he would try to obtain a practice at Ludlow. It would be far from the Court, but what (he said, proudly) was the Court to one admitted to the austere civility of Pembrokiana? He would, however, from time to time be in London; and it would give him pleasure to meet Nashe again. At Newman's, perhaps, his whereabouts could be ascertained, or at Charlewood's or Orwin's? He hoped, at their next encounter, to have something to show Nashe which, as a fellow-admirer of Sir Philip Sidney, he would appreciate something, moreover, a little more up Nashe's street than all this modish French philosophy. Over two years went by. A appears to have been at Ludlow, making a good impression on both professional and literary fronts. In August 1590 Pembroke wrote to Burghley, asking him to intercede with Her Majesty so that A, 'in that Court... a pleader at the barre... bred up by my brother Sir Philip Sidney long in Cambridge,' might have John Amy as's now-vacant post of Queen's Solicitor at the Council in the Marches. He courteously reminded the Lord Treasurer of the request on 9 September; and thanked him for his successful efforts in a letter of 28 April 1591, which makes it clear that he, the Earl, had personally 'moved her Majestic' to grant the suit. Moreover, A's literary work had evidently pleased the Countess whose favour he so assiduously courted, for on 9 February 1591, his two new books - appealing simultaneously to the Countess's twin appetites for pastoral flattery and Protestant devotion - received the Circle's official accolade: they were entered by William Ponsonby, the accredited 'adventurer' of both the Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Orwin, A's friend, was again to be the printer.

180 Chamber music Nashe, meanwhile, responded to other calls and achieved a different success. Marphoreus had been commissioned, written and printed (by Orwin) in 1589; An Almond for a Parrot in the spring of 159O.20 After this disreputably brilliant defence of an embarrassed establishment, he had turned his hand to 'overgoing' Marlowe and out-Oviding Ovid; and had produced, later in that same year, A Choice of Valentines, which he considered the first original Ovidian elegy in English but which we remember rather as the only piece of Elizabethan pornography that retained its power to embarrass right-thinking people until well into the twentieth century.21 Also known at the time as 'Nashe's Dildo/ the Choice was eagerly circulated in manuscript - three of them signed22 - and clearly unsuitable for print: functioning thus, to our view, as a sort of parody of the manuscripts that circled in the circles of the Sidney Circle; reminding us that there were manuscript subcultures on both sides of the printed wor(l)d; and suggesting the strong possibility that one of these MS copie found its surreptitious way into Baynard's Castle. This last would not be surprising. Harvey read 'thy unprinted packet of bawdye, and filthy Rymes';23 Spenser may have done; and so may some of the Earl's younger literary-minded hangers-on. The Countess and her friends would have been briefly outraged, and then quickly dismissed such foulness from their minds. But they would remember the name. In the summer of 1591A and Nashe met again, probably in London. A had been promised the post of Queen's Solicitor, and may have come down to deal with preparations for taking up the office. Nashe was at work on his second book, Pierce Pennilessey^ A had just published his fifth and sixth, rededicating to the Countess the fifth edition of his first work (this time with Watson's name prudently included - the witty playwright's revenge had so far been confined to an acerbic remark in the Preface to his elegy on Walsingham, but one never knew) with some (acknowledged) Tasso added on, and a versification of the life of Christ with eight Psalms. He had been true to his word, and now showed Nashe his personal Sidneian treasure: what I have called MS Z2, his own copy o Astrophil and Stella, with some other poems he admired. Nashe was impressed. For all his low-life habits, he was a man of excellent taste in language. And who could better appreciate the energia with which the 'English Petrarke' had utterly transformed the inbred progeny of the Italian? This, truly, was a worthy counterpart to last year's printing of the Arcadia.25 An idea began to form in his mind. Very cautiously, he edged the conversation around to a diffident request.

Divertimento 181 Might he borrow this treasure until A's departure back to Ludlow? With some misgivings, but with a heart warmed by shared admiration for the Sidney heritage, A agreed. Z2 changed hands, and A went about his business. The Circle - the second ring - had been broken. Now Nashe -aut Nashius aut diabolus - very nearly ran to Charlewood's printing-house. Charlewood too was impressed, and scented a coup. Why not ask Thomas Newman if he was interested in the commercial side of the venture? Not long after, Nashe - his sense of humour mightily stimulated by the irony of A's manuscript in the hands of A's own former publisher - arrived at St Dunstan's Churchyard. Newman also recognized a breakthrough when he saw one. One good turn deserved another: would Nashe be interested in writing a Preface? Nashe would indeed. This was better than Menaphon, and it would link him with the magic name of Sidney. Now Newman thought ahead: to whom could he dedicate such a prize? The opportunity must not be wasted. Clearly, with the MS obtained the way it was, it could not be the Countess: legal and above-board the venture might be, but she was renowned for her jealous guardianship of the Sacred Texts and could not be expected to be pleased, any more than could, say, Greville. Then Newman, who had dedicated an early venture to Sir Christopher Hatton's nephew,26 thought of a Hatton client who was interested (in more ways than one) in the printing and bookselling world: Francis Flower. Germaine Warkentin, who sees him as the villain of the story, has done excellent work on Flower's identity and connections, which I will not duplicate here; except perhaps to offer a modest defence of this admittedly rapacious man. On the one hand we have a very sharp letter by Burghley to Walsingham about him, which Warkentin prints; on the other, his acceptance into the highly principled 'Puritan Earl' of Huntingdon's circle of patronage, his receiving of a pension and his appointment as a Gentleman Pensioner, and his intimate and affectionate correspondence with Sir John Conway, who was not only a notably upright man but Fulke Greville's uncle.27 Can a man who in February of 1591 was on such terms with Sir John have been quite such anathema, a few short months later, to his nephew and the Circle? Newman had another, more precise and professional, interest in Flower's patronage. When the latter had received the honorary post of Her Majesty's Latin Printer in 1573, he had assigned the monopoly patent for the printing of the Grammar and Accidence to a syndicate of one printer and five booksellers: Christopher Barker, John Wight, William Norton, John Harrison, Garret Dewes, and Richard Watkins. Of this group, which

182 Chamber music paid Flower £100 per annum for the assignment, Barker was sixty-two: he had appointed the partnership of George Bishop and Ralph Newbery his deputies in the management of his large, five-press business, and was grooming his eldest son for the succession. John Wight had died in 1589 and been succeeded by his son; Watkins, Harrison, and Norton were still in business. However, Garret Dewes, who had been in semi-retirement since his wife's death in 1583, died on 12 April 1591, without a widow who could, or a son who would, carry on his shop.28 It seems more than likely that Newman hoped, through Flower's influence, to obtain Dewes's share in the patent's assignment, and/or some help in the licensing of lucrative titles.29 Flower, approached, graciously permitted the dedication. Meanwhile Newman, conscious that he had a borrowed manuscript and that no time was to be lost, set his three apprentices - Thomas Chaunce, Matthew Selman, and the newly arrived John Smythick30 - to copying Z2 as quickly as they could. That the high-pressure scribal reproduction of a MS of some hundred leaves by three not particularly motivated apprentices on hot and tempting summer days is not a formula for an accurate text will be readily appreciated; and the resulting manuscript (which I shall call Z3) explains Ringler's judgment 'either that it [Qi] was printed with almost unbelievable carelessness, or more probably that it descends from Z through one or more carelessly executed intermediaries.'31 As soon as Z3 was completed, Newman returned Z2 to Nashe, who gave it back to A. Should he tell A of the plan to publish? Did he, in fact, do so? My own feeling is that he did not; knowing of As dependence on the Countess, whose displeasure at the publication could be safely assumed, I suspect that Nashe thought it better not to tell his friend anything, so that if there were to be recriminations, A might be safely tucked away at Ludlow and perhaps not even suspected. (I may be attributing far too noble motives to Nashe; but purely selfish considerations would have led him to the same reticence.) Newman did not enter his 'copy/ This has long been seen as part of the publication's skulduggery-aspect; but fully one-third of all books printed were not entered, and it is clear that there existed other, equally effective ways of establishing copyright.32 In view of the available evidence, what seems likeliest is that Newman was quite prepared for the Countess and her friends to be displeased (though Nashe had carefully said some nice things about her in the Preface - more, one suspects, as a disclaimer, since he had also referred

Divertimento 183 to her and her circle as the text's 'keepers' from whom it had escaped); but that he did not reckon this to be terribly important,33 and that he assumed normal passage and brisk sales. Z3 now went to Charlewood's printing-house, where it was set by two compositors:34 a fact that may indicate that Charlewood, who was a busy printer with two presses,35 had been apprised of the project's urgency. If fragmentary statistics are anything to go by, the first Quarto of Astrophil and Stella now appeared in an edition of some 750 copies,36 selling for somewhere around 5d.37 With the renewed interest in the Sidney name occasioned by Ponsonby's 1590 Arcadia to back it, and graced with Nashe's delightful Preface, the volume was set to make Newman the full £15/12/6 of its market value, with every possibility of enough demand for a second edition in short order.38 Then the storm broke. How did it break? I strongly suspect Nashe, with characteristic brashness now that the deed was done, of presenting A with a copy, sent perhaps to Ludlow or delivered to Baynard's Castle. A was mortified but felt obliged, penitently, to inform the Countess. It seems clear that her fury knew no bounds. Yet what exactly occasioned it? I cannot believe that Francis Flower, ampelopsis39 though he may have been, was the sole or even the chief cause. Let me propose a composite alternative: In the first place, and perhaps most stingingly, the Circle had been broken. Not with the noble Arcadia, and not through the trusted Ponsonby: what had gone outside - what had escaped - to the pawing of the vulgar was her sainted brother's most controversial text, a 'toy' of amorous sonnets, of which the scandalous associations could only imperfectly be suppressed (if Sir John Harington could so easily put Stella and Rich together,40 what moderately astute courtier in St Dunstan's Churchyard could not?). Truly this was perhaps the last text Mary would wish to see 'enlarged.' Secondly, a glance at the odious book showed her at once that the text of her brother's sonnets had not even been accorded the respect of accuracy. This might not normally have been a problem; but in this particular case being bothered by it should not, I think, be dismissed as a modern 'intellectual's desire to correct.'41 For the Countess, such matters were related to what she regarded as her sacred trust; and in its behalf, normal standards of flexibility could and must be put aside. Thirdly, there was the insult of the dedication: not to herself, the patron honoris causa of all that pertained to her brother's legacy (the fact

184 Chamber music that she would not have accepted was quickly forgotten), but to some grasping client of Hatton's! True, Greville said that his uncle spoke well of the man; but that was not the point. However, what finally, I am sure, broke the camel's back was the Preface. That Philip's love-sonnets should arrive at the reader's eye-any reader's eye - via an odiously glib and disgustingly charming introduction by the guttersnipe of An Almond, and - what was infinitely worse by the lip-smackingly popular pornographer-in-chief of Nashe's Dildo, the latest red-hot item on the underground snigger-circuit! I have no trouble at all imagining the rage of the Keeper of the Shrine, the versifier of the Psalms, the translator of Gamier, the inspirer of Daniel's Cleopatra. It must have been very nearly as awesome as one of the Queen's own tantrums. Pace the shade of A.A. Milne, what followed appears to have been something like this: the Client told the Countess, the Countess told the Earl, the Earl told the Lord Treasurer (Burghley, who seems traditionally to have dealt with high-level snags involving the book-trade),42 the Treasurer leaned on the Stationers' Company, and Something Was Done. A good part of the edition was called in, and John Wolfe, the Company's Beadle (the poacher now turned gamekeeper) rode especially to assure Burghley - on Progress with the Queen - that the matter had been attended to. What is intriguing, incidentally, is the 'zero factor' in the case: what was not done. Newman's press was not destroyed, his type not defaced. Clearly, the maximum penalty was not applied; as the 1575 case of William Patten's now-lost Kenilworth book shows, simple confiscation was the standard penalty for a successful external complaint, as a fine was the intra-Company sanction.43 Nevertheless, Newman also was angry. He had published in good faith; he had probably paid Charlewood and Nashe; and he was now going to lose money, to say nothing of such a scandal's nullifying any chance of the dedication's having its hoped-for effect. Which brings us to the questions surrounding Q2. Again, the story the traces suggest to me is a slightly different one. I agree with Lavin that Ringler's suggestion of Q2 as Newman's penance44 is unlikely: considering the insouciance with which authors' (or their representatives') displeasure was regularly treated, Q2 was more probably his reward. Newman was not required to deal directly with the Sidney Circle; and I suspect that, the edition duly called in, he came to an arrangement with the Company. He would remove the offending preliminaries, if they

Divertimento 185 would let him recoup his loss with a second edition. Moreover, he would do his best not further to offend the Circle by correcting the text if a suitable MS could be procured. Daniel is currently - and I believe correctly - accepted as the most probable provider of the MS used for the correction.45 It stemmed from Y which I have liked to think of as Greville's; but Greville himself was in all likelihood at Ludlow during this period, so that Daniel's own copy of Y let us call it Y1 - is a better candidate. So Newman had his tacit permission and his manuscript for correction; but now another snag appeared. Charlewood turned him down. Several reasons are possible: he had two presses but was one of the few printers rarely out of work; he was getting old (he had been printing for thirty years, and was to stop in 1593); and quite possibly, as a prudent and respectable craftsman, he refused to touch this particular hot potato again. Rather surprisingly - and there is perhaps some lingering anger in this - Newman now turned to a very young printer who had just opened his own shop. It may have been Nashe who introduced him to John Danter: a few years later the English Aretine was living in Danter's house, and their association was immortalized in the turn-of-the-century Cambridge Parnassus Plays.46 Danter, as an apprentice to John Day, had been involved in a monopoly-busting transgression against, ironically, the Flower Assigns,47 had been banned from printing, seen the ban revoked, been forced into a partnership with William Hoskins and Nashe's friend Henry Chettle,48 but was now, at last independent, with one small ballad to his name.49 Not surprisingly, he agreed at once to Newman's proposal. In the tradition of Shakespeare bibliographers, he is the 'notorious Jack Danter';50 Leo Kirschbaum, making an entirely correct point about QI of Romeo and Juliet (which Danter printed six years later), exonerates him and calls him 'poor, struggling John Danter.'51 It would be tempting to believe that he has simply been maligned; yet if that is so, how can we explain the fact that, with 'an almost perfect manuscript to work from/ the Q2 corrector 'worked in an exceedingly haphazard and slipshod fashion,' producing a result 'about as inaccurate as it is possible to get/ as Ringler puts it?52 Either Newman, in haste or in vengefulness, had told Danter only to go through the motions of correcting, or Danter really was (at this stage of his career at least) an exceptionally incompetent printer. In any case, the farce ceased after sonnet 95, when MS Y1 was withdrawn lost, burnt, or became in some other way unavailable. Newman briskly brought out the edition and sold it, recouping some of his losses; and

186 Chamber music when it was all over he turned away from this inconvenient episode, washed his hands of the Sidney Circle, and teamed up with his colleague John Winnington and Danter to produce the comedy Fair Em.53 Our story, however, does not end there. It will by now, I suppose, be clear that the culprit of my whodunnit, the hapless A, is Abraham Fraunce,54 that literary lawyer we left at Ludlow, happily published under the imprint of the Circle's bookseller and awaiting the start of his duties as the Queen's Solicitor to the Council in the Marches. One of the more intriguing items in the case shows that he did not get off scot-free. Although Pembroke's letter to Burghley, on 28 April makes it clear that Fraunce had obtained the position, he was never allowed to occupy it: on 19 October it was one Thomas Medlicote who was appointed to succeed John Amyas. Clearly Fraunce had received a severe slap on the wrist from the inner Circle. He seems to have continued in the Court as a simple lawyer. Moreover, his last book, The Third Part of the Countess of Pembrokes Yin/church, Entituled Amintas Dale (tales of the pagan gods in English hexameters),55 was no longer allowed to appear under Ponsonby's name. His friend Orwin, still Fraunce's printer, placed it with Thomas Woodcock, his habitual business partner since 1589. And within a year of its publication, Fraunce was dead at thirty-five: 1592-3 was a notorious plague-year,56 and it seems probable that he incautiously came to London, perhaps to see Orwin. One more chapter in the tale remains, before I turn to its semiotics. Six years after Qi's appearance, the literary landscape had changed drastically. In the wake of the Astrophil and Stella, no fewer than sixteen other sonnet-sequences had flooded the market, ranging in quality from Daniel's 1592 Delia to Robert Linche's 1596 Diella. On this strong tide, Ponsonby's solid argosy had sailed confidently ahead: the 1590 Arcadia and Faerie Queene i-m had been followed by the 1593 composite Arcadia and the 1596 Faerie Queene i-vi; in 1595 he effortlessly wrested control of Sidney's Defence of Poesy away from Henry Olney,57 and published Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion. And now, in 1597, he was planning the biggest Sidney venture of all: the Countess was preparing for him Our Dead Hero's last monumental entombment, a First Folio. Scheduled to appear in 1598, it would contain all the literary Works, and Ponsonby had calculated its selling-price at a hefty nine shillings.58 As word of this monument got around, another young bookseller saw his chance. Matthew Lownes, who had brought out his first title the year before, had managed to obtain one of the now-scarce copies of Astrophil and Stella's Qi. Quick calculation suggested to him that a market existed

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for a cheaper edition than the nine-shilling monster planned by the Circle: the sonnet-boom might have peaked59 but a swift profit might still be made from the text that had started it all. So Lownes engaged Felix Kingston,60 who had only just transferred himself from the Grocers and obtained his freedom on 25 June to print the book. It was almost like old times; but the anger was gone. The Circle was engaged on the Folio, and - especially with the old prelims not in question - remained unconcerned with minnows. Ponsonby recognized that Lownes had been too quick for him, and that little could be done. That little, though, he did: on 23 October 1598, he took the unusual step of entering 'A book called ASTROPHELL and STELLA'61 - the only component of the Folio to receive a separate entry. The small fry had had their day: from now on the deserving would duly gather the harvest. Well, nearly. The story ends with two ironic footnotes. Within a year of the First Folio's majestic appearance, it was pirated: a cut-price version under Waldegrave's Edinburgh imprint was launched by a syndicate at six shillings - a clear indication that Lownes's misgivings about the Ponsonby price (and his calculation of the demand) had been correct. Ponsonby sued at once, and won.62 The tomb was erected, the text confined: the monument stood. The final irony belongs to Lownes himself who, on 5 November 1604, became joint owner with Simon Waterson of the title to the Folio.6? At the beginning of this chapter I proposed it not only as a trial marriage between traditional scholarship and modern criticism but as a day in the life, as a chapter in the biography of text. This last is a concept worth developing; but here is rather the place for its practice than for its theory. Any new biography of a known personage is picked up and judged for two traits: a coherent, convincing, and pleasing narrative based on the known facts, and an interpretation of those facts (and, by implication, of its own narrative) which will cause the reader to experience the pleasure of thought. An interpretation of the Astrophil and Stella's Flegeljahre - its youth and bratty years, its adolescence, we might say - is necessarily an exercise in semiotics, seeing the facts in the case, and the 'history' they suggest, as signs. In writing one I am trying to discover the structure, the Gestalt, created by these signs; and since such 'structures of significance' notoriously will not stay still, I am prepared to find - and to engage - a moving structure, a shape that is still writing itself through the hollow tube which is my pen. The shape which forms, in the biography of Astrophil and Stella, is that

i88 Chamber music of Desire. The post-Petrarchan text that so courageously engaged Desire as the undesirable but inseparable companion of the search for the Other (Stella, Love, poesy itself) has become, by 1591, the text of desire, a Helen in the first flickering flames of Troy. It is, during these years, itself an Other: most easily understood as not subject but object, the silent centre of a tempest of its own creation. What is extraordinary is the tension, the violence, with which it is unceasingly desired, its capacity to generate a discourse of significant action that illustrates its own transgressive premises far more than it conforms to the ideal reception-theory of the Defence.64 The principal combat surrounding it is the eternal one between Text and Work. To Newman, to Charlewood, to Danter, to Flower, to Lownes, to Kingston, and even to Ponsonby, it is text: as 'copy' it is part of the endless chain of signifiers, of writing, of moveable type to be composed, printed, distributed, its transcoded result entering another chain of paper to be sold, impounded, remaindered, disseminated, distributed to the chandlers, 'a Rembrandt torn into squares and put in the Jakes' (Genet/Derrida/G/fls).65 It is there to be got hold of, to be touched, handled, bought, processed, sold, bound, and forgotten. Part of Time's river, it is substantial but ephemeral, coterminous with Time itself, biodegradable. To the Circle, on the other hand, it is a Work: it closes itself upon a signified,66 it is about something, it means something. What it means to them, on the other hand, even in its primary sense, is hard for us to discern. Overtly, a sonnet - even a sonnet-sequence, a genre for which, significantly, the age had no word - was a 'toy,' at best nugatory, at worst lubricious. It is hard not to believe that part of the Countess's anger stemmed from the tensions inherent in having to regard such a trifle as part of the Sacred Works of her sainted brother, to live with it and to defend it as such. Defend it the Circle does; and in doing so their actions reveal an equally violent, though different, desire. It is to them Work by definition of auctoritas but not incontrovertibly by its nature: they desire it, but they desire it to become Work, to submit, to stay still; they defend it not only against the transgressive desire of others but also against its own embarrassing tendency to become an opera aperta - to become Text. Between the Family and the Suitors - between the Circle and the World - stand two figures who, with varying degrees of pleasure and address, play Pandarus. Thomas Nashe is the one for whom (and in whose writing) Work and Text combine, who steps with ease from one to the other without feeling, or making us feel, that he is entering a foreign

Divertimento 189 country. He is the Panurge, the Hermes, the trickster-psychopomp who runs the frontiers of was die Mode streng geteilt. He is undaunted by the lauzengiers, the busily whispering slanderers who have surrounded this Rich text and its lovers from the beginning, and cheerfully attaches the rope-ladder to the bedroom window. Aut Nashius aut diabolus. The man caught between the warring factions is Fraunce. Fraunce the Ramist, the trendy and ambitious intellectual, with an intellectual's veneration of magnates who appreciate his values; but with, too, an intellectual's naivete when faced with an immemorial streetwise Hermes in the subversive service of Text. Fraunce, one might almost say, is an Astrophil, loving in truth an Other, a world, that he genuinely admires, however ambitiously - the world of the Work, the Circle of the signified; but betrayed by his hamartia, his fatal weakness, his own desire for Desire the desire that recks nothing of Works or of auctoritas, that deconstructs every signified toward the amoral purity of Text.67 And what of the work, the text, itself? In 1973, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari published a disconcerting but illuminating article called 'Bilanprogramme pour machines desirantes' ('Balance-sheet programme for desiring machines').68 Their concept of a 'desiring machine' is an abstract one: as in the nomadic war-machine formed by the man-horse-bow complex under the conditions of the steppe, 'man constitutes a machine as soon as this nature is communicated by recurrence to the ensemble of which he forms a part under given specific conditions.'69 In other words, desiring-machines have an objective existence: they 'are not in our heads, in our imagination, they are inside the social and technical machines themselves.'70 Capitalism, for instance, despite its tendency to produce tools and ally itself with Oedipal repression, functions nevertheless as a desiring machine. Astrophil and Stella, I submit, is (part of) such a desiring-machine. Desire is the energy that flows through, not only every area of its own delimited body, but through every moment and dimension of its being-in-the-world. In the years of its life of which Qi, Q2 and Q3 are the 'events,' this extraordinarily transgressive nexus, as desiring-machine, 'in itself is the break-flow process,' created and constituted not by individual parents but by 'a collective full body, the engineering agency on which the machine installs its connections and effects its ruptures.'71 Break/flow: between the inner and the outer circles of the Circle, between the Circle and the World, between Work and Text. And what if Astrophil and Stella were a subsection of a larger desiring-machine? This, of course, is the printing and bookselling system, Oedipal in its

190 Chamber music gadgets but Anti-Oedipal in its continual generation and suppression, its break/flow, of the desire of Text - the valorization of the signifier, the multiplication of hands on pages, the machine that draws into itself the whole world, that can allow an apprentice to buy a Countess, thumb her, stain her, and forget her, and can use the gaps inherent in a sonnetsequence to deconstruct Nobility and let in the disseminative flow of Text.?2 Seen in this way, the manuscript circulation of such a sequence - the life for which its 'engineering agency' had prepared it - seems at first like a successful non-disseminative desiring-machine which, by functioning within a closed Circle, confines Desire and confirms that Circle's borders.73 In fact, though, it is a machine with a built-in virus. For a second desiringmachine, the printing-bookselling system, has attached itself to it, and uses its circulated ritual objects as food and as fuel. As soon as this happens, an interface occurs (which the formerly closed Circle must necessarily begin by seeing as a locus of transgression), and the breaking of the Circle, by being made possible, has been made inevitable. The degree to which this is true is symbolized by the recurrence of the pattern at one further remove, the fate of the Folio: this monumental format is the Circle's counterstrike, the last-ditch attempt to control the flow of desire by limiting the larger machine's action - creating within it a counterpart of the smaller machine. Its immediate pirating signifies echec: it emphasizes the fact that the borders are henceforth open, that dissemination is assured, that as the auctor is dead, the Work will be always dying - into the flow of desire, the sexuality of Text.

11

Four-part fugue indeterminacy and undecideability

L'armature intellectuelle du poeme, se dissimule et-a lieu - tient dans I'espace qui isole les strophes et parmi le blanc du papier; significatif silence qu'il n'est pas mains beau de composer que les vers. Puisque ces mysteres me depassent,feignons d'en etre I'organisateur.

Mallarme1 Cocteau2

1

When the bed first answered back, Astrophil wondered if he was going mad. Then he remembered that he had merely lost his Reason, and with a sigh of relief gave it - and other interlocutors - his full attention. Beyond the window, the highway muttered. A dog's bark and the cheep of a sparrow joined in. With a malign whisper, Cupid spoke to him from the saddle. A friend's voice (was it old Hubert again?) shouted to make itself heard. A coach rattled by, its curtains possibly drawn. And behind it all, the unceasing murmur of the Muse. Not for the first time, Astrophil reflected curiously upon the space he was trapped in. He had tried to raise (Edmund) in the next volume; but (Edmund), who was himself but not a name, pretended to be in Ireland and courtship. Two tomes away, Will, ambiguously triangulating, could not hear: which was probably just as well. 2

The trouble with this space was that it would not let him think his body.

192 Chamber music Yet every time he was lifted from the shelf, he felt new eyes completing him. Within a week, sometimes a day, his hair went from blond to brown to black, his frame from sturdy to slender, his features from grave to aquiline to fresh. Only his Desire came furiously erect for every reader; and his usually formless ears were doomed to hear Stella's refusal repeated time after painful time. He felt old and very tired. But his Maker, in his questionable wisdom, had given him not only no determination but no end. No state funeral for Astrophil; and (he kept coming back to this, obsessively) no shape, even. He existed, he knew, in parts, and damned few of those. Sometimes he felt like one enormous Gap. 3

A fugue is not merely Bach and grand. 'Fugue' is flight; in this case a Flucht nach vorne, a fleeing ahead, a (four-part) flight forwards. It is, thus, part of criticism's violent enlargement from its keepers (see Nashe's preface to Astrophil and Stella). An organized, orchestrated flight: a dance forwards, a disconcerting concert of variations on a ground (full) of gaps and whites. 4

Any setting-out of a ground of gaps and whites must begin by disconcerting. For the gaps, like the codes of criticism, normally go unnoticed.3 To write about them without writing in them is a task fraught with hazard. Yet it is, in a sense, the essence of criticism which, being at all times a gloss, cannot but occupy the white around and between the (poetic) texts. The danger of writing a gloss about the gaps is that there is no space for such a metatext, except to write across the text itself. This, then, is a crossing of the text(s) - like an old-fashioned cheque or an eighteenth-century letter - in order to save the white: to save space. We (you and I: indeterminate through each other's gaps) will cross them together. Not as Virgil and Dante crossed the nether world, for no matter how pleasurable or terrifying the distractions, the end was always in view. But in a fugue, dancing forward not innocently but with care; as a noncombatant might have crossed No-Man's-Land - or rather, perhaps, a deserter. A deserter crosses at the same human peril as an innocent, but in addition he knows his going a flight and a transgression; and although the intention of his destination is firm he has no clear idea or fore-conceit of what he will find upon arrival.

Four-part fugue 193 5

We will cross the texts also in their seeming purpose. To be written, to be printed, is to make your mark: to be present, to impinge, to instruct, to delight, to move. Exploring gaps, we will cross these meanings, these Imean-to-says. We will listen to the texts, but not to what they want to say. Rather, to what they say in spite of themselves, to what they cannot help saying; and, most disconcertingly, to what they appear not to say at all. Our reading and the texts will be - and guiltlessly - at cross-purposes. 6

Finally we may find, at the end of our text, that we have crossed over. The text is first a ptyx,4 then a Styx. Exploring the gaps of the first, can we fail to find the second? Three sequences of love-sonnets cannot fail to engage us in our death (which physic did except). Crossing the ab-ject to study its gaps is to subvert (every parallel between) the texts and our lives: it is doing what comes naturally in order to cross over the immortality of art in order to reach, through the little death, the Big One. To plunge into the gaps of three texts that de-scribe love in short spurts is to accomplish the erosis5 of the texts. It is one way to reach Bataille's 'sovereignty' of (self-)abandonment in the face of Death.6 7

First we must agree on a choice of no-man's-lands. I propose a brief Taxonomy of Gaps (later to be written over). In so doing, I refer to other, theoretical texts. Not to place them in the margins of the sonnetsequences, which would defeat my purpose; but to cross the sequences with them (first). This preliminary crossing will produce our own, which will thus wear openly its status as a hybrid. 8

The first in our taxonomy - as numbers i and 2, above, have shown - is what we may call Ingarden's Gap. Such gaps are what the Polish philosopher referred to as Unbestimmtheitsstellen, translated by Grabowicz as 'spots of indeterminacy' and by Iser as 'gaps of indeterminacy.'7 Ingarden's Gap is not a physical but an intellectual phenomenon. In the context of his analysis, it belongs to the Stratum of Represented Objects, and is

194 Chamber music what distinguishes any object represented in language from the corresponding (or any) 'real' object. A real object is absolutely determined; while, no matter how exhaustive the description, an object represented in language will invariably present gaps of (in-)determinacy. These allow/force the reader to, in part, complete the 'picture'; in fact his doing so is habitual and largely unconscious. Ingarden's Gap on one level is very simply grasped, and may seem trivial; yet on another it is of the greatest importance. In Ingarden's work, it helps to define the manner of a literary work's being, and the nature and range of its mimetic activity. For the present study, it is a useful gap with which to begin: both the most intellectually remote and the most embedded in subsequent theoretical concerns, it allows the beginning of subversion by way of apparent application. 9

The second is Iser's Gap.8 This is essentially an extension of Ingarden's, effected by transfer from the Stratum of Represented Objects to that of Schematized Aspects (Ingarden) or Schematized Views (Iser).9 This transfer is at the same time one from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic dimension: Iser's Gap lies between the differing Ansichten of, for example, two plots of a narrative, successively actualized in alternating chapters. Two further characteristics of Iser's Gap are relevant. The first is worked out in his discussion of the nineteenth-century serial novel, where syntagmatically realized indeterminacy not only is associated with the process of text-production but also creates, via continuous interaction with readers, a feedback effect. The second is demonstrated via a study of Ulysses, and shows that the multiplying of Ansichten, a device which in Ingarden's sense would reduce indeterminacy, in fact increases it, by increasing the number of (Iser's) Gaps. To put it more theoretically: a consideration of textual time (the sequential nature of language/writing) undermines the effectiveness of the device which reduces paradigmatic indeterminacy, by allowing it to increase syntagmatic indeterminacy. It is this transfer from model to movement, and the implications it raises, which make Iser's Gap particularly relevant to the sonnet-sequences. 10

More complex still is Derrida's Gap.10 This spills over from the conceptual to the physical: in keeping with Derrida's project for the deconstruction of metaphysics via ecriture, it intimately associates the two. One

Four-part fugue 195 effect of the Derridean deconstruction is to make this kind of taxonomy virtually impossible, and his Gap almost impossible to describe. It is, as a gap, not only a gap but a space; as a space, also a white; as a white, because of a French polysemy that must be unfolded in English, additionally a blank. This, however, is by no means the end of its descriptions. Derrida's Gap is also the slash (/) that both joins and separates its flanking elements; it is thelimen, the threshold, that marks a barrier and invites one to cross it; it is the hymen, the membrane that protects a space yet covers an opening into it; it is the space between the two texts of Glas. It is, finally, the fold, the pli, in and through which two texts are folded over on to each other and, as Derrida puts it, re-mark each other - or, indeed, one text (upon) itself.11 Within the present taxonomy (which, as remarked, it subverts), we may note that it not only effects a transfer from the purely conceptual to a conceptuality which embraces the physical, and potentially includes both the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic dimensions, but that it also allows (forces) us to extend indeterminacy to undecideability, which implies - as we shall see below - an added dimension of active process. 11

(At this point Derrida, characteristically, impels a digression. His Gap derives almost entirely from the consideration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century texts: Mallarme and Genet and Sollers. These then transform even such earlier texts as Plato and Hegel by the touch of his application. A necessary effect of his deconstruction is to make us question the applicability of not only his but all indeterminacy to early texts. In the case of Ingarden's Gap this problem is covered by Derrida's discussion of Husserl;12 further applications involve the wrongly abandoned - because still-unfinished - debate about the validity of structuralism. This, however, is not the place to pursue it. In keeping with the principles outlined in 'Prelude,' above, I propose to remind ourselves of the question and then to continue the interrogation of our subject. In the case of the sonnet-sequences, our enterprise stands reaffirmed as a crossing of the texts; yet we may find that they allow, or even invite, such a crossing to an unusual degree.) 12

The taxonomy's final element is the obvious, or White, Gap. Its appearance is one of purely physical space: the space between (and, to a certain

196 Chamber music extent, the space around) the individual sonnets of a sequence. In most versions of sonnet-sequences, both MS and printed, the sonnets are no printed as single texts per page. The White Gap, then, is a fairly small area of unprinted paper left between texts, usually impinged upon by the number of the following sonnet. The layout also involves sonnets running over from the end of one page to the beginning of the next; in which case the respective upper and lower margins are given the role of what might be called a self-denying gap or space. Our evaluation of the White Gap's potential for more than a physical interpretation will be closely related to its differentiation from other, physically similar, gaps between the stanzas of a long poem on the one hand, and between the independent poems in an anthology or miscellany on the other. I propose to defer this differentiation until the final stages of my application; but I am prepared to state here my conviction that the White Gap is both physical and conceptual - that it is, in short, a gap of Unbestimmtheit. 13

'Now let me take some rest/ sighed Will, temporarily between sonnets and driven (as so often) to quote his mentor Astrophil. He seemed always to be between things: between Friend and Lady, between Reason and Passion, between a name and an organ. His Maker (who was himself) had placed him there, for reasons he was tired of guessing at. Astrophil, for ever worrying about his shape, was no help; and he bitterly resented (Edmund) who claimed, with God's assistance, to have solved all the problems. Placed between, he was prevented from using the space between sonnets to rest: it hummed and echoed with the disseminating activity of his ambiguities. His bonds might be determinate: his texts were not. 14

Between the Taxonomy13 and its placing-at-risk in a series of applications, an interim reflection may not be out of place. Since our four kinds of gap - or white - clearly span a wide range of signification, from philosophical indeterminacy to blank paper, we may begin to ask ourselves what they have in common. The first answer, I think, must be that they are all, in one way or another, negativities. They are each a negative space, a hollow, a creux (as in un temps creux: a space of empty or vacant time); but a creux in which things (can) happen. They are the negative

Four-part fugue 197 face of the text (the entre/antre, the cave: the con-cave?); they are the locus of every texfs undecideability, and to an extraordinary degree that of the sonnet-sequences'. Undecideability may be defined here as indeterminacy plus a dynamic of urgency; or, indetermination plus overdetermination. The locus - or rather the loci, for there are many - of undecideability thus create(s) in the reader that tension which draws him into the text, which motivates him; and they provide, moreover, the liminary spaces through which he constructs his entrance into the text. Of all 'early texts/ I submit, it is the sonnet-sequences which most inescapably activate these undecideabilities. 15

To begin, then, let us apply Ingarden's Gap to Astrophil and Stella; and let us at once tackle Iser's objection about trivialities by starting with represented objects. To some extent, of course, he is right. The fact that you, as a reader, unthinkingly assign a breed and a colour to Stella's dog (59) is of major importance neither for your interpretation of the text nor for the practice of reader-response criticism. Similarly, the hangings of Astrophil's bed (98), the breed of his horse (49), and the topography and destination of the highway (84) are, in more senses than Ingarden's, neither here nor there. Their indeterminacy, however, is of value only in conjunction with their referential unimportance and their textual prominence. For they are indeterminate not only to us but to Sidney as well. They furnish the pseudo-specificity on to which the concerns of both Astrophil and the reader may be projected; as such they are an innocent meeting-place for the object of the text and that of text-production. 16

This innocence of the indeterminately represented object is, however, soon left behind. As an example of the next stage of Ingarden's Gap, let us examine an object which appears in sonnet 105: Unhappie sight, and hath she vanisht by So neere, in so good time, so free a place? Dead glasse, doost thou thy object so imbrace, As what my hart still sees thou canst not spie?

The brief and foolish critical history of 'Dead glasse'14 (does it 'mean' the

198 Chamber music mind's eye?) is of no importance. That any object designated 'glasse' may have properties of transparency or reflectivity, either of which may be activated, helps us a little farther along, but not much. That the modern reader may associate it with the 'miroir sans tain' or one-way mirror topos so lovingly analysed by Riffaterre15 brings us closer still, but the aporia remains. And even common sense, which will consider 'sight' the antecedent of both 'dead glasse' and 'thou/ leaves an irreducible residue of discomfort. What, then, is happening here? It is perhaps best explained by saying that Ingarden's Gap is beginning to come alive. The indeterminacy that was of merely philosophical importance in relation to Stella's dog has, in 'dead glasse/ been heightened to aporia. It has become active; and it has done so, in this case, by contaminating the most reliable of a text's features, its lexicality. Ingarden's Gap, in other words, has produced its normal indeterminacy, but this indeterminacy is one which the reader is prevented from (satisfactorily) completing. The result is an itch that must be scratched but will not go away. Within the Stratum of Represented Objects, the reader is confronted with an Unbestimmtheitsstelle which, from being philosophical, has become textual, and thus inescapable. Not being given a decideable meaning, he is driven to make sense: and thus, to participate. 17

(A possible objection prompts me to a brief digression on indeterminacy and metaphor. Does - it might be asked - Ingarden's Gap properly apply to a trope such as 'dead glasse'? Without tackling in too much detail a theoretical question of which the relevance goes well beyond the sonnetsequences [the relation of indeterminacy and rhetoric will need a great deal of what Derrida would call 'patient and rigorous work'],16 I would suggest that it does so apply, in a particular way. On the one hand, metaphor can be characterized as an indirect way partially to cancel or complete Ingarden's Gap. It does so by triangulation: providing another object, in a separate space, which points at the same essence, it locates that essence at the crossing of the two imaginary lines. On the other hand, the metaphor does not fully complete the Gap and thus control the reader's decoding: for at the heart of all the major tropes lies a further gap, which we might call Ricceur's Gap17 and which is epitomized by his citation of the Majorcan story-tellers' formulaic exordium 'Aixo era y no era' [this was, and was not]. Each of the four Great Tropes - metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony - consists of two poles in an indeterminate relation.)

Four-part fugue 199 18

Ingarden's Gap operates in a more complex way when the Represented Objects are human features. In this regard (and in few texts is it more of a regard than in the sonnet-sequences) we should distinguish between two separate functions: those pertaining to the subject (the narrator, the Poet/ Lover, the 'self) and those involving the object (the beloved, the Other). About the former little is said, perhaps because the whole sequence is an internalization of his features; the closest we are allowed to come is Will's age in the Sonnets, externalized in lines and wrinkles (63). The Other's features, on the other hand, are given considerably more attention. Counting only those mentions which appear descriptive, Stella's lips are shown in six poems, her hair in five, her eyes in four, her cheeks in three, her teeth in two, and her forehead, skin, and hands each in one. All these descriptions - and this is the first sign that something is amiss pertain to colour: Stella, the reader learns, is a lady with red lips, blonde hair, dark eyes, red and white cheeks, and white teeth, skin, and hands. When we remember that every one of these attributes is a commonplace of European love-poetry, we realize that Ingarden's Gap remains thoroughly unfilled. 19

In fact, what is happening in these blason-derived 'descriptive' passages is an important variant of metaphor as described in no. 17, above. Oscillating between metaphor and simile, these descriptions about (around) the Other, instead of maintaining the indeterminacy of Ingarden's Gap (or partially completing it), create what we might call a false determinacy. Where a normally active metaphor or simile attempts partially to fill the Gap by triangulation, the blason 'compare' (which, as Shakespeare asserts, is inherently false; see Sonnets 130:14) has the effect of widening Ingarden's Gap. It does so by using the normal triangulation pattern as a feint, while in fact pointing the reader to a conventional signified we may call the Beloved, or the Lady. To this signified, 'Stella' implicitly stands in a synecdochal, or exemplary, relation. Let me try to make this clearer in two diagrams. Both contain the standard levels of signifier (Sr), signified (Sd), and referent (R).18 The first shows the way the text's object (Stella) is situated in an ordinary metaphor, by standard metaphoric triangulation: a combination of direct reference (DR) and metaphoric reference (MR). The second diagram shows the same procedure in the case of a blasonreference (MR/B).

200 Chamber music Level

ii

i

Sr

DR-»MR

Sd

'Stella'

R

( Pen el one)

DR

MR/B

'Stella' < Beloved (Penelope)

The effect of the process shown in no. n is that metaphor's apparent completion of Ingarden's Gap is deflected, and that the signified is made more, not less, indeterminate. This in turn weakens the relation between the signified and the referent (who, being a 'real' person, is perfectly determinate). The reader reaps two benefits: he is rewarded for knowing the code; and the text's Other (the signified) is made more adaptable as a target for his own projection. Both these benefits point to a characteristically Renaissance form of reader-response and textual co-creativity. 20

The relation of Ingarden's Gap to the text's mimesis of character presents a different range of problems. We may object to this application in principle, on the grounds that 'character' seems indeterminate even in 'life.'19 However, if we remember that Ingarden's 'determinacy' is a philosophical one, this objection disappears: philosophically, a human being's character is as determinate as its corporeal entity. It is only the Ansichten of it that are more obviously indeterminate, as well as more hermeneutic in nature (perhaps for that reason). In the text of a sonnetsequence such as Astrophil and Stella, Ingarden's Gaps relating to character are many, and highly active. It might be said that the narrative element in this text is character; the unfolding of two characters and of the unstable space (the gap) between them. As such, character's indeterminacy and the text's intermittent attempts to complete it are a continuing element, which involves Ingarden's syntagmatic categories as well as his Gap: notably his concept of Parathaltung or 'holding-in-readiness/20 This will be further discussed below; what can be said here is that the sonnetsequence, with its emphasis on short, situational utterance and its frequent, built-in interruptions, creates a discourse which, while valorizing character, encourages a high level of Ingardenian indeterminacy in its representation.

Four-part fugue 201 21

The final dimension of Ingarden's Gap I shall look at is that of identity. Astrophil, we remember, sometimes felt like one enormous Gap, and was doomed to live on after his Maker died a hero's death. The trickiness of the relation Astrophil/Philip and Stella/Penelope is an ancient critical topos, which I do not propose to go into here. In the light of indeterminacy and the Gap we may recall that the text takes care to overdetermine both the signified (Astrophil and Stella) and the referent (Philip and Penelope), not only by name but by situational references.21 Once again, however, this apparent completing of Ingarden's Gap is a feint: the ostensible parallel of levels is continually destroyed (deconstructed, rather) by contradictions of which any reader conversant with Philip's and Penelope's lives is - and would have been - aware. The effect of this fein is to turn the normal Ingarden's Gap of philosophical indeterminacy into what is almost a Derrida's Gap of experiential undecideability: 'Aixo era y no era.' The relation between the signified identities and the referential ones thus becomes, in Ricceur's sense, metaphoric - an aspect that has not received the attention it deserves. 22

Having - in one, limited, aspect - crossed Astrophil and Stella with das literarische Kunstwerk, what have we learned about its gaps? In the first place, that generically - as a sonnet-sequence - this text not only is based on and contains Ingarden's Gaps, like all literary text, but structurally exploits them. Secondly, that this exploitation occurs not only paradigmatically but syntagmatically and thus points ahead, via Ingarden's Parathaltung, to Iser's Gap. Thirdly, that on certain levels Ingarden's Gap becomes experiential and undecideable, and thus approaches Derrida's Gap. And finally, that the sonnet-sequence's syntagmatic nature as a text of modular interruptions has something to do with all this, which suggests that the White Gap may not be irrelevant. With these elaborations, Ingarden's Gap functions as one of Astrophil and Stella's fundamental structural principles, an integral part of its particular (as well as its generic) code. 23

The last, careless, hand that had returned him to the shelf had placed

2O2 Chamber music Astrophil between The Literary Work of Art on one side and Winnie-thePooh on the other. Roman had been explaining him (though in rather general terms) for a long time. Cumbered with good manners, Astrophil pretended to go on listening; but not only did he keep thinking (inconclusively) of Stella, he kept falling asleep. Confusedly, he wished that he could have had a Shepard to illustrate him. Finally Roman's guttural voice was still. The silence seemed poised for a reply. 'Oh, I see,' said Astrophil, sadly. 24

In crossing the Amoretti with 'Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response/ it will be well to keep in mind the twofold nature of Iser's Gap. The Ansichten, or 'views,' function paradigmatically but are actualized syntagmatically. The indeterminacy, therefore, is one of both reason and (gradual) revelation - in the text's practice, an indeterminacy of both concept and movement, of 'plot' levels and of the language's progress. 25

As early as 1956, Lever was troubled by what he experienced as (in Riffaterrean terms) 'ungrammaticalities' in the Amoretti.22 While the specific locus of these lay in certain sonnets' imagery, the nature of their power to disturb consists in an anomaly of tone, seen in the context of the given emotion's and the given relationship's mimesis. Subsequent criticism has largely discarded the literary-historical aspects of the argument; what remains is an early and valuable insight into what I should like here to characterize as the text's two 'plots.'23 Before we apply Iser's Gap to these, they may usefully be described as follows. The two 'plots' in the Amoretti are two kinds of love, and thus two kinds of language, two kinds of Histoire, two kinds of love-poetry. The first (the one that bothered Lever) is a traditional one, based upon the fidelity/cruelty topos which is, in this text and for its particular purposes, often represented in a greatly exaggerated form. The second 'plot/ which functions as a radical renewal of love/poetry, is that of a love made conformable to the Creator's purpose (amor re-ligatus and thus religiosus) and experienced (via the bold equation oferos and agape: see 68) as a confident and cheerful mutuality. The guerra amorosa of this text is the war between (the memory of) the first 'plot' and (the experience of) the second.

Four-part fugue 203 26

Iser's Gap, as the taxonomy (above, no. 10) reminded us, can be the indeterminacy of (between) the Ansichten involved in multiple plots and their sequential actualization in the text. The Amoretti's comfortably traditional opening has the effect of lulling the reader into what we might call a security of literary competence. Throughout the early part of the text, this security is reinforced (and the "skilful reader's' competence rewarded) by the clearly marked use of sources such as Petrarch, Tasso, and Desportes.24 And this security is not only a general one, but specifically generic: it maintains in the reader a continual awareness that the text confronting him is - and not only in form - a sonnet-sequence. He is thus in every sense unprepared for the fact that, from time to time (i.e., both sequentially and sporadically), the text troubles him with the hyperbolic indecorum of its 'compare' (e.g., sonnets 20, 31, 32, 37, 47, and 56). The effect of this indecorum is to unsettle the reader by jarring his expectations and subverting the security of his competence. 27

We may find, then, a first manifestation of Iser's Gap between the Ansicht presented by the early sonnets and its displacement in the 'ungrammatical' sonnets. It is a very active gap of indeterminacy, bothering and subverting as it does the reader's sense of an understood code with an intermittent Ansicht not readily explicable. The reader is forced into a hermeneutic of this new View'; and even if he reaches what I believe to be its most likely interpretation - that it is an ironic one - he is forced into a further hermeneutic: he must interpret the relation between this view and that of the surrounding text, and interpret also the intermittency itself. The text provides a multiple indeterminacy which the reader cannot proceed without completing, and it gives him (as yet) no instructions for the decoding. 28

With sonnet 62 (the first in the history of the love-sonnet to use, however ambiguously, the first-person-plural pronoun), the second 'plot' makes its appearance; and a new version of Iser's Gap thus applies. On the one hand, the second plot (the 'mutuality' plot) functions as an instruction

2O4 Chamber music for decoding the first: for completing the indeterminacy the first plot had created. Yet at the same time, by adding a third Ansicht to the earlier two, it multiplies the Iserian indeterminacy gaps. It does so not only technically but specifically, by creating a new and active indeterminacy between itself and the 'ungrammatical' or jarring sonnets. Once again the reader, experiencing the text in its gradual unfolding, is halted and forced to make sense. 29

(The syntagmatic progression here invites a digression on the Amoretti's use of textual time and movement. In accordance with Spenser's contemporary technique in the Faerie Queene, there is a constant use of completion via Parathaltung: a deliberate indeterminacy creates an enigma, which some later actualization in the text - often much later - then 'solves/25 This use of 'suspense' in areas well beyond what is usually thought of as 'narrative' is a clear example of Iser's Gap. Equally interesting is the back-and-forth movement this forces the reader to perform. There is, in the Amoretti as in the Faerie Queene, a constant use of retroactivity which is in every sense a feature of ecriture - of writing/reading rather than, indeed as opposed to, speaking/hearing. This subverting of logocentricity in Spenser invites much further study.) 30

The Amoretti's second 'plot' only gradually gains the upper hand. Although the indecorum of the 'ungrammatical' sonnets has ceased, the traditional code reappears (e.g., sonnets 64 and 70). The new plot, however, is so strong that it can co-opt not only the tradition but a subversion of the tradition to overdetermine it. This the reader experiences in the strongly intertextual sonnets 63 (in which the Petrarchan lover's tempest-tossed ship gains safe harbour) and 67 (in which Tasso's 'Questa fera gentil,' reversing Petrarch's 'Una Candida cerva/ is deepened to fit the second plot's re-ligio). In this context, two aspects of Iser's Gap are worth noting. In the first place, the indeterminacy between Ansichten is maintained (though at reduced levels of intensity and frequency) after the introduction of the second, ultimately victorious, plot. So the reader is not given this plot as a maximally determinate, 'realistic' alternative: sense must continue to be made. Secondly, we are alerted to the indeterminacy produced by the conversion of an intertext.

Four-part fugue 205 Within the Renaissance style of text-production, with its enormous stress on the reader's literary competence, the conversion of an intertext is one of the chief places where the reader's role as co-creator of the text's significance happens - a fact which has extensive implications for the validity of the 'open work' or 'indeterminacy' concept's application to early texts. 31

The apparent victory of the 'mutuality' plot does not, however, settle everything. The reader's new-found security is once again jarred, first by a fresh hyperbole and then by a series of traditional topoi misused. Sonnet 83 ('Let not one spark of filthy lustfull fyre') is addressed by the Poet to himself with 'ungrammatical' vehemence. Iser's Gap here functions both syntagmatically - the indeterminacy created by this new Ansicht in relation to the preceding one - and intertextually: as an echo of Astrophil and Stella nos. 71 and 72 (the 'Desire' sonnets). The reader is forced once again into an 'active' role: his competence called on and his (co-)creative powers put to the test. 32

The absence-sonnets (86-8), introduced by 85's 'slander' text, create the same indeterminacy in a different way. In 85, the poet uses a selfreferential intertextuality (the Blatant Beast from the Faerie Queene) to create a climate of uncertainty. The final texts, which follow this, on the one hand are situationally reassuring (they and 85 mutually 'explain' each other, by suggesting a situational signified); on the other hand, however, they create a strongly overdetermined Iser's Gap by their positioning, with regard to the second 'plot' (which they appear to undermine), and to the sequence as a whole (which they appear to conclude). They do so, significantly, by misusing (rather than 'converting') a coded topos of 'absence' (most recently and influentially employed in Astrophil and Stella 88,89, and 106). In keeping with this text's practice, Parathaltung is used. Yet here its usual function is reversed; for the appearance of the Epithalamion, so far from completing the indeterminacy of 86-8, creates it, retroactively. It is the unexplained cancellation (Aufhebung)26 of the absence-sonnets' situational signified which creates the enigma. Here Iser's Gap points toward Derrida's: the indeterminacy here produced is in fact an undecideability.

2o6 Chamber music 33

Perhaps the most shocking version of Iser's Gap in the Amoretti comes after the indetermination (the non-closure) of the absence-sonnets. As the reader's literary competence scrabbles among its intertextual memories of other sequences to create meaning, still another Ansicht is presented which makes a mockery of that very competence. The presence of the Anacreontics in a maximally overdetermined liminary position between the sonnets and the Epithalamion is a phenomenon I have discussed in Two-part invention/ above. In the present context we may see it in two ways. In the first place it functions as an extreme version of Iser's Gap. Blatantly belonging to neither 'plot/ the Anacreontics may be said to incarnate the indeterminacy between views: to be, in fact, an Iser's Gap become text. On the other hand, the extreme nature of their indeterminacy tempts me to see them as the Aufhebung of Iser's Gap. Seen in this way, the Anacreontics entirely subsume Iser's Gap - itself a dynamic development of Ingarden's - into the exponentially greater indeterminacy of Derrida's Gap. We should then be dealing with, not the indeterminacy of a text's progression from Ansicht to Ansicht, but a text suddenly and brutally converted to undecideability. 34

What of Iser's Gap in the Epithalamion itself? This triumphal Ode to the victory of the second plot and the consequent transformation of love (poetry), is very strongly overdetermined, recapitulating as it does a number of the Amoretti's motifs.27 A closer look, though, reveals a surprising proliferation of 'views' (though at a much lower level of intensity). The text shifts constantly between the Ansichten of classical myth, Protestant Christianity, Catholic Christianity, homespun Irishness, and folkloric superstition. At each transition, technically, an Iser's Gap appears; what, in this case, is their effect? Most obviously, I suspect, the reader is invited to construct, via these transitional indeterminacies, his own participating sense of the marriage's totality: he becomes, as the text's co-creator, a member of the wedding. Less intentionally, however, the gaps' effect is to maintain a level of indeterminacy at the heart of what is presented as the fulfilled totality of experientia re-ligata: an indeterminacy brutally exploited later by Shakespeare's Sonnets.28 While such a proliferation of Iser's Gaps is, in the Amoretti, ordered and held in check by the regularity of the sonnet-sequence's White Gaps, in the Epithalamion

Four-part fugue 207 they multiply in the same way as those illustrated by Iser in his discussion of Ulysses. 35

Concluding our crossing of Spenser's text with Iser's, we may say that the dynamic and syntagmatic nature of Iser's Gap is particularly relevant to the textual practice of the Amoretti. It provides an unparallelled instrument for perceiving and interpreting Spenser's characteristic preoccupation with a poetic text's sequentiality, and with the way this can be used to actualize a multiplicity of 'plots.' What is more, it makes us think about the phenomenon of retroactivity and about the back-and-forth movement that is reading - a point it is highly rewarding to pursue by applying Iser's Gap to the Shakespeare Sonnets.29 Finally, it suggests the existence, and the possible nature, of a relation between Iser's Gap and Derrida's; and it throws further light on the White Gap's importance and function in structuring the pattern of a sonnet-sequence's indeterminacies. 36

(Edmund) was not amused. 'Simple truth and mutual good will,' (he) had written. And had (he) not proved it? 'Good will' was God's Will, in or out of a sonnet-sequence. Yet here, in the neighbouring volume, was Will: Will who, turning to good account an accident of baptism, mockingly overturned all (his), (Edmund's), achievements. He had had the nerve to take Astrophil's perverse invitation to Reason to 'leave Love to Will' as a call to deconstructive action, and had set about the task with relish. But it was (Edmund's) Love that had been left to him; and he had placed a crowbar in its every Gap. Everything that, with God's help, (Edmund) had decided and ordered, Will had disordered and distorted into undecideability. Was that a chuckle he heard from SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS next door? A melancholy chuckle, certainly; but with a good deal of malice in it. No, (Edmund) was not amused. 37

It is almost inappropriate to try to deal with Derrida's Gap in the Sonnets by means of a single (meta-)text such as this. Ideally, as Derrida himself has demonstrated embryonically in Dissemination and fully in Glas, this Gap should be shown. Shown in the simultaneous presentation of the

2o8 Chamber music text and a metatext, or rather of another text, thus creating Derrida's Gap and forcing the reader to experience it. The importance of this text/ says Glas, 'lies in the air circulating between its screens/30 In addition, it should never be forgotten that Derrida's own purpose is a philosophical, not a literary-critical, one; and that the light-hearted conversion of 'deconstruction' into 'deconstructionism' - especially when the results are presented in unaltered North-American-scholarly discourse - is at best an epiphenomenon. This said, let us proceed (as in a mined noman's-land). 38

(What I have called Derrida's Gap is, in the sense used so far, not a Gap at all. This fact proceeds from his inclusion of Husserl - Ingarden's mentor, as Ingarden is Iser's - in the 'onto-theology' he attempts to deconstruct. Thus there can be no confident phenomenological discussion - and certainly no use - of a paradigmatic, metaphysical, UnbestimmtheitssteUe. Derrida's realization that onto-theology pervades even the language we use to discuss it, and his consequent selection of writing as the locus for its - gradual and subtle - deconstruction, means that Derrida's Gap is in fact a displacement in and of the text's apparent determinacy. This slight subversive jarring creates - or reveals - a space of tension where elements (do not) touch. Most frequently, as I have suggested above, this tension exists as a 'gap/ not of indeterminacy but of undecideability.) 39

Unlike Iser's Gap, which suggested its sequential application in the Amoretti, Derrida's can and should be applied anywhere. Shakespeare's Sonnets lend themselves particularly well to this practice. As it allows no theoretical distinction between physical and conceptual dimensions, it is appropriate to begin with the text as printed. (The authoritative Booth edition, by reproducing - though, as we shall see, with one important omission - the 1609 text, happily eliminates the choice between the original text and a modern one.) And let us go at once to the notable crux of sonnet 126. Not fourteen lines, but twelve; and arranged in couplet-rhymes. In terms of the reader's genre-expectation this is mildly surprising but in no way unsettling: 'sonnets' came in various lengths and with all sorts of rhymes. The text of 126, then, cannot be said to

Four-part fugue 209 provide any sort of unusual indeterminacy. Its uniqueness in the Sonnets, and its place within their overall pattern, is more interesting. But what in the 1609 text our eyes are drawn to most urgently is the appearance, after line 12, of two pairs of spaced but empty parentheses in the place of a hypothetical couplet (lines 13-14*). These marks are normally given a bibliographically dismissive interpretation31 and omitted in modern editions. Such a solution leaves 126 as a twelve-line lyric which marks a turning-point in the character-centred structure of the macrotext: from Friend to Lady. Yet if for a moment we refuse the doxa of the parentheses' dismissal, what do we find them to be? The mark of an empty line. 40

At the turning-point of the macrotext are two overdetermined adjuncts to the White Gap, two marks of space. The paradox this makes visible spreads across the text in either direction. It cannot - witness all editorial practice - be left alone: it forces an attempted solution. And this (dis)solution can only be reached by intervention, by doing violence to the text: by removing the marks - and thereby removing the space. For without such violence, the parentheses create an absolute indeterminacy. By marking emptiness at the core of the text, they question - they jar not only the text but text - the enterprise of writing (and, by implication, of reading). Nor do they subvert it by erasure: there is no text that has been removed from them, nor is there any text which can be added to them. They subvert text by undecideability: the irreducible tension between mark and emptiness, between Black and White. 41

Their paradox, I wrote, spreads across the text. In fact, the parentheses of 126 are the mark of Derrida's Gap in the Sonnets. Every other undecideability in the text (and there are many) finds itself re-marked here. Let us follow the spread and glance, first, very briefly at 145. Ostensibly, again, this tetrameter sonnet is - merely? - another permitted variant of the paradigm. In the light of the Parentheses, however, we notice that its shorter lines create a wider margin. While discussion of margins belongs with that of the White Gap in general (see below, no. 51), we may remark here that our perception of the phenomenon prompts us to look for a reason, and that neither the microtext (145) nor its

2io Chamber music immediate context provides us with one. Derrida's Gap, in this case, opens between margin and meaning. 42

There is another typographical crux close by. The repetition of 'my sinfull earth' in line 2 of 146 is normally, again, dismissed as a printer's error; an 'explanation' made the more persuasive by the fact that the repetition overloads line 2 with two syllables surplus to the metre. However, as Booth's parallel printing clearly shows, omitting the repetition leaves line 2 'incomplete.' The result is the most infuriating of indeterminacies. Of undecideabilities: for this too is Derrida's Gap, and it takes on a new dimension by appearing ('of all places') in the one sonnet which is itself a major crux of the sequence. Not only its nature but its existence within the Sonnets has been repeatedly questioned;32 and even if it is accepted as a reference to the intertext of Sidney's palinodic 'Leave me O Love,' its placing in the macrotextual order can quite effectively generate Derrida's Gap all by itself.33 We may attempt to find separate 'solutions' to these two cruces: we cannot escape the fact that they overdetermine each other and create a gap of extreme instability for 146 to exist in. 43

Worse is to come. The significant omission in Booth's edition (even in the facsimile reproduction)34 of the 1609 text is the Lover's Complaint. Once again, as with the parentheses of 126, the editorial 'solution' to a case of Derrida's Gap is the violence of radical surgery. Such surgery is often felt to be justified by the perceived difference in quality between the Complaint and the preceding sonnets, and the lack of continuity in 'plot' (Kerrigan is the exception, but his admiration has not found many followers). Readers of both sonnets and complaint, in other words, are struck by difference. Yet at the same time there exist, in both texts, a woman, a young man, and an older man, within an ambiance of faithless loving; at the same time the banal Complaint contains haunting and often mysterious images - the broken rings, the nun's love spurned - and at the same time the Sonnets and the Complaint coexist within the same original volume, printed continuously.35 If, then (as with the parenthe ses), we disallow ourselves the surgery of excision, we find that in numerous ways the Complaint and the Sonnets re-mark each other, and

Four-part fugue 211 do so both irreducibly and undecideably. The (Derrida's) Gap between these two texts, then, is in fact a characteristically Derridean 'fold' or 'joint/ and the space of their joint signification is the space (the membrane) that both joins and separates them. 44

The indeterminacy noticed in Astrophil's and Stella's identities vis-a-vis their referents is also, in the Sonnets, activated and energized into undecideability. For the Poet, here, is Will, and exploits to the fullest the polysemy of this name. On one level, of course, there is Will in the 'honest' (non-Sidneian!) sense of '(Edmund)' or '(Francesco Petrarca)/ involved in the characteristic indeterminacy between Poet and poet, between Will and Will (Shakespeare). But the energia comes from the coincidence of Will's centrality in the moral microcosm (between divine Reason and animal Passion, it was for Pico and others the locus of the 'Dignity and Excellence of Man'), of Will's colloquial meaning of genitalia, and of its capacity to indicate the genitalia of either sex. Together, these co-incidences (which consistently re-mark each other) produce a field of interlocking undecideabilities so intense that it embraces, and in many ways interprets, the entire text. For this version of Derrida's Gap cannot be cut away. The reader is left to face it, and at all points to 'decide' it. But he cannot do so. There are other important cases of Derrida's Gap in the Sonnets: the order of the text, for instance, which has been perceived as a crux ever since Benson's edition of 1640. But none illustrates the Gap more clearly than Will. 45

Nowhere does crossing the text with the (other?) (meta?)text produce such an active consciousness of the gap(s) as in this case. Derrida's Gap, as predicted, operates differently. It overdetermines the urgency of a response (a 'solution') from the reader; at the same time it makes any determinate, or determinating, response impossible. An excellent example of this is provided by the method that underlies Booth's commentary. Sensing, probably rightly, that it is the worst possible system except for all the other ones, he assembles every conceivable denotative and connotative meaning, and then leaves the reader with the sort of polysemic confusion that de Man describes in Allegories of Reading.^6 In other words, where Iser's Gap both urged and allowed the reader of the Amoretti to

212 Chamber music make sense, Derrida's Gap forces the reader of the Sonnets to try, but simultaneously denies him the possibility of succeeding. The result is a sonnet-sequence that develops, to a height never reached before, the genre's latent power of getting under the reader's skin (and thus, we might subversively add, creating an unprecedentedly adequate mimesis of 'love': the whole of the Sonnets is the dismembered and disseminated Body of Cupid). It does so by indissolubly associating the physical aspect of writing and of space with the conceptual, and by insisting without respite on the undecideability of its tensions. 46

47

My final crossing is the most complex, and the most unusual. For what we must now bring ourselves to do is to cross our three texts with each other, and to cross the resultant complex with the omnipresent reality (which is not - yet - a concept) of the White Gap. The White Gap is in many ways the most difficult to deal with, because its insistently physical nature dissimulates its status as a gap of indeterminacy, as an Unbestimmtheitsstelle. And yet our experience with Derrida's Gap should have prepared us for perceiving it this way: I believe that I have demonstrated the extent to which its (Derrida's Gap's) association of the physical with the conceptual dimension functions, not only for Mallarme but for an early text as well. There is, however, another reason for trying. The sonnet-sequences - all sonnet-sequences - overdetermine their undecideability at every turn. One of the few laws that can be formulated concerning them is that nothing one can say about them will be completely true (which may be one reason for the form's complete neglect by early theorists). There is thus a case to be made for at least investigating the White Gap. 48

The White Gap, in the first place (in all its places), is in the most literal sense a Stelle - a place. And this (multiple) place is the place of, the locus of, the sonnet-sequences' indeterminacies as sonnet-sequences. It is, for

Four-part fugue 213 example, the space of their generic indeterminacy. The status of the sonnet microtext within the sequence macrotext is, as we have seen, neither stanza nor independent poem; the locus of this indeterminacy is the White Gap, which alone decides the undecideable relation to the preceding and following (micro)texts. In this case, its presence helps to create the concep tual dimension (of indeterminacy) without which the genre would not be what it is. 49

Of far more importance is the White Gap's relation to the order of the sonnet-sequences. The order, we have seen, is subject to Derrida's Gap: it is not only indeterminate but undecideable. The crucial result of this attribute, however, is enabled by the White Gap. For it, and it alone, allows and urges upon the reader the characteristic action of (co)creative grouping common to all serious readers' responses to the sonnetsequences.37 With the exception of the strongly marked volta between the Sonnets' Friend and Lady sections (which may itself be an echo of the popular In Vita and In Morte division of Petrarch's text), and the less strongly marked demarcation of the same text's 'procreation' sonnets (i17), all groupings in our texts are evidence of both an irresistible hermeneutic urge and the unconvincing nature of the result. It is not, I think, too bold an assertion to attach a semiotic significance to this fact: to state that the urge to group hermeneutically, the ability to do so, and the individuality of the result are a major factor of the sonnet-sequences' status as what Eco calls an 'open work,' in which the reader is an essential (as opposed to either an incidental or a perverse) co-creator of the meaning. Neither, I submit, is it unreasonable to point to the White Gap as the enabling locus of this indeterminacy. 50

A special version of the White Gap appears to be its own denial: the text as Gap. We have seen this in the case of the Amoretti's Anacreontics, and it is not an isolated case: Shakespeare's 126 can make a claim to this status, and Shakespeare's 153 and 154 much more so. They are texts simulating a blanc, and it is no coincidence that in each case they appear as the dividers between a macrotext's major sections. So far from (dis)solving the White Gap between the sonnets and the subsequent long text, these 'texts-as-gap' in fact overdetermine it. They both hide and reveal this

214 Chamber music particular White Gap's privileged status as a major limen/hymen, both threshold and membrane, simultaneously separating and joining the textual spaces on either side of it in an undecideable relation. As, in fact, the Stelle of the text's major Unbestimmtheit. 5i

The most apparently far-fetched form of the White Gap is the margin. This does not seem like a gap of indeterminacy, and certainly not relevant in any special way to the sonnet-sequences. After all, it is common to all texts, and in the form in which we meet it in the sequences it is common at least to most lyric texts. What, then, is its claim to the status of a White Gap (of indeterminacy)? Such a status is, in this case, determined by the text's other indeterminacies, and by two of them in particular. The normal White Gap, first: the gap between microtexts, highly active as it is in a sonnet-sequence, spills over into, contaminates, the margins in its significance as in its physical presence. The reader, in other words, is sensitized by the normal White Gap into re-marking the physical page's other blancs. The second factor valorizing the margin as a White Gap is the characteristically undecideable relation between a sonnet-sequence text and the referential 'world.' This relation, symbolized by the (non-) identity between Astrophil and Philip, is unique to the genre (though the Faerie Queene, not surprisingly, comes close). The margin, where the reader's hand touches the book, is always the interface between text and world. In a medieval text, it is often filled ('illuminated') with the scribe's, or the illuminator's, frequently irrelevant figures: the world, in a very particular and physical way, invades the text. In the text of a sonnetsequence (whether manuscript or printed), the margin is 'blank' (blanc). As it is in other sixteenth-century lyrical texts; but because the text itself of a sonnet-sequence has already established its relation to the 'world' as an undecideable one, the White Gap of the margin becomes the invisible space where this particular undecideable tension happens. 52

We have crossed No-Man's-Land, you and I; and it is time to look around us, to take stock. I propose a brief meditation on theory and practice. In the progression from Ingarden via Iser to Derrida we can see a gradual liberation of 'indeterminacy' as a concept from the Husserlian phenomenological framework. In this process the concept had necessarily to be redefined. Its first redefinition lies in its move from the Stratum of

Four-part fugue

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Represented Objects to that of Schematized Aspects and Views. Thus, from being a single dimension of the 'transcendental' work it becomes a multiple dimension of the latter's sequential actuality. The second major redefinition lies in Derrida's association of the physical with the conceptual, so that indeterminacy now becomes a force revealed by the process of displacement. As such, it also undergoes a change in relation to the reader: from indeterminacy it becomes undecideability. The Unbestimmtheitsstelle becomes the blanc as a locus for the fold, the membrane. The White now becomes the Unbestimmtheitsstelle and, as such, the White Gap: the locus where indeterminacy as a dynamic praxis can take place. The blanc is the reader's door into the work's indeterminacy. The reader is Lord of the Marches of the text: the Marches are the locus of his freedom and his activity. 53

In crossing these texts, these sonnet-sequences, with these metatexts of indeterminacy, I suggest we have arrived at the following possibilities. In the first place, we have found a genre of early texts that brilliantly embodies even the most apparently 'postmodern' concepts of indeterminacy. Such a discovery necessarily displaces critical attitudes that tie 'indeterminacy' too closely and restrictively to nineteenth- and especially to twentieth-century texts. Second, we have found that crossing the texts did not inconvenience, much less invalidate, them: on the contrary, the crossing involved in interrogating their 'gaps' enabled them to reveal essential elements of their character. Third, the crossing, and the gap, have revealed a number of important freedoms for us as readers: the freedom of involvement (urgency plus undecideability), the freedom of grouping (a non-verbal hermeneutic) and the freedom of (from) time (we are no longer bound to either interpretation of the term 'contemporary'). And, last, interrogating the Gaps has given us a radical means of understanding the sonnet-sequence as a form; a means that goes beyond previous methodologies for grasping this most elusive of literary objects. 54

Thus, in analysing the gaps, have we dealt with the text as ptyx. One further dimension beckons: the text as Styx. In no. 6, above, I made what may have seemed the curious statement that crossing the text of the three sequences could not fail to engage us in our death. Only now are we in a position to look more closely at this claim. Crossing the texts has meant

216 Chamber music ignoring their 'meaning' and examining what they do not say. As those familiar with the work of Riffaterre will recognize, such a process is not unrelated to his version of literary semiotics. To adapt some of the Riffaterrean concepts, the significance of all love-sonnet sequences' uniquely structured indeterminacy is their constant turning around an empty space. The space of the unsaid - and, usually, the unattained represents sexual fulfilment: openly so in some texts (many troubadours, Astrophil and Stella); dissimulated, sublimated, or tamed in others (Petrarch, Spenser). 55

The treatment of sexual fulfilment as a central silence establishes it as a gap of indeterminacy also. At first sight this may seem odd: regarded mimetically according to experience or semiotically as a matricial presence, it might seem not only determinate but overdetermined. What, then, is the nature of its indeterminacy? A clue to the answer may lie in its contemporary nickname of the 'little death.' Ecstatic sexual union traditionally is, or at least precedes, the end of a (love-)story; and the experience itself (ec-static) is lived as a loss of the (rational, social, 'human') self. This loss is a loss of experience's determinate nature, as well as of the language that is its fundamental structuring material. In this case, the specific determinate experience subjected to the loss is, paradoxically, the plot we call 'love': which is why long sequences of lovepoems must repress it into silence, if it is not to silence them. 56

The accomplishment of this significance by the reader is what, by analogy with Peirce's 'semiosis/ I have called the erosis of the texts. As mentioned above, it can be achieved only by plunging into their gaps, which enables us then to plunge further into their central, matricial gap. Such a plunge, though not yet a crossing over, is at least a departure from comfortable banks. It represents the intermediate stage of the text's becoming Styx. 57

To travel beyond this stage, we must reascend the brief metaphoric chain that originally produced the 'little death.' If - in the disillusioned

Four-part fugue 217 Ricoeurian sense of being-like, of being-and-not-being - ecstatic sexual fulfilment 'is like' the greater Death, then the indeterminacies of lovesonnet sequences lead us inexorably to the final Indeterminacy. Blanchot' L'espace litteraire has made complex and challenging connections between the 'work's' mode of existence and the 'space' and nature of Death ('L'ceuvre et 1'espace de la mort'), which strongly support the direction of our crossing-over. Where we (may) arrive is at the Open Sign par excellence: Death-as-sign is both maximally overdetermined, by its universality and its urgency, and maximally undecideable. It is the Gap where all our gaps meet, mingle, and are subsumed. 58

And the point of this extension? Blanchot has made it for the writer; let us here try to do so for the reader. The crossing of the text as Styx should once and for all rob us of all possible detachment from it. We have each our Death to accomplish; we cannot but accomplish our text. Our text, for we are here re-minded: - reminded that we are its co-creators. I, the reader of these sequences, am also the artist; and, as such, am not absolved from the need to create my death - to create my text. 59

Astrophil, (Edmund), and Will were going to end this movement for me, allowing me to escape a final reflection on the critical text as (meta-)text. But they are silent in the face of a Death of which they know nothing; and I am left with the (un)certainty that, on that level, nothing is solved. Having crossed over, we are still strangers, so near the end of this series of recitals. Having accomplished (perhaps) the gaps of our three texts, we (you and I) have produced, and consumed or co-produced, still another (series of) text(s), the gaps of which themselves now entice and challenge us. All criticism is (or should be) 'fragments of a lover's discourse/ It is in the light of our Death that we are free to enjoy the pleasure of criticism. The pleasure of criticism is dependent upon the acceptance, and the accomplishment, of indeterminacy. The importance of this text, also, lies in the air that circulates between its screens.

12

Encore

irregardless

Etre avec qui on aime et penser a autre chose: c'est ainsi que j'ai les meilleures pensees, quej'invente le mieux ce qui est necessaire a mon travail. De meme pour le texte: il produit en moi le meilleur plaisir s'il parvient a sefaire ecouter indirectement; si, le lisant, je suis entraine a souvent lever la tete, a entendre autre chose.

Being with the one you love and thinking of something else: that's how I have my best thoughts, how I'm best at finding what I need for my work. It's the same with the text: it gives me the best kind of pleasure when it manages to get itself listened to indirectly; if, while I'm reading it, I am led often to look up, to listen to something else. Barthes1

En figurant le monde, la litterature I'ouvre au jeu, au reve, a I'utopie, a I'uchronie.

By representing the world, literature opens it up to play, to dream, to utopia, to uchronia. Sallenave2

Of course I don't buy the books for the fucking course. I haven't even read half of them. Overheard on campus

A student writes: Irregardless of what Professor Kuin said in class, I wish to argue that Astrophil and Stella is somewhat autobiographical in mode/ And I am moved to consider, not the argument of his sentence (which can be dealt with only so many times), but its initial word. Such a considering, of course, suggests a code of its own: irritable, middle-aged teacher fighting the purist's losing battle for a prescriptive lexis. This code is met in senior common rooms and faculty clubs, and surfaces occasionally in 'concerned' journalism. Yet 'irregardless/ the word that sums it all up, will not leave me alone. It haunts me, and worms its way

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irresistibly into territory forbidden it: a 'scholarly publication.' It whines to be transcoded, and will not be denied. Which is naughty of it. We like to leave such post-deluvian mutants behind in the classroom and pretend, when we sit down in library or study to 'do our research/ that the world in which they roam the malls does not exist. The resultant discourse (that of 'scholarship/ 'serious criticism/ or - these days - 'critical theory') is one which we like to believe neutral and uncoded. In fact, of course, it is very highly coded indeed: its every paragraph connotes learning, hard work, intellectual sophistication, awareness of current professional trends, and a repudiation of naivete. Outside this formidable edifice lounges - cheerful, masticating, and Walkmanned - Irregardless. To anyone claiming to create a modern criticism of early texts, it is an irresistible challenge. Hence the present fragment. Its structure is triangular: three sides, all suggested by the obscene, the behind-the-scenes, portmanteau-word. A lack of regard (regard denied); a lack of respect (respect denied); and, as basis, a characteristically modern, pretentious ignorance. The first two are united: they represent a certain stance in relation to the text. The last is the opposite, making me place myself with the text, facing an audience left high and dry by the receding tide of knowledge. And so, to write this triangle, I must be in two places at once - which is merely an overdetermination of the critic's usual place. He is always both with the reader, facing (or turning his back to) the text; and with the text, facing the reader. Of this impossible stance, the present case is an extreme example, but one that is less and less rare. For if a critic's audience is not to be restricted to other critics, he must be increasingly prepared to find himself in the position of background noise to lives conducted irregardless of the text and of his metatext. He is a radio in the car or in the kitchen, a television set in another room. How to react to such sidelining, such backgrounding? In the first place, I will deny myself the impulse to hector, to be a hortatory (and thus a nugatory) humanist. If ours is the space of a disregarding and disrespectful modernity, it behooves me first of all to listen: to regard and to respect the life that does neither to my chosen Text. I should perhaps begin by allowing myself to be what, in fact, I am: a member, a part, of this irregardless society. To do so, I must (must?) temporarily disallow my intellectual('s) superego, and attend to my libido, my otium. For I, as well as 'they/ disregard the text in much of my life, and dis-respect it in a great deal of my loving. I too live daily in an

22O Chamber music irregardless ignorance composed of auto shows and pizza, of traffic reports, grade-school projects and the Toronto Blue Jays. (But always at my back I hear it: that is the difference. It is not only a book on a shelf, waiting patiently to be rediscovered: it is the rustling of a papery voice in the ear of my I.) Listening to this irregardless life, I am moved to heed its spell, to question all that does not belong to it: my critical enterprise, and the very texts it exists to perform. I cannot, as Arnold did, pretend that my age will turn to them as a substitute for a failing faith; we appear to need no instruction other than technical and are entertained by video; consolation, interpretation, and sustenance are not words understood by the life of irregardless. Testing my commitment, it tempts my lassitude. And yet, precisely by doing so, it mysteriously regenerates the difference. It revives my regard, and my respect, both for itself and for the text. It reminds me that I am tied, in some way, to both; and that my enterprise is to re-join those extremes which meet in me, to bind them together (again), which is a work of re-ligare and thus a religious act. And, in that act, neither may be betrayed: it would be as dishonest to translate Astrophil and Stella into a comic-book as it is thoughtlessly to crush the irregardless under the supposed obligations of their cultural inheritance. This act of humility is, then, an act of re-cognition. In regarding and respecting the irregardless life, I find myself being brought back to the most painful and urgent of the Stellungen with which I began this book: those that concern the Renaissance text and the world in which we live. In order to reach some closureless conclusions which the text, the world and I can all live with, I shall have to begin by exploring the irregardless within this triple bond's own nooks and crannies. There are times, for example, when as a critic I turn my back on the text. When I do not regard it (to unpack, again, the portmanteau). Such are the times when I am concerned, deliciously, with critical theory alone, reasoning in a void, succumbing to the temptations of the speculative intellect. (Lest this seem merely to prove how nugatory is apolitical formalism, I hasten to add that Marxist-feminist and New Historicist critics experience, and succumb to, similar temptations, mutatis not so very many mutandis.) At such times I may consider 'writing'; perhaps 'literature'; possibly even 'poetry' or 'the sonnet-sequence'; but a specific text is then an irritant, a ball and chain. Its rustle and whispering voices distract. It bothers me (il m'embete: denying my flights of Pure Reason c.q. Committed Dialectic, it pulls me down, it insists on curbing my privilegium humanum). Alternatively, I may be listening to, and filled with, the voices

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of my own time in poetry or in art: lost, happily, in the contemplation of a Rothko, arguing with a Beuys, swept away by a Mapplethorpe, reading Ashbery or Heaney, I am tempted to reply to its Elizabethan call in the words of Arnold's abbey-children - leave our desert to its peace/ There are times, equally, when as a critic I do not respect the text. Not in my own case - out of a presentist distate for its supposedly unacceptable social attitudes, but from an occasional irritation with its own, to me alien, critical and creative choices. These are the moments when, as it might be, Gardner's 'Parnassus Stakes' reassert themselves and when, turning from Petrarch or the Faerie Queene to theAmoretti, I find the bulk of them insipid; when Sidney's contemptuous description of Astrophil and Stella as 'toyes' seems fully justified; or when, all of a sudden, I can see perfectly why the Augustans despised the 'clenches' of Shakespeare's Sonnets. At such times of critical disrespect I may even be drawn into wholesale condemnation of the 'sonneteers,' and simply become tired of a textual practice which, in the age of As You Like It or Lear, could delight in the interminable dancing of quite so many dubious angels (or little loves) on the point of a quill. These are the moments when the text becomes an ab-ject, a re-ject. What, as a critic, do I do with them? It seems to me important not to resolve the situation - for instance, by rejecting, quickly, such impulses as an unworthy and a passing mood. Rather, it is at such times that the text can tell me things I am otherwise too intent and too respectful to hear. In The Pleasure of the Text Barthes writes of 'babbling texts' as frigid, pre-neurotic demands. Later, though, he glimpses another possibility: Just as the pleasure of the text presupposes a whole indirect production, so boredom cannot claim any spontaneity: there is no such thing as sincere boredom: if I personally am bored by the babbling text, it is because I really do not like demands. But what if I did (if I had some sort of maternal appetite)? Boredom is not far from ecstasy: it is ecstasy seen from the banks of pleasure.3

Elsewhere he writes of the multiplicity of languages, none foregrounded, that flow into and through him as he sits, half-asleep, in a bar. There is in these passages a clue to the value of disregard and disrespect. For 'babbling texts' are not only those that always babble; every text of any length has its babbling moments; these may, in 'great' texts, change with our moods ('felicity of Proust: from one reading to another, one never skips the same passages'); and any text may, by a power-failure in our cocreative current, be reduced to babbling at one time or another.

222 Chamber music When (and where) this happens, I am summoned by the text to enjoy myself. Not to read for instruction, nor for an organized delight; but to rummage and be rummaged in. It is an enjoyment unknown to both the intellectual tourist and the conscientious humanist. An irresponsible enjoyment, proper to a prisoner immured with a single book, or to some decadent Crusoe unconcerned with useful constructs. For once, I am led to an enjoyment for which I do not have to account (repondre) to my moral, intellectual, or aesthetic conscience/consciousness. And so I let the words of the no-longer-tutelary text flow through me: 'Her soul, arm'd but with such a dainty rind'; 'Her breast, like to a bowl of creame uncrudded'; 'Whose pants do make unspilling creame to flow'; 'Shriking undistinguish'd woe' - I let them bounce their obsolete but proper significations off their modern and improper ones, and derive from the contrast an ephemeral and guiltless jouissance. So much for the text behind me, disregarded and/or disrespected. What lies before? With the text at my back, the triangle's third side cannot help but be faced. 'Irregardless' sits there, legs crossed, absently swinging one foot, the cheerful, vacant face of cultural hypererosion. Am I as a critic implicated in what I have called a 'characteristically modern, pretentious ignorance'? This is a much harder question and a bitter one, and even the shadow of an affirmative reply to it seems menacing. But I am not sure I can avoid it. For one thing, it inexorably reminds me that in proposing a criticism more consciously separate from scholarship, I am treading the edge of precisely that ignorance's abyss. More relevantly, though, it points out another abyss, on the other side (showing our present course to follow an arete). This second abyss is not one which a modicum of scrupulous scholarship can help one to avoid. It is structural, and to some extent inherent in all attempts at a modern criticism. One aspect of it - perhaps the least dangerous, in any case to me the least unacceptable - is the ontological uncertainty I have pointed out as lying at the heart of structuralism and semiotics. Another is what one might call the anti-humanist heedlessness that underlies much of both formalist and anti-formalist post-structuralism, and which, perhaps not wrongly, so bothers George Steiner.4 And a third is surely the 'presentism' which all too often flouts the very principles of equity and scholarship by retroactively condemning the past and its denizens for having infringed laws only recently invented. Even at its worst, the 'Whig historiography that underwrote an earlier literary history' showed more regard and respect for, and less ignorance of, the pastas past.

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These ignorances bring me to a further consciousness of participation. They may not be the same as the ignorances of the irregardless; they may not even have the same roots. Yet they (and with them, I) do form part of the same continuum; and the two do, disastrously, meet in many classrooms. Because of this, I need to pursue the topic further, to begin to spin a bridging thread. If my critical lack of regard and respect led me to a perverse but guiltless enjoyment, where can my hair's-breadth arete between ignorances lead? To a consideration of bridges, perhaps, and of those perilous webs that join: the irregardless to the text, the critic to the text, the critic to the irregardless, the irregardless to the (other) irregardless. The first of these connections lies in the decalage between any 'early text' and any modern reader, from the simplest to the subtlest. All our reading is an archaeology, which is why all our reading is to some extent a misreading. Eliot wrote, 'Someone said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know/5 True: but by the same token we know so much less than they. To make room for the word-processor, we must clear the astrolabe from the study table; and we cannot but see their cosmic paradigms as more truly fictional than they did. Of such a decalage, the basic ignorance of irregardless is in one sense the extreme term: the present state of a diminishing knowledge, a dwindling presence of cultural heritage. As such, it leads me to the second connection, the main and (with Introductions) the most usual bridge between reader and (early) text: footnotes - the 'apparatus' or commentary. It is a tribute to the stamina of scholarly faith that in even the most would-be subversive and incendiary works of revisionist scholarship, these as a category have so far escaped both analysis and criticism. This is a pity: an irreverent semiotics of the apparatus would reveal the latter's continuing kinship to the culture of liberal rationalism and scientism where, in its modern form, it originated. Nevertheless the apparatus, like the democracy it represents, is not easily dispensed with, if early texts are to be read at all. Between irregardless on the one hand and Astrophil on the other there is need for a bridge of some length and solidity. The structural decalage, then, joins the irregardless to the sophisticate, linking the two in a common plight. The bridge of the apparatus connects both to the text in the worthy and necessary manner of democracy. And the two, as connectors, point to the ignorance of irregardless as an extreme case, different in degree but not in kind, thus reinforcing my sense of belonging to both sides and performing religious actions.

224 Chamber music The arete, however, leads me to a further consideration, and a farther peak. The 'irregardless' of the critic I described above as a 'perversion'; and in the world of the apparatus, for instance, it is. Yet it is to this various forms of which could be created as extensions of this book's practices, and which is thus the perspective or prospect of this book - it is to this that the arete leads. There is, in other words, a second irregardless: not an extreme term but a special case. The essence of the first is deprivation; that of the second is decadence. To a decline and fall of liberal knowledge has been fitted (in part deliberately) a decadent metatextual practice. Its roots lie in the tradition of Nietzsche, Blanchot, Bataille, and Barthes; its early practitioners saw it as a plastique for blowing up liberal bridges. However, in relation both to the first, or Walkmanned, irregardless and to the world of prudent bridges it reveals itself as aristocratic and esoteric - two terms to be explained. Aristocratic, because in its decadence it is dependent upon the very learning it subverts: any child can draw cubes, but making a Cubist painting needs a long process of traditional learning, subsequently shaken. As such, it is peculiarly unfitted for adoption into the curriculum of universities where, increasingly as parents and schools abandon their mandate, the linguistic, literary, and cultural formation of the irregardless is addressed. Neither, however, can or should it be abandoned; for it is aristocratic also as being the most refined state of knowledge. As knowledge, it cannot be discarded: there is no way to unlearn what has been thought. Nor should it be. This decadent practice is what knowledge is for. Like pure mathematics, it is in essence an art, pursued for no sake but its own, yet blossoming in instruction and delight. In a rare positive sense, a jeu d'esprit. There is no higher goal for knowledge to aspire to than the play, the game, that is art. Yet there is more. At best, I wrote, this metatextual practice is not (only) aristocratic but esoteric; and I mean that word in its strict and full sense. In any esoteric religion, certain texts are sacred: they are separated from the world of daily life, and access to them is restricted to those who have undergone a long and intense process of spiritual formation. Now in any bookshop with a section labelled 'Religion' or 'Occult' these texts are presently available for a small sum, a desiring-machine for the irregardless. In no way, however, does this destroy their value as sacred texts: for what the irregardless read is a different text, even though written in identical words. Anyone who has tried to teach, say, indeterminacy to undergraduates will have remarked a similar phenomenon: all too often

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their effortless co-optation of hard-won revolutionary practices is aimless, pointless, useless, and feckless (as well as being, increasingly, Big Business). Yet their casual acceptance will in no way destroy or even cripple the metatextual practices themselves, which remain as the final term of a lengthy process of learning. (It might, however, make us think twice about communicating the jouissance of disrespect to those who have never known the joy of respect, teaching deconstruction to those who have only the scantiest knowledge of architecture, multiplying courses and appointments in 'Modern Critical Theory' or 'Postmodernism,' and practising the repressive tolerance that treats perversion as a sane and worthy part of our transmitted heritage.) We should not, I think, be put off by the term esoteric, which, far from being confined to louche or silly suburban sects, can teach us valuable lessons about mental/spiritual processes in general and about reading in particular. This can perhaps best be made clear at the hand of Matthew Arnold's The Study of Poetry.' That notorious collection of circular arguments awkwardly supporting a noble ambition deserves another look - a new regard, and a new respect. For in never giving a theory; in withholding from the reader any recipe for poetic 'excellence'; in constantly sending us back to snippets of great verse, to be used as 'touchstones'; Arnold is in fact guiding us to an esoteric (as well as a remarkably modern) criticism. A criticism, that is, in which there is no short-cut, no substitute for reading - reading long, reading often, re-reading, and reading with what Arnold marvellously refuses any name other than tact. In thus refusing theory, he recognizes the plurality, the discontinuity, and the necessary uncertainty of readers and of readings. And he also emphasizes that the truths of a text can only be assimilated, can only be accomplished, through process; that the learning, the assimilation, the accomplishing are the interpretation of life, the consolation, the sustenance he sees as poetry's role; and that these are in the process itself, not in its result. It is in this sense that the irregardless I have postulated as an art is properly esoteric (and also, as Arnold's shade reminds us, deeply moral; but that is another Histoire). We are getting to the moral of the story. The text of the Renaissance needs to become, once again, a subject. It has for too long been an object: object of study, object of discovery, object of analysis, object of education. So objective has it become; so objective have we become; that no simple declaration of enthusiasm will resubjectify it, no guileless kiss will bring

226 Chamber music it back to life. We are, then, condemned, if we would once again hear its voice, to the dubious art of irregardless. For it is by irregardless's decadence, its aristocracy, its esoterism, that we can deny regard, deny respect, indeed ignore the sonnet-sequences, and so provoke them to respond. Paradoxically, the two species of irregardless bear, and must bear, a superficial resemblance (seen, for instance, from the regarding and respectful bridge of knowledge). Their difference is that the decadent irregardless's ignoring, its ignorance, is a reading ignorance. When, practising its art, we ignore the sonnet-sequences, we do so while (re)reading them. It is this, and only this, that enables them to respond to the provocation of our irregardless attitude. In so doing they become, once again, subject: speaking to us in the voices they have taken over time. We can then reply in our turn, and so revive that dialogue of which I wrote above, in the first movement; that irregardless activity between text and reader so finely sketched by Blanchot: But is not the book that is dug up, the manuscript taken out of the jar into reading's daylight, by some impressive stroke of luck reborn? What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written. Reading, then, might be - not rewriting the book but letting the book write itself or be written - this time without the mediation of the writer, without anyone writing it. The reader does not add himself to the book, but he tends first of all to remove from it the weight of any author; and the swiftness of his approach, the idle shadow passing over the pages and leaving them intact, all that makes reading seem superfluous, and even the lack of attention, the small weight of interest, all the infinite lightness of the reader, proclaims the new lightness of the book become authorless, without the seriousness, the work, the weighty anxieties, the heaviness of a whole life poured into it - an experience sometimes frightful, always formidable, which the reader erases and, in his providential lightness, regards as nothing.6

Meanwhile, and at the same time, bridges must continue to be built between irregardless and irregardless: bridges of regard, bridges of respect, bridges of knowledge. Such a building merits every encouragement, every energy we can give it. If we deprive one or two generations of what Daniele Sallenave calls the 'gift from the dead/ we shall have ensured that whatever we ourselves value in our subversive readings of the Renaissance text will be inaccessible to them, and our betrayal will be complete. Between irregardless as deprivation and irregardless as art lies a long labour - Bentleian, Arnoldian, and Barthesian - of regard and of respect.

Encore: irregardless 227 In accordance with the art's esoteric nature, moreover, such a labour is the opposite of extraneous. The Bentleian work of pure scholarship maketh an exact man, his regard honed to a precision and a discrimination that bear pure pleasures of their own as well as serving to prepare the mind for perversion. The Arnoldian reading and rereading, the acquisition and exercise of a reader's tact, unites the right brain to the left in a practice of respect, and joins the heart to both. The Barthesian 'move into perversion,' finally, takes regard and respect together and translates them into the purer dimension of irregardless. When this dimension is reached, learning becomes flight. What is it to be a weightless reader of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare? It is perhaps to attain, passing over their pages like a winged and inconsequential shadow, something infinitely distant and infinitely true. Not, obviously, The truth - or, indeed, The meaning - of Astrophil and Stella and the others: pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty have not ceased to apply. What the discipline that allows freedom, and the freedom that finally enables irregardless, create in us is a new and peculiarly apt way to accomplish (the plural of) these texts. For the lightness of irregardless, the lightness of the lack of regard and respect, permits me at last to read the sonnet-sequences with an absolute, but absolutely weightless, seriousness. This condition - itself a plural of the text - is, I think, the only equivalent of (though not, indeed, the same as) the Renaissance's own way of reading sonnet-sequences, which we are almost totally barred from recovering.7 Our mistake has been to act as if a text's old age deprives it of voice, to reduce it to object, to study it. (In a certain sense, we may find, it is the preservation of literature as object that will have very nearly accomplished its destruction; its survival in classrooms that will all but have assured its death in the mind and heart.) In the case of the sonnetsequences it is a commonplace to say that we cannot read them as did their contemporaries; but from that we go on not to read them at all. Literature - novels, poetry, literary fiction - completes, accomplishes this movement of soaring, of leaving the world behind: when the movement is there, literature is in tune with it; when it's not there, literature demands it. A child reading is like a child when it's sick: it is stretched full-length, it doesn't move, it doesn't hear, outside, the glorious call of July. 'What's wrong with you?' its mother asks, 'Are you ill? You're so quiet.' 'No/ says the child, 'I'm reading.'8

In their old age, the sonnet-sequences are still subjects: they still have voices, though not those of their youth, and they can and will still be provoked to whisper authorless and disconcerting verities. That which

228 Chamber music to scholars makes their mystery - the elusive nature of the autobiographical element, the object's vagueness (a woman? a symbol? a college? an Idea?), the undecideable engagement (or conversely) of their Poet-Lover - awaits, we find, the weightless and always already perjured I of irregardless. 'A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)/9 'Aixo era y no era' is the exordium of stories, we remember. Stories that speak, that entrance, that keep us from play or from the chimney corner. 'No,' we say, 'We're reading/ The poet who accomplishes these marvels is not a person with a car and a credit card. The poet - now as in 1580 - is the text. All it demands of me as a reader is everything: to close my eyes (not to look); to be very simple (not crippled by respect, or indeed by suspicion); to achieve, after learning, unknowing. Within itself, I shall find, it teaches me the way: irregardless may be decadent, it is not incongruent. The sonnet-sequences themselves disregard, disrespect, and are elaborately ignorant of, their ostensible object. More than any other poetic structures, they revolve about an Other. 'O know, sweet love, I alwaies write of you, / And you and love are still my argument' (Sonn. 76: 9-10). Moreover they are, from Dante and Petrarch on, at pains to convince us of that Other's (extratextual) reality. 'When say Stella, I do meane the same / Princesse of beautie, for whose only sake / The raines of Love I love' (A&S 28:5-7);anc* her foolish husband is (Lord) Rich (24; 37). Yet their Other is an also empty space, disregarded. 'Your name from hence immortal life shall have, / Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye' (Sonn. 91:5-6): but the text represses the name, which we do not know because we are not told. Stella's name is veiled, Elizabeth's is revealed; yet Stella's dark eyes and golden hair are also Laura's, and Elizabeth's body is that of a blason. The poet/lover lives, he would have us believe, in the perpetual blinding sunlight of the Beloved's radiance. Dazzled but mesmerized, his regard is fixed there: ... I look'd, and Stella spide, Who hard by made a window send forth light. My heart then quak'd, then dazled were mine eyes, One hand forgot to rule, th'other to fight... That being now with her huge brightnesse dazed, base thing I can no more endure to view, but looking on her still I stand amazed at wondrous light of so celestiall hew.

A&S 53

Am. 3

Encore: irregardless 229 And not only his regard. His respect for the Beloved is boundless: Not at first sight... But knowne worth did in mine of time proceed Till by degrees it had full conquest got.

A&S 2

Her mind adorned with vertues manifold.

Am. 15

The whole sequence, finally, is predicated on his knowing: knowing the right words - 'Looke in thy heart, and write' (A&S i); 'So long lives this, and this gives life to thee' (Sonn. 18). He invests everything in the adequacy of his discourse to transcribe the object of his regard and his respect. Yet what is the result? A depersonalized Other, describeable and described only in highly coded metaphor; a supposed respect that regularly cedes to desire, or disapproval, or both at once; and an ostensible knowledge no less consistently revealed as ignorance. Astrophil's maniacal regarding of Stella sees only a Beloved who might as well be Laura, Delia, or Cynthia. (Edward)'s respect for Elizabeth does not save him from 'unquiet thoughts' and leads him to repress, dismember, and thus disseminate Cupid. And Will's knowledge of both Friend and Lady leads him at every crucial step to prefer, and to practise, ignorance: 'O cunning love, with teares thou keepst me blinde, / Least eyes well seeing thy foule faults should finde' (148). Considering the texts' relation to the reader will join this second triangle of irregardless to the first. For as the addressee of love-poetry is always already double, the reader does not go scot-free. The text does not regard him, look him in the face: in the multiple dissimulations of readerly presence that characterize the lyric's duplicity, the sequence turns its back on him, murmuring what he must pretend to overhear. 'These lines I use, t'unburthen mine owne hart, / My love affects no fame, nor steemes of art' (Daniel, Delia 4). Nor does the text respect the reader. In the very obviousness of its intertextuality, in the manipulative coding of its highly visible rhetoric, and in its teasing contradiction of his prejudices, the major sequence bullies and bores, counterattacks and upsets. 'Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lyes we flattered be'(Sonn. 138). Finally, the text is as ignorant of its reader as he is of it. Apparently written to an apparently known Beloved and to a small circle of known and 'skilfull' readers, it is in fact (the fact of publication, however sprezzaturically) unleashed upon the Unknown, upon the multitude.

230 Chamber music When Wordsworth wrote 'with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart/ he was not lamentably misunderstanding the Sonnets; he was merely reflecting what the text wishes to project. But in Wright's or Apsley's bookshops, it projects this upon anyone - irregardless. There is, I find, one final question to be opened, one last thread to be spun. Again I return to the movement with this text began. At the start of an argument focused on the three conditions of pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty, I proffered ten propositions, the tenth of which rather baldly stated This is a book of you(rs)/ Perhaps the last word - which is of course not the last word - belongs to that voice. It is, first of all, not a serious voice. In traditional Dutch thesis-defences, the Tenth Proposition is known also as the Ludic Proposition, and opens the possibility of a discussion in which wit may leaven learning. This challenge seems to me important, even if it is rarely taken up; its voice carries, in its uncertain or discordant timbre, a small but authentic promise of irregardless. Secondly, it is the voice of this proposition that has (m)uttered this entire text. It is the voice that denies itself, that pays attention (but without regard or respect, muttering over its shoulder) to you. This voice, self-effacing but insistent, reminds you, as it does me, that what Sidney called 'this bee writing' is now - almost - the diary of a bygone year, a box of keepsakes in an unlit attic. Unless you open it, have opened it, will have opened it, will have read it. If and when you will have done so, the voice will be (found to be) whispering truth. This is a book of you(rs): you have made it so, in and by the act of reading. Beyond that obvious point there is more. For what the Ludic Proposition's voice tells you is a process which has been true all through the time of your reading, your Lesezeit. For all of that time, it will not have been a book except in combination with you. In itself it has been the performance of a score, which then becomes in turn the score for your performance, of which this is (also) the Encore. Thus and so, this is a book of you(rs). Your reactions to it - to its whole, to its several parts are an integral and indispensable part of that book. By and in them you have (co-)created what, by analogy with Riffaterre's term, we might call the critical phenomenon. And the implications of this go farther still: for my ludic proposition which, after this co-creation, you might write on the fly-leaf, is of course the caption, in Memoires d'aveugle, of a blind man's self-portrait: 'Ceci est un dessin de moi' - this is a drawing of m(in)e - this is a book of you(rs).

Encore: irregardless

231

The call of this drawing, the voice of this (m)utterance, has in no sense drowned, or tried to drown, Astrophil's, (Edmund)'s, and Will's. They, after all, were you(rs) before: they are if anything more so now. The voices meet and mingle in you as they do in me, as they did in Roland Barthes's bar; and, as there, they are fragmented: I was myself a public place, a souk: in me came and went words, bits of phrases, scraps of expressions, and none of it formed a single sentence, as if such was the law of that language. This speech, at once highly cultured and quite wild, was above all lexical, sporadic; it created in me, through its apparent flow, a definite discontinuity: this non-sentence was not at all something incapable of becoming a sentence, something existing before the sentence; it was that which exists eternally, superbly, outside the sentence.10

And so in these ludic, light, commingled voices - the voices of Astrophil, (Edmund), and Will, and the several voices of this present text - what is fragmented is perhaps (what we know as) Thought. Thought in the sense in which Barthes uses sentence: as something teachers finish. These voices weave a planless web, a smoky drifting language outside thought, yet the winding warp of which is formed by the sonnet-sequences. An irregardless web, a disregarding and disrespectful weaving; a text, finally, of unknowing. You(rs).

[THE END]

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Appendix: Discourse and its choices

This is admittedly an odd book. Its chapters are not chapters, and they are written each in a different manner. Let me explain why. As a whole, Chamber Music is really two books: a book about sonnetsequences using a modern method, and a book about modern criticism using three Elizabethan sonnet-sequences as an example. The unity of such a book depends to a great extent on the inseparability of its 'manner' from its 'matter.' While sonnets were, as a rule, not set to music and are perhaps the least musical of lyrics, the musical background of the lyric genre did provide a helpful pattern. The book's title is a metaphor: the great sonnet-sequences take, within their poets' ceuvre, the place of chamber music within a composer's. The chapters that are not chapters one might call 'movements' if such a title were not precious. They are sequential, but not in the way that chapters are in a book of argument. They follow each other more like movements in a quartet, or indeed like sonnets in a sequence, creating a cumulative experience through apparently independent (or semi-independent) material, treated in different keys and tempi. The argument of the first movement, which sets out the book's critical position, postulates as an aspect of a 'modern criticism' the modern(ist) transformation not only of the argument but of its discourse, as modern painting has transformed not only subject-matter but also technique. Accordingly, the discourse - I use this word in preference to 'style,' as what is meant is more a persona than a garment - of each movement originates in its matter. A part of the decision to proceed like this stemmed from the conviction that our standard Anglo-Saxon academic discourse, which might be

234 Appendix called the Neo-German Expository, is admirable but not self-evident. It represents a choice, a fact frequently unrecognized and sometimes dissimulated. What my choices of discourses have tried to do collectively is to make us aware that the NGE is one of many possible critical discourses, apt for some purposes, less so for others. What they attempt to do severally is the following. 'Prelude' had to do two things: to shock (in the French sense: not moral but striking) and to explain. So I begin with a borrowing from another academic tradition - that of Dutch and German thesis-defences - which yields ten propositions, for debate. What follows explains both what I mean and why I believe it is worth spending time and thought on. Three easy pieces' is a rigorous application of Riffaterrean semiotics to three sample sonnets. For this I chose an equally rigorous expository discourse, as the method itself is both so methodical and so intricate (and, at first, difficult) that careful sequential thought - both represented and furthered by a careful, sequential discourse - is essential for its manipulation. 'Polyphony' seemed to need a discourse both more unusual and more reflective. We are not used to thinking of (these) texts in terms of polyphony (which is not the same as intertextuality). So it seemed appropriate to modify both structure and vocabulary, in order to permit a little more of the 'right brain' to enter both the discourse and the readers' process of understanding. Tempo/Sequenza' compares two kinds of present tense - critical and lyrical - and, through them, the two discourses which represent object and subject of the book. It is (the book's nature being double) also an argument about time in the Astrophil and Stella. The two kinds of present are conventions, codes that need to be recognized consciously if our consciousness of time in the sequences is to be capable of producing an analysis such as follows. The one is explained in part by reference to the other; and it is the introduction of a lyrical present beside the critical present in this text that helps to do so. Two-part invention' could not proceed without recognizing a huge difficulty. 'Shakespeare' is an entity that has little to do with William Shakespeare the man. It has become a cultural token, competed for and appropriated by everyone; as an entity, it has become exceedingly difficult to approach naively. To discuss it in the same manner as discussing Drayton, say, or even Sidney, is like comparing the political stability of Russia to that of Denmark. The curious discourse of this movement results from three sources which, in different ways, helped to solve the

Discourse and its choices 235 problem: a translation I made of Derrida's Memoires d'aveugle (not published though used in part by the Chicago translators Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas for their Memoirs of the Blind); a performance of The Tempest by Peter Brook's international theatre company at the Bouffes du Nord in Paris; and, for the argument of the movement - the Sonnets as the transformation of the Amoretti - a long-ago conference theme called Time, Love, and Ruins.' Derrida also writes eloquently of ruins in Memoires; and the impassioned contemplation of the sequence as selfportrait, of the self-portrait as ruin, and of two sequences as two selfportraits, one the ruin of the other as well as of itself, provided an unusual but effective route to approach the mountain that is 'Shakespeare.' Theme with variations' is not particularly 'unusual' in its discourse. Its theme - that 'beauty' in the sonnet-sequences is the same as the 'beauty' discussed by Barthes in S/Z, a central silence (and thus susceptible to Riffaterrean analysis, in reverse) - seemed well served by a discourse as clear and relatively simple as Barthes's own. 'From the new world' is of course controversial. This piece is in fact a highly serious treatment of myth in its relation to the sonnet-sequences using the only myth that really matters there, Eros. During my research for a made but never-aired TV miniseries on myth, one of the things tha struck me was the extent to which 'Greek Mythology' distorts what myth is. Sidney especially, of the three sonneteers here discussed, went some way to undoing this disastrous conceptual stasis. The present movement is an attempt to let a myth speak, and thus to remind readers that a myth (a fortiori Eros, and in particular in the sonnet-sequences) is something (someone?) that lives: a point borne out, in different ways, by texts such as Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? and Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. As for the discourse, in this case, it is essential to my argument that a myth is a living being, a 'tale that lives.' Since Eros is the only serious myth in the sequences, it is Eros who speaks. (His ideas, I might add, are not nearly always mine, nor is his tone. John Fowles has shown that the ideas and behaviour even of a character in a novel do not always conform to the author's purposes: much less so those of a myth.) 'Ein Heldenleben,' like Three easy pieces/ applies something close to 'standard academic discourse' to propose a set of unusual ideas - the analysis of a life, a career, as a text; the discovery of what one might call its structural poetics, 'the rules according to which the object functions.' I have here used five codes, as Barthes did in S/Z, which seemed appropri-

236 Appendix ate for the discussion of a Renaissance courtier's life. (Substantially the same codes have since been used to analyse the life of Marguerite de Valois, with interesting results.)1 'Death and the maiden' is an attempt to trace the central role of Death in the sequences under consideration. Here what seemed crucial was to eliminate the distance - to break through the distancing - we, as critics, create between ourselves and the text. Our now-traditional NGE discourse is the creation and the example of that distance, that distancing. It allows us not be terrified, it permits us - indeed, it enjoins us - not to be moved. Given the central position of Death in the sequences, this seemed inexcusable. This 'movement's' discourse, then, is an attempt to let ourselves be moved without abandoning thought. Both description and quoted lyric (the 'second hand' that is 'the work of quotation') helped here to undermine too great an expository arrogance. 'Divertimento' is almost entirely expository, being as it is an intricate attempt to solve a bibliographical puzzle. The only oddity in its discourse is the temporary withholding of the key character's name, in the interests of suspense. This grew spontaneously. I used to use the example in a bibliography course, and was intrigued at the students' instant (and quite correct) perception of it as a detective story. This, after all, is what 'research' is; and using a device from that other 'research' seemed to address both the mood surrounding the event and the curious anger of the Sidney Circle at what was not an 'unauthorized' publication at all since it did not have to be 'authorized.' 'Four-part fugue' has already appeared, in substantially the same form, in Spenser Studies 8. Its form is peculiar, but derives from its attempt to analyse its subject: indeterminacy and undecideability. The argument is itself fairly difficult. Dividing it into numbered sections seemed both congruent with the sonnet topic and helpful to the reader. Some sections, though, do more than that (or less, according to one's point of view). Nos. i and 2 are there to disconcert, and to make the reader understand what 'indeterminacy' means. Nos. 13, 23, and 36 are, one might say, the 'Anacreontics' of the movement: text-as-space, a break, a rest, between major articulations of what is, after all, a dense and complex argument. They are also reminders that the authorial personae of the sequences are indeterminate, undecideable but considerable presences, to a reader. No. 46 is not one of these - it is there purely to (re)mark a point. And no. 59 gathers up the previous ones, and is part of the reminder that we are not, here, dealing with an objective scientific

Discourse and its choices 237 activity; as such it is the bridge to the deliberately impassioned twelfth 'movement/ 'Encore: irregardless/ while exhibiting no formal curiosities, returns to the discourse of 'Prelude.' It takes up some of the points there made about criticism and its readership, and pursues these to the even more urgent and crucial area of reading in general, and reading early texts in particular. It defends, with deliberate passion, both such reading and the relation to it of a modern criticism as here set forth. Its discourse, accordingly, joins reflection and emotion, to remind readers that reading is a passionate activity. Thus and so, the book's discourse at each turn reflects a choice, always consciously completed if not always so begun. I am convinced that the possibility, the permissibility, and the desirability of such a choice are beginning to be widely sensed. In harmony with sound scholarship, it can only do us good.

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Notes

The editions I have mainly used are: The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1962); The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989); Shakespeare's Sonnets, Edited with an Analytic Commentary, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977); and Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. J. Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin/Viking, 1986). Where the edition is not important, poems are cited by number only. All translations of foreign texts are mine. Preface i One note concerning the ecriture. After a certain amount of nineties soulsearching I have decided to follow human generic nouns in the singular (such as 'reader') with the masculine pronoun. Needless to say, this is not intended to insult women, nor does it reflect a belief that the masculine is dominant. But I, for better or for worse, am a man; and when I imagine the situations of which such nouns are a part, I identify with their referent. This being the case, honesty seems best served with the appropriate pronominal forms. i Prelude 1 Maurice Blanchot, L'espace litteraire (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1955), 337. 2 Michael Riffaterre, La production du texte (Paris: Seuil,i979), 9,11,27. 3 Cf. David Quint's Introduction to Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed, Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), 15, where he notes, with apparent approval, the essays' 'engagement with contemporary theory, their resistance to its most radical conclusions,' and my discussion of this statement and the attitude it represents in 'Untitled,' SNew, 9:1 (1988), 33-41.

240 Notes to pages 4-7 4 The lay audience's comprehension of, and liking for, modern art has not grown according to the accelerating J-curve characteristic of the century. Particularly in the linear arts (which, unlike the visual, cannot be reduced to incidental decoration), yesterday's avant-garde has not become today's mainstream. We should not confuse cause with effect: modernism's causes may be rooted in (linear) history, but its effects belie notions of continuity and progress. If, as I submit, it is not merely a stage we were going through, criticism has some urgent reconsidering to do. 5 This is (unfortunately) one area where the J-curve is in full swoop, with disastrous effect. On the one hand a hidden curriculum is created which prevents young scholars from taking seriously what is outmoded; on the other, the seriousness and durability of any new approach is implicitly degraded by its status (positive or negative) relative to Fashion. 6 An exception should be made for Terence Hawkes's still excellent introduction Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley/Los Angeles: California UP, 1977). 7 I am considering the work of Dilthey CWhat is will? What is reason? Structure is all') and Spranger as structuralist prehistory; the reintegration of structuralism and psychology came with the work, and especially with the school, of Lacan. 8 See especially Jacques Derrida, L'ecriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967); tr. Alan Bass as Writing and Difference (U of Chicago P, 1978), chs. i and 5. 9 L. Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques (Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog og Kulturferlag, 1959), i. 10 Roland Barthes, 'L'activite structurale,' in Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964); tr. R.Howard as Critical Essays (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern UP, 1972). 11 For Ronsard, see Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 86ff.; for Du Bellay, see La production du texte, ch. 7,11326. Since this last passage deals with one of the 'songes/ it is of equal interest to Spenserians. 12 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970); tr. R. Miller (London: Cape, 1975), chs. 3-12,87, and passim. 13 Claude Levi-Strauss, in both Elementary Structures of Kinship, tr. J.H. Bell, J.R. von Stunner, and R. Needham (Boston: Beacon P, 1969), 3, and The Savage Mind (U of Chicago P, 1966), 247; cited, with a valuable critique, by Derrida, Writing and Difference, 284-85. 14 In anthropology, the work of Michel Leiris and especially that of LeviStrauss was decisive; in linguistics, the line of development passes from Saussure via Roman Jakobson to A.-J. Greimas and the Liege Group. 15 This caveat, of course, applies mainly to anthropology, where a society may

Notes to pages 7-8 241 consciously decide upon an alteration of specific practices or customs; but also to linguistic phenomena such as slang, jargon, or buzz-words. 16 It might be thought that this supposition has been long defunct; but a glance at the Bulletin du groupe de recherches semio-linguistiques (the Greimas group at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris) shows that it is still very much alive, and that the mammoth project of a General Semiotics on linguistic (structural) bases continues unabated and unabashed. Even Paul de Man, who discusses the problem with grace and intelligence in his 'Semiology and Rhetoric' chapter in Allegories of Reading (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1979); 3-19, leaves the reader at best in a 'state of suspended ignorance' (19). 17 This in no way deprecates Derrida's extraordinary work with literary texts, such as his essays on Jabes and Artaud in Writing and Difference or his 'Double Session,' largely on Mallarme, in La dissemination (Paris: Seuil,i972); tr. B. Johnson as Dissemination (U of Chicago P, 1981); but all these form part of his philosophical attack, via ecriture, on metaphysics, and are at crucial points determined by this objective. The error thus created leads a stubborn and apparently charmed existence, sowing confusion wherever it finds itself. For some notable examples, see The Question of Textuality, ed. W. Spanos, P.A. Bove, and D. O'Hara (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982), where occasional awareness of the problem struggles with, and is usually defeated by, an irrepressible drive to continue the practice of 'deconstructive criticism.' That it is possible to be inspired by Derrida without falling into the trap is shown by some of Jonathan Goldberg's work, notably Voice Terminal Echo (London/New York: Methuen, 1986) and Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990). For an attempt in a very different vein, see the discussion of Derrida's Gap in 'Four-part fugue,' below. 18 In Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974; orig. Munich: Fink, 1972), and The Act of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979; orig. Munich: Fink, 1974). 19 Cf. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford UP, 1971) and Allegories of Reading. 20 Cf. especially H.R. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, tr. M. Shaw (Minneapolis Minnesota UP, 1982). 21 Ibid., 56-60; Umberto Eco, The Open Work, tr. A. Cancogni (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 19.89). 22 Michel Foucault, L'ordre du discours (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1971). 23 Ibid., 54-5.

242 Notes to pages 9-12 24 A good example is A-J. Greimas's 'Roland Barthes: une biographic a construire/ Bulletin du groupe de recherches semio-linguistiques, no. 13 (March 1980), 5. A more accurate, while still positive, picture is presented by LouisJean Calvet's excellent biography Roland Barthes (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 25 There is, of course, the work of Pound; but since it tends to be read as the prose of a major poet I reluctantly omit it in this context. See also Geoffrey Hartman, The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis/ in The Fate of Reading (U of Chicago P, 1975). 26 For this concept, see Barthes's remarks on 'accomplishing the plural of the text' in 'Par ou commencer?,' Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 145; and below, lyff. 27 Like decalage only more so, this term is not really covered by its usual English translation 'writing.' Even in standard French, it has the additional meaning of 'handwriting' and is often used to mean (personal) 'style'; in the ceuvre of Barthes the word undergoes a twenty-year development, and in that of Derrida the Barthesian usage is always intertextually present. Curiously, even a text as perceptive as Goldberg's Writing Matter shows no awareness of this. 28 See Barthes, Le degre zero de I'ecriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953), 14; tr. A. Lavers and C. Smith as Writing Degree Zero (London: Cape, 1967; New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). 29 Since almost all Derrida's work from Grammatology on is in one way or another concerned with this topic, it would be useless to point to specific essays or references. However, 'Plato's Pharmacy' in Dissemination is perhaps as clear a statement as any. 30 Critics as diverse as Roman Jakobson, Tzvetan Todorov, Jean Cohen, and Michael Riffaterre have all, with reference to poetic language's ecart, or distancing, from a non-poetic norm, cited scholarly language as an instance of the non-stylistically-marked, or transparent, standard. 31 Neither 'liberation' nor 'subversion' is, emphatically, criticism's main objective; but in this context it should be remembered that Foucault is signalling the danger of unquestioned, inherent ideologies as a form of the control of discourse. 32 The extent, and the line, of the dependence is stated rigorously and well in Fredson Bowers' two small classics Textual and Literary Criticism (Cambridge UP, 1959) and Bibliography and Textual Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1964). Time has not cancelled their relevance. 33 This term, which refers to a number unimaginably large (io100) but still finite, originated in E. Kassner and J. Newman's Mathematics and the Imagination (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).

Notes to pages 12-16 243 34 It would, of course, be simplistic as well as unkind here to cite Lawrence Durrell's famous tetrastich in the text; but as it is both good and salutary, it may be allowed to creep into a note: How nugatory and how glum The endomorphs of scholarship Like hippos on a sinking ship Stay bum to silly bum. 35 The text will not bear it, good Gilgilis Hobberdehoy' (Strange Newes). Perhaps Nashe is the real forerunner of modern criticism. The fact that he is also an 'early text' provides a good excuse for the unrespectable pleasure of rereading him. See also 'Divertimento,' below. 36 This is even more true in English, where the language itself underwent virtually unrestrained change until the mid-eighteenth century, than in neoclassically frozen French. The fact that Shakespeare is still not only taught but produced and bent to every director's bias (and occasionally even read) should make us thank Heaven fasting for an infinitely adaptable cultural imperative. 37 Roland Barthes, Ecrivains de toujours (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 94. 38 Ibid., 107. 39 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit (Pans: Seuil, 1983), i:86ff. 40 Helen Gardner, 'The Sceptre and the Torch/ in The Business of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1959), 3-24. 41 I use this term here in a loose version of Riffaterre's sense: the statement (not itself present in the text) the actualized variants of which form the text. See Semiotics of Poetry, 19. 42 This is the helpful, non-directive version: earlier models might better be worded as 'I will now tell you the reasons.' 43 Paul Ricceur, Temps et recit n: La configuration dans le recit de fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1984); tr. by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellaver as Time and Narrative (U of Chicago P, 1988), ch. 2,173-246. Among the views dealt with are those of William Dray, George Henrik von Wright, Arthur Danto, W.B. Gallic, Louis O. Mink, Hayden White, and Paul Veyne. 44 Especially in his discussion of White, Temps et recit n, 228ff. and 247ff. 45 Paul Veyne, Comment on ecrit I'histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 44ff. 46 The evocation of this frightening prelate will serve to remind us that, historically, a cultural consensus has almost always been maintained, and often imposed, by political authority. Pace the New Historicists, this does not necessarily mean that the consensus itself is, or was, illusory.

244 Notes to pages 16-25 47 And as such (as Foucault's sustained investigation of this phenomenon makes clear) our ways of conceiving truth and of formulating our questions. 48 In Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 104-5; see also his posthumous Le grain de la voix (Paris: Seuil, 1981). 49 In Barthes, Le degre zero de I'ecriture, 145. 50 Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change 1914-1939 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 88-9. 51 For a more detailed discussion, see below, 47-51. 52 The myth of the non-academic reader (at least of early texts) dies harder in England than in Evanston, in Montpellier than in Montreal; but it dies. Whether the reality dies also is up to us. 53 This power in our case is a cultural one, based once again on the fact that almost all critics now participate professionally in the inherently authoritarian process of teaching. The rhetoric of this process (what Barthes would have called its Mythology) is currently one of humble resource for the achievement of the student/consumer's personal goal. But this rhetoric is produced via the typical late-twentieth-century commercial-language norm of antonymic signification: it corresponds to a reality of cultural erosion and often at best instrumental motivation on the part of the reader/student. The result is increased authority, both cultural and institutional, on the part of the critic/teacher. 54 It should be mentioned here that Barthes, throughout Le plaisir du texte, occasionally (though not always) distinguishes plaisir and jouissance. This latter word has no direct equivalent in English. 'Enjoyment' is far too lowkey: the French, being also the word used to denote the peak of sexual pleasure, is closer to describing an experience of ecstasy. In my use of 'pleasure' here, I do not distinguish the two in kind, implying only their difference in degree. 55 Cf. Barthes, Plaisir, 38-9 and passim. 56 For performance, I have used musical analogies, but dramatic ones, such as Peter Brook's productions, are of course equally relevant. 57 I have borrowed this term from Judith Fetterley's The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), without thereby implying any connection. 58 This warning is implicit throughout Writing and Difference, but explicit especially in ch. 4 'Violence and Metaphysics.' 59 See Barthes, Plaisir, 63. 60 Charles Morgan, The Judge's Story (London: Macmillan, 1947), 37. 61 Barthes, Plaisir, 31.

Notes to pages 26-9 245 2: Three easy pieces 1 Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 391-2. 2 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978). Page references to this work are given in the text. 3 In contrast to current practice, in these three pieces at least, I normalize only long s, leaving u/v and i for; as they appear in the original. My reason for this is that, of these three cases, only long s was a separate character: the others consist of a different distribution of existing characters and thus at least a potential (and wholly secondary) blurring. In pieces where the reader is invited to regard the text with great intensity, I think it is worth keeping the potential blur, if only as a perpetual reminder of non-mimetic reading practices. 4 Semiotics, usually thought of as the study of signs or the 'study of codes/ is for Riffaterre the study of the 'indirection which is the essence of poetic discourse' (Semiotics, 1-2). To put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another' (ibid.). The 'one thing' is the level of meaning or mimesis, where the text is 'a continuously changing semantic sequence' (2); the 'other' is the level of significance, which is that of a 'formal and semantic unity' (2). The 'transfer of a sign from one level of discourse to another ... is the proper domain of semiotics. Everything related to this integration of signs from the mimesis level into the higher level of significance is a manifestation of semiosis' (4). 5 For this concept, see Tzvetan Todorov, Litterature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967), n6f. 6 Especially with reference to syntactic structure. If one is willing provisionally (according to the First Law of Textual Criticism) to accept the punctuation as authorial, the marking of line-endings in 10,11, and 12 reinforces my point (below) concerning the deliberate ambiguity of line i3's 'And I...' 7 The second factor of semiosis that slants representation toward another, symbolic meaning is the way the text is built... The suspense and semantic overturn are space- or sequence-induced phenomena, inseparable from the physical substance of the text or from its paradoxical retroversion - the end regulating the reader's grasp of the beginning' (Sem. 8-9). 8 The metaphors are in fact on one level the least unusual of the three, and solidly illustrate the points made by Rosemond Tuve in chs. 10 and 11 of her Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (U of Chicago P, 1947). 9 This is Riffaterre's - and the generally current - awkward translation of the,

246 Notes to pages 29-33 already awkward, French surdetermine. One is less likely to stumble over this if one remembers to interpret 'over-' as 'highly' and not as 'excessively.' An approximate translation into real English might be 'emphasized/ with overtones of 'solidly established.' 10 Riffaterre and others deny it the title of genre, wrongly as I believe: the Petrarchan sonnet and cycle/sequence go well beyond the limits of a mere 'fixed form' (Semiotics, 154). Cf. also Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), where it is defined, gingerly, as a 'subgenre' (112). 11 The actual texts are, in their liturgical order: a / 'Take, eat, this is my body, which is given for you: do this in remembrance of me.' (Canon, pt. i) b / 'that we ... be filled with thy grace and heavenly benediction, and made one body with him ...' (Canon, pt.2) c / 'Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ... that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His body ... and that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us.' (Prayer of Humble Access; italics mine) 12 Todorov, Litterature, 116 and 91. 13 It is this, in modern terms, that is meant by the traditional statement that rhetoric's purpose is to 'persuade.' There is scope for a great deal of fascinating work on the relation between Renaissance rhetoric and semiotics. 14 Desportes's Les amours de Diane, bk. i, no. 32, 'Marchands, qui recherchez/ itself based on Sasso's 'S'alcun se maraviglia che natura' (which, however, has no merchants). Cf. Victor E. Graham's edition in Textes litteraires franc.ais' (Geneva: Droz, 1959), 73. On this sonnet, see also Mary-Bess Whidden, 'Method and Value in Amoretti 15,' Explicator 51:2 (Winter 1993), 73-515 Lines 167-180. A further, and better, reason for its choice is its curious double semiotic structure, as shown below. 16 For the semiotic function and importance of neologisms, see Riffaterre, Semiotics, 26 and Production, ch. 4,6iff. 17 Each anatomical feature, itself meekly following the precious substance, is followed by either an adverb, one or two adjectives, or another word not crisply germane to the issue. Within the codes of the Renaissance poetic image, the 'round' in relation to pearls and teeth (line 9) may pass; 'her forhead yuorie weene' (line 10) introduces an unnecessarily prominent archaism, which moreover breaks the pattern of unquestioned identification; 'on ground' (line 11) is an especially awkward form for 'on earth/ actualizing the 'soil' rather than the 'globe' seme of 'earth'; while 'Her hands are

Notes to pages 33-43 247 siluer sheene' is not only weak but (even if, remotely, read as a countercounterblason of Mopsa's black silver-ore in Sidney's OA 3) curiously unpleasant. The wording of the blason generally bears unusually clear marks of the rhyme-scheme's exigencies. 18 Cf. Sidney's OA 62, the most famous English blason of the time. The French Blasons du corps feminin collection of 1536, which began the fashion, contains a section on 'Esprit' as it does on 'la Gorge' or 'le Genou.' 19 'A network of words associated with one another around a kernel word, in accordance with the sememe of that nucleus ... a grid of metonyms built around a kernel word' (Riffaterre, Semiotics, 39,66). 20 For expansion and conversion as the two forms of text production, from a matrix and via a model, see Riffaterre, Semiotics, 47 and passim. 21 In Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with an Analytic Commentary by Stephen Booth (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1977). This enormous and idiosyncratic edition is, and is likely to remain, one of this century's very rare landmarks related to the Sonnets. Its only objective fault is the omission of the Lover's Complaint; the latter's inclusion is one of the principal virtues of John Kerrigan's 1986 New Penguin Shakespeare edition. 22 See Booth's commentary for both general remarks on, and precise unpackings of, the complexity specific to the Sonnets: the latter frequently appear, at first reading, clear, comprehensible, and authoritative, only to become increasingly obscure upon closer examination. 23 Booth (xiv-xviii) justifies his modernization, yet does this mainly for the convenience of readers accustomed to logical, grammatical/syntactic punctuation. He admits in a number of places that Elizabethan punctuation as printed allows for a great deal of constructive and co-creative ambiguity. There is, I am convinced, even more reason for conserving it than for conserving spelling, especially in poetic texts. 24 The k in skope is in effect a marker of graecity, and as such conserves the original Greek seme of sight. Skopos's meanings are: he who sees; the seeing, watching, spying; the thing seen, looked at, looked for, aimed at - hence Lat. scopus, 'target.' 25 Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets, 241-2. 26 For the vertiginous effect of this nom's polysemy, see below, pp. 48ff. 3: Polyphony 1 Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 100. 2 Roland Barthes, Le degrezero de I'ecriture (Paris: Seuil, 1953; repr. 1972), 145. 3 Scholars who study the sonnet-sequences invariably agree that at least those

248 Notes to pages 43-5

4

5 6 7

we call the major ones were composed with scrupulous care; yet their explanations of the ordering principles are usually lame and unconvincing. A good example is E.H. Wilkins's monumental The Making of the 'Canzoniere/ Storia e letteratura raccoltata di studi e testi no.38 (Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1951), which, after lengthy discussion of the Chigi MS and postulating a pre-Chigi form, concludes weakly: 'Each part was arranged with great artistic care, upon the three principles referred to on the first page of this chapter' - i.e., a rough chronology, variety of form, and variety of content. Thomas P. Roche, Jr, in Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989), gives the most sensible version of an alternative approach, the precise and numerological; yet this in its turn is almost always vitiated by the number of irregularities or 'exceptions' it is forced to accommodate. (Cf. also Shohachi Fukuda's The Numerological Patterning of Amoretti and Epithalamion/ SSt 9 [1988], 33-48.) Just how thorny the paths of numerology are can be seen whenever the subject crops up in scholarly debate. As for every other aspect of the sonnet-sequence, there is no external evidence to settle the matter; internal evidence ranges from the almost inescapable to the unconvincing. Probably the most reasonable is the liturgical pattern in Amoretti [see Alexander Dunlop, The Unity of Spenser's Amoretti, in Silent Poetry, ed. Alastair Fowler (London, 1970), and The Drama of Amoretti/ SSt 1(1980), developed by Anne Lake Prescott, The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti, 67-70,' SSt 6 (1985), and William C. Johnson, Spenser's 'Amoretti': Analogies of Love (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1990)] - though we do have to adjust our concept of 'pattern' for such structures - with the 'Penelope' structure in Astrophil and Stella next in line. The latter, consisting of 108 sonnets, 108 lines in the total of the Songs, and a proportion of sonnet-lines to song-lines as 14:1 (the 108 being the traditional number of Penelope's suitors in the Odyssey), appears motivated by Stella's civil name. Yet it would be necessary first to be sure how widespread the Penelope-game with 108 stones in fact was; and secondly to determine if the pattern has any function within the text itself, or if it is just there as an otherwise extraneous compliment. The reordering of sonnet-sequences is an extreme form of the subgrouping activity, a temptation no attentive reader can resist (cf. John Padel's New Poems by Shakespeare: Order and Meaning Restored to the Sonnets [London: Herbert, 1981]). I am increasingly convinced that this last is a major locus of the form's functioning as an 'Open Work.' Michael Riffaterre, La production du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 9. Ibid., 27. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 9-12. The translation 'writerly text'

Notes to pages 45-8 249 commonly adopted in North America for 'texte scriptible' seems to me perverse and misleading. A 'readable text' for Barthes is one which can only be read, by a docile and passive reader; the 'writeable text' is one which not only can but must be (re-) (co-)written by an active reader. 8 This is by now a commonplace, though the doubling mentioned by Jakobson is not often represented in diagram form. The original version, concerning any given message's components, may be found in his 'Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics' in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1960), 353: addresser -

context message contact code

addressee

The doubled version adapted to a love-sonnet might look something like this: poet (as lover)

poet (as poet)

Love sonnet MS. original Love-poetry MS. copy/book - sonnet Literature

Beloved

Reader

9 Ibid. 10 It is relatively clear that the title was not part of the original MS (see The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. Ringler [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1962], 458, 542, 544); but it was part of both the unauthorized 1591 editions which made it widely known, and was adopted by the Countess of Pembroke for the authorized 1598 edition. For virtually every, even contemporary, reader the the text was and is Astrophil and Stella. 11 Cf. Simone Dorangeon, 'L'"Autre" et ses miroirs dans les Sonnets de Shakespeare/ in L'Autre dans la sensibilite anglo-saxonne, Publications du Centre de Recherche sur 1'Imaginaire et Litterature de Langue Anglaise (Reims: PU de Reims, 1983), 21-34. 12 As Pico's De hominis dignitate says, 'Sed quorsum haec? Ut intelligamus postquam hac nati sumus conditione, ut id simus quod esse volumus.' In Joannes Picus Mirandulanus, Opera Omnia, ed. E. Garin (Turin: Bottega d'Erasmo, 1971) 1:315. 13 For a useful modern summary of meanings, Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1977), 466-7 (commentary to sonnet 135).

250 Notes to pages 48-58 14 Paul Ricoeur, La metaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975), tr. by R. Czerny et al. as The Rule of Metaphor (U of Toronto P, 1978). 15 Cf. Sidney, The Defence of Poetry' in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones and J. van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973), 83. 16 Julia Kristeva, Histoires a"amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983). 17 Cf. ibid., 32ff.; and also chs. i and 2 of Mariann Sanders Regan's Love Words: The Self and the Text in Medieval and Renaissance Poetry (Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1982). 18 Kristeva, 259. 19 Ibid., 252. 20 Ibid., 345-6. 21 Sidney, 'Defence,' 112. 22 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 26. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Ibid., 12-13. 25 Cf. Crebillon fils, Lettres de la marquise de M*** au comte de J?*", ed. Jean Dagen (Paris: Desjonquieres, 1990). 26 Cf. Barthes, S/Z, ch. 16. 27 Even the puns, the clenches, reinforce this parallel: they create and invite us into love's own ambiguities and ambivalences. 28 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et recit, vol. i (Paris: Seuil, 1983); quoted in Eric Vigne, 'Dossier: Histoire' in Magazine litteraire, no. 200/201 (Nov. 1983), 34. 4: Tempo/Sequenza 1 Cf., for example, J.A. Hefferman and J.E. Lincoln, Writing: A College Handbook (New York: Norton, 1982), 339, s.v. 'common present/ uses no. 3-5. 2 For examples of the long-standing tradition that literary language is measured by its distance from a hypothetical norm of unmarked neutrality, to which scholarly language is supposedly closest, see Roman Jakobson, Essais de linguistique generale (Paris: Minuit, 1963), Jean Cohen's Structure du langage poetique (Paris: Flammarion, 1966), and Michael Riffaterre, Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion, 1971). As I have argued above ('Prelude'), the codes of scholarly discourse have their own semiotic significance, which repays study and invites question. 3 The connection present (tense) /present (adjective of place)/presence, possible in a number of languages, is activated by Derrida but, oddly, not by Heidegger, who in his many terms for 'presence,' avoids Gegenwartigkeit (cf. Sein und Zeit). 4 Ricceur, Temps et recit, vol. i (Paris: Seuil, 1983), pt. i, ch.3 (pp. 87-136).

Notes to pages 59-64 251 5 This comment is so often partially quoted that it may be useful to reprint the entire passage here: 'Gentlemen, that have scene a thousand lines of folly, drawn forth ex uno puncto impudentiae, & two famous Mountains to goe to the conception of one Mouse, that have had your eares defned with the eccho of Fames brasen towres when only they have been toucht with a leaden pen, that have scene Pan sitting in his bower of delights & a number of Midasses to admire his miserable hornepipes, let not your surfeted sight, new come from such puppet play, think scorne to turne aside into this Theater of pleasure, for here you shal find a paper stage strewd with pearls, an artificial heav'n to overshadow the fair frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, while the tragicommody of love is performed by starlight. The chiefe Actor here is Melpomene, whose dusky robes, dipt in the ynke of teares, as yet seeme to drop when I view them neere. The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire: videte, quceso, et linguis animisque favete.' Preface to Astrophil and Stella, repr. in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G.G. Smith, vol. 2 (Oxford UP, 1904), 223. 6 See, for example, sonnet 349: 'a pena riconosco omai me stesso.' 7 Antonio da Tempo, Delle rime volgari (1332), repr. in Biblioteca musica bononsiensis, sessione 5, no. 14 (Bologna: Forni, 1970). 8 Giinther Miiller, Morphologische Poetik (Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1968), 270. 9 A sample is given in Thomas P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989), 499 n. 42. A particular kind of grouping is that which comes when habitues of a sequence eventually discern elements on the level of the signifier and/or 'invention' which link sonnets otherwise separate(d); doing so allows them to observe patterns not indicated on the ordinary 'heuristic' level. One of the first such groupings to be published was Lever's set of 'anomalies' in the Amoretti (see below, ch. 11, n. 23). Cf. also M.C. Andrews, 'Sincerity and Subterfuge in Three Shakespeare Sonnet Groups/ SQ 33:3 (Autumn 1982), 314-27. 10 For madrigali, see for example nos. 52, 54,121; for ballate, nos. 14 and 149. 11 Cf. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1962), nn. to songs ii, iv, vi, viii, ix, x, and xi. 12 It may be objected here that this placing is problematic: QI and Q2 place all the songs at the end, and the first instance of the currently accepted version is the 1598 Folio, overseen by the Countess of Pembroke. My own belief is that the Q placing reflects Sidney's first MSS while the Folio version may wel be his final ordering, piously followed by the Countess (cf. below, 'Divertimento/ n. 54). In any case, I am here dealing with the sequence as known to, and read by, the majority of its readers, ancient and modern; the author's precise intention is thus both unknowable and irrelevant.

252 Notes to pages 64-80 13 Miiller, 275. 14 Cf. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), 259-60 and passim. 15 The topos derives from Johannes Secundus's Basia, imitated (as the baiser) by the Pleiade. 16 See above, n. 5. 17 Cf. Ricoeur, Temps et recit, vol. 2, La configuration dans le recit de fiction (Paris: Seuil, 1984), ch. 3, 'Les jeux avec le temps/ 18 On genres' and subgenres' capacity for change and redefinition, see Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind (Berkeley, U of California P, 1973), 30 and passim; Fowler, 45ff. The present analysis shows, in part, a few details of the way such redefinition is occasioned by the text. 19 Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur I'histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1969), 4ff. 20 See above, 'Polyphony,' n. 3. 21 Cf. Ricceur, Temps et recit, vol. 2, 4iff., 'Le contraste de 1'eternite.' 22 There is, of course, a visual pre-recognition in most cases; but that is not relevant to the present argument. 23 On sonnet and sequence composition, see Germaine Warkentin, 'Sidney's Certain Sonnets: Speculations on the Evolution of the Text,' 6th ser. 2 Library (1980), 430-44, and 'Sidney and the Supple Muse: Compositional Procedures in Some Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella,' SLitI 15:1 (Sprin. 1982), 37-48. 24 Sidney, 'Defence/ 116-17. For an extended treatment of energia in Astrophil and Stella, see N. Rudenstine, Sidney's Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1967), ch. 10. 5: Two-part invention 1 Jacques Derrida, Memoires d'aveugle (Paris: RMN, 1990), 64 (60, 62); tr. P.A. Brault and M. Naas as Memoirs of the Blind (U of Chicago P, 1993). My own translation of the Derrida text, which was made available to, and used by, Professors Brault and Naas, is called Blind Memories; quotations and citations will either be in French, giving the French pagination, with the Brault/Naas reference in parentheses, or in my own English version. 2 Derrida, Memoires, 61(57) and passim. 3 Cf. Derrida, Memoires, 37(32): 'Ceci est un dessin de moi/ Brault and Naas translate: This is a drawing of me, a drawing of mine/ unfolding Derrida's polysemy. One could also write, This is a drawing of m(in)e/ See Proposition no. 10, in 'Prelude/ above. 4 Jacques Derrida, La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 322. 5 Cf. Stephen Booth's 1977 edition, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with an

Notes to pages 80-92 253 Analytic Commentary (New Haven/London: Yale UP), in the Commentary of which this fact is made abundantly clear, by way of both positive and negative examples. 6 Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare's Dramatic Meditations (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1976), 119.1 am, of course, being slightly disingenuous: there are several places where the present text, too, uses such language. My objections to its employment in this place and in this manner are twofold: that supersubtle elaborations do even more damage in a reading of Shakespeare than elsewhere; and that the analytic expository is - or should be - only one of the discourses at the critic's disposal. 7 This translation of 'le don des morts' refers to Daniele Sallenave's important essay of that title (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), an impassioned defence of literary education as our greatest aid to the young and the deprived. See also 'Irregardless,' below. 8 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1954), 502; Wm. Shakespeare. Sonnets (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986), 12. 9 Delia is followed by an Ode and the Complaint of Rosamond. The others are Thomas Lodge, Phillis, an ode, and the Tragical Complaint of Elstred (1593); Giles Fletcher, Licia, an ode, a dialogue, A Lover's Maze, three elegies, and The Rising to the Crowne of Richard the Third (1593); Richard Barnefield, Cynthia and the Legend of Cassandra (1595); and Richard Linche, Diella, with 'the amorous Poem of Don Diego and Ginevra' (1596). Kerrigan sums up the arguments on pp. 12-15 °f his edition; see also Thomas P. Roche Jr's very thorough discussion in Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989), ch. 7, partially developing his 'Shakespeare and the Sonnet Sequence/ English Poetry and Prose 154.0-1674, ed. Chr. Ricks (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1970), 101-18. Roche has his own unease, which has led him to his own, characteristically erudite and elegant, way of playing the Sonnets. It will be clear that our games in no way resemble each other. 10 A Second World War English abbreviation of 'unexploded bomb.' 11 This conflation of three Derrida quotations appears in the 1990 Derrida issue of Les lettres franqaises. 12 Quoted from Kerrigan, 387. For these two sonnets, see also Peggy Munoz Simonds, 'Eros and Anteros in Shakespeare's Sonnets 153 and 154: An Iconographical Study,' SSt 7 (1986), 261-323. 13 I am counting here all the sonnet-sequences published in first editions between 1591 and 1609; but not reissues, whether revised or no. 14 Cf. Jean Fuzier, 'Le Banquet de Shakespeare: les Sonnets et le Platonisme authentique,' EA 34:1 (Jan.-March 1981), 1-15.

254 Notes to pages 92-102 15 See 'Tempo/Sequenza/ above, for the notion of plot as applied to a collection, or a sequence, of lyrics. 16 Cf. Am. 86-8; A&S 87-9,91,92. 17 The Friend's Fault comprises nos. 33-5, 40-2, 57-8,61, and 69-70; the Poet's Error, 109-14 and 117-21. 18 Antonin Artaud, Le theatre et son double, Folio Essais no. A 32301 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 131-61. 19 Ibid., 153-1. 20 For a view - not mine - of the link between the Hymns and the Amoretti, se William C. Johnson, 'Spenser's "Greener" Hymnes and Amoretti: "Retraction" and "Reform/" ES 73:5 (Oct. 1992), 431-43. 21 Cf. James Devereux, The Last Temptation of Shakespeare: The Sonnets and Despair/ RenP (1979), 29-38. 22 Alain Arnaud and Gisele Excoffon-Lafarge, Bataille, Ecrivains de toujoursours no. 101 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 144. 23 'J'echappe a la pesanteur en riant. Je me refuse a la traduction intellectuelle de ce rire: 1'esclavage recommencerait a partir de la.'(I escape gravity by laughter. I refuse all intellectual translation of that laughter: that instant would be the renewal of slavery.) Georges Bataille, Le coupable, in CEuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 5: 251. There are many other places in Bataille's work which cite laughter as the ultimate response of 'sovereignty' in the face of Death; with Maurice Blanchot, he remains among the art of thinking's greatest, and most moving, subversives. 24 Cf. my review article 'Untitled/ SNew 9:1 (1989), 33-41, where I insist that this non-name, however insufficient, is not adequately replaced by 'Modern Critical Theory.' 25 Cf. Emmet Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972). 6: Theme with variations 1 Georges Bataille, Les larmes d'Eros (Paris: Pauvert, 1971), 43. 2 Georges Bataille, L'experience interieure, in: CEuvres completes, vol. 5 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 86. 3 On the effects of this, see Michael Riffaterre, La production du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 86. 4 The range of this concept can best be seen in those works that deal with visual art: cf. Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1940; repr. 1956), esp. the chs. on Alberti and Michelangelo. It is clear that

Notes to pages 102-5 255 the Neoplatonism of the Florentine Academy, and especially of Ficino and Pico, played a decisive part in this development, though vestiges of Scholasticism helped broaden its appeal. The work of Michelangelo is unique in that it provides evidence in three media, painting, sculpture, and poetry; and by its inner unity in development it itself forms the link between them. 5 Respectively A&S 47:9 and Bonn. 127 6 That this is no accident of what are, after all, lyrical texts can be seen in works more directly concerned with it, such as Alberti's or Vasari's. Both consider it to be rational (and thus philosophical) but so universally understood that it needs no defining beyond vague references to 'a certain harmony of all the parts' (Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, bk.vi, ch.2). In a lyrical context, this may be seen as the background to Petrarch's sonnet 354, with its announced difficulty of 'dir di quella,' speaking of Laura. For this, and for its link with the problem of Laura's reality (taken up in ch. 9, below), see the discussion in William J. Kennedy's important Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), 12-15. Kennedy's ch. 5 provides, via Spenser, the connection with England. 7 'Difference' is here used in a partly, but not fully, Derridean sense. 8 Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 19-21. 9 For the major Elizabethan treatment of the Garden of Adonis, see Spenser's Faerie Queene, ui.vi. 10 Cf. Donne's The Good-Morrow': 'If ever any beautie I did see / Which I desir'd, and got, 'twas but a dreame of thee.' The Ijeautie' can be a metonym for a beautiful object, a feature, or another woman. 11 The following diagram will visualize the relation referred to: Beauty

a beauty

(metonym))

[person]

(metonym))

•(synecdoche)-

[feature]

256 Notes to pages 105-6 12 The full diagram, then, should read thus: Beauty

a beauty

(actual metonym)

(potential metonym)

(actual metonym)

[person]***'(potentialsynecdoche)**\body]*"-(potential synecdoche)***[feature] (actual synecdoche)

13 The blason (the term is French) is usually credited to Clement Marot (14961544), who developed it while in exile at the court of Ferrara. It consists in taking an apparently insignificant object and lavishing praise (or, in the contre-blason, dispraise) on it, 'the point being to lend it significance through a disproportionate verbal construction' (Riffaterre, Semiotics, 128). From the beginning the blasons concentrated almost exclusively on details of the female body, each of which became the object of a separate poem. The first publication was the Blasons anatomiques du corps feminin (1536) by M Maurice Sceve, and others, with eleven texts. This was an instant success and went through five editions (each expanded) in fifteen years. By 1543 the anthology had grown to thirty-seven blasons, and twenty-one counterblasons were added. 14 The catalogue of beauties is as old as the Song of Solomon, and is codified in Geoffrey of Vinsauf's thirteenth-century Poetria Nova. Just as the blason is perhaps not unconnected with the emblem-fashion (Alciati's trend-setting Emblemata appeared in 1531), the popularity of the blason-catalogue may be in part due to the contemporary (and medieval) fondness for lists. While this is doubtless linked to theories of copia, there is an intriguing background in Foucault's The Order of Things, tr. of Les mots et les chases . York: Random House/Vintage, 1973), 30. 15 This is in effect an extension of Max Black's concept of metaphor as a suppression of certain aspects of the term-compared by a filter or screen effect in order to organize our vision (cf. Models and Metaphors [Ithaca:

Notes to pages 106-11 257 Cornell UP, 1962], 39-41). What I am suggesting is that this organization (which fits in with Riffaterre's theory concerning the text's control of the reader's decoding - Production, 11-12) here has the more extreme effect of a feint. 16 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 120-1. 17 This concept is found especially in the work of Barthes; see, for example, S/Z, ch. 20. 18 The Symposium, the Phaedrus, and the Hippias Major especially. 19 It is noteworthy that even a rare notice of irregular beauty leads Marcus Aurelius at once to a philosophical consideration: cf. Meditations, 111.2. 20 Enneads, tr. E. O'Brien, The Essential Plotinus (New York: NAL, 1964), 43. All Plotinus quotations are from this edition. 21 All quotations are from Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, tr. G. Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). 22 Cf. his letter to Bishop Giacomo Colonna of 21 December 1336 (Ep. fam. 11.9), quoted in E.H. Wilkins, The Making of the Canzoniere and Other Petrarchan Studies, Storia e Letteratura, Raccolta di studi e testi no. 38 (Rome: Storia e Letteratura, 1951), 26; and in Petrarch, Sonnets and Songs, ed. Th. E. Mommsen (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968), xxxiii. See also Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch, 13. 23 The effort of the Amoretti/Epithalamion to convert the cumulative intertext oft of. the sonnet-tradition is discussed elsewhere (cf. 'From the New World' and 'Death and the Maiden/ below). Relevant to the topic of beauty is the possibility that Spenser's greater familiarity with the philo-sophia code attached to the word (cf. his own 'Hymn to Heavenly Beauty') and his conscious attempt to propose an alternative, Protestant/marital solution to the sonnet dilemma account for the sparse use of beauty in the Amoretti/ Epithalamion as compared to the other two sequences. For a recent discussion of the Hymns in relation to the Amoretti, see William C. Johnson, 'Spenser's "Greener" Hymnes and Amoretti: "Retraction" and "Reform/" ES 73:5 (October 1992), 104-20; for his Protestant alternative, see Lisa M. Klein, '"Let Us Love, Dear Love, Like As We Ought": Protestant Marriage and the Revision of Petrarchan Loving in Spenser's Amoretti,' SSt 10 (1992), 109-37;7, for Spenser's conversion of Petrarch, see Reed Way Dasenbrock, The Petrarchan Context of Spenser's Amoretti,' PMLA 100:1 (January 1985), 3. 24 Ronsard, Sonnets pour Helene XLIII: 'You will be an old woman squatting by the fire ...'; Horace, Odes 1.25: 'Your turn is coming: an old hag in a lonely alley ...' For even stronger terms, see Odes iv.13 and Epodes 8. 25 Barthes, S/Z, 40-1. 26 It should be borne in mind, when French critics are cited on matters of

258 Notes to pages 111-32 rhetoric, that (a) their references are usually to seventeenth-century neoclassical, and not to either classical or Renaissance, rhetoric; and (b) certain rhetorical terms have become French critical pets, and their range of meaning has been widened. Catachresis is a good example: originally the term for a deliberately illogical or indecorous metaphor (Quintilian's term is abusio), it is seen by critics such as Barthes and de Man as fundamental to the nature of language and its relation to reality; they often cite such 'dead' catachreses as 'the legs of a chair' (cf. also Paul de Man, 'The Epistemology of Metaphor/ Critical Inquiry, 5:1 [Autumn 1978], 21). It will be clear from the suggestions below that I am following the French example: I believe that the semantic expansion of certain rhetorical terms, as long as the original base is not lost sight of, is legitimate, since it stems from our changed consciousness of literature and of language. 27 By the repressed body I mean, emphatically, the body in its totality, its physical integrity. 28 For a complex but intriguing discussion of the fold and the membrane as liminary factors and images, see Derrida's La dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 'Hors texte' and essay n, The Double Session/ 29 By an open sign I mean one that is both maximally overdetermined (perceived as urgently important) and maximally undecideable (open to widely conflicting interpretations), thus creating a tension which results in proliferating semiosis. 7: From the New World 1 Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-il cru a leurs mythes? (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 12. 2 Ibid., 13-14. 3 Jean Genet, Notre Dame des Fleurs, quoted in Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), 144-5. 8: Ein Heldenleben 1 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 11. 2 'Haec tibi victuro in aula scribo, in quo genere vitae majores difficultates experieris, quam tui aequales, qui jam paternis facultatibus fruuntur: sectari autem otium tibi parum esset decorum, cum adhuc sis filius familias. Ut uno verbo dicam, oportet eum qui vult vivere extra contemptum in aulis potentum regum, moderari suos affectus, multas molestias devorare, summo studio vitare omnes contentionum occasiones, & eos penes quos est summa rerum colere. Sed desinam tibi esse diutius molestus, cum haec

Notes to page 133 259 omnia melius, quam ego intelligas.' Hubert Languet, Epistolae politicae et historicae ad Philippum Sydnaeum (Leiden: Elzevir, 1646), 172-3. 3 E.g., Robert Montgomery, Jr, who, in his Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney (Austin: U of Texas, 1961), notes that the contemporary emphasis on Sidney as 'learned statesman and selfless warrior ... all but overwhelms' his reputation as a poet; and concludes, curiously, that 'it is difficult, then, to approach Sidney through the opinions of his contemporaries' (1-2). For a more nuanced, yet still basically uncomfortable, outlook, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, Courtier Poet (New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 1991), x-xi. 4 E.g., Roger Howell, Sir Philip Sidney: The Shepherd Knight (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 255 and n.; an evaluation maintained in Duncan-Jones, 296 and n.iog. The source for this recurring characterization is a description in Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, Presently at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (London: HMSO, 1883), 3:189-90; yet the most complete versions, such as M.W. Wallace's in The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge UP, 1915), 374ff •/ drawing on eyewitness accounts such as George Whetstone's, make it clear that, by the relatively modest standards of the sixteenth century, Zutphen was a battle, though a small one. The English - 300 foot and 250 horse - found themselves fighting a force of 4,500 Spaniards (of whom fully one-third were cavalry), later definitively reinforced by some 2,000 troops from the besieged city. Neither the self-consciously semiotic attitudes of the English gentry nor a modern irritation with 'mythologizing' (Duncan-Jones, 296) should blind us to the military reality. 5 Cf. F.J. Levy, 'Philip Sidney Reconsidered,' ELR 2 (1972), 5-18. For a more recent view, see Sz> Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed. J. van Dorsten, D. Baker-Smith, and A. Kinney, Publications of the Sir Thomas Browne Institute, n.s. no. 9 (Leiden: Brill, 1986). The first to point out this aspect, and to make an energetic (if often one-sided) distinction between 'life' and 'legend' was Richard A. Lanham, in 'Sir Philip Sidney: The Ornament of His Age/ Southern Review (Adelaide, Australia) 2:4 (1967), 319-40. 6 Roland Barthes, 'De 1'oeuvre au texte/ in Revue d'esthetique, 3 (1971), tr. by Josue Harari as 'From Work to Text' in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979), 757 See Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), I30ff. 8 Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d'ltalia, ed. C. Panigada, 5 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1967)-

260 Notes to pages 133-6 9 Niccolo Machiavelli, // Principe, ed. L. Russo (Florence: Sansoni, 1968). 10 Benvenuto Cellini, La Vita, ed. B. Maier (Novara: Istituto geografico de Agostini, 1959). The French court is 'La Corta del Re' (n.ix); that of the Pope 'quella Corte' (i.xlv); the Cardinal's attendants he calls 'certi di quei sua cortegiani' (n.x). 11 Pauline Smith, The Anti-Courtier Trend in Sixteenth-Century French Literature (Geneva: Droz, 1966). 12 Claus Uhlig, Hofkritik im England des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Berlin/ New York: De Gruyter, 1973). 13 Cf. ibid., 39ff. 14 Ibid., 176-90. 15 Ibid., 176-7, n.316 Ibid., 184 and n.22. 17 Ibid., i6iff. and 32iff. The Hofkritik discourse can be found also in apparently unlikely places such as commentaries on the Psalms: cf. Anne Lake Prescott, 'Evil Tongues at the Court of Saul: The Renaissance David as a Slandered Courtier/ JMRS 21:2 (Fall 1991), 163-86. 18 For Castiglione's Cortegiano, the English edition I use is that of George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); the Italian (to which the chapter divisions refer) is that of Bruno Maier (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1964)19 Bull, 17. 20 Cf. also Uhlig, 220; Giuseppe Prezzolini, Introduction to his edition of B. Castiglione and G. Delia Casa, Opere (Milan and Rome: Rizzoli, 1927); Lanham (where the opportunism is approvingly cited in contrast to Sidney's supposed naivete); and Daniel Javitch,'// Cortegiano and the Constraints of Despotism/ in Castiglione: The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Cu Robert W. Manning and David Rosand (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1983), 17-28. For other views, see J.R. Woodhouse, Baldesar Castiglione: A Reassessment of 'The Courtier' (Edinburgh UP, 1978); and Wayne A. Rebhorn's highly laudatory Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione's 'Book of the Courtier1 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1978). 21 Maier, n.viii; Bull, 115. 22 To my knowledge, the connection has not been made before. It seems both likely and well within the age's ethos: compare, for example, Donne's behaviour on his own deathbed as reported approvingly by Walton. Fame was the secular purpose of all ambitious action, though ambition itself was frowned on ('I understand I am called very ambitious and proud at home/ wrote Sidney bitterly to Walsingham from Flushing in 1585; see The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. A. Feuillerat [Cambridge UP, 1963], 3:167);

Notes to pages 136-40 261 once achieved, it was used and furthered in strongly semiotic acts intended to instruct and delight. In such a context it would be short-sighted to suppose that an act such as Sidney's discarding of his cuisses was not intended to be noticed and interpreted. 23 Maier, i.xxviii; Bull, 70; my italics. 24 Maier, m.lxiv; Bull, 267. 25 Maier, iv.lix; Bull, 332. Maier's footnote, interestingly, glosses trofeo as 'segno, contrassegno.' 26 Maier, n.xli; Bull, 151. 27 Maier, n.xix; Bull, 127. 28 Maier, iv.xlvii; Bull, 320. 29 Jacques Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 302. 30 Most modern discussions of the Cortegiano would consider this an unsophisticated argument. Yet they go to extraordinary lengths to find different explanations; and even such authors as Javitch, and Thomas Greene in 'II Cortegiano and the Choice of a Game/ also in Manning and Rosand, either sense an unease in the text or feel it in themselves. The more one interrogates the text, the more unmistakable such connections become. For one example of the link between virtue and honour, see Count Lodovico in i.xiv (Bull, 54); for that between honour and glory, see Federico Fregoso in n.viii (Bull, 115-16); of reputation's role the whole text will furnish examples, e.g., Federico Fregoso in n.xxii (Bull, I4iff.). 31 It is curious that the medieval and Renaissance paradigm, the tree, is an upward one (perhaps influenced by Isiah 11:1), while modern versions follow the opposite construct of descent. The semiotics of this difference remain to be explored. 32 For an excellent discussion of this concept, see Walter Benjamin's 'Agesilaus Santander' (1933); cited, with useful comments, in Geoffrey Hartman's Saving the Text (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), 111-13. 33 Cf. Neville Williams, All the Queen's Men: Elizabeth I and Her Courtiers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972; repr. Cardinal/Sphere, 1974), 16. 34 Ibid., 135. 35 Ibid., 76,102. For Leicester's career, cf. also Elizabeth Jenkins, Elizabeth and Leicester (London: Gollancz, 1961). 36 Robert Langham, A Letter, ed. R.J.P. Kuin, Medieval and Renaissance Texts no. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1983), 59 and n. to line 890 (p. 102). 37 Quoted in Joel Hurstfield and Alan Smith, Elizabethan People: State and Society (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 34. 38 A remarkable visual (emblematic) sign of this memory is Faithorne's frontispiece to Sir Dudley Digges's Compleat Ambassador (1635), where

262 Notes to pages 141-3

39 40 41

42

43

44 45

Elizabeth is flanked by 'Lo: Burleigh' and 'Sr: Fr. Walsingham/ both dressed in the grave official robes of their lifetime portraits. Contrast this image with courtier portraits such as Milliard's Earl of Cumberland as 'Knight of Pendragon Castle/ and all the surviving portraits of Leicester. In this context, there may be an intriguing link to be made between the miniature court(ier) portrait as it flourished at Elizabeth's court and the sonnet as courtly miniature: see Patricia Fumerton, ""Secret" Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets/ Representations 15 (Summer 1986), 57-97. His audience ranges from the Prince alone (Bull, 125), via a group of friends (Bull, 139), to the Court as a whole (Bull, 141), to the crowds at large (Bull, 118-20). Cf. Jenkins and Williams. For Hatton, see esp. Eric St John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946). For an admirable brief account of his career, see Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969; repr. Omega/ Futura, 1976), 213-18. For this use of the term (in an English context) see Uhlig, 220-1, who also cites Ruth Kelso, The Doctrine of the English Gentleman in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: Illinois UP, 1929), and Ludwig Borinski, 'Das politische Denken des englischen Humanismus/ Studium Generale 6 (1953), 424-34. Uhlig, however, does not dwell on the different connotative coding of Furstendiener and Hofling, which correspond approximately to the Elizabethan use ofof minister and courtier. This fact has been noted by virtually all Sidney's biographers, and is most fully discussed by Wallace. The causes usually alleged are connected with Ireland (for a brief but clear description, see Howell, 48-9), though DuncanJones (89) suggests a Spanish rumour alleging Catholic sympathies on Sir Henry's part as a possible reason - unlikely, in view of De Quadra's usual and well-known inaccuracy. It seems clear that the Queen's treatment of both Sir Henry and his son exceeded the situationally explicable. Part of the reason may have been Sir Henry's honest but necessarily suspect accommodation to her predecessor's rule (cf. Howell, 19-20); another part, though, is surely more visceral: Elizabeth - who (we should not forget) had had Lady Mary as lady-in-waiting, presumably because she was Leicester's sister, and had seen her depart disfigured in the cause of duty by the smallpox while she, Elizabeth, had escaped - seems, quite simply, to have found both Mary's husband and her son personally irritating. Sidney, Misc. Prose, 134. J.M. Osborn, Young Philip Sidney: The Education of a Statesman, 1572-1577 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1972), 246. Cf. also Languet to August of Saxony,

Notes to pages 143-5 2^33 i March 1575 (Osborn, 287). How current this sort of gloss was, especially among foreigners, is shown by the almost identical version in a report to Philip ii by Ambassador Mendoza in April 1578 (CSP Spanish 1568-1579, 575-6X 46 This boy, Lord Denbigh, was born at the end of 1579 and died 19 July 1584 (Jenkins, 290, 328-30). 47 The 'Protestant activist party' of which Leicester was the courtier-leader, Walsingham the functionary-leader, and Sidney the 'young courtier spokesman' (Howell, 96), also comprised such figures as Robert Beale, the Earl of Bedford, Fulke Greville, Sir Christopher Hatton (although his Faction-code took second place to his Favourite-code: the beneficial effects of this are shown by the fact that Walsingham, for all his power, counts on Hatton to soften the Queen's displeasure regarding his daughter's marriage to Sidney - cf. Howell, 95-6); the Earl of Huntington (who kept himself very much in the background because of his vulnerable status as a potential claimant to the throne - cf. Williams, 62); Sir Francis Knollys, Sir Walter Mildmay, Sir Amyas Paulet, the Earl of Pembroke, Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Henry Unton, and Sir Edward Wotton. Much of this group's specific policy consisted of the project for a 'Protestant League' to be made up of England and various German states. It was to explore this possibility that Sidney was sent on his Viennese embassy in 1577; its failure led to the end of his political dreams until, in 1584, the Council decided to aid the Netherlands substantially and thus, in effect, declared war on Spain. 48 Henry Goldwell, A Briefe Declaration of the Shewes (London: R. Waldegrave, 1581). 49 Dated 8 August 1575; quoted in Wallace, 158. 50 John Phillips, 'The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney,' in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1655) sig. ci; cited in Wallace, 394, and Howell, 264n. 51 Once, wrongly, attributed to Federigo Zuccari, repr. as frontispiece in Osborn. For its evaluation, see Berta Siebeck, Das Bild Sir Philip Sidneys in der englischen Renaissance (Weimar: H. Bohlaus, 1939), and A.C. Judson, Sidney'sney's. Appearance: A Study in Elizabethan Portraiture (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1958)52 In the collections of the Duke of Portland and Lord Hampton respectively; cf. Williams, 20,136. 53 The connection between this impresa and the birth of the child was first made by Camden in 1605; for other interpretations, see Emma Marshall Denkinger, The Arcadia and "The Fish Torpedo Faire,'" SP 28 (1931), 177; and Alan R. Young, 'Sir Philip Sidney's Tournament Impresas,' SNew 6:1 (1985), 14-15.

264 Notes to pages 145-7 54 Williams, 166. 55 Examples of such friends are Dr Andreas Dudith, Dr Andreas Paull, Dr Zacharias Ursinus, Johann Matthaus Wacker, Paul von Welsperg, Count Ludwig von Wittgenstein, Wolfgang Ziindelin, and (in a French context) Jean de Vulcob. Two major examples, moreover, to which not enough attention has been paid, are those of Guillaume de Salluste du Bartas and Philippe de Mornay du Plessis. For the most thorough work on this circle to date, see Beatrice Nicollier-De Weck,Hubert Languet (1518-1581): un reseau politique international de Melanchthon a Guillaume d'Orange (Geneva: Droz, 1995). 56 'Fuit mihi jucundum, superiore hyeme, videre te gratia florentem, & in magna apud omnes existimatione: sed ut nihil dissimulem: visa sunt mihi minus mascula vestrae aulse exercitia, quam cupivissem, visique sunt mihi plerique ex proceribus potius sibi quaerere laudem ex affectata comitate, quam ex iis virtutibus, quae sunt salutares reipublicae & quae generosos animos, ac illustri loco natos homines maxime decent. Dolebam itaque & mecum alii tui amici, te in ejusmodi rebus istum tuae aetatis florem deterere, & metuebam ne eximia ilia tua indoles tandem retunderetur, & consuetudine tibi placerent ea quae animos nostros emolliunt.' Languet, 402-3; Cf. also Osborn, 502-3. 57 Correspondence of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester ... 15^5 and 1586, ed. John Bruce (1844), 45; cited in Wallace 372 and Osborn 515. 58 24 March 1586; quoted in Osborn, 513-14. 59 It is curious to trace the changing locus of Sidney's reputation, as well as its shifting accent. As lately as the 19505, he was still the preux chevalier, and it was in schools and to schoolchildren that his story (with emphasis on the cup of water) was told. The slightly awkward division of Howell's 1968 biography may be said to mark (though certainly not to create) the transition from a legend of conduct to an academically studied auctor. a metamorphosis since confirmed by the direction and growth of Sidney scholarship and by the rapid and complete fading of interest and knowledge on the part of the non-academic public. In recent years this development has been complicated but not checked by the New-Historicist evaluation of this (and every Elizabethan) author as a 'politician': a development of which, in a sonnet-context, the seminal texts are Louis Montrose's 'Celebration and Insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the Motives of Elizabethan Courtiership,' RenD n.s. 8 (1977), 3-35; Arthur Marotti's 'Love is not Love: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order/ ELH 49 (1982), 396-442; and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, 'Courtship and Courtiership: The Politics of Astrophil and Stella,' SEL 24 (1984), 53-68.

Notes to pages 147-53 265 60 For the Defence, see Sidney Misc. Prose, 79 and 62; for the Old Arcadia, see Jean Robertson's edition (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1973), xvi-xvii. 61 See The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W.A. Ringler, Jr (Oxford UP, 1962), 439. 62 Cf. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: The New Arcadia, ed.ed.. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987), xvii. 63 Cf. the passage comparing poesy with history, Misc. Prose, 87-90. 64 Cf. Jan van Dorsten, 'The Final Year' and Arthur F. Kinney, 'Intimations of Mortality: Sidney's Journey to Flushing and Zutphen/ both in Van Dorsten, Baker-Smith, and Kinney. 65 Quoted in Wallace, 390. 9: Death and the maiden 1 Alain Arnaud and Gisele Excoffon-Lafarge, Bataille, Ecrivains de toujours no. 101 (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 141. 2 Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 50. 3 The description which follows is based in large part upon Philippe Aries's L'homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 162-78, and ch. 6, 293ff. See also his Images of Man and Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1985), 19, 53, 96,115, and 120. 4 Cf. Aries, L'homme, 218. 5 In both these writers, the confrontation with Death is one of the determining factors in the entire ceuvre. For Bataille, see especially L'experience interieure (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), but also La litterature et le mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), Les larmes d'Eros (Paris: Pauvert, 1961) and Le mort (Paris: Pauvert, 1967). For Blanchot, see especially L'arret de mort (1948), L'espace litteraire (1955), and Le pas au-dela (1973), all chez Gallimard.rd.. 6 Jacques Derrida, Feu la cendre (Paris: Des Femmes, 1987; w. cassette, read by Derrida and Carole Bouquet). 7 Jerome Mazzaro, The Figure of Dante: An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Princeton UP, 1981) and Morris Bishop, Petrarch and his World (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963) accept; K. Foster, Petrarch, Poet and Humanist (Edinburgh UP, 1984) continues the carefully non-committal attitude of E.H. Wilkins's Life (U of Chicago P, 1961) and Durling's Introduction to Petrarch's Lyric Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1976). For the question's antiquity, see William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994), i3ff. 8 E.g., sonnets 10, 39,118, 266, 269. 9 See especially Alistair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge UP, 1970) and Thomas P. Roche, Jr, The

266 Notes to pages 154-61 Calendrical Structure of Petrarch's Canzoniere,' SP 71, (1974), 152-72, developed in his Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS, 1989). 10 Cf. Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love (New York: Schocken, 1982), 134-5; and J. Roubaud, La fleur inverse: essai sur I'art formel des troubadours (Paris: Ramsay, 1986), 269-71. 11 This, of course, is the point of both 'passus et sepultus est' and 'et in resurrectionem mortuorum' in the Creed, and of the entire theological tradition that opposes Platonism. Cf. also Aries, L'homme, 31,280. 12 Cf. Wilkins, and Roche, Petrarch, 69. 13 Cf. E. Maillard, Eglises du XHe au XIVe siecles (Paris: Tournon, 1964); and seesee also Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order (New York: Pantheon, 1962); Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (New York: Meridian, 1961); and Wolfgang Golz, Zentralbau und Zentralbautendenz in der gotischen Architektur (Berlin: Mann, 1968). 14 Cf. M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); tr. as The Order of Things (London: Tavistock,i97o). 15 Pierre-Jean Jouve, Diademe, suivi de Melodrame (Paris: Gallimard), [1970]), 112. © Mercure de France 1967. Reprinted by permission. 16 Cf. Margarita de Bonfils Templer, Itinerario d'amore: dialettica d'amore e mortemor nella Vita Nuova (Chapel Hill: UNC/ISBS1973); Mark Musa, Dante's 'Vita Nuova': A Translation and an Essay, 2nd edition (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1973), 154; Jerome Mazzaro, 15-18; Domenico de Robertis, // libra della 'Vita nuova,' 2nd edition (Firenze: Sansoni, 1970), 157-61; Charles Franco, La Beatrice di Dante: un' interpretazione psicanalitica (Poggibonsi: Zalli, 1981); Robert Pogue Harrison, The Body of Beatrice (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), g8ff.; O. Ciacci, Realismo della 'Vita Nuova' (Lan; Itinerari, 1974); and ch. i of Charles Singleton's classic Essay on the 'Vita Nuova' (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1958). 17 Jouve, 156. © Mercure de France 1967. Reprinted by permission. 18 In a letter to Boccaccio of 1359 (Familiares 21.15), quoted in Bishop's Lettersers. from Petrarch (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1966), 176-180, and cited in Canzoniere, ed. Piero Cudini (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), xvi. 19 Cf. Wilkins, 151-2; and Roche, Petrarch, 57: the latter insists that as it stands it does in fact open the In Morte section. For Petrarch and the Vita Nuova, see also Germaine Warkentin, The Form of Dante's "libello" and Its Challenge to Petrarch,' Quaderni d'ltalianistica 2 (1981), 160-70. 20 Cf. Templer, 99-106. 21 Valency, 271. 22 Rene Char, Fureur et mystere (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 160. © Editions Gallimard. Reprinted by permission.

Notes to pages 162-9 2^77 23 Although Petrarch had been known in England since Chaucer, and both Wyatt and Surrey had translated individual sonnets, there were no sequences of (love-)sonnets in English before about 1581, the year of Watson's Hekatompathia of eighteen-line variations on a theme (for a useful up-to-date list, see Roche, Petrarch, 518-22). If we keep our minds on the architectural dimension of the sequence, and accept Ringler's (Sidney, Poems, 438-9) dating of Astrophil and Stella mainly in 1582, Harington's 1591 characterization of Sidney as the 'English Petrarke' takes on a weight and substance not usually, these days, accorded it. See also Anne Ferry, The Inward Language (U of Chicago P, 1983), 16 and passim.im. 24 In the J.M. and M.-L. Osborn Collection, Yale University Library. Cf. Osborn, 114. 25 The most famous and best-known of these at the time was Veronica Franco, for whom see Margaret F. Rosenthal, The Honest Courtesan (U of Chicago P, 1992); for an elaboration of this theory, see 'From the New World,' above. 26 Cf. John Buxton, Elizabethan Taste (London: Macmillan, 1966), 24-30, 233-40. 27 For the placing of the songs in the various MSS and early printed editions of Astrophil and Stella, see Ringler, 447-56. In Ringler's MS Z* and the text derived from it, the songs are placed together at the end, while in those sources derived from MSS X* and Y* they are dispersed more or less as in th definitive 1598 Folio. 28 Francisci Petrarchx Operum tomus I (Basle, 1554; rep. Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg, 1965), 402: 'Fecit hoc ilia quantum potuit. Quid enim aliud egit, cum nullis mota precibus, nullis victa blandiciis muliebrem tenuit decorem, & adversus suam simul & meam aetatem, adversus multa & varia quae flectere adamantium licet spiritum debuissent, inexpugnabilis & firma permansit. Profecto animus iste fcemineus, quid virum decuit admonebat, praestabatque ne insectando pudicitiae studio (ut verbis utar Senecee) vel exemplum deesset vel convitium, postremo cum lorifragum ac praecipitem videret, deserere maluit quam sequi.' 29 See, for example, the useful summary in Edmund Spenser's Poetry, Hugh Maclean and Anne Lake Prescott, ed. 3rd edition (New York/London: Norton, 1993), 637ff. One text that does, with thoroughness and grace, establish the link is William Kennedy's Authorizing Petrarch, ch. 5: 'Authorizing Petrarch in England: Edmund Spenser's Amoretti' (195-280). 30 In Derrida's Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), part of the point is that the columns must, but cannot, be read together; thus creating the desired non- or antimetaphysical effect. In the case of the sonnet-sequences the desirable effect is rather a contrapuntal one. 31 Roland Barthes, Incidents (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 116.

268 Notes to pages 170-5 32 Arthur Rimbaud, 'Venus Anadyomene/ in CEuvres completes, ed. A. Adam, coll. La Pleiade (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1972), 22. 33 Wilhelm Miiller, 'Erstarrung' (Die Winterreise), in Gedichte, ed. Max Miiller, vol. i (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1868), 48. 34 Andre Compagnon, La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979)35 The best and wittiest summary of these is given in Stephen Booth's edition, Shakespeare's Sonnets: Edited with an Analytic Commentary (New Haven/ London: Yale UP, 1977), 546-4936 See Timothy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (1586), repr. in The English Experience, no.212 (Amsterdam/New York: Da Capo, 1969), 102, for the 'false laughter' arrived at 'through a kind of Sardoniam.' 37 Such subversion, contradicting the reader's literary competence with a repeated breaking of codes, enhances his sense of the mimesis of nature rather than that of other writers. 38 Cf. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the 'Sonnets' (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986). 39 This is of course to a certain extent true of all sonnet-sequences that insist on the 'truth' of their loving; but in Shakespeare's work the reality of the alternative is stressed by the means he employs. 40 Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda (Paris: Pauvert, 1966), 3. 10: Divertimento 1 Daniele Sallenave, author of Le don des marts (Gift from the Dead): interview with Jean Ristat, Les lettres franqaises, no. 8 (April 1991), 5. 2 It is this consanguinity which leads me here to use a narrative model with detective-story overtones. I have not gone as far in this as Josephine Tey in her classic The Daughter of Time (1951); but I was interested by the reaction of a number of senior-year undergraduates who, upon being told the story of the first three quartos as part of a course in Elizabethan poetry and bibliography, spontaneously asked me why nobody had written a novel about this. 3 The respective STC numbers are: Qi - STC 22536; Q2 - 22537; Q3 - STC 4 Fulke Greville, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford UP, 1907); but see also Ronald A. Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1971), 8-11; and Thomas Moffett, Nobilis, ed. V.B. Heltzel and H.H. Hudson (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1940). 5 My choice of temporary anonymity for A, in the interests of suspense, leads me necessarily to defer justificatory material concerning him; it will be found below, n. 54.

Notes to pages 176-7 269 6 For all data on printers and booksellers not otherwise noted, see McKerrow, Dictionary. 7 It is usual to consider Bartholomew Young's translation of Boccaccio (STC 3179) as Newman and Gubbin's first title. However, it was not entered until 18 September 1587; and since there is no entry for A's 1587 work, it is quite possible that it, as well as Richard Crompton's Short Declaration, preceded Young's Boccaccio. 8 For Wolfe see McKerrow, Dictionary; also Cyprian Blagden, The Stationers' Company (London: Allen and Unwin, 1960), 67-9; Frank A. Mumby, The Romance of Bookselling (London: Chapman and Hall, 1910, repr. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1967), 89; and E. Arber, A Transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 (repr. Gloucester: P. Smith, 1967), 2: 773-939 I have attempted, on the basis of Ringler's analysis and of probability, to assign owners to his principal derivatives of O: X, Y, and Z. I agree with Ringler (The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W. Ringler, Jr [Oxford: Clarendon P, 1962], 449) that X, the most accurate MS and the basis for the 1598 Folio, which the Countess edited, was probably her own. Y and Z, the other two principal MSS, I have tentatively assigned to Greville and Dyer respectively; in that order, since Dr, which is a Y-type, is conjectured by Ringler (540) to have come via Daniel from Greville, while Harington, who made Z1 from Z, was an acquaintance of Dyer's rather than of anyone else in the Circle (cf. Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. N. McClure [Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1930], 61-2). The matter's most recent treatment is in H.R. Woudhuysen's Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscript 1558-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1996), which discusses manuscript ownership on 365-6. His whole section on the Quartos, and the subsequent Folio printings, is of considerable interest. While not coming to the same conclusions as mine, Woudhuysen's research does not invalidate them. 10 Campion was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1586, two years before A left. 11 The connection between A and Greville, probably begun via the Sidneys, was continued after 1590 at Ludlow, where Greville was Secretary to the Court of the Council in the Marches (cf. Rebholz, 20-3 and 89-90); as for Daniel, in the revised 1611 edition of Musophilus, his dedication claims that Greville 'Did first draw forth from close obscuritie / My unpresuming verse into the light / And grac'd the same, and made me known thereby.' 12 For Nashe, see G.R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1962). The unfriendly suggestion regarding his departure from Cambridge surfaced in Richard Lichfield's The Trimming of Thomas Nashe (1597; repr. Menston: Scolar, 1973), sig. 03.

270 Notes to pages 177-80 13 STC 18364-5 (entry: Arber, 2:499) 14 Printed by Thomas Orwin for S. Clarke, 1589; STC 12272. The text is in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R.B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958) 3:300-26. 15 Brian O'Kill, The Printed Works of William Patten (0.1510-0.1600),' Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 7 (1977), 39. 16 Greville's Life shows what is perhaps (at least for this particular friend andd andd in his circumstances) the final, disillusioned stage of this development: thirty-four years after his death, Sidney has become for Greville a disembodied paradigm for all that was noble in his own youth, seen now as the Golden Age of Elizabethan Protestantism. Compare this with the unaffected grief of his letter to Archibald Douglas in October 1586, cited in Rebholz, 74, and at the end of 'Bin Heldenleben,' above. 17 For Greville's differences with the Countess, see M.E. Lamb, The Myth of the Countess of Pembroke/ Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981); for Daniel'siel'ss 'rescue from what... had grown to be a stifling atmosphere,' cf. Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel - A Critical and Biographical Study (Liverpool UP, 1964), 65.65. 18 For the Martin Marprelate controversy and Nashe's role in it, see Hibbard, 21-7. 19 The book printed in 1576 by Christopher Barker as Turbervile's Booke of Hunting was a reprint of George Gascoigne's Noble Arte of Venerie (Henry Bynneman, 1575), itself a translation of La venerie de Jacques du Fouilloux and work by Gaston Febus, acknowledged as to national origin but not as to author. See C. and R. Prouty, 'George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie, and Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth,' in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. J.G. McManaway, G.E. Dawson, and E.E. Willoughby (Washing ton: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 652. 20 STC 17452 and 534. 21 The text is in McKerrow, Works, 3:297-415. Nashe himself justifies the poem by referring to Ovid as 'the fountaine whence my streames doe flowe.' For evidence of lingering embarrassment, see McKerrow's comment (5:141), There can, I fear, be little doubt that the poem is the work of Nashe' (my italics); Helen Gardner's curt dismissal of it as 'indecent' in the introduction to her edition of Donne's Elegies, Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1965), xxiv; and not only its omission but the lack of any mention of it in an edition such as Stanley Wells's Thomas Nashe: Selected Writings (Cambri, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1965). 22 The MSS are described in McKerrow, Works, y. 397-402. On reasons for manuscript circulation, see Woudhuysen, nff.: he does not, however, mention scurrility.

Notes to pages 180-2 271 23 The Works of Gabriel Harvey, ed. A.B. Grosart (London, 1884-5),2: 91-91. 24 Printed by John Charlewood for Richard Jhones, 1592 (STC 18371). 25 The Countesse ofPembrokes Arcadia, Written By Sir Philippe Sidnei printed by John Windet for William Ponsonby (STC 225393 and 22539). Even more recent was Thomas Dawson's printing of A lettre written by Sir HENRYE SYDNEY unto PHILIP his sonne, with an Epitaph uppon the life and Death of Sir HENRYE SYDNEY (ent 5/1/1591; STC 225333.5). 26 This was Yonge's translation of Boccaccio (STC 3179); for the dedication to Sir William Newport Hatton, see Germaine Warkentin, 'Patrons and Profiteers: Thomas Newman and the "Violent Enlargement" of Astrophil and Stella,' Book Collector 34:4 (Winter 1985), 472-3. 27 Cf. Rebholz, 80-1. For Warkentin, see note 26. 28 For Garret Dewes, see McKerrow, Dictionary, 91. There is a 1635 note by Si John Lambe claiming that Dewes in 1590 sold his business to Thomas Dawson (Arber 3: 702); but it is unsubstantiated, and the Flower assignment may in any case have been transacted separately from the shop and stock. 29 For an example of such help, see this entry, for 13 December 1589: 'Richard Jones - Entered for his copie, by warrant of master FFLOWERS letter, and under the Wardens handes: The booke of honour and Armes' etc. (Arber, 2: 252 italics mine.) 30 Thomas Chaunce, son of a Gloucester tailor, had his apprenticeship transferred to Newman on 12 October 1586 (Arber, 2: 88); Matthew Selman a smith's son from Devon, had been apprenticed to Newman for seven years from i September 1587 (Arber, 2:153); and John Smythick, the son of . deceased London draper, was apprenticed on 12 January 1590/91, for nine years (Arber, 2:166). (He was the 'John Smethwicke' who in 1623 was par of the Shakespeare First Folio syndicate, and ended up as Master of the Company in 1639.) 31 Ringler, 452. Newman may, of course, have used a scribe or scrivener for the copying, in which the inaccuracies would be attributable simply to haste. 32 Peter Blayney writes, 'there is evidence that by 1586 it had become possibl. to pay the licence fee without spending the extra 4d. [for entry in the Clerk's book]. On 27 June 1586, for example, Warden Christopher Barker presente. the Clerk with 45. "which he had Receved for copies yl were not brought to be entred into the book" (Arber, 2: 448); the receipts for 1592-93 included, in addition to the sums recorded in the Clerk's book itself, "more for Seaven Copies which haue not ben broughte to be entred in the booke" (i, 559). It was, in other words, possible to satisfy the requirement originally known as "entrance" without an entry appearing in the Register' (letter to the author).

272 Notes to pages 182-4 33 For authors', and/or their representatives', reactions to publications about which they had not been consulted, and for the stationers' indifference to this, see Leo Kirschbaum, Shakespeare and the Stationers (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1955), 32-118. 34 Cf. McD. P. Jackson, The Printer of the First Quarto of Astrophil and Stella (1591),' SB 31(1978), 201-3; cited in Warkentin, 468. 35 See the 1583 survey of London printing-houses, printed in Arber, i: 248. 36 On 4 December 1587 the Master and Wardens issued orders limiting the size of impressions for most books to a maximum of 1,250 of 1,500 copies (Arber, 2: 43). The most probable size of a sonnet-sequence edition was around 750. It is possible that, in the case of a 'name' like Sidney's, Newman might have ventured on more copies; in which case his loss would have been correspondingly greater. An intriguing feature of sonnet-sequences is the comparatively small number of copies remaining, which is proportionately smaller than that of even some ephemeral pamphlets: this may be a fragmentary clue to edition size. 37 On 19 June 1609, the actor Edward Alleyn recorded in his household accounts the purchase of Shakespeare's Sonnets for 5d. (cited in Robert Giroux, The Book Known As Q [New York: Atheneum, 1984], 4); there is some evidence that price was calculated at id. per sheet, in which case a fortyfour-leaf quarto like Qi would have sold at 5a/id. 38 This projected income was hardly a fortune; yet it should be considered in relation to other figures. A foot-soldier in Ireland in 1570 was paid £12 per year; in 1575,140 longbows cost £14; and Robert Langham's annual salary as Keeper of the Council Chamber in the 15705 was £10 plus perks (HMC L'Isle 1.423,428; Langham's Letter, my edition [Leiden: Brill, 1983], 15). It is impossible to know how much Newman paid Nashe for his Preface, but in the parody of Nashe (as Ingenioso) and Danter in the 1601 Parnassus Plays, Ingenioso rejects Danter's offer of 40/- for his MS as 'a reward for one of your rheumatic poets' (cited in Mumby, 101-2). As for printers' expenses, around 1590 the price of casting a new italic fount for John Day was '40 marks,' i.e., £13/6/8 (Mumby, 82-3). So Newman's projected revenue was by no means negligible. 39 A term explained by Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy Sayers's Murder Must Advertise (1933) as a 'suburban plant that climbs by suction.' 40 See Ringler, 436 n.2, and sources there cited. 41 Cf. Warkentin, 483. 42 Cf. Blagden, 56 and 68; Kirschbaum, 193; Alexander Rodger, 'Roger Ward's Shrewsbury Stock: An Inventory of 1585,' Library n.s. 5:13 (1958), 247ff.; and Arber, 2: 771-2 and 813.

Notes to pages 184-6 273 43 Although the maximum penalty was usually invoked for the printing of 'lewd' (i.e., subversive) books (as against Abel Jeffes in 1595; Arber, 2:825), the 1586 Star Chamber decree provided for its imposition for infringing any of the Company's ordinances (Arber, 2:810-12), and it was in fact applied to Roger Ward for infringing a privilege in 1591, and to Bourne for infringing the Flower Assigns patent in 1586 (W.W. Greg and E. Boswell, Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company from Register B, 1576 to 1602 [London: Bibliographical Society, 1930], 20-1). A typical simple fine was the 2/6 levied against Thomas Millington for not licensing a ballad before printing in 1597 (Arber, 2: 826); for the Patten case, see my The Purloined Letter,' Library 6:7 (1985), 11525. It is not, however, cut and dried: Edward White's 'corrected' 1592 edition of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was confiscated for infringing Jeffes's entry. intriguing possibility for a penalty imposed, then mitigated, is suggested by two cases mentioned in the records of the Stationers' Court where books called in for disorderly printing are listed as afterwards having been 'redelivered' (Greg and Boswell, 85,86-7): this might explain the excision of the prelims in the Penshurst and Trinity copies of Qi (cf. Warkentin, 470). 44 Cf. J.A. Lavin, 'The First Two Printers of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella,' Library 5:26 (1971), 250. 45 Cf. Warkentin, 484. 46 The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J.B. Leishman (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1949); esp. The Return from Parnassus. The passage is also quoted by Mumby, 100-1. 47 Cf. Greg and Boswell, 21. 48 For Nashe's friendship with Chettle, who was printer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright, see his Have with You to Saffron Walden, in McKerrow, Works, 3: 131. 49 His first shop, which he had just moved into, was in Duck Lane near Smithfield; within a year he transferred to Hosier Lane near Holborn Conduit. The ballad - if, as seems probable, it preceded Q2 - is seen in an entry to him of 26 August 1591: 'A pleasant newe ballad called "the maydens choyce"' (Arber, 2: 593). 50 Warkentin, 484. 51 For Kirschbaum's defence of Danter, see his Shakespeare and the Stationers, 296-952 Ringler, 451. 53 'Imprinted at London for T.N. and I.W. and are to be solde in S. Dunstones Churchyarde in Fleete-streete.' 54 And now, at last, the documentation on Fraunce. Most of the data are to be found in the introduction to G.C. Moore Smith's edition of his Victoria: A

274 Note to page 186 Latin Comedy, Materialien zur Kunde des alteren englischen Dramas, 14 (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1906; repr. Vaduz: Kraus, 1963), xiv-xxxix. The date of his death is elucidated in the two following notes: (i) Victor Skretkowicz, 'Abraham Fraunce and Abraham Darcie,' Library 5:31 (1976), 239-42; (2) Michael G. Brennan, The Date of the Death of Abraham Fraunce/ Library 6:5 (1983), 391-2. His published works are: (i) The Lamentations ofAmyntas (J. Wolfe for T.T. Gubbin and T. Newman, 1587; STC 25118.4; repr. J. Charlewood for T. Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588); (2) The Lawiers Logike (W. How for T. Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588; ent.2O/5, STC 11343); (3) Insignium ... explicatio (T Orwin for T. Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588; ent.2o/5, STC 11342); (4) Th. Arcadian Rhetorike (T. Orwin for T. Gubbin and T. Newman, 1588; ent.n/6, STC 11338); (5) The Countess ofPembrokes Ivychurch (T. Orwin for W. Ponsonby, 1591; ent.9/2, STC 11340); (6) The Countess ofPembrokes Emanuel (T. Orwi. for W. Ponsonby, 1591; ent.9/2, STC 11338.5); (7) The Third Part of the Countes ofPembrokes Ivychurch (T. Orwin for T. Woodcocke, 1592; STC 11341). On Ramism at St. John's, see Hibbard, 5-6. It is perhaps useful to deal here with the usual reason for dismissing Fraunce as the source of Newman's Qi copy. The argument, implied by Ringler (449) and stated explicitly in Warkentin (466), is that Fraunce's Sidney quotations in the Arcadian Rhetorike derived from MS X. This is not, i. my view, sufficient. The AR quotations were prepared for a work to be published, with a dedication to the Countess. It is thus probable that Fraunce took them from, or at least verified them against, her MS. The MS have postulated as Z2, however, was his own private copy from Z, which last may well at some point have been more accessible to him than the Countess's jealously guarded treasure. I have imagined Z as Dyer's, to whom Fraunce dedicated his MS Shepherd's Logike (an early drafte Lawiers Logike with illustrations from Spenser's Shepherd's Calender and other pastoral poems), probably in the early 15805 (BM. Add.MSS. 34361; quoted in Moore Smith, xxv-xxvi and xxxii-xxxiii). The reason why Dyer might have had a less perfect copy than the Countess (e.g., in the placing of the Songs) may be that X reflects Sidney's final ordering of the work, while Z shows an earlier, incomplete stage. Not enough attention has traditionally been paid to Dyer, though there is a biography - R.M. Sargent's The Life and Lyrics of Sir Edward Dyer (Oxford UP, 1968) - and as regards his friendship with Sidney the lack is well remedied in Duncan-Jones's biography of the latter (esp. 101-6). In the present context it should be remembered that he was perhaps Sidney's foremost literary friend, and that it was to him, not to the Countess, that Sidney willed his books. Intriguingly, Woudhuysen also sees

Notes to pages 186-7

55

56 57 58 59

60

61 62

2

75

Fraunce as implicated in what he uncompromisingly calls the 'theft' of the A&S manuscripts; but he proposes another identification for the accomplice and/or chief villain (cf. his section The Question of Guilt/ 371-84). A brief note on the tangled story of Amyntas in England: Thomas Watson's Latin version was printed in 1585 by Henry Marsh, the lacklustre son of Thomas Marsh. Fraunce's unacknowledged Englishing in 1587 has become notorious, mostly because of Watson's crisp note in the Preface to his 1590 Meliboeus. However, such practice, though perhaps lacking in manners, was neither illegal nor especially uncommon. Watson's retort may well have been due to mild envy, as Dickey suggests in his edition of Fraunce's version (Ren.Eng.Text Soc. vol.2 [U of Chicago P, 1967]; xxn.): Watson's was never reprinted, and only one copy survives, while Fraunce's went through five versions in all, totalling twenty-six surviving copies. What moved Fraunce finally to acknowledge Watson's authorship in the 1591 Yvychurc edition is hard to determine: Orwin, who printed it, had just (23 June 1591) received the rights to Watson's in a large assignment from Henry Marsh's brother Edward, and may have made a friendly suggestion; Robert Robinson had printed both Watson's Meliboeus and Fraunce's third edition in 1589, so that an attempt at mediation may have come from him; finally, the Sidney Circle may have put in its oar: the English Meliboeus was dedicated to Philip's widow, while all the Fraunce editions, of course, bore dedications to the Countess. There is no proof that sides were taken, with Fraunce on one and Watson and Nashe on the other: Nashe goodhumouredly praises 'sweet Master France' for 'his excellent translation of Master Thomas Watsons sugred Amintas' as early as his Preface to Menaph. in 1589: a further indication that the original authorship was known well before 1591. Cf. Hibbard, 88 and 108. Cf. Arber, 2: 295. Cf. H.R. Plomer, Library n.s. i (1900), 195. There appears to be a peak ca. 1596; while at the sophisticated level reaction had set in as early as 1594/95 with Sir John Davies' 'Gulling sonnets/ continuing with Hall's 1597 Virgidemiarium i, 7, and Marston's 1598 Scou ofVillanie.. This is NSTC'S attribution, based on John Buxton's 'On the Date of Syr P.S. his Astrophel and Stella ... printed for Matthew Lownes/ Bodleian Library Record 6:5 (1960), 614-16; but see Lavin, 250 n. 2. Felix Kingston may have been Orwin's stepson: cf. Arber II. 824. Arber, in. 128. STC 22542; cf. Plomer

276 Notes to pages 187-92 63 64 65 66

Ringler, 536. Cf. also Woudhuysen, 383. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilee, 1974), 7. 'Whereas the text is approached and experienced in relation to the sign, the work closes itself upon a signified.' Roland Barthes, 'De 1'oeuvre au texte' in Revue d'esthetique 3 (1971), tr. as 'From Work to Text' in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornel UP, 1979), 75. 67 I am aware that this last sentence sounds like one of the bits in translated French texts one tends to skip; yet if you are prepared to suspend disbelief in my tale as told, it will be clear that its crucial ingredient - that without which the Circle might have been broken eventually but not then and not in that way - was Fraunce's genuinely subversive attraction to Nashe and Nashe's friendship. It is both totally plausible and utterly out of tune with the rest of his life; and I do not think it unjustified to regard it as his (perhaps even literally, as it turned out) 'fatal flaw.' 68 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 'Bilan-programme pour machines desirantes/ Minuit no. 2 (January 1973); tr. by Robert Hurley as 'Balancesheet Programme for Desiring Machines' in Semiotext(e) 2:3 (1977), 117-35. 69 Ibid., 118. 70 Ibid., 129. 71 Ibid., 121. 72 For this concept, see 'Four-part fugue,' below. 73 For a recent survey of MS circulation and its significance, see Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Lyric (Ithaca/London: Cornell UP, 1995)11: Four-part fugue 1 'The intellectual framework of the poem, hides itself and - takes place works in the space which separates the stanzas and among the white of the paper; meaningful silence which it is no less fine to compose than the lines themselves.' J. Scherer, Le 'Livre' de Mallarme: premieres recherches sur des documents inedits (Paris: Gallimard), [1957], Quoted in Derrida, La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 260. 2 'Since these mysteries are beyond me, let us pretend to be their organizer' (Jean Cocteau, Les maries de la Tour Eiffel [Paris: NRF, 1924]). 3 Cf. R. Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, tr. G.G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973). Throughout this text there has been, as part of the explicit critique of forms, an implicit reflection upon foot- and endnotes.

Notes to pages 193-6 277 This should now be foregrounded, since footnotes bear a charged relation to gaps in the economy of the text. 4 This Mallarme ghost-word, from the sonnet 'Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx,' discussed in Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Po (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978), 16-19, is a neologism designed to act as a verbal no-thing: impossibility-made-text, thus text as impossibility. 5 I have coined this word, on the model of semiosis (cf. ibid., 8-10), to signify the reader's accomplishing a love-poem's erotic reality-as-text. 6 Cf. Bataille, L'experience interieure (Paris: Pauvert, 1961), 239 and passim; and its discussion in ch. 9 of Derrida's L'ecriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1961). 7 Ingarden, trans. Grabowicz, 246ff.; Wolfgang Iser, 'Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response/ in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1971), i3n. Neither is a very good translation. A Stelle is a place or locus, which favours Grabowicz, but for the unfortunate 'stain' connotation of spot. To translate Unbestimmtheit by 'indeterminacy' is rather like translating Freud's Ich and Es by 'ego' and 'id/ Denotatively these translations are unexceptionable, but connotatively they are all wrong. The German in each case is a common word, the English a Latinate jargon-term: German unbestimmt usually means Vague/ for lack of Bestimmung or destination. We are probably stuck with 'indeterminacy'; but 'places (or loci) of vagueness' would be a better rendering. 8 I am using primarily the discussion in Iser, 'Indeterminacy and the Reader's Response'; that in Der Akt des Lesens (Munich: Fink, 1976; tr. as The Act of Reading, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979) is in many ways a repetition of this, in the context of a more complex development pertaining to narrative. The later discussion does introduce the term Leerstellen ('empty places'), which might seem promising; but it is not in the direction of 'gaps' in the present sense that Iser develops the term. 9 Iser, 'Indeterminacy/ 10. Both are translations of Ingarden's Ansichten. In this case, Grabowicz's 'aspects' may be the more precise translation, as long as it is taken in its precise, not its colloquial, sense. 10 See especially Derrida, 'La double seance' in La dissemination; tr. by B. Johnson as Dissemination (U of Chicago P, 1981). 11 Cf. Derrida, La dissemination, 63,257-17. The whole of this last section (part 2 of 'la double seance') provides Derrida's most challenging discussion of the blanc, and is of great value in the understanding of sonnet-sequences. 12 Cf. Derrida, L'ecriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967), ch. 5. 13 It is, of course, only a limited taxonomy. Other gaps invite our attention:

278 Notes to pages 197-206 Barthes's Gap, for instance (between the five codes of S/Z), or Riffaterre's Gap (between the 'levels' of meaning and significance in Semiotics of Poetry). 14 Cf. Ringler, Poems, 490, n. to 105:3. 15 Riffaterre, Semiotics, 32-9. 16 Ever since Saussure's remarks on the need for a future semiotics, obiter dicta on remaining tasks and their necessary rigour have become a minor but amusing topos of French theory and criticism. It would be pedantic to give specific references; but any reader familiar with the work of Barthes, the Tel Quel and Greimas schools, and Derrida will have no trouble finding examples. 17 See Paul Ricceur, La metaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975); tr. by R. Czerny et al. as The Rule of Metaphor (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1978), esp. ch. 7. 18 I am here using these terms in the following sense: signifier is the word or or phrase in the text; the signified is the object in the diegesis to which the signifier refers; while the referent is the external reality embodied in the object. 19 For a challenging discussion of our consciousness of our lives as 'literary' and inherently hermeneutic, see Paul Ricceur, Temps et recit, vol. i (Paris: Seuil, 1983), esp. ch. 3 ('Mimesis i'). 20 Ingarden, 265-8. As this involves the Ansichten's syntagmatic relation, it will be further discussion in the context of Iser's Gap: see below, sections 29 and 32. 21 E.g., sonnets 30, 33, 83, song viii (Astrophil); sonnets 24, 35, 37, 78, song viii (Stella). 22 J.W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love-Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1956), 97-103. 23 It should be borne in mind that the term 'plot/ while usually applied to narrative, need not be. In a more diffuse and situational sense, the lovelyrics of Catullus, Propertius, and the troubadours all depend on implicit plots. It is in this specifically lyrical sense, outlined above in Tempo/ Sequenza/ that I use the word here. 24 For Petrarch, cf. 35, 59,63, and (via Tasso) 67; for Tasso, cf. 4, 5,13,21,43,67, 72,76,79, and 84; for Desportes, cf. 15,22, 30,42, 50,60, and 69. 25 For a parallel to this, see Barthes's 'hermeneutic code' in S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), ch. 10. 26 This term of Hegel's, implying something cancelled but not destroyed, has been introduced into the lexis of literary theory and criticism by the French Hegelians and anti-Hegelians. It might perhaps be translated as 'sublimation/ if the popular-Freudian misuse of that term could be ignored. 27 Not only in the text's words but, via numerological techniques, in its

Notes to pages 206-13 279 organization and disposition. See A. Kent Hieatt's classic Short Tinie's Endless Monument (New York: Columbia UP, 1960), which has since been followed by numerous other texts. For a list to 1985, see Thomas P. Roche, Jr, Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: Ams, 1989), 478 n. 8; some more recent ones are: Shohachi Fukuda, The Numerological Patterning of Amoretti and Epithalamion,' SSt 9 (1988), 33-48; David Chinitz, The Poem as Sacrament: Spenser's Epithalamion and the Golden Section/ JMRS 21:2 (Fall 1991), 251-68; and John B. Gleason's 'Opening Spenser's Wedding Present: The "Marriage" Number of Plato in the Epithalamion,' ELR 24:3 (Autumn 1994), 620-37. 28 See Two-part invention/ above. 29 For example, such an analysis might provide a much-needed clue to the placing of a sonnet like Shakespeare 42 within its macrotext, something traditional critics attribute to a printing-house error and numerological critics such as Alastair Fowler in Triumphal Forms (Cambridge UP, 1970) and Roche, 4i8ff., fail to account for. 30 Derrida, Glas, 88. 31 See Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets. Edited with an Analytic Commentary (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 1977), 43on. For an attempt to do something more positive with them, see Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1982), iSgff. 32 See Booth, 507-17 for extensive discussion. For his parallel printing see 124-5. 33 An undecideability which awareness of the possible Sidneian intertext, characteristically, does nothing to remove, as the latter's persistent but unjustified association with Astrophil and Stella (definitively refuted by Ringler, 423-4) shows. 34 That this represents an editorial decision on Booth's part is clear from the fact that the previous facsimile edition (Menston: Scolar, 1970) includes the Lover's Complaint. Happily John Kerrigan's 1986 New Penguin Shakespeare edition has remedied the situation to some degree. 35 Gathering K begins, not with the first page of the Complaint (Kiv), but with the final page of the Sonnets, comprising no. 154, the word 'FINIS/ and the 'A' of 'A Lover's Complaint' as catchword. 36 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979), 1937 Almost any lengthy critical discussion of our three sequences will demonstrate this practice: convenient examples may be found in Ringler, xlvff.; Lever, H5ff.; and Booth, 545-6.

280 Notes to pages 218-36 12: Encore: Irregardless 1 Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte (Paris: 2 Daniele Sallenave, Le don des marts (Paris: NRF Gallimard, 1991), 123. 3 Barthes, 43. 4 Cf. George Steiner, Real Presences (London: Faber, 1989). 5 T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent/ in T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose ed. F. Kermode (London: Harcourt, Brace, 1975), 40. 6 Blanchot, L'espace litteraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 256 7 See, though, the strong and conscious attempt to do so in Anne Ferry's The Inward Language (U of Chicago P, 1983). 8 Sallenave, 98. 9 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber and. Faber, 1963), 222-3. 10 Barthes, 79. Appendix: Discourse and its choices i See my 'Marguerite de Valois: le plaisir du texte/ in the forthcoming Acta of the 1995 Blois (France) conference 'Royaumes de Femynie: femmes et pouvoirs en France a la Renaissance.'

Index

Note: As Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare appear everywhere in this book, they do not have separate entries in the index. An aspect of the life of each is dealt with in 'From the New World'; Sidney's life is analysed in 'Ein Heldenleben.' Their sonnet-sequences, however, are listed here individually. accomplishing - the pleasure of criticism 25 - the plural of the text 10, igff., 43ff., 47, 55, 227; in Amoretti 51-4; in Astrophil and Stella 45-7; in Shakespeare's Sonnets 19, 47-51, 99 - the text i6f., 19, 21, 22,104,19 and n., 2i6f., 225, 227 Alengon, Franqois (Hercule) de Valois, Duke of 147 Amoretti/Epithalamion (Spenser) 71,1,. 186,208,211,213,221; Anacreontics in 206,213; archaism in 52-4; abjection of female in 49; 'beauty' in 102-13; grouping in 63n.; indeterminacy in 202-7; intertextual role of 88-98,235; 'plots' in 2O2ff.; plural of language in 51; no. 15, analysis of 32-7; relation to intertexts of 166; role of Cupid in 1278; significance of structure of 43n., 166-8, 206 and n.

archaism 34; in Amoretti 33n., 52-4; double, in Amoretti 54; as plural of language 52; Riffaterre's discussion of 52; as sign of time 53f. Archer, Will, god 114,116,123,125, 130,131 Arnold, Matthew 220,221,225, 226-7; 'The Study of Poetry' 225 art 91,127,193, 229; beauty and 99, iO2n., 111; dialogic reading as 23; criticism as 10,11, 21, 99, 224-7; modern, criticism and 4n., 13,14, 22, 221; new intellectual, semiotics as 14; sonneteer's, turning constraints to opportunity in 67 Artaud, Antonin 93, 95 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 51, 60, 62,84,92,93,122,147,166,168, 205,216, 218,220, 221, 227,234 - abjection of female in song v of 49 - analysis of time in 56-76 - architecture of 43n., 161-5 - beauty' in 102-12

282 Index -

Cupid in 124-7 diegetic structure of 6$ff. energia in 75 and n. first publication of 174-90; first Quarto (Qi) of 183 and nn.; second Quarto (Q2) of 185-6 and n.; third Quarto (Q3> of 186-7;in first Folio 186-7 - identity in 45-7 - indeterminacy in 197-201 - intertextual role of 167 - MSS of 177 and n., 180- no. 29, analysis of 27-32 - patterns of textual time in 6gff. - 'plot' in 59, 6 - plural meanings of 12 - songs in 63f., 71,163 and n. - as structure of Desire 187-90 - structure of textual time in 70-5 - textual time in second half of 109 - title of 46n. - verbal energy in 51, 75 and n., 166 Augustine, St: Confessions, treatment of time in 58; in Petrarch's Secretum 164 Barthes, Roland 5, 6,10-14, 21/ 22> 23, 25, 66, 68, 70,71, 83, 85,104, 112,132,133,138,169,218,224, 231 - on beauty 111 and n., 13 - on blasons 106 - career of, influence on modern criticism of 9 - ecriture in the thought of 10 an n., 138 - and freedom 24f. - intuition in the late works of 10 - method of, inadaptability of 6, 42 - modern criticism, forerunner of 9

- ontological location of 'structure' by 6, 137 - on pleasure 22n. - on plural of text 17, 43ff., 51-2 - works: 'L'activite structurale' 24on.io; Le degre zero de I 'ecriture 138, 242n.28; Fragments d'un discours amoureux 9; Incidents 169, 218; Tar ou commencer?' 17, 43ff.; Le plaisir du texte 21, 23,221,231; Roland Barthes 9, 243^37; S/Z 42,106, inf., 136,24on.i2 Bataille, Georges x; and death 99n., 101,152 and n., 193 Benson, John: 1640 reordering of Sonnets by 211; reordering as sign of plural 44 Blanchet, Maurice x, 3,150; and death 99n., 152 and n.; L'espace litteraire 217, 226 blason 33n., 36-7,105 and n., 106, no, 199,228 blason-catalogue 29-34, 36-7, 94, I05n., 106, in, 228; relation to metaphor and indeterminacy 199-200 Book of Common Prayer, texts from, and Astrophil and Stella 29 30 and n. Booth, Stephen: commentary on Shakespeare's Sonnets 38-40 Brook, Peter 22n.: production of The Tempest So, 94, 96, 235 Bryskett, Lodowick 178 Castiglione, Baldesar: II Libra del Cortegiano, semiotics of 107,133-7 catalogue of Beauties: see blasoncatalogue

Index 283 Cellini, Benvenuto: La Vita, courtiers in 134 Char, Rene: Tenombre,' quoted 161 Charlewood, John: printer of Astrophil and Stella Qi 181,183-5 Chaucer, Geoffrey: and Spenser's archaisms 52 choice: criticism and 2of., 24; crux as, for reader 86; Fashion-code as locus of 138,143,146 Cohen, Jean: Structure du langage poetique ion., 5/n. Compagnon, Antoine: cited on intertexts 26,170, 236 congruence: of literary time with experience 71-2; between sonnetproduction and meaning-production 72-3; between textual and diegetic time 69, 7 iff. consensus: cultural, disintegration of 15-19, 24-5 critic: Barthes as a modern 9; choices of 20; discourses of 8in.; and love-poet, meeting of, in present tense 57-8; mind of, as location of 'structure' 6; performance of text by 21, 22, 24, 58, 99, 230; person of, existence of, admission of 10; power of 2in.; role of, in text/ reader relation 21-4, 219; texture of the language of 17; thinking of the text by 11 criticism - as art 11, 2 - blindness of 89 - descriptive system of 87-8 - dialogic reading and 23 - discourse of, codes of 57 and n. - as explanation/appreciation 15 - as game 44, 5

- as judgment 15 - modern: accomplishing text as purpose of 21; as art of thinking 21; Barthes as forerunner of 9; vs. 'contemporary' criticism 9; and early texts nff.; features of 4, ioff.; role of intuition in 10; need for 9f.; nonexistence of 3; pleasure of 2iff.; and plural 19. See also pluralism, discontinuity and uncertainty - as poetry of text 56 - present tense as code of 5off. - psychoanalytic 7- purpose of 15,16,19, 21 - reading 25 - scholarship and 11,18,22 - structuralism and 5,7 - truth and 8 Cupid 30, 31, 47,85, 87, 90, 98,191, 229; lover defined by, in Astrophil and Stella 47. See also archer Daniel, Samuel 177-8,184; his MS of Astrophil and Stella 185; Delia 86, 88-9,186, 229 Dante: Vita nuova 152-8; architecture of 154-5; central silence in 156; reality of the Beloved in 152-4 Danter, John: printer of Astrophil and Stella Q2 185-6 de Man, Paul 7n., 8 and n., 211 Death 51, 54,102,113,117,122,132, 148,149, 201, 215, 217; bo. and 112; body of no; decay of beauty, sign of 109; as element in sonnet-architecture 150-73; hero defined by 148; Languet's 146 Laura's 65; 'little' 216; and Love mutual semiosis of 51; mystery

284 Index of 101; as open sign 113 and n.; Sidney's, interpretations of 133; time and the closure of 72 Deleuze, Gilles: 'Bilan-programme pour machines desirantes' (with F. Guattari) 189 Derrida, Jacques vii, x, 8, 9, 24, 79, 129,198 - and ecriture 10 and n - and indeterminacy in sonnetsequences 194,195 and n., 201, 205, 206, 207-12,213, 214, 215 - and ontology of 'structure' 5, . - philosophy of, and literature 8n., 10 and n. - works: La dissemination 8n., 137; L'ecriture et la difference 5, 8n; Feu la cendre 152; Glas 166,188; Memoires d'aveugle 77,78,100,118, 235

desiring-machine, text as 189-90 Desportes, Philippe 82,203; sonnet of, original of Amoretti no. 15 34, 37 detachment: relation to critical present tense 58f.; in lovesonnets 46, 50; furthered by sonnet-sequence structure 75; from text, reader's 18 diegetic time 62, 64-70, 71 discontinuity 4, 8-12,19, 21, 23, 24, 227, 230, 231; between critic and reader 23; of discourses 8; Matthew Arnold and 225; in modern art's reception 4n.; and reader's experience 11. See also pluralism; uncertainty Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste i46n. Du Bellay, Joachim 62; Riffaterrean analysis of sonnet by 6 and n.

Du Plessis, Philippe de Mornay 14611. Dudith, Andreas, Hungarian humanist i46n.; Languet's introduction of Sidney to 142-3 duplicity: in love-poetry 44 Durrell, Lawrence 2j6n... Dyer, Sir Edward 178; his MS of Astrophil and Stella 177 and n. E.K.: glosses of, as signs of plural of text 44; justification of Spenser's archaisms by 53 Eco, Umberto: L'Opera aperta (The Open Work} 8,61,213 ecriture 5,12,17, 43, 96,204; Barthes's use of 10 and n., 138; Derrida's use of 194 Epithalamion (Spenser): and Amoretti no. 15 32,105,206 and n.; Archer and 128; fulfilment of Easter sonnet (Amoretti 68) in 89; as intertext for Shakespeare's Sonnets 92,96-7;9607; Iser's Gap (indeterminacy) and 205-6; as viewpoint for Amoretti's retrospect 93 Flower, Francis: dedicatee of Astrophil and Stella Qi 181-2 Foucault, Michel: L'ordre du discours 8,10 and n. Franco, Veronica, Venetian poet and courtesan: and Sidney 121, i62n. Fraunce, Abraham 175-89, i86n., iSgn. Gardner, Dame Helen 15, 21, i8on., 221 Genet, Jean 114, 188 Goldwell, Henry: description of

Index 285 Foster Children of Desire pageant 143 Greimas, A-J. 7nn., 9n. Greville, Fulke I75n., 177 and n., 178; letter on Sidney's death 149; Life of Sidney 175 and n., lySn. Grogan, Emmet: Ringolevio 99n. Guattari, Felix: see Deleuze Gubbin, Thomas: publisher, partner of Thomas Newman 176 Guicciardini, Francesco: Storia d'ltalia, image of courtier in 133 Hacket, Thomas, bookseller: and Thomas Nashe 177 Harington, Sir John 183; his MS of Astrophil and Stella 177 and n. Hatton, Sir Christopher 181, 184; as Favourite 140-1 and n., 145 Hjelmslev, L.: on 'structure' 5n. Ingarden, Roman 194, 208, 214; 'Gap' of (indeterminacy) 193 and n., 195, 197-201, 206 Iser, Wolfgang 8, 208, 211, 214; 'Gap' of (indeterminacy) 193,194 and n., 197, 201,202-7 Jakobson, Roman 7n., ion.; semiotic diagram of 45 and n.., 46., 81 Jauss, Hans-Robert: 'shared poetics' 8 Jouve, Pierre-Jean: poems by, quoted 155-7 Kerrigan, John: edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets by 38n., 85 and n., 86,88, 96,210 Kristeva, Julia: Histoires d'amour 7, 49,53

Languet, Hubert 132 and n., 141-2, 146 and n. Lever, J.W.: and Amoretti 63n., 202 andn. Levi-Strauss, Claude: on method 6 and n. Lewis, C.S.: on Lover's Complaint 85 Lover's Complaint (Shakespeare) 85, 96,172; Derrida's Gap (indeterminacy) and 210-11; relation to Epithalamion 85-6,96; problem of 85-6; role in structure of Sonnets 71 Lovers: criticism as discourse of 76; reading of sonnet-sequences as 50-1, 54 Machiavelli, Niccolo: // Principe, absence of courtiers in 133 Macmillan, Harold: and j£schylus 18 Mallarme, Stephane 191,193 and n. Marot, Clement iO5n. 'matter' (lyric equivalent of plot): of the alba 60; and plot 59; of thehe sonnets 59, 60, 65,171 mimesis: in Ricceur's Temps et recit 51, 58-9, 61, 65, 67, 69,71 modularity: characteristic of sonnets as microtexts 62, 65, 67, 201; and Pleiade sonnets 65; and textual time 63-8, 71 Moffett, Thomas, physician 178; Nobilis 1755 Morgan, Charles: The Judge's Story, quoted 24-5 Muller, Giinther: theory of narrative time 62,64, 69,71, 73; congruence between textual and

286 Index diegetic time in 71; time and tempo in 69 narrative: biography as 187; critical discourse as denial of 57-8; Iser's Gap (indeterminacy) between plots of 194, 200, 204; in lyric 58; past tense as code of 57; and sonnet-sequences 59-62, 65-8, 71, 159-60,163, 200; and time: see Ricceur Nashe, Thomas; Preface to Astrophil and Stella 59 and n., 67, 70, 93; role in publication of Astrophil and Stella (Qi) 176-90; A Choice of Valentines 180 and n., 184 New Historicism: problems of 8 Newman, Thomas, publisher 176; and Astrophil and Stella 181-6 Orwin, Thomas, printer 177,179, 186 Paull, Andreas, German humanist I46n. Petrarch 42, 45, 53,84,97,160,170, 203,216, 221 - and Dante 157-8 - Sidney as English i62n. - works: Rime (alias Canzon Amoretti in relation to 89,166-8, 204, Astrophil and Stella in relation to 63, 71,89,162-6, canzoni in 61, genre of 29n., Laura's death as structural element in 154-5, !58/ 213, degree of plot in 65, reality of Beloved and 108,153 and n., 154,228, time in 62; Secretum: and Astrophil and Stella 1644. and n.

Phillips, John: The Life and Death of Sir Philip Sidney' (1655) 143-4 Pico, Giovanni, della Mirandola 13; De hominis dignitate 48 and n. pleasure: criticism and/as 13, 2iff., 25, 58, 217; reading and 13, 22 plot 58, 216: in Amoretti 92, 202-5; m Astrophil and Stella 67-8; and experience 59,122; and Iser's Gap 194,207; and Lover's Complaint 210; and/in lyric 59-62, 65, 202 and n.; in Petrarch's Rime 65; in Ricceur's Temps et recit 59,65,67, 71; of sonnet-sequences 60, 72, 73, 115,159 plural 10,23,45,47,102,104,132, 171; archaism as 52; of career-astext 132; duplicity as 44; of feeling 19, 45, 47-51; of identity 45-7; of language 45, 51-4; as sign 44; of text, accomplishing of 10,17, 43, 45, 54, 227; and truth 99 pluralism 4, 9, 11; apparent, of dialectic 9; critic's authority and 21; radical, of meanings 11 pluralism, discontinuity, and uncertainty 4,10,12, 21, 24, 227, 230; Barthes and 9; choice and 21, 24; as condition for dialogic reading 12; consensus replaced by 19; modern criticism, features of 4, loff.; and New Historicism 8; reader's own 24 present 56, 68,233,234 - critical 57, 58, 75; detachmet valorized by 57; as code 57; as liminary discourse 57 - lyrical 58-9,75; immediacy valorized by 58 and n., 65

Index 287 Protestant activist party, at Court 14311. reader: autonomy of 21, 63, 215; as co-creator of text 61, 67, 75,194, 200, 204-7, 213/ contemporary, andandd early text 4, 223; critical/choosing 21, 86; detachment and 17-18, 75, 225; dialogic reading by 20, 23, 45, 50; grouping of sonnets as activity of 61, 63, 66, 75, 213, 215; indeterminacy and 198, 203, 211, 215; informed non-academic 3, 19; as lover 50-1, 54, 76; modern criticism's advantages for 11, 21, 226, and difficulties for 42; plural of text as invitation to 44, 54, 75, 215; pluralism and 11; role of, in Riffaterrean semiotics 28ff.; tact of, in Arnold's 'Study of Poetry' 225; targeted by sonnet (-sequence) text 20,43,45-7,203; and text, constituents of literary phenomenon 44, 62. See also accomplishing Renaissance texts: general readers and 12; modern criticism and 11 rhetoric: and semiotics of poetry 7, 32,11 in. Ricceur, Paul 14,15, 53-4,148; La metaphore vive 48,201, 217; Temps et recit: triple mimesis in 58-67,71, time and plot in 71 Riffaterre, Michael vii, x, 5, 27-31, 42, 52,87,99,104,108,111-12,164, 198, 202,216, 230,234-5 - Semiotics of Poetry, and structuralism 5,27; applications of 6n., 27-32, 32-7, 38-42; value of 27, 42

Rogers, Daniel, humanist and diplomat 178 Ronsard, Pierre de 45, 48, 62, 65,109; sonnet by, analysed by Riffaterre 6n., 27, 28,111 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst: letter on Sidney's death 149 Sallenave, Daniele 174; Le don des marts 218, 226-7 Sanford, Hugh 178 Sceve, Maurice iO5n. scholarship: contemporary, features of 3; criticism and nf., 18, 222; discourse of 219; modern criticism and 11, 22, 44,174,187, 222, 227, 237; Renaissance criticism and 44 semiotics 10,16,134,140,144, 186 - Astrophil and Stella's publication, circumstances of i87ff. - Barthes's definition of 6 - of courtier-text i37ff. - of Death in sonnet-sequences 1579; Sidney's reaction to 164-5 - General, project for 24in.i6 - Riffaterrean: discourse appropriate to 99, 234; validity of 27, 42,216 - of scholarly texts' apparatus 223 - structuralism and 4, 22 Shepheardes Calendar (Spenser) 44, i86n. 'Sidney Circle' i78ff. Sidney, Sir Henry: and Queen Elizabeth 142 and n. Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke 46n., 64n.; and publication of Astrophil and Stella 176, 178-80,182-3,188 Sidney, Robert, 2nd Earl of Leicester 1788

288 Index songs: in Astrophil and Stella 43n., 46, 63 and n.; modularity and 6iff., 63f.; role of, in sonnet-sequences 61,65,71,162 sonnet-sequences 3, 66; architecture of I54ff.; blason and 105, no; composition of, theory of 73; Death in i52ff., 159; discourse of no, 112; endings of i6off., 167; genre of 2gn.; indeterminacy and 191-217; lack of early definition of 60, 99,162,166,188; as macrotext 61; morphology of 61, 63 and n.; myth and 114-31; non-lyric elements in 59-60, 62, 66; ordering of 43 and n., 44 and n., 50, 61, 64n., 84, 85, i86n., 211, 213; plural of text and 17, 43-4, 51; reader's role in 61, 63n., 67, 212, 213, 226-7; reading, temporal patterns of 75; relation to reality of 72,152,160,170-2, 228; as selfportrait Sgf., 97; sonnets as microtexts in 61; Sonnets /Lover's Complaint and codes of 83, 86, 90; subject and 171, 226-7; textconsumption of i74ff.; understanding of 154-5, *57 sonnets, formal characteristics of 29 Sonnets/Lover's Complaint (Shakespeare): Death in 169-72; identity in 47-50; indeterminacy in 206n; no. 61, analysis of 37-41; myth and 127-9; plural of feeling in 18; relation to Amoretti/Epithalami 89-97,234; risk in 98; role of Lover's Complaint in structure of 70,70. 85ff-,94 structuralism: and anthropology 7n.; continuing relevance of 6, 7; as

liminary phenomenon 4; and semiotics 4; weaknesses of 5, 7, 195, 222 structure: of false solutions, in Amoretti 15, 35; philosophical problem of 5-6; sensitivity to (in Barthes) 17; of Sidney's career 132-49; of significance (in Riffaterre) 5,28,29, 31, 35, 36-7, 42, 90; of sonnet-sequence 71 subject, Renaissance text as 225ff. theory: Arnold's refusal of 225; critical, connotations of 219; criticism and i6f.; and fiction 174; of genre, for biosemiotics 137; pedagogical dangers of 225; pleasure of 220; semiotic 27; of sonnet-sequence text-production 72; structural (in Barthes) 6, appropriate to sonnet-sequences 60 time: archaism as sign of 53-5; congruences of 7iff.; diegetic, and plot 65; diegetic, importance of in Astrophil and Stella 66ff.; diegetic, irregularity of 64; diegetic, in Petrarch 65; diegetic, in sonnetsequences 62, 64ff., 71; dimensions of, as distancing factor 75; drift as dimension of 75; Fashion-code as commentary on 139,144; and literature 4; and plot, associated by Ricceur 59-61, 72; and progress 25; seqential, as dimension of sonnet-sequences 90; and text 188; textual, and experience 75f., 230; textual, and indeterminacy 194, 215, in Amoretti 204; textual, measurement of 64-7,

Index 289 model of: concord with diegesis 70; textual, patterns of, in Astrophil and Stella 70,75; textual, structure of, in Astrophil and Stella 67; of the world, and of mortals 54,72 Todorov, Tzvetan ion., 28n., 32 uncertainty: in Barthes 9; enemy of consensus 16; modern criticism, principle of 12; modernity, principle of 27; ontological, in structuralism and semiotics 222; pleasure of 20 Ursinus, Zacharias, German humanist I46n. Veyne, Paul x, 108,124; and nature of history 16; on plural of truth 43; Les Grecs ont-ils cru a leurs mythes? 114, 235 Vinsauf, Geoffrey of iO5n. Vulcob, Jean de, French humanist and diplomat I46n.

Wacker, Matthaus, German humanist i46n. Watson, Thomas 176,179; Amyntas i86n.; Hekatompathia i62n. Welsperg, Paul von, German humanist I46n. Will: as myth 114-31; plural of, in Sonnets 48-51; in Sonnets 94, 199, 211, 229, 231; extensions of 94, 97 109, no, 112,128-30,171,191,196, 207, 217; in Sonnets 61 40 Wittgenstein, Count Ludwig von, German humanist I46n. Wolfe, John, printer 176 and n., 184 writeable text (Barthes's 'texte scriptible'): plural as 45 and n. Zuccari, Federigo: Sidney portrait, formerly attributed to 144 and n. Ziindelin, Wolfgang, Venetian correspondent I46n. Zutphen (Netherlands), Battle of 133 andn.