The Sonnets: The State of Play 9781474277136, 9781474277167, 9781474277150

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The Sonnets

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THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE STATE OF PL AY SERIES

Series editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson Macbeth: The State of Play, edited by Ann Thompson Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin Further titles in preparation Titus Andronicus: The State of Play, edited by Farah Karim-Cooper The Revenger’s Tragedy: The State of Play, edited by Gretchen Minton

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The Sonnets The State of Play Edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Arden Shakespeare 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Clare Whitehead and contributors, 2017 Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN s:

HB : 978-1-4742-7713-6 ePDF : 978-1-4742-7715-0 eBook: 978-1-4742-7714-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Crawforth, Hannah Jane, 1980- editor. | Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth, 1982editor. | Whitehead, Clare, editor. Title: The sonnets : the state of play / edited by Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. | Series: Arden Shakespeare the state of play | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016048850 | ISBN 9781474277136 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474277150 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Sonnets. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Shakespeare. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry. Classification: LCC PR2848 .S646 2017 | DDC 821/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016048850 Series: The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Cover image © Fisher Photostudio/Shutterstock Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

For Russ McDonald (1949–2016)

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CONTENTS

Series Preface x Notes on Contributors xi Acknowledgements xvi Copyright Acknowledgements xvii

Introduction 1 Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead Part One: The Sonnets and History 1 Promising Eternity in the 1609 Quarto Cathy Shrank

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2 Thomas Thorpe’s Shakespeare: ‘The Only Begetter’ 33 Lynne Magnusson 3 ‘Our brains beguiled’: Ecclesiastes and Sonnet 59’s Poetics of Temporal Instability 55 Kristine Johanson 4 Unfulfilled Imperatives in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 77 John Roe

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CONTENTS

Part Two: The Sonnets in Context 5 Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Event Colin Burrow 6 A Lingering Farewell: Sonnet 87 Ann Thompson

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7 Enduring ‘Injurious Time’: Alternatives to Immortality and Proleptic Loss in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 137 J.K. Barret 8 ‘Thou single wilt prove none’: Counting, Succession and Identity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 157 Shankar Raman Part Three: Afterlives of the Sonnets 9 Desire is Pattern 185 Matthew Harrison 10 Regifting Some Shakespeare Sonnets of Late 209 Jonathan F.S. Post 11 The Scar on the Face: Ted Hughes Reads Shakespeare’s Sonnets 229 Reiko Oya

CONTENTS

12 Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Undergraduate Classroom 251 Daniel Moss Afterword 269 Heather Dubrow Index 281

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SERIES PREFACE

The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson This series represents a collaboration between King’s College London and Georgetown University. King’s is the home of the London Shakespeare Centre and Georgetown is the home of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Each volume in the series is an expedition to discover the ‘state of play’ with respect to specific works by Shakespeare. Our method is to convene a seminar at the annual convention of the SAA and see what it is that preoccupies scholars now. SAA seminars are enrolled through an open registration process that brings together academics from all stages of their careers. Participants prepare short papers that are circulated in advance and then discussed when the seminar convenes on conference weekend. From the papers submitted, the seminar leader selects a group for inclusion in a collection that aims to include fresh work by emerging voices and established scholars both. The general editors are grateful for the further collaboration of Bloomsbury Publishing, and especially our commissioning editor Margaret Bartley. In the Series: Macbeth, edited by Ann Thompson Othello, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS J.K. Barret is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. In her first book, Untold Futures: Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England (2016), she investigates Renaissance literary constructions of the future in the works of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and John Milton. Her work has also appeared in journals including ELH, English Literary Renaissance and Shakespeare Quarterly. She has been awarded fellowship support from sources including the Huntington Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, UCLA’s Clark Library, the Whiting Foundation and the Josephine de Kármán Foundation. Colin Burrow is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is the editor of the poems of Shakespeare for the Oxford Shakespeare and of Ben Jonson for the Cambridge Ben Jonson, and has published widely on English writers from 1500–1700, with a particular interest in classical influences on English writing. He is presently working on two large projects: a history of Elizabethan literature for the Oxford English Literary History and a study of the idea and practice of literary imitation. Hannah Crawforth is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London, where she is also a founding member of the London Shakespeare Centre. She is the author of Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (2013) and co-author, with Sarah Dustagheer and Jennifer Young, of Shakespeare in London (2015). She is also co-editor, with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, of On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (2016), a xi

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collection of contemporary poetic responses to Shakespeare’s verse. Heather Dubrow is the John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in the Poetic Imagination at Fordham University. Her previous appointments include Carleton College and the University of WisconsinMadison. She is the author of seven scholarly books – most recently Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like ‘Here’, ‘This’, ‘Come’ (2015) – co-editor of a collection of essays and editor of As You Like It. Her own poetry has appeared in Forms and Hollows (2010), two chapbooks and numerous journals, such as Prairie Schooner, Southern Review and Yale Review. Among her other publications are articles on teaching and on higher education. Matthew Harrison currently teaches the English literature survey and specialized courses in Renaissance literature at Hofstra University. His current projects include a book on poetic ‘badness’, and a study of Renaissance humanism, digital literary scholarship and the future of criticism. Kristine Johanson is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches Shakespeare and early modern literature. Her scholarly edition Shakespeare Adaptations from the Early Eighteenth Century: Five Plays was published in 2013, and at present she is completing a monograph on Shakespeare’s use of nostalgia, provisionally titled Golden Ages: Shakespeare and the Idea of Nostalgia in Early Modern England. Lynne Magnusson is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, and has published on Shakespeare’s language, early modern women’s writing, the genre of the letter and discourse analysis. She is the author of Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (1999), co-author and co-editor of Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide (2001, reprinted 2002) and co-editor of The Elizabethan Theatre, volumes 11 to 15. Currently she is working on a book

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on The Transformation of the English Letter, 1500–1620, a second book on ways to rethink Shakespeare’s language historically and an edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Daniel Moss is Associate Professor in the English Department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He received his BA from Brandeis University and his PhD from Princeton University, where he was a Mellon Fellow. He is the author of The Ovidian Vogue: Literary Fashion and Imitative Practice in Late Elizabethan Poetry (2014), and has published on Spenser’s Despair episode, and on Ovidian allusion in Chapman’s early satire. He has recently turned his attention to early modern English drama and the question of Shakespeare’s status as an in-house playwright for the Lord Chamberlain’s Company. Reiko Oya is Professor of English at Keio University, Tokyo. She is the author of Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (2007), and publishes extensively on Shakespeare’s reception in eighteenth-, nineenth- and twentiethcentury England as well as in modern Japan. Her recent work includes articles for Shakespeare Survey on Edmond Malone and on Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare, and a book chapter on Yasujiro Ozu’s rereading of King Lear in Tokyo Story. Jonathan F.S. Post is Distinguished Professor of English, UCLA , and the Founding Director of the UCLA Summer Shakespeare Program in Stratford and London. Publications include A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (2013), The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (2013), Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric (2002), English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (1999), Sir Thomas Browne (1987) and Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (1982). He is currently writing A Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems. Shankar Raman is Professor in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Framing ‘India’: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern

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Europe (2002) and Renaissance Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2012), and has edited Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, Cognition (with Lowell Gallagher, 2010). He is currently working on a book on literature and mathematics in early modern Europe. John Roe is Professor of Renaissance Literature and a member of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York. He is the author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli (2002) and is interested in the history of both lyric and epic poetry in the Renaissance from the point of view of Italian influence, notably that of Petrarch, including considerations of form. He also researches modern subjects such as American poetry and British fiction, in particular John Berryman, Robert Lowell and Anthony Powell. Elizabeth Scott-Baumann is Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at King’s College London. She is the author of Forms of Engagement: Women, Poetry, and Culture 1640–1680 (2013) and has co-edited two essay collections, The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680 (2011) and The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture (2014). She is also co-editor, with Hannah Crawforth, of On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (2016), a collection of contemporary poetic responses to Shakespeare’s verse. Cathy Shrank is Professor of Tudor and Renaissance Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is author of Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (2004) and co-editor, with Mike Pincombe, of the prize-winning Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (2009). With Raphael Lyne, she is co-editor of Shakespeare’s Poems (forthcoming), and she is one of the General Editors of the AHRC -funded Collected Works of Thomas Nashe, currently in preparation for Oxford University Press. She is also writing a monograph on early modern dialogue, undertaken with funding from a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

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Ann Thompson is Emeritus Professor of English at King’s College London. She is a General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare and has (with Neil Taylor) edited all three texts of Hamlet for Arden (2006, updated 2016). Other publications include an edition of The Taming of the Shrew (1984, updated 2003), Shakespeare’s Chaucer (1978), Shakespeare, Meaning and Metaphor (with John O. Thompson, 1987), Teaching Women: Feminism and English Studies (edited with Helen Wilcox, 1989), Women Reading Shakespeare, 1660–1900 (edited with Sasha Roberts, 1996), In Arden: Editing Shakespeare (with Gordon McMullan, 2003) and Macbeth: The State of Play (edited, 2014). Current projects include a book on Shakespeare and metonymy. Clare Whitehead is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She has also taught at King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. She has published on Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare and literary theory, and is currently working on her first book, on power and performance at the early Jacobean court.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Our foremost thanks go to Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson, series editors, for kindly commissioning this book, and to Gordon McMullan and our colleagues at the London Shakespeare Centre for providing us with the opportunity to explore the sonnets in this way. We have been generously supported in our work by the Parenting Leave Fund at King’s College London, and by the English Department there under the wonderful leadership of Richard Kirkland. Margaret Bartley has been a delight to work with, as ever, and we are very grateful to her superb team at Arden, particularly Emily Hockley and Shereen Muhyeddeen. Our previous project with them, On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (2016), helped us think creatively about the poems, and we would like to thank all the contributors to that volume here for the new energy they gave Shakespeare’s sonnets in the four-hundredth year since the poet’s death. Thanks are also due to Laura Douglas and Rachel Willie for their work with us on Shakespeare400 projects relating to the sonnets, which further developed our thinking on the poems. This collection originally grew out of a session at the Shakespeare Association of America annual convention in Vancouver in 2015; we are thankful to the organizers of that gathering and to all contributors to our session. Heather Dubrow deserves a special debt of gratitude for contributing her Afterword to this volume. Finally, we would like to thank Hadrian, Lucian and Rufus Green, Benjie, Edward and William Way, and David Whitehead.

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COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ‘Sonnet 8’ and ‘Sonnet 134’ were first published in Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, Brooklyn, New York); © Jen Bervin, 2004. ‘Still Life’ by John Burnside from On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016); © John Burnside; used by permission of United Agents LLP. ‘Ann Hathaway’ from The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador, 2010); © Carol Ann Duffy; reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN . ‘CXVI ’ by Carol Ann Duffy; © Carol Ann Duffy, 2016; reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN . ‘Because We Never Practiced With The Escape Chamber’, ‘Claustrophilia’, ‘Peroral’, ‘Triptych For Topological Heart’, from Barely Composed: Poems by Alice Fulton; © 2015 by Alice Fulton; used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc; all rights reserved. Unpublished writings of Ted Hughes (BL Add MS 78758, BL Add MS 88918/1/3 and BL Add MS 78759); © 2016 Estate of Ted Hughes; used by permission of Faber & Faber. ‘Two’ by Don Paterson; © Don Paterson, 2016; reproduced by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London, W11 1JN . The editors are also grateful to Paul Hoover for permission to quote from ‘Alphabetical I’, and to Folger Digital Texts for permission to quote from their XML code for ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’.

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Introduction Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead

In 1609, Shakespeare’s sonnets were scarcely known, ‘never before imprinted’.1 Four centuries later, they have been reprinted countless times, individually and as a collection, and are among the most studied of Shakespeare’s works, having inspired a committed readership over the course of their long history. They are also some of the most beloved poems in the English language, unrivalled in popular culture for their appeals to love, beauty and poetic immortality, and unparalleled as inspiration for creative responses across the range of artistic disciplines. What is it about the sonnets that allows them to speak to so many people across time? Where does the particular aesthetic and emotional power of the poems reside, and how is it generated? The essays in this volume explore what these poems mean to us now, and how the diversity of current critical approaches can develop our understanding of them by further building upon this unbroken tradition of reading, both professional and personal. 1

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Despite its diminutive form, the sonnet has served as a vehicle for some of literature’s most expansive themes and ideas. Published comparatively late in the sonneteering tradition, almost twenty years after Philip Sidney’s influential Astrophil and Stella, Shakespeare’s sequence draws on its predecessors, as well as deviating from their models, to explore resonant ideas of mortality, remembrance and temporality. As a collection, the sonnets explore the potential for poems to outlast their authors and, in doing so, asks what it is that poetry itself can do in the world. The particular nature of the sonnet form the concision and compression of those fourteen crossrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, seems to invite critics to virtuosic displays of their own art. Jennifer Wagner has written of Wordsworth’s identification of the sonnet form as ‘a figurative procedure that is motivated by its own synecdochic nature’, detailing ‘the way large ambition can be contained in a small form; the way in which the form tropes one moment as all moments; the way in which the constraints of the form force one to reflect on the nature of poetic form generally’.2 Sonnet criticism offers a unique window onto the field of Shakespeare studies and, in some regards, mirrors criticism of Shakespeare’s other works and our discipline more broadly. It charts the evolution of literary studies from the Romantic obsession with genius and character to the quasi-empirical beginnings of the first professionalized study of English, to the plethora of today’s approaches, via formalism, New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism, historicism, New Historicism, the new New Historicism, New Formalism and everything in between. Shakespeare’s sonnet form has provided a prism in which the light shed on poetry by these multiple approaches has been refracted and tested, issuing an irresistible invitation to scholars, teachers and poets alike. But at the same time the sonnets stand apart, occupying a distinct position within Shakespeare’s oeuvre, and embodying theoretical issues quite different to those that have occupied critics working on his narrative poetry and dramatic texts. Most notable, perhaps, has been the tendency of the sonnets to invite close reading, to

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inspire attention to style, language and literary form at moments when such approaches found little room within our wider field. From Stephen Booth’s radically close reading of the poems, which opened a path to later deconstructionist versions of the sonnets, to Helen Vendler’s seminal commentary, and on to the new Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, much work on the sonnets has focused on questions of style and language, even during periods when scholarly attention to the plays has moved towards contextual, ideological and political approaches.3 Similarly, the sonnets demand attention to psychology and affect, and place the concept of narrative (currently enjoying a theoretical resurgence) at the forefront of critical considerations. How does the sequencing of these poems affect our reading of them? This problem has troubled readers from the first publication of the sonnets onwards. While biographical interpretations of the sonnets have proved endlessly alluring (and often endlessly silly), a widespread critical backlash against such readings argued that we should not see the poet author of the sequence as ‘William Shakespeare’, but rather as a self-consciously constructed persona who may bear little or no relation to what we know of Shakespeare’s life. New Historicism, so prevalent in readings of the plays, has registered relatively little in criticism of the sonnets, but recent critics have sought to reposition the poems within history, making the circumstances of Shakespeare’s life once more relevant to their composition, albeit reframed in radically different terms. Clive James claims that a ‘Shakespeare sonnet is the essence and exemplar of the poem as the separable, stand-alone thing. Even when a Shakespeare sonnet is part of a sequence, it is there for itself.’4 Or, as Stephen Booth writes, ‘The most important thing about a sonnet is that it is a sonnet.’5 More than any other form, the sonnet contains its own history within itself, its structure bearing the traces of both Petrarchan origins and many later modifications. All poetry is to some extent about itself, but the sonnet has a peculiar claim to self-reflection, to a literary as well as psychological inwardness. As such the sonnets provide particularly fertile ground for us to stop and consider the ‘State of Play’ in Shakespeare studies, sending us both deep into the

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poems themselves and also encouraging us to look outward to their place among his other works, those of his contemporaries, their own history and pre-history, and the very active afterlives of these works. The sonnet is thus not only a form that demands self-reflection (on the status of the particular poem and poet, and poetry as a whole) but also one that uniquely captures the past, present and future (one moment as all moments) – an aspect of the genre that this collection foregrounds, seeing the sonnet’s relation to time as a crucial element of its structure. This volume is organized around the movement of time from the many different kinds of past with which the sonnets engage, to their interaction with their own present moment, and finally to the way they both look ahead to, and have been received by, an imagined future (including its poets). Our three sections deal with the history, early modern context and posthumous life of the sonnets, although many of our contributors work across different temporalities and explicitly engage with temporal issues. In fact, our collection as a whole suggests that the sonnets can be read both in and through time, and that they themselves seek to transcend the workings of time. The focus of the poems on time and textuality, in particular, has been a key impetus for many of the essays in this collection, and in this regard the sonnets generate many of their own terms for critical understanding. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death we are uniquely placed to consider the sonnets’ preoccupation with memorialization, which receives its most direct expression in Sonnet 55, ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’ (ll. 1–2), and also its most challenging treatment too, ‘besmeared with sluttish time’ (l. 4).6 The present volume asks how the poems theorize this subject and how they help us to historicize the practice of making monuments itself. Several of our contributors address the question of time and memory in relation to the sonnets, asking how this form can at once stand as a testament to the past, bearing witness to the beloved and the poet’s love, and simultaneously embody the passing of time, the strict sonnet form with its interlocked rhymes drawing the reader ever onward.

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Our first set of essays examines the ways in which Shakespeare’s poetic sequence draws on elements of the past. Cathy Shrank begins with Thomas Thorpe’s first edition of the sonnets and its dedication, which serves for her to demonstrate the ways in which the volume denies its memorial potential at the same time as it seeks a form of permanence. Reading the sonnets alongside A Lover’s Complaint, the narrative poem that concludes Thorpe’s 1609 quarto, Shrank demonstrates how Shakespeare’s long poem defies the generic expectations, set up by late-Elizabethan complaints, of a tradition of commemoration through poetry. Plotting meditations on memory across the first 126 sonnets, she suggests that this sequence too is not so much concerned with commemoration, or the posthumous survival of the young man’s image, but rather with a more immediate fixing of the image in the poet-speaker’s present mind. Lynne Magnusson is also concerned with debts owed to texts of the past, not only by Shakespeare but also by Thorpe. Her essay reviews and contributes to the ‘misprint’ theory surrounding the 1609 quarto, assessing why an argument that convinced many leading scholars – namely, that Thorpe’s dedication is meant to address Shakespeare himself – was never taken up in a major edition. Magnusson then takes a new direction, proposing a re-reading of the epigraph in relation to the sonnets, and highlighting what rhetorical work it might be doing if the poet Shakespeare is its addressee. This reading focuses on the epigraph’s visual and rhetorical presentation as a monumental inscription, its debt to the Book of Common Prayer and to typographical experiments in Ben Jonson’s plays as printed by George Eld, and its intertextual engagement with the sonnets’ own preoccupation with monuments and memorialization. The connection between the sonnets and established religious texts is further underlined by Kristine Johanson, who situates Sonnet 59 in the context of the popular biblical Book of Ecclesiastes and its instructions to early modern readers in thinking about and using time. This essay demonstrates how Shakespeare’s use of Ecclesiastes locates him within a tradition of poeticizing this biblical book, and disturbs any security in

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comprehending time that the sonnets might offer elsewhere in the sequence. By attending to the sonnet’s temporal discontinuities, emphasis is placed not simply on Shakespeare’s characteristic playfulness and ambiguity towards time, but also on a marked uncertainty, which has broader implications for Shakespeare’s temporal discourses – particularly nostalgia – both inside and outside the sonnets. Moving away from religious texts, John Roe explores Shakespeare’s debt to the Petrarchan origins of the sonnet. His focus is the imperative form, and the tension between emotionally urgent instructions and the ways in which they are frustrated or unfulfilled in the sonnets, either through a lack of completion or answerability. Highlighting the poet’s confidence – in preserving ‘thy eternal summer’, resolving a desolate mood or insisting on mutual forgiveness – Roe exposes the frustration of all these hopes, and draws on the work of past artists, such as Bronzino and Titian, to underline the sub-themes he sees in the sonnets, such as the representational nature of art, and its capacity to deal in real and false truths. The second section in this collection unites essays that locate the sonnets in their own historical moment. In Colin Burrow’s essay, the sonnets are conceived as ‘events’, or in his own words ‘objects not fully knowable, stubbornly full of futurity’ (see 112), which should not be pinned down to specific historical occasions but rather set free in the midst of their own potential. He approaches memorialization from a unique temporal viewpoint, identifying an anticipatory mode in Shakespeare’s sonnets that reflects on their own physical persistence, on what they will mean to future readers, and on what kinds of immortality they might enjoy or convey. Burrow’s reading is of a sequence of poems that publicize an intrinsically private relationship and are significantly concerned with managing the future reception of that relationship. Ann Thompson’s essay draws on the broader Shakespearean corpus, taking Sonnet 87, often extracted from the sequence to stand alone, and setting it within the context of Shakespeare’s dramatic writings. Thompson offers a careful close reading of

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the sonnet’s financial and legal metaphors, its use of feminine rhymes, and the interpretative puzzle over the reference to ‘a king’ in the last line. This essay highlights one of the sonnet’s most impressive characteristics – the ability to say so much in such a small space – and yet it also demonstrates how easily the darker undertones of this poem can be missed in the absence of those narrative contexts more readily available in Shakespeare’s plays or in the wider sonnet sequence. The temporal peril suggested by the sonnets lies at the heart of J.K. Barret’s essay, which highlights the poet’s suggestion of the power proleptic destruction can wield in the present. Recognizing the passage of time as a persistent concern in Shakespeare’s sequence, Barret considers the extent to which he couples material ruin with anticipations of loss in his poems. She reveals Shakespeare’s employment of a variety of strategies, including incomplete grammatical structures, to render temporality indeterminate and express prolepsis in recursive terms, and in doing so she argues that such pastoriented proclivities not only threaten to interfere with productive considerations of time but also rely on conditional structures to convey unresolved anticipation. Shankar Raman’s essay is the last in this section, positioning the sonnets alongside the early modern emergence of mathematics in its recognizably modern form. Through close readings of Sonnet 2 and Sonnet 8, his essay explores how Shakespeare refracts his negotiation of repetition and difference through the logic of enumeration. Raman argues that the language of numbers in the early modern period offers a rich opportunity to explore the paradoxes of succession and also how the desire for the self’s eternal summer rests fundamentally upon symbolizing negation and absence. His essay goes on to suggest that the intricacies of counting do not simply reflect the mathematical past of Shakespeare’s present but point forward to questions very much alive in the later development of set theory. By tracing the relationship of the sonnets to subsequent advances in mathematics, Raman anticipates the final set of

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essays, which look beyond the sonnets’ early modern context to examine their afterlives. In the first of these essays, Matthew Harrison discusses the long history of arranging and rearranging Shakespeare’s collection, looking at the variety of attempts across four hundred years to fix narratives and find teleologies in these poems. Moving from John Benson’s 1640 edition of the sonnets to digital editions, apps and computer programs, Harrison draws out the connections that are elucidated in reordered sequences, whether those be sequences of poems, lines or individual words. In doing so, he argues that considerations of sequence can answer questions about the history of our discipline, and shows how remapping offers a model for reading the sonnets against constantly shifting planes of meaning. Harrison’s discussion of those who reorder and repurpose Shakespeare’s sequence resonates with the work of Jonathan Post, who uses his essay to trace the legacy of the sonnets in recent creative responses by British and American poets. Paying attention to the unusual forms the sonnets have fostered and inspired, Post provides detailed analysis of poems by Alice Fulton, Carol Anne Duffy and Jen Bervin, before moving on to discuss the myriad ways in which contemporary poets responded to Shakespeare on the four-hundredth anniversary of his death. His essay offers a glimpse of the poetic impulse both to evoke and to obscure one’s predecessors, using close readings of words and forms to explore what it means to creatively engage with Shakespeare. Delving further back into the twentieth century, Reiko Oya examines another poet’s treatment of the sonnets, tracing the influence of Shakespeare’s collection on Ted Hughes’ poetry. Focusing on the ideas revealed in the latter poet’s anthologies, prose works and letters, Oya uncovers Hughes’ concern with poetic honesty and artificiality, and his desire to read Shakespeare’s sonnets biographically. Looking towards the publication of Birthday Letters, this essay suggests that Hughes used the sonnets as a means of reflecting on the traumatic events in his family life and shaping how he wrote about them in his own poetry.

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In our final essay, Daniel Moss moves us from poets to students, as he demonstrates the continuing afterlife of Shakespeare’s sonnets in the undergraduate classroom and asks what role they can play in our pedagogy as teachers of Shakespeare. He guides us through introductory poetry courses and Shakespeare surveys, creating a dialogue from suggested readings of the sonnets individually, in sequence and alongside the plays. His essay maintains that, above all, the sonnets remain engines of ambiguity in the classroom and that, for teachers and undergraduates alike, approaches identifying and allowing for polyvalency at multiple levels offer the best chance for holding these poems to account. Heather Dubrow concludes this collection with an afterword, tracing her own methodological, textual and thematic concerns alongside those of our contributors. She affirms the diversity of approaches to studying the sonnets evident in this volume, and calls for continued discussion to re-evaluate the relationship between different critical methodologies; she hails the wide variety of digital editions and media, while also sounding a note of caution for how we encourage students to use these resources; and she ponders the future of the field and the considerations we might make of the sonnets and space, of paratexts, and of authorship. This in turn leads us to ask questions of our own about future possible directions in sonnet studies. If part of every sonnet’s subject matter is the tradition of the sonnet itself, looking inwards to its own history, then another key element of most sonnets is their engagement with the outside world. How do Shakespeare’s sonnets speak not only to other sequences but also to other disciplines, and what do they share with other aesthetic forms that privilege pattern, symmetry and balance? How does the sonnet form encourage innovation, experimentation and virtuosity while preserving its own basic integrity as a small poem of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter? What can the critical reception of the sonnet teach us about the relationship between the often competing impulses of historicism and formalism that have alternatingly dominated our discipline?

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And how do sonnets function in the world at large – what can they know, what do they do, and how can they speak so distinctively to so many? In many ways, the sonnet serves as its own form of criticism, but alongside this our collection brings together poet-scholars, experts on contemporary poetry and critics of early modern poetry to explore the four-hundred-year life of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets.

Notes 1

William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609), A1r.

2

Jennifer Ann Wagner, A Moment’s Monument: Revisionary Poetics and the Nineteenth-Century English Sonnet (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 27.

3

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997); The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

4

Clive James, ‘Little Low Heavens’, Poetry 192:5 (2008), 483.

5

Stephen Booth, An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 28.

6

All quotations from the sonnets, here and throughout the collection, are from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 1997; 2010), unless otherwise stated. All quotations from the plays are from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works (London: Arden, repr. 2011), unless otherwise stated.

PART ONE

The Sonnets and History

11

12

1 Promising Eternity in the 1609 Quarto Cathy Shrank

Shakespeare’s England witnessed contrasting attitudes towards memorialization. On the one hand, as Lorraine Attreed notes, ‘it was the era of ostentation in funerals and burials’; on the other, its inhabitants would have regularly encountered evidence of the futility of memorials.1 For older members of the parish, the suppression of obits (anniversary prayers for the dead) would have represented a rupture in oral and communal commemorative practices, but written memorials could have seemed equally fragile.2 Schoolboys would have been reminded of the impermanence of brass and stone in classroom texts such as Horace’s Odes, and the fabric of many churches bore the material scars of both neglect and iconoclasm, as can be seen in John Stow’s description of St John’s, Walbrook, where evidence of the ‘diverse noble men and persons of worship’ interred there ‘appeareth both by arms in the windows, by the defaced tombs, and print of plates torn up and carried away’.3 Ghosts of memorials testify to the high rank of the deceased, but their actual identities have been effaced. 13

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This concern for posthumous memory and consciousness of its frailty are apparent in the abundance of epitaphs dating from this period, recorded in manuscript and print, some of which were attributed to Shakespeare.4 Of the ten poems ascribed to Shakespeare in the decades after his death in 1616, seven are epitaphs.5 The brief and conventional nature of these verses makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain authorship on stylistic grounds. Nonetheless, that Shakespeare’s name attaches to them tells us much about both his post-mortem fashioning and the popularity of epitaphs in the early seventeenth century: these poems constituted the type of verses his early readers assumed that he would have written, be they irreverent mock-memorials, such as that for the Stratford businessman John Combe, or suitably serious reflections on the deceased, such as that found on the west end of the Stanley monument at Tong: NOT MONUMENTAL STONE PRESERVES OUR FAME, NOR SKY-ASPIRING PYRAMIDS OUR NAME : THE MEMORY OF HIM FOR WHOM THIS STANDS SHALL OUTLIVE MARBLE, AND DEFACERS’ HANDS. WHEN ALL TO TIME ’S CONSUMPTION SHALL BE GIVEN , STANDLY FOR WHOM THIS STANDS SHALL STAND IN HEAVEN . Both epitaphs result from the ‘ostentatio[us]’ investment in commemoration identified by Attreed. That on Combe preempts his death: it was allegedly ‘fastened upon a tomb that he had caused to be built in his lifetime’ and asks, with a sense of futurity, ‘who must be interr’d’ within it.6 The Stanley tomb, meanwhile, is an impressive, two-tiered monument, with tall obelisks (which early moderns would have termed ‘pyramids’) at each corner, effectively doubling its height.7 Yet both epitaphs also undercut the commemorative process: Combe’s, inscribed not on stone but on a leaf of loose paper, comments caustically on his status as a ‘notable usurer’; that on the

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Stanley monument manages simultaneously to express faith in the power and continued presence of words, and a consciousness of their vulnerability and potential erasure, even – or perhaps especially – when engraved in stone. The term ‘defacers’ (l. 4) captures more than disfiguration; in the sixteenth century, the verb ‘deface’ could convey obliteration: ‘to blot out of existence, memory, thought’.8 These words are, of course, carved in marble, on a tomb featuring the kind of ‘sky-aspiring pyramids’ the durability of which the epitaph questions, so that the inscription destabilizes the efficacy and permanence of the very monument on which it stands and which – in order for the words to be read – must still remain. The epitaph is thus, cleverly, both a manifesto of the potency of words, and an acknowledgement of their fragility. The remainder of this essay examines how the 1609 quarto (Q) similarly explores the ambivalences of such memorial processes. Aspersions have been cast on the legitimacy of Thomas Thorpe’s acquisition and publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, which comprise Q. Nonetheless, pirate or not, his dedication shows that he was an attentive and creative reader of the texts he allegedly purloined: TO. THE . ONLY. BEGETTER . OF. THESE . ENSUING . SONNETS . Mr. W.H. ALL . HAPPINESS . AND. THAT. ETERNITY. PROMISED. BY. OUR . EVER-LIVING . POET. WISHETH . THE . WELL -WISHING . ADVENTURER . IN . SETTING . FORTH . T.T.

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The disjunction between this lapidary dedication – a paper facsimile of an inscription in stone or brass – and the decidedly un-monumental size of the book it introduces resonates with the subversion of ideas of memorialization and monumentality that occur within the pages of the volume itself, as we can see if we look at the example of female-voiced complaint that it contains. Late-Elizabethan female-voiced complaint characteristically gives voice to figures from the past who have been omitted from, or misrepresented by, the historical record; in the process, their protagonists explicitly or implicitly acknowledge the power of print to recover their posthumous reputations, as in Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamund (1592), in which the printed poem is set up to be a more lasting monument than her fine tomb erected at Godstow, where – thanks to the Dissolution of the Monasteries – ‘now scarce any note descries / Unto these times, the memory of me, / Marble and brass so little lasting be’ (ll. 705–7).9 Preoccupied as they are with reputational recuperation, these female-voiced complaints are intensely self-referential, name-checking and competing with their predecessors. Daniel’s Rosamund envies Mistress Shore for the way that she has been rehabilitated by The Mirror for Magistrates and now ‘passes for a saint’ (l. 25); Michael Drayton’s Matilda compares herself to Rosamund, Shore and other heroines of 1590s complaint (Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Thomas Lodge’s Elstred).10 The genre is also suffused with images of Catholic piety, refracted archly through a post-Reformation lens. Daniel’s Rosamund imagines herself delivered by lovers’ sighs from the liminal space this side of the River Styx (an intervention by the living in the fate of the dead strongly reminiscent of Purgatory); Matilda’s tomb becomes a site of pilgrimage and atonement for her murderer, King John; and the evocation of cloisters – those post-Reformation icons of historical loss – is integral to this discourse (as seen in Rosamund’s allusion to her desecrated monument at Godstow). However, A Lover’s Complaint breaches these generic expectations and refuses to be transmuted into a pseudo-

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historical intercession. It contains pre-Reformation features, such as cloisters, but these are not ruins: they are inhabited by living nuns (ll. 232–52). The poem thus seems defiantly ahistorical, particularly as – unlike the staple protagonists of Elizabethan female-voiced complaint – the complainant is not presented as an identifiable figure from the English or British past. Rather, she is anonymous and atemporal, untied to a historical individual or historical period. The poem might give voice to her perspective, but in contrast to the expectations of the genre it does not memorialize her; and – unlike her historical counterparts – she is not even trying to set the (printed) record straight. She does not deliberately address a poet, asking him to preserve her story in writing – the usual scenario, as we see with Daniel’s Rosamund when she demands that the poet ‘re-edif[y] the wrack of [her] decays’ (l. 716), the suitably architectural choice of verb transmuting Daniel’s poetic narrative into a physical monument. Instead, her words are overheard, unbeknownst to her, and appropriated by the poet-narrator, as she tells her story to another passer-by. It is presented as an oral history, accidentally preserved in writing. As a volume, then, the 1609 quarto subverts ideas of memorialization, evoking poetry as a means of evading posthumous obscurity, while at the same time thwarting, suppressing, denying or – as we will see – even erasing its commemorative potential. The preoccupation with memorialization is indicated by the amount of times the word cluster related to ‘memory’ occurs: seventeen times in the sonnets up to Sonnet 126 (although never after that point), in comparison with three instances in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (across its 119 poems), three instances in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti (across 89 sonnets) and one instance in Samuel Daniel’s Delia (across 54 sonnets).11 In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the majority of these occurrences are also concerned with posthumous memory, rather than – as in Astrophil and Stella 49 – a mental skill (‘thou, Fancy, saddle art / Girt fast by memory’, ll. 9–10), or – as in Amoretti 63 – recalling recent experience: ‘remembrance of all pains’ (l. 12).12

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This concern with memorialization is made evident from the outset of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as the sequence begins with a series of poems (the ‘procreation sonnets’) advising their addressee, the young man, how to perpetuate his memory (or – often more specifically – the memory of his physical image). In those first seventeen sonnets, sexual reproduction is the predominant solution proffered as to how to resist ‘death’s conquest’ (6.14): ‘get a son’, the youth is told in diverse ways (7.14). As we read on, that biological imperative starts to compete with a poetic one; Sonnet 15 finds the poet-speaker declaring himself ‘all in war with time for love of you’: ‘As he takes from you, I engraft you new’ (ll. 13–14). The powers of poetic composition here acquire their own generative force, as ‘engraft’ quibbles on both the Greek verb graphein, to write, and the horticultural practice whereby new branches are fused onto another, for the purposes of propagation. Yet the poetspeaker’s attitude to memorialization proves far from stable. Over the course of the ensuing sonnets, he fluctuates in his faith in the power of his words. In Sonnet 16, his ‘pupil pen’ is unable to ‘make you live yourself in eyes of men’ (ll. 10–12). Sonnet 17 continues this slide into despair: his poetry – far from restoring life – is ‘but as a tomb, / Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts’ (ll. 3–4); the papers on which he writes are imagined ‘yellowed with their age’, being scorned ‘like old men’ (ll. 9–10). Nonetheless, Sonnet 17 constitutes a watershed in Q’s sequence: after this, the idea of biological reproduction falls away. Although belief in the eternizing power of language is not always asserted with conviction, from this point forward poetry is held up as the only viable alternative to the ‘dust and injury of age’ (108.10). ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this [the poem] gives life to thee’, concludes Sonnet 18 (ll. 13–14). ‘Yet do thy worst, old Time’, challenges Sonnet 19: ‘despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live young’ (ll. 13–14). Sonnet 55 (entitled ‘A Living Monument’ in John Benson’s edition of 1640) is characteristic of the way in which the sequence meditates on posthumous memory. ‘This powerful

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rhyme’ promises to ‘outlive’ marble and ‘the gilded monuments / Of princes’ (ll. 1–2); the choice of adjective coats the commemorative stone in a quality strongly associated across Shakespeare’s works with insubstantiality and superficiality, as in Coriolanus’ ‘gilded butterfly’ (1.3.61–2), or King Lear’s ‘small gilded fly’ (4.6.111). Within Sonnet 55, for all their ostentation, such stone monuments risk neglect or destruction: they are left ‘unswept’ or ‘besmeared’ (l. 4), and we are invited to imagine them ‘overturn[ed]’ and ‘root[ed] out’ (ll. 5–6). In contrast, the poem constitutes a memorial in which the youth will ‘shine more bright’ (l. 3). Yet even as the sonnet declares ‘the living record of your memory’ immune from ‘war’s quick fire’ (ll. 7–8), the evocation of flames surely tempers this certitude, reminding us of the vulnerability of written documents, just as in Sonnet 65 the ability of poetry to resist the depredations of time ultimately depends on a ‘miracle’: Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back, Or who his spoil o’er beauty can forbid? O none, unless this miracle have might: That in black ink my love may still shine bright. (ll. 11–14) Turning to Sonnet 65 also points to a problem as to who, or what, is being commemorated. The phrase ‘my love’ is ambiguous (l. 14). The immediate context of this sonnet strongly suggests ‘the beloved’; however, once set in the wider framework of the sequence, there is at least room for doubleness and a sense that what is being preserved is the poet-speaker’s emotion. Sonnet 55, for example, is almost certainly indebted to Horace’s Odes 3.30, as well as the closing lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (both of which would be familiar to all Elizabethan schoolboys). These source texts celebrate not the memory of a beloved, but the immortality that poets achieve through their writing: ‘I shall not wholly die’, Horace declares (‘non omnis moriar’, l. 6); ‘My life shall everlastingly be

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lengthened still by fame’, reads the final line of Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid.13 Shakespeare’s echoes of these wellknown poems thus complicate the reception of Sonnet 55. That sliding sense of what (or who) is being commemorated surfaces more obviously – if momentarily – in Sonnet 107: ‘My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, / Since ’spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme’ (ll. 10–11; emphasis added). The Ovidian and Horatian influences break through, before the couplet returns to the idea of memorializing the beloved: ‘And thou in this shalt find thy monument, / When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent’ (ll. 13–14). Despite the seeming attention to honouring the young man, there is a hole at the heart of this memorial project. Sonnet 81 imagines the poet-speaker writing an ‘epitaph’ to the youth (l. 1). ‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse’, he promises: ‘Your name from hence immortal life shall have’ (ll. 9, 5). This pledge – made repeatedly across the volume – is never fulfilled. This withholding culminates in Sonnet 126, the last of the sonnets which, in Q’s sequence, are to (or about) the young man: O thou my lovely Boy, who in thy power Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour, Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st Thy lover’s withering, as thy sweet self grow’st; If nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure: She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure! Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, And her quietus is to render thee. ( ) ( ) The empty brackets at the end of the sonnet are the cause of much speculation as to whether they are a typographic feature

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present in the manuscript (and thus potentially authorial), or the result of the compositor signalling that something is missing in his copy: unusually for Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 126 is only twelve lines long; comprising six couplets, it is also only one of three sonnets to vary from the ‘English’ form – of fourteen pentameters rhyming ABABCDCDEFEFGG – otherwise adopted by Shakespeare.14 Nor does the ambiguous syntax help clarify the status of those brackets.15 The phrase ‘render thee’ could be interpreted as ‘surrender you’,16 in which case the poem is complete after twelve lines and the bracketed lines can be omitted, as in the Riverside Shakespeare, where the poem comes to a halt at the end of the sixth couplet. However, Shakespeare uses ‘render’ as a verb sixty times across his works in various senses (‘give’, ‘make’, ‘surrender’, ‘recite’), usually in more syntactically complicated situations than the subject-verb-object construction required by the reading ‘surrender you’; the only two analogous situations to such a usage are in Antony and Cleopatra 4.14.33 (‘She rendered life’) and Much Ado about Nothing 4.1.27 (‘unless you render her again’). Alternatively, ‘render thee’ could here be read as ‘make you’; this reading requires an adjective to complete the sense (as in Julius Caesar 2.1.302: ‘Render me worthy’).17 In the case of Sonnet 126, if the brackets are authorial, this adjectival something is not supplied verbally; rather, it is supplied visually by the blank lines (and death’s oblivion) that follow, as nature’s surrender of the ‘lovely Boy’ to time causes him to become a void. Consequently, the brackets have variously been read as evoking the mutability epitomized by the crescent moon, the curve of time’s sickle, the grave, an hour-glass emptied of sand or ‘the marks in an account-book enclosing the final sum, but empty’.18 Those brackets – dark space around a void – also (or alternatively) resemble an act of erasure. It was not simply temporary notes, entered into table-books – the waxed leaves of which were designed to be rubbed clean and reused – that could be erased.19 Supposedly ‘permanent’ writing could also be physically scratched out, a procedure which leaves on the

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page a blank bordered by the dark marks of the surviving ink.20 If memory is a book (a common conceit), then it is one which can be altered, and Shakespeare alludes to this process of erasure at various points across his works. Prince Hal promises ‘to raze out / Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down / After my seeming (2 Henry IV 5.2.127–9); Macbeth asks his wife’s physician to ‘Raze out the written troubles of [her] brain’ (Macbeth 5.3.42). In 2 Henry VI the act of erasure – ‘Blotting your names from books of memory, / Razing the characters of your renown, / Defacing monuments of conquered France’ – is put in the context of utter destruction: ‘Undoing all, as all had never been!’ (1.1.98–101). That same sense of total eradication is evident in the addition of the intensifier towards the end of Sonnet 25, which writes of names being ‘from the book of honour razed quite’ (l. 11, emphasis added): these names are not simply erased; they are erased entirely. In Sonnet 126, the youth’s memorial is thus scratched out. The only name that the book preserves is Shakespeare’s own: ‘Shake-speares Sonnets’, reads the title page, the internal title above the first sonnet and the running-head. But like all erasures, this deletion leaves a trace. Part of the power of an erasure, a razing out, is that there is a physical witness of the eradication: looking on, we can see that something is missing. It is not only that something is removed: it must be seen to be removed. There is a violence inherent in such acts, including this sonnet’s act of erasure. Within the internal drama of the sequence, it can be seen as a form of revenge. Of course, outside that drama, there might have been other reasons for withholding the name (not least discretion), but the fact remains that within the sequence, posthumous fame has been repeatedly promised, and is now ultimately denied. As such, it asserts the poet-speaker’s strength even from a position of seeming weakness, just as, later in Q’s sequence, the poet-speaker attempts to bargain with the mistress, offering – or menacing her with – the power of his words in return for her compliance. ‘Suit thy pity like in every part’, he states, ‘Then will I swear beauty herself is black, / And all they foul that thy complexion lack’ (132.12–14; emphasis

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added). ‘Be wise as thou art cruel, [. . .] / Lest sorrow lend me words’, he threatens: ‘For if I should despair, I should grow mad, / And in my madness might speak ill of thee’ (140.1–4, 9–10; emphases added). The poet-speaker’s words are not freely given: their provision, or withholding, is contingent on the actions and behaviours of others and thus a means to punish or control them. The act of obliteration in Sonnet 126 is all the more shocking because this poem concludes this part of Q’s sequence; there is, in other words, no chance to revise the position or to make amends. After this, the primary subject and addressee change to the woman, and all mention of memorializing falls away (as noted earlier, the ‘memory’ word cluster does not appear after Sonnet 127). Sonnet 126 thus stands at the end of a sequence, as an epitaph, albeit an unusual one, rather like Thomas Watson’s epitaph to Love at the conclusion of his Hekatompathia (1582), one of the earliest of the Elizabethan sonnet sequences. ‘Here lieth Love, of Mars the bastard son’ writes Watson in a memorial that perhaps shares some of the vengeful nature of Sonnet 126, as it blames Love’s self-slaughter on ‘the fault’ of the callous beloved (N3r). The 1609 quarto thus has an odd relationship with memorialization: its opening dedication resembles an inscription on a tombstone and promises ‘eternity’, a theme that echoes through the first 126 sonnets to the young man, although that pledge remains unfulfilled, a process of memorialization that is also denied in the female-voiced complaint appended to the volume, contravening the conventions of that historicallyinflected genre. However, as we will see, those first 126 sonnets engage in a different memorial project: the poet-speaker’s own memory-making. Renaissance allegories of memory usually equate it with historical memory and the preservation of written records, as in Thomas Tomkis’s Lingua (1607), where Memory is ‘an old decrepit man’, with custody of ‘musty moth-eaten manuscripts, kept in all the old libraries’ (D3v).21 Nonetheless, Tomkis’s play points to another aspect of memory: namely, recall, as Memory

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is shown dependent on his often-absent page Anamnestes (‘Remembrance’), who is despatched to relocate the things that Memory has mislaid (his spectacles and purse). Communication between the two is threatened by the presence of Oblivion, who wipes out Memory’s footsteps, so that Remembrance cannot find him. The mere mention of Oblivion alienates Remembrance from his allegorical essence and renders him inarticulate: ‘The very naming of him hath made me forget myself. O, O, O, O’ (E4r). The shape of his cries on the page (dark spheres around a void) resembles both the imprint left by an erasure and – as an oral utterance – the transient ‘bubble glass of breath’ described in Edmund Spenser’s 1591 Complaints (‘The Ruins of Time’, B1v). As Tomkis’s allegorical drama indicates, that is, there are two different types of memory. One is the posthumous intergenerational memory, represented by the historical record and the depiction of memory as the guardian of ancient rolls and chronicles. The other is the faculty of recall: a more immediate, more individual sense of memory (be it where one put one’s spectacles, or the ability to recollect facts, words, events); this functional – but more temporary – notion of memory is figured in Tomkis’s play by the erasable ‘table-books’ placed in Remembrance’s hand at his first entrance (D3v). Both forms of memory are threatened by oblivion, and both are frequently conflated: it happens in Daniel Woolf’s 2003 monograph The Social Circulation of the Past (where his study of early modern historical thought includes a chapter on ‘ways of remembering’), and it happens in the Renaissance texts which taught the memory-building techniques that Woolf’s chapter explores. Take William Fulwood’s translation of Guilelmo Gratarolo’s Castle of Memory (1562). The book lays out methods and herbal remedies designed to improve his readers’ memories, yet his dedicatory poem blurs the boundaries between that kind of individual skill and the wider collective memory, as it sets itself against ‘oblivion’, described as ‘the loss / Of high renowned acts’, ‘an eating moth / And sore corrupting rust: / Abasing things of noble state, / No better than to dust’ (A3v). Within a couple of stanzas, however,

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Fulwood has shifted to commending the more functional sense of memory: the faculty of recall (‘remembrance’) necessary for various occupations to allow them to do their job, so that the preacher can recite his sermon; the merchant, keep his accounts; the lawyer, plead his case; and so on. This ambiguity about the nature and purpose of memory is further complicated by the suspicion of writing that the Castle of Memory (like many such texts) evinces. ‘Take heed lest the writing of things do not hurt your memory’, Fulwood warns (as does Plato), ‘lest you counting those things to be sure and steadfast, which you have written in your book of remembrances, do cease to think any more of them, and so trusting to that security, do suffer them to slip out of your mind’ (G1v–G2r). Clearly, the text here refers not to historical memory (which by the sixteenth century was seen to rely on the written record), but to the individual faculty for recall.22 Shakespeare’s Sonnets alludes to this belief in the deleterious effects of writing in Sonnet 122, when the poet-speaker excuses himself for giving away the young man’s gift of a commonplace book by explaining that its contents ‘are within my brain / Full charactered with lasting memory’ (ll. 1–2). The initial boast that – safely registered there – they will ‘remain / Beyond all date, even to eternity’ (ll. 3–4) is immediately qualified by the lines that follow: ‘Or at the least, so long as brain and heart / Have faculty by nature to subsist’ (ll. 5–6). This back-tracking highlights the way that the poem toys with the two types of memory that Tomkis’s text outlines: the intergenerational one promised – impossibly – in the first quatrain, and the individual one (‘remembrance’), which can last no more than a lifetime. Within this poem – for selfinterested reasons and rhetorical effect – these impermanent ‘tables’ of individual, internal remembrance are counted superior to the external writing on which intergenerational memory relies, and the need for a written record is depicted as a slur on the poet-speaker’s devotion: ‘To keep an adjunct to remember thee / Were to import forgetfulness in me’ (ll. 13–14). According to Renaissance memory theory, to guard against such ‘forgetfulness’, the memory needed to be exercised,

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through regular repetition. As Fulwood writes: ‘You must have an often and daily cogitation or thinking of the same thing, or a disputation with other, or a declaration to another: for of frequented acts is engendered a state or habit, which is that memory’ (G1r). And this is where we can see Shakespeare’s Sonnets recording a memorial process which depicts the poetspeaker consolidating his own remembrances, rather than seeking to preserve the posthumous memory of the beloved for posterity (which is what he had ostensibly undertaken to do). The need for a memorial project of this nature arises from one of the distinctive features of Shakespeare’s sonnets to and about the young man. Unusually for an English sonnet sequence, they are permeated with a sense of absence: we frequently find the poet-speaker meditating on his physical separation from his addressee, and never do these sonnets give the impression that they have been composed to capture a moment in the young man’s presence.23 Where the proximal deictic ‘this’ appears, it all too frequently refers to ‘this line’ (71.5), ‘this verse’ (71.9), ‘this book’ (77.4), ‘this [. . .] rhyme’ (55.2, 107.11), which mediates between the poet and his subject, a ‘written embassage’ (26.3) bridging the intervening space as would a letter or an ambassador. This dynamic is quite different both from the sonnets to or about the mistress, and that found in Elizabethan sonnet sequences more generally, where the typical addressee tends to be much more physically present to the poet-speaker, at least some of the time: someone whom he might ‘come so near’ (as with the mistress in Sonnet 136.1), or whom we see responding to – or participating in shared activities with – their wooers, as when Sidney’s Astrophil turns Stella’s ‘no, no’ into a ‘yes’ (Astrophil and Stella 63), or when Spenser’s future bride watches him write her name upon the sand in Amoretti 75.24 Nor can this difference be attributed to the gender of the addressee: Richard Barnfield’s ‘Certain Sonnets’ depicts his lover in proximity to his male beloved, ‘sighing, and sadly sitting by [his] love’.25 Two Shakespearean sonnets which treat explicitly of music illustrate the contrast: the first, Sonnet 8, addressed to the

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young man, utilizes an abstract discussion of musical harmony as an argument for marriage; there is no sense of speaker and addressee inhabiting the same space. Sonnet 128 (from the group traditionally associated with the mistress) evokes a musical performance at which the poet-speaker is positioned tantalizingly close to the object of his desires: his ‘lips’ – a synecdoche for the lover – ‘by thee blushing stand’ (ll. 7–8). Separated from the youth, Shakespeare’s poet-speaker can thus be seen going through a process of memorialization, attempting to fix the image of the beloved in his own mind. Certainly, the iterative nature of Shakespeare’s sonnets – going over the same ground – and their intense focus on the remembered image of the youth accord with the emphasis on repetition and on ‘figures or similitudes’ found in memory treatises. As Fulwood notes, Memory is by the which the mind repeateth things that are past. Or it is a steadfast perceiving in the mind of the disposition of things and words. Or as (Aristotle supposeth) it is an imagination, that remaineth of such things as the sense had conceived [. . .] Memory is a retaining of the images or similitudes first perceived of the soul. (B1 v, F6r) The poet-speaker’s rehearsals and re-rehearsals of the youth’s attributes – perceiving them, transforming them into word-pictures, retrieving these word-pictures from his memory to cogitate over them, declaring them to another – thus map on to the stages (or ‘movings’) of memory, as laid out by Fulwood: The first [stage] is a moving of the spirits which transport the figures or similitudes from the cogitative to the memorative. The second is a picturing and feigning of figures in the same memory. The third is a reportation or carrying again of the spirits from the memorative to the cogitative or ratiocinative. The fourth is that action by the

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which the cogitative considereth and knoweth things perfectly, the which is properly called the memory. (F6 v–F7 r) When Sonnet 108 celebrates the cyclical nature of the poetspeaker’s devotions, which ‘like prayers divine, / I must each day say o’er the very same’ (ll. 5–6), it captures the way in which repetition can be seen as the key to conservation, keeping ‘eternal love, in love’s fresh case’, free from ‘the dust and injury of age’ (ll. 9–10).26 This process of reiteration, necessary for individual memorymaking and effective recall (‘remembrance’), can also be seen as a crucial component of Shakespeare’s understanding of what makes a ‘living record’ (55.8) capable of extending beyond the current generation. This oxymoron embodies some of the oddities and complexities of the (pseudo?) memorial project of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but also of early modern ruminations on posthumous memory more widely. As the Elizabethan perplexity in the face of Stonehenge indicates, physical monuments are in themselves insufficient without the active creation of intergenerational memory to preserve information about them; Stonehenge might dominate the Wiltshire plain, but it remains, frustratingly, what Samuel Daniel calls ‘that huge dumb heap that cannot tell us how / Nor what, nor whence it is, nor with whose hands / Nor for whose glory, it was set to show’.27 To return to the Tong epitaph discussed earlier: one of the striking things about it is the way that, in the face of the impermanence of earthly, concrete things, it does not retreat into pious claims about heaven. Even as it asserts the eternal, celestial life enjoyed by the tomb’s occupant, it activates a pun, a figure of speech that relishes the transient pleasures of language, but which also requires an audience/reader to recognize it: ‘STANDLY FOR WHOM THIS STANDS SHALL STAND IN HEAVEN ’. Posthumous memory is not achieved through inert words on a page, or a tombstone, or even a monument as durable as Stonehenge. It needs people to ‘rehearse’ or recite, and thus revivify, what is being remembered.

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This idea lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Its poems never provide the youth with the posthumous fame it promises, at least not in the way that commemorative poems usually work, preserving the subject’s name. The most explicit evocation of such a tribute is Sonnet 81, which ponders whether ‘I shall live, your epitaph to make’ (l. 1). That poem contrasts the sepulchre which will eventually ‘entomb’ the young man with the more animate ‘monument’ of his ‘gentle verse’, ‘Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, / And tongues to be your being shall rehearse’ (ll. 8–11). ‘When all the breathers of this world are dead’, it predicts, ‘You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, / Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men’ (ll. 12–14). It thus envisages a lasting, living memorial, created not in stone or brass, but through a collaboration between the text and its community of readers: a secular ‘obit’ that relies on the participation of future generations.

Notes 1

Lorraine C. Attreed, ‘Preparation for Death in Sixteenth Century Northern England’, Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982), 57.

2

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 568.

3

John Stow, Survey of London (1598), 181.

4

Four hundred and thirty-two epitaphs are listed in Steven May and William Ringler, Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 3 vols. (London: Continuum, 2004), III , 2098–101, compared to 158 encomia and 138 dream visions (III , 2095–6, 2103). There is no equivalent resource for seventeenth-century poetry.

5

The seven epitaphs comprise two verses on the Stanley tomb at Tong (‘Ask who lies here’; ‘Not monumental stone’); ‘An epitaph on Elias James’ (‘When God was pleased’); two epitaphs on John Combe (‘Ten in the hundred’; ‘Howe’er he lived’); ‘On Ben

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Jonson’ (‘Here lies Ben Jonson’), ‘On himself’ (‘Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear’). The further three poems are: ‘Shall I die?’; ‘Upon a pair of gloves’ (‘The gift is small’), ‘Upon the King’ (‘Crowns have their compass’). See Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne (London: Routledge, forthcoming), Appendix 6. 6

Richard Braithwait, Remains after Death, appended to Patrick Hannay, A Happy Husband (1619), L2v. Cf. ‘On Ben Jonson’, which Shakespeare purportedly co-produced with its subject.

7

For images of the monument, see Gordon Campbell, ‘Shakespeare and the Youth of Milton’, Milton Quarterly 33 (1999), 96, 99.

8

Oxford English Dictionary, sense 3b. www.oed.com [accessed 14 December 2015].

9

Daniel’s poetry cited from Poems and a Defence of Rhyme, ed. A.C. Sprague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965).

10 Michael Drayton, Matilda (1594), B1v–B2r. 11 This cluster includes ‘remember’, ‘remembrance(s)’, ‘memorial’; see Sonnets 1.4; 3.13; 5.12; 15.8; 29.13; 30.2; 55.8; 63.11; 71.5; 74.4, 12; 77.6, 9; 81.3; 120.9; 122.2, 13. 12 The exceptions are Sonnets 29.13; 77.6, 9; 120.9; 122.2, 13. 13 Horace, The Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004); Ovid, The. xv. books of P. Ouidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (1567), 200r. 14 The other two are 99 (fifteen lines) and 145 (written in tetrameters). 15 The placing of a full stop at the end of l. 12 is not a reliable indication of syntax; both of Q’s compositors are prone to end-stopping quatrains, even in cases where sense requires enjambment. 16 Oxford English Dictionary, sense 6a. www.oed.com [accessed 14 December 2015]. 17 Oxford English Dictionary, sense 18a. www.oed.com [accessed 14 December 2015]. 18 See John Lennard, But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Oxford: Oxford University

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Press, 1991), 41–3; Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 1997), 125. 19 See Peter Stallybrass et al., ‘Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 55 (2004), 379–419. 20 Examples can be seen in numerous sixteenth-century printed books; see, for instance, the British Library copy of Robert the Devil (1517), available via Early English Books Online, where the word ‘pope’ has been systematically erased (C1v–C2v). 21 Compare the depiction of Eumnestes (‘good memory’) and his library in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590): ‘therein sat an old old man, halfe blind / And all decrepit in his feeble corse’; ‘His chamber all was hang’d about with rolls / [. . .] all wormeeaten, and full of canker holes’ (2.9.55.5–6; 2.9.57.6–9). 22 See, for example, John Leland’s explanation of why memory of Roman history survives, in contrast to the lost history of pre-conquest Britain: ‘The Romans were as famous to future generations as either the eloquence or favourable disposition of writers wanted to make them’ [‘tam clari posteris errant Romani, quam scriptorium vel eloquentia, vel adfectus eos facere voluit’], Genethliacon (1543), G3r. 23 See, for example, Sonnets 26–8, 33, 36, 39, 41, 43–5, 47–52, 61, 97–8, 113. 24 Despite its publication in 1609, Shakespeare’s Sonnets is in origin an Elizabethan collection; see the headnote to Sonnets in Shrank and Lyne, Shakespeare’s Poems. 25 Richard Barnfield, ‘Certain Sonnets’, Cynthia (1595), Sonnet 11. 26 Compare the depiction of ‘unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time’ (55.4). 27 Samuel Daniel, Musophilus, ll. 339–42.

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2 Thomas Thorpe’s Shakespeare: ‘The Only Begetter’ Lynne Magnusson

No paratext has affected the reception and interpretation of a Shakespearean text as much as Thomas Thorpe’s dedication in the 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.1 The inscription itself is moot, and given the lack of consensus on the reference to ‘Mr. W.H.’, I took the decision to emend it for the new text of the sonnets in The Norton Shakespeare 3E, thus: TO.THE .ONLY.BEGETTER .OF. THESE .ENSUING .SONNETS . Mr. W.[S.] ALL .HAPPINESS . AND.THAT.ETERNITY. PROMISED. BY. OUR .EVER-LIVING .POET. WISHETH . 33

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THE .WELL -WISHING . ADVENTURER .IN . SETTING . FORTH . T.T.2 Sonia Massai has argued that paratexts should be read and edited as carefully as Shakespearean texts, and ‘when necessary, emended’.3 In emending to ‘Mr. W.[S].’, I accepted arguments that ‘Mr. W.H.’ likely misprints ‘H’ for ‘S’ or ‘SH ’ and that the well-wishing salutation is meant to address Master William Shakespeare. Donald Foster, who developed the fullest version of the ‘misprint’ argument in his award-winning PMLA article of 1987, claimed the thrust of Thorpe’s message could most readily be paraphrased as ‘To [. . .] the sole author of this text, I wish happiness in this life and eternity hereafter, as promised in Holy Scripture by our Maker, the ever-living Poet.’4 He pointed to conventions likely to cue the cognitive uptake of early modern readers to a message as straightforward as a modern-day greeting card: the commonplace metaphor of poetic creation as paternity to condition an expected identification of the sonnets’ ‘only begetter’ as their author, Shakespeare; ‘Mr. [Master]’ as an address form marking status no higher than ‘untitled gentleman’;5 the standard bipartite formula for well-wishing in printed salutations (‘all happiness in this life, and eternal felicity in the life to come’) to cue Thorpe’s shorthand ‘all happiness and that eternity’ as opposing mortal and divine realms;6 the familiar epithet for divinity of ‘Maker’ (the literal translation of the Greek word for ‘poet’) and common collocate ‘ever-living’ to cue identification of ‘our ever-living Poet’ who promises eternity as ‘our Lord God’. In other words, a strong argument can and has been made that, as an error for ‘S’ or ‘SH ’, the one unexpected letter ‘H’ in the epigraph of the 1609 quarto has obscured a straightforward message and delivered an unnecessary puzzle. In my view, Foster made an entirely plausible argument about the three persons of Thorpe’s epigraph – that is, identifying ‘the only begetter’ as Shakespeare the author, ‘the

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ever-living Poet’ as God the Creator, and (as is more generally accepted) ‘the well-wishing adventurer’ and signatory ‘T.T.’ as Thomas Thorpe, the quarto’s publisher. Even though the careful argumentation of Foster’s article evidently convinced many leading scholars, there has been scant discussion following from it about how these identifications might reorient questions or reading practices either for Thorpe’s epigraph or for Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a whole. This is critically important, since unexamined background assumptions about this paratext, especially when imagined as a patron dedication to the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton, tend to orient interpretation of the sonnets along certain set lines, even when Thorpe’s epigraph is not explicitly referred to. It seems clear that we have absorbed Foster’s misprint perspective as one viable view, but we have not truly re-read the poems in light of his argument to understand how it frees up possibilities for fresh interpretation. This omission is probably an effect of the textual emendation not having been taken up in the three major late-twentieth-century editions that appeared soon after and themselves reshaped reading of the sonnets. G. Blakemore Evans was half persuaded, acknowledging the long lineage of the misprint view from A.E. Brae’s suggestion in 1869 through Foster’s plausible argumentation, but chose not to emend in the New Cambridge edition due to ‘what I feel is a forced interpretation of God as “our.ever-living.poet”’. When Foster’s essay appeared, Katherine Duncan-Jones was already pursuing the bold and contentious claims she presented in the Arden Third Series edition for Shakespeare ‘authorizing’ the 1609 quarto and having it dedicated at his wish to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke as ‘Mr. W.H.’; she acknowledged Foster’s view only in a footnote as ‘another attempt to put an end to further speculation’. In the Oxford Complete Sonnets and Poems, Colin Burrow endorsed no particular candidate but instead embraced the mystery promoted by the initials as a key part of the legacy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, dismissing Donald Foster’s misprint view out of hand as a ‘party-pooping claim’.7 With the textual emendation not circulated until The Norton

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Shakespeare 3E, the seed planted for revitalized interpretation of the epigraph in relation to the sonnets has yet to flower. Foster himself is disappointing in this regard. Having focused on his ground-breaking argumentation in favour of Shakespeare as addressee, he arrives at unremarkable conclusions about the epigraph’s purpose and effects. Reasoning that ‘we cannot, by any rationale, take “only begetter” [i.e. sole author] as a compliment to “W.H.” (or to “W. SH .,” or anyone else)’, he reads the dedication as ‘an ordinary advertisement to the reader that all the ensuing sonnets belong to Master William Shakespeare and that they were printed with his consent or at his request’.8 Reducing it to a sales pitch to the reader, Foster omits any reflection on what Thorpe’s message may be saying to Shakespeare, the person he has so forcefully argued it addresses. This is odd, especially since such a sales pitch would be redundant. Given the title page’s prominent positioning and huge font announcing ‘SHAKE SPEARES SONNETS ’, an ‘advertisement’ on the overleaf could only reinforce an already blatant message. Furthermore, Foster’s assumption of Shakespeare’s cooperation or implied consent to publish goes entirely unexplained. The present essay accepts Foster’s basic template for reading the epigraph and it builds on his important work. But instead of adopting Foster’s highly instrumentalist view of the epigraph as salesmanship, it takes up Massai’s challenge to read early modern paratexts with care and develops Arthur Marotti’s view of them as ‘site[s] of contestation and negotiation among authors, publisher/printers, and readership(s)’.9 Foster’s hugely important advance was to bridge the critical distance between our own and collective Jacobean reading practices by elucidating generic conventions, formulaic metaphors and cultural texts affecting Thorpe’s composition that would have oriented and channelled the collective inference-making of historical readers. Foster’s Thorpe deploys imitation and intertextuality merely to construct a formulaic and instrumental message. I argue that Thorpe’s interventions on the literary scene go far beyond this. Here is a publisher who aspires to creativity, deploying the Renaissance principles of copia and clever variation in pursuit

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of literary effects and rhetorical goals. A writer’s imitation begins as a reader’s careful observation: Thorpe’s intertextual inventiveness reveals him to be an astute reader both of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and of the contemporary print-culture scene. I argue that Thorpe deserves attention not just as publisher (and, possibly, editor) of the sonnets but as first reader of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As many poet/readers of the sonnets will later do, Thorpe pays Shakespeare a tribute that Foster overlooks: the compliment of imitation.10 In order to develop his textual conversation with the sonnets, he engages in intertextual dialogue with Shakespearean themes (including textual monument-making) and devices (such as the linguistic performativity of deictic art), adapting the experiments of other stylish participants on the literary scene, especially Ben Jonson’s exploitation, in the quartos Thorpe published of Sejanus (1605) and Volpone (1607), of commendatory verses as paratexts and of lapidary typography to emulate classical inscriptions. While Thorpe’s literary experiment plays with the generic expectations of dedicatory and commendatory epistles, it also makes creative use of the everyday social speech genre of greeting. This essay reaches towards a pragmatic reading of Thorpe’s greeting as a contestation and negotiation of publisher with author, a reading that takes seriously the important work of civility and risk mitigation at the heart of this everyday speech genre. In order to make this point, my argument falls into four parts: the influence of the Book of Common Prayer; Thorpe as an imitator of Shakespeare; Thorpe’s engagement with literary experimentation on the printing scene; and the genre of the greeting.

Thorpe’s poetics of praise and the Book of Common Prayer Before turning to Thorpe’s dialogue with the sonnets, and because scholars like Blakemore Evans consider Foster’s case to falter on the identification of ‘our ever-living Poet’ with

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God, I want to add a piece of evidence to Foster’s strong case and then open up its poetic implications. Foster’s reading depends on his demonstration that the conventional bipartite structure for well-wishing familiar in printed salutations provided a formulaic structure for Thorpe’s salutation, wishing its addressee, first, all worldly happiness and, beyond that, the felicity that consists in the eternal life promised by God. Recognizing this standard template helps us to cross between our own modern reading expectations and an early modern horizon of expectation, unlearning the reflexive habit that leads so many current readers to identify ‘our ever-living Poet’, however anachronistically in 1609, with Shakespeare and necessitating an identification of ‘Mr. W.H.’ with someone else. ‘[T]he term ever-living appears most frequently in Renaissance texts as a conventional epithet for God’, Foster asserted, suggesting quite legitimately that the term primed interpretation of ‘our ever-living Poet’ as ‘God, our everlasting Maker’.11 Perhaps this failed to persuade because we do not recognize ‘ever-living’ (as opposed to its close synonyms ‘everlasting’ and ‘eternal’) as part of the familiar diction of Scripture, whether in Tudor or modern translations. It is, however, a familiar epithet in the Book of Common Prayer. Brian Cummings has reminded us that ‘life in the English imagination is mediated through [the] idiom’ of the Book of Common Prayer. The prayer book gave people of Shakespeare’s day ‘a set of words to accompany everyday life’, a ‘background to the thought processes by which a person addresses’ life’s trials.12 In this idiom, church-goers would have recognized the adjective ‘ever-living’ as a synonym that varies regularly with ‘everlasting’ and ‘eternal’ in one of the most consistent and repeated formulae for addressing ‘our Lorde’ God. In the Communion service, the invocation ‘Almighty and everlastinge God’ alternates with ‘Almightye and everlyvyng God’.13 It also varies between ‘everlasting God’ and ‘everlyvyng God’ in the service of Baptism, while ‘everlivyng’ is preferred in the Confirmation service.14 Furthermore, this form of invocation is frequently associated with the assertion of God’s role as

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creator, author or maker, as with the prayer in the marriage service ‘O eternall God, creatoure and preserver of all mankynd, giver of all spirytuall grace, the aucthour of everlastyng life’ or the communion of the sick, ‘Almightie everlivyng God, maker of mankynde’, resulting in expressions closely related to Thorpe’s ‘ever-living Poet’.15 Once we acknowledge the Book of Common Prayer as a familiar intertext for the epigraph, it becomes clear that Thorpe (contra Foster) is not merely tapping into conventional language and automatic associations. The highly distinctive phrase, ‘only begetter’, also activates the resonant power of the prayer book’s idiom. Of course, the phrase it echoes in this case, ‘only Begotten Son’, is biblical, occurring in John 3.16 as a key touchstone for Christian belief and the central promise Thorpe alludes to as ‘that eternity promised by our ever-living poet’: ‘For God so loued the world, that he gaue his only begotten sonne: that whosoeuer beleueth in hym, shoulde not perishe, but haue euerlasting lyfe.’16 But the prayer book made the words a script for everyday life, at the heart of the Nicene Creed’s assertion of belief in ‘one Lorde Jesu Christe, the only begotten sonne of God’, regularly recited at the Communion service.17 In thus aligning the human poet or ‘only begetter’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with God the Father as ‘begetter ‘of ‘the only Begotten son’, Thorpe might well plead with Sir Philip Sidney, ‘Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison [. . .] but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker’.18 The allusion to John 3.16 and the Nicene Creed seems so obvious as scarcely to deserve mention – except that Foster so strangely ignores it in his explication of the ‘only begetter’ as ‘the sole author’, Shakespeare, in line with his argument that Thorpe’s message is merely formulaic and his purpose simple advertising. Recall Foster’s odd claim that ‘we cannot, by any rationale, take “only begetter” as a compliment to [. . .] anyone’. But surely the obvious echo in ‘only begetter’ of the Creed implies comparison of the sonnet maker to the divine Maker, as does the casting of that divine Maker as ‘our ever-living Poet’. Reversing Sidney’s formulation, Thorpe’s

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comparative strategy elevates and casts honour on the earthly maker he is addressing. Similarly, paraphrasing ‘only’ as ‘sole’ and neglecting the widely acknowledged second meaning of ‘peerless’, ‘unequalled’, Foster seems almost willfully to detract from what I read as Thorpe’s imaginatively crafted compliment to Shakespeare as the sonnets’ author. Just as George Puttenham and Philip Sidney define and elevate the authentic earthly poet by comparison to the divine Maker, so does Thorpe devise a poetics of praise when he sets Shakespeare as ‘the only begetter’ or most excellent author of the sonnets in relation to ‘our everliving Poet’ whose scriptural Word promised eternal life.19

Thorpe as first reader and the compliment of imitation Thorpe read the sonnets carefully, and there is no doubt that his compliment to ‘the only begetter’ also draws resonance from interplay with the diction, themes and rhetorical strategies of those poems concerned with procreation and memorialization. Neither the noun ‘begetter’ nor the verb ‘beget’ occur in the sonnets, but the diction Thorpe selects to affirm Shakespeare’s role as the ‘only begetter’ of the sequence playfully engages with the copiously varied procreation theme central to the first movement of the sonnets as they are arranged in the printed sequence (Sonnets 1–19). To counter the threat of Time’s decay, the young man is urged to ‘breed another thee’ (6.7), to ‘form another’ (3.2), to ‘print more’ (11.14) or, closest to Thorpe’s ‘begetter’, to ‘get a son’ (7.14). The urgent advice is all to no avail, a preamble to the poet’s assertion of his own verse’s life-giving power: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (18.13–14). Furthermore, Thorpe’s ‘only’ appears to draw on the term’s distinctive ‘superlative’ usage in Shakespeare’s first sonnet. Having elaborated on superlatives of praise declaring the young man among ‘fairest creatures’ (1.1), he calls him the

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‘only herald to the gaudy spring’ (1.10, emphasis added). Surely this usage registers not so much the ‘sole’ or solitary herald of the spring (many birds and buds would qualify) as the ‘peerless’ or ‘preeminent’ herald.20 At this basic level, Thorpe’s verbal invention is responsive to Shakespeare’s diction. Still more important, I will argue, the structural signals (‘these ensuing sonnets [. . .] that eternity’ [emphasis added]) of Thorpe’s creation imitate Shakespeare’s art of lyric deixis. As the early sonnets introduce their alternative remedy to Time’s decay – a longevity or renewal offered not through the youth’s procreation but through the poet’s creation – their gestural mode of expression (‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ [emphasis added]) foregrounds a key linguistic strategy of Shakespeare’s lyric art. As Heather Dubrow has recently explored, Shakespeare’s sonnets make distinctive use of deixis, linguistic pointing words, to structure complex movements of thought within sonnets and to stage selfreflexive or meta-lyric moments that gesture outside the assumed sonnet frame.21 In ordinary language use, these small grammatical function words work quietly to structure our comprehension of discursive space (‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘this’ and ‘that’), time (‘now’ and ‘then’) and persons (‘her’, ‘him’, ‘I’, ‘you’). As I have argued elsewhere, Shakespeare’s linguistic art often consists in bringing to light in imaginative ways the ‘small words’ of the language, turning these bit players into star performers.22 On the larger scale, the sonnets’ deployment of personal deixis constitutes a chief difference from the poetics of his narrative poems: in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, the personal pronouns are anchored to the proper names of the titular or subsidiary characters, whereas the pronominal use in the sonnets has an indeterminacy that contributes to their compelling ambiguities. Given we do not really even know what Shakespeare might have named his sequence, we cannot be sure the mysteries attending the identities of persons in the sonnets are a controlled or intended effect of his art. But the small words constituting spatial or temporal deixis are often highlighted at critical junctures, requiring the reader’s

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attention and active interpretation to apprehend a freshly glimpsed direction in the poem’s movement or resolution. Characteristically, the linguistic resources for spatial and temporal deixis – the small words ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ – afford resources to focus and organize perception in interrelation as proximal (near) or distal (remote). Shakespeare is masterful at using these words in association to create and structure the conceptual, the psychological or the emotional space of a sonnet. He is also expert at using them to fracture the frame of a sonnet, gesturing from a reference inside to one outside the sonnet. Deixis is perhaps most powerfully deployed in the sonnets that put on offer the poet’s verse as the best imagined means to sustain the fair youth’s beauty and long life (for example, ‘And that is this, and this with thee remains’ [74.14]). Deixis is also among the poetic devices used to render imaginative concepts with crystalline precision and to delimit the articulation of claims in the sonnets. Do the sonnets, as so many commentators on Thorpe’s epigraph take for granted, promise the youth ‘eternity’? Do they promise ‘eternal life’ or, indeed, immortal or ‘ever-living’ life? As the promises first take confident shape, emerging as brags in defiance of Time, they certainly come close. Sonnet 18 speaks of ‘eternal lines’, using deixis for careful delimitation: ‘So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ (18.13–14). To make the youth live ‘ever’ is part of the brag in Sonnet 19, a putdown of ‘old Time’: ‘despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live long’ (19.13–14). Yet however boldly the sonnets extend the promise, they also work most carefully to explore its limits. Sonnet 81 imagines ‘the breath’ of still-being-recited verses ‘in the mouths of men’ as the vehicle of his friend’s memorialization or ‘immortal life’ (81.5). The logic of these claims carefully contains the ‘eternal’ or ‘immortal life’ promised in the sonnets within this temporal world (e.g., 18.13–14). Sonnet 81 goes furthest in stretching the envelope, positing the long life as being sustained ‘When all the breathers of this world are dead’ (81.12, emphasis added). And yet the sonnet demands

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that readers delimit what other (or distal) world is gestured at in contradistinction to ‘this world’. It turns out still to be a breathing temporal world, one of future mortal readers, yet unborn, whose ‘tongues to be your being shall rehearse’ (81.11). Significantly, the sonnets making ‘this powerful rhyme’ the friend’s ‘monument’ keep in play (or bracketed outside of their own play) an eternity beyond ‘this’ the poet promises: Your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes. (55.10–14) The ‘life’ promised by the sonnet poet, like the Fame sought in Love’s Labour’s Lost by the King of Navarre and his ‘brave conquerors’ to make them ‘heirs of all eternity’ (1.1.8, 7), stays on this side of ‘the judgment’ day and does not meddle with theology, the afterlife or the scriptural promise of ‘everlasting life’. Thorpe’s epigraph imitates Shakespearean sonnet poetics in similarly deploying proximal and distal index words to structure his offering, setting up a contrast between ‘these ensuing sonnets’ and ‘that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet’ (emphasis added). The contrast differentiates (as Shakespeare does in the sequence itself) among eternities, between the near-eternity promised in ‘these’ sonnets by the mortal poet and ‘that eternity’ beyond worldly life or human gift promised by the Christian God. ‘That eternity’ cannot be promised or put on offer by any living writer, but a wish from the ‘well-wishing’ Thorpe that it may come to its honoured addressee, the peerless ‘begetter’ William Shakespeare, is wholly appropriate. The compliment of divine comparison that Thorpe pays the author is greatly enhanced by the respectful and active reading of Shakespeare’s own poetic strategies that it displays. This is entirely consonant with Thorpe’s acute ability to read the contemporary literary scene.

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Epistles dedicatory and commendatory: Thorpe and the literary scene If assumptions about the identity of the ‘ever-living poet’ have been one stumbling block to widespread acceptance of Foster’s misprint theory, the frequently assumed identification of the paratext as a dedicatory epistle has been another. ‘Why would a dedicatory epistle address the author rather than a patron?’ is a question often asked. The larger question about the rhetorical genre of the paratext and its corresponding speech act or communicative purpose has been insufficiently addressed. The answer requires attention to two aspects – attention to the types of epistles, dedicatory and commendatory, appearing as preliminaries in printed editions around 1609 and attention to the everyday speech genre of the ‘greeting’. It is to the first of these considerations I now turn. It is an especially interesting question in this case because Thomas Thorpe, from the outset of his publishing career, experimented with paratexts. Not only did he take delight in puns and creative language in his publisher’s dedications; he also enjoyed surprising generic expectations or outright parodying dedicatory and commendatory addresses. What Leona Rostenberg called Thorpe’s ‘literary debut’ is the dedicatory epistle ‘To His Kind and Trve Friend: Edward Blunt’, which appears in the 1600 edition of the late poet Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the First Book of Lucan’s Pharsalia.23 In Rostenberg’s judgement, this epistle to the publisher Edward Blount (from whom Thorpe appears to have acquired rights to the copy) directly parodies patron dedications: ‘It leaves little doubt that during the preceding years Thorpe had carefully scrutinized the English literary scene and had observed the servile state of the author and publisher whose very livelihood depended upon the mercurial whims of a capricious, shallow benefactor.’24 It hardly begins as a regular dedicatory epistle, as Thorpe flirts with puns

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and with the roles and relationships of dedicatee, friend and author: Blount: I purpose to be blu[n]t with you, & out of my dulnesse to encounter you with a Dedication in the memory of that pure Elementall wit Chr. Marlow; whose ghoast or Genius is to be seene walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or foure sheets.25 Thorpe structures his conceit on the punning contrast cued by Blount’s name between his own blunt dullness and Marlowe’s wit, activating a second clever punning equation between the sheets associated with ghosts and the few printed pages displaying the deceased Marlowe’s genius.26 Sustaining the puns and ghostly metaphor, he explains that he chose his friend the publisher Blount as addressee due to ‘your old right’ in ‘Lucans first booke translated’.27 The pastiche of patron dedication develops as he instructs his friend to ‘accommodate your selfe’ to the ‘property of a Patron’: to keep state in a lofty and evasive way, to invent and repeat a ‘dry iest or two’, and to ‘[C]ensure scornefully’. Blount will ‘fit excellently’, he reassures them both, and have no trouble with the ‘speciall vertue in our Patrons of these daies’, which is ‘to giue nothing’.28 Having introduced his print persona as a writer of this mock dedication with its unconventional choice of addressee, Thomas Thorpe clearly continued striving to inject wit into his publisher’s paratexts, providing colourful preliminaries when need or opportunity arose – most often in situations when an author was deceased or absent from London. No such opportunity for Thorpe’s own composition arose when he published Ben Jonson’s Sejanus in 1605 or Volpone in 1607, both (like Shakespeare’s Sonnets) printed by George Eld. These texts were extraordinarily rich in preliminaries, and the author himself (unusually, for a living writer and, especially, for a playwright) was proactive in writing epistles and mustering commendatory verses from poet friends to adorn his books. Thorpe as publisher was positioned as a close observer (and

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participant at some level) in these novel developments on the literary and print-culture scene. In these two quarto play-texts, the experimental vehicle was the commendatory verse epistle rather than the patronage dedication. As Joseph Loewenstein notes, the commendatory verses were ‘unusual adjuncts to a printed play’.29 Thus, Jonson was actively shaping new uses for these tributes within Thorpe’s own publishing ventures. In the opening greetings to these commendatory epistles, some address the author by name, ‘To my worthily-esteemed Mr. Ben Jonson’; some by role with a complimentary attribute, ‘To the deserving Author’, ‘To the most vnderstanding Poet’, or ‘To his learned, and beloued Friend’; and some with deictic reference, ‘To him that hath so excell’d on this excellent subiect’.30 Thomas Thorpe clearly took an interest in this changing feature of the literary scene, as is evident from his response when Thomas Coryate, the flamboyant travel writer, took the practice of self-collected complimentary verses to a ludicrous extreme. The ‘Panegyricke Verses’ prefacing Coryats Crudities (1611) constitute the first 160 pages or so of its massive bulk. Whether best described as mock-encomiums or commendatory epistles, the imaginative verses had been solicited by Coryate from over fifty poets (including Ben Jonson and John Donne), friends and distant acquaintances.31 The book is also unusual in that Coryate acted as if he were his own publisher, investing the capital, seeking a licence, arranging for William Stansby as printer, and selling or distributing copies himself. Thorpe capitalized on this strange arrangement, evidently taking advantage of the grey area concerning the rights to the commendatory verses, to publish in the same year a volume called The Odcombian Banqvet Dished foorth by Thomas Coriat, and served in by a number of Noble Wits in prayse of his Crudities and Crambe too. This quarto volume of 121 pages consists entirely of the complimentary preliminaries. The publisher’s parodic intention is signalled, first, by the prominent association on the title page of Coryate’s name with the motto, ‘ASINUS PORTANS MYSTERIA’. As Coryate himself explains in a letter of complaint ‘To the Reader’ in his

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follow-up volume, Crambe, it was ‘most sinisterly and malignantly applied [. . .] (as all the Readers doe interprete it) to my selfe, and thereby very perversly wrested [. . .] from that allusion I intended’.32 The parody of Coryate in The Odcombian Banqvet continues in an unsigned concluding epistle (‘Nouerint vniversi’), quite possibly composed by Thorpe as the volume’s publisher, purporting to explain why Coryate’s actual text is omitted. The humorous account turns on the book’s ‘value’, offering a lesson in the economics of print publication. It claims that to print ‘654. pages, ech page 36. lines, each line 48. letters’ would necessitate a price that far exceeded the volume’s worth. Indeed, studying to ‘epitomize’ the work, the letterwriter concluded that its great ‘lumpe’ hardly amounted to ‘so much matter worthy the reading [. . . as would] haue filled foure pages’.33 Given that Coryate directly defends himself against these insults in his Crambe, it is clear that Thorpe’s exploit in delivering a volume of paratexts stirred up attention. The Odcombian Banqvet was yet to come when Thorpe penned the prefatory notice to the sonnets, but Ben Jonson’s prolific examples in the 1605 and 1607 play quartos meant that a commendatory address to a living dramatic writer would by no means be unprecedented and could be seen as exploiting a current vogue in print culture. Nonetheless, the genre of Thorpe’s inscription is still a significant question. Compared to the usual format of a dedicatory epistle to a patron, Thorpe’s ‘dedication’ is truncated: it stops (as Foster has shown) with the well-wishing greeting that would usually preface such a dedicatory letter. Though often read as address to a patron, in content it is vastly different: there is no ‘ask’ nor any preparation for such a request. Compared to the usual format of a commendatory epistle or encomium to the author, it also departs in one striking way from the norm: it lacks the self-displaying artifice of verse which almost always marks the commendation as one worthy poet’s tribute to another. To compensate for this departure, however, I argue that Thorpe adapts another of Jonson’s innovations to new creative use in his artful epigraph.

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Thorpe was clearly a publisher with a creative or literary bent, but never in his extant publications did he provide evidence he could write verse or had an interest in doing so. In fashioning his poetic tribute to Shakespeare, Thorpe kept within his capacity, but nonetheless he rose to the high occasion by substituting his own rare and original ornament in lieu of the tribute of verse compliment: that is, the print imitation of classical epigraphy. The 1605 quarto of Sejanus, Jonson’s collaboration with Thomas Thorpe as publisher and George Eld as printer, had experimented with the use of print typography to emulate the style of a Roman monumental inscription.34 For the medium of verse, Thorpe’s tribute to Shakespeare substitutes a similar experiment, using capital letters, full stops between words, and centred lines of varying length to create the effect on the print page of an engraved monument. While it adapts a Jonsonian device, in this fresh context, in conversation with Shakespeare’s theme of memorializing his beloved ‘in [the] black ink’ of manuscript lines (65.14) or in ‘gentle verse’ (81.9), it can be read as overgoing Shakespeare’s own bold claims in order to assert the superior memorializing power of print. ‘Setting forth’ ‘SHAKE -SPEARES SONNETS ’ in print (whether the author wished it or not) and marking their print publication with this inscribed tribute, Thorpe might with some right have claimed for the 1609 quarto of the Sonnets this memorializing power, ‘From hence your memory death cannot take’ (81.3, emphasis added).

The rhetorical genre of the greeting and the speech action of Thorpe’s paratext We return now to the unusually truncated form of epistle Thorpe developed for his tribute to Shakespeare, not so much a full commendatory or dedicatory epistle as an extended greeting without the usual body of an epistle. Why might

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Thorpe have offered an address in this form to the writer whose sonnets he is ‘setting forth’ in print? Considering the main purpose the genre of a greeting might characteristically serve – as a work of civility – can help us to an answer. To accomplish this, the formal greeting generally encodes relative power and social distance, and, while it expresses good will, it also deploys strategic politeness to mitigate against the potential risks in interaction. To read Thorpe’s greeting aright, we should ask what social relation it encodes and what risk it mitigates.35 Had it encoded Thorpe’s relation to an earl, we would expect something of the deference we hear when Thorpe actually addresses dedications for two translations by John Healey to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke in 1610 and 1616 (‘To the Right Honorable, William Earle of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlaine to his Maiestie, one of his most Honorable Priue Counsell, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, &c.’).36 Had it encoded a relation of close friendship or assumed unearned the relation of a close friend as is common in promoting business, Thorpe might have written ‘To his kind and true friend’, as he addresses Edward Blount in Lucans First Book, or to ‘his worthy Friend, the Author’, as Hugh Holland does to Ben Jonson in Sejanus.37 Thorpe’s greeting is marked neither by extreme deference nor by hearty familiarity. Instead, the address form is marked by ‘sweet respect’ (Sonnet 26.12) that gives precise due to what we may conjecture was the poet’s preferred ‘style’, Master William Shakespeare, lifting him out of the potentially stigmatized place the theatre world was sometimes taken to be and registering the aspirational social status of gentleman that Shakespeare had purchased with the coat of arms for his father. The greater respect is paid in another kind by Thorpe’s poetic tribute. While it does not make the living poet out to be already the ‘thing enskied and sainted’ that those identifying the ‘ever-living Poet’ as Shakespeare would have it, we have seen how the literary imitation delivers a fitting compliment, implicitly suggesting that print remediation of manuscript verse can extend the sonnets’ power to make a lasting monument.38

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We have no definitive answer about whether Shakespeare consented or not to publication of the sonnets, but the respectful distance and careful courtesy of Thorpe’s epigraph suggest neither a close acquaintance between them nor an active collaboration in the venture. Whatever injury the release of his poems in the 1609 quarto might potentially inflict upon Shakespeare, the author is without legal recourse to prevent their sale and distribution. Surely we would be naive to assume that this publication – so clearly identified with the author despite his lack of legal or proprietary right and his powerlessness to control who sees and reads it – would not potentially cause anxiety or trouble for Shakespeare? Margreta de Grazia has famously debated how to understand what the true ‘scandal’ of the sonnets in their time would have been.39 Was there ‘scandal’ in the sonnets’ depiction of samesex love? Or in their misogyny? Or what about the witty but forthright admission of double adultery (both poet’s and mistress’s) in Sonnets 142 and 152? If Shakespeare had an interest in rebuilding a peaceful life with family and Stratford townsfolk, which revelation (whether of real or imagined indiscretions) might have most plagued his efforts? We need not determine which misconstrued revelation might be most troubling in order to recognize the likelihood of injury to Shakespeare with the release of what could so readily be read as autobiographical material. Nor could Thorpe, who had read (and even possibly played a role in organizing) the sequence of sonnets, have failed to recognize this potential for harm-doing. A well-wishing greeting, which at the same time raises the sonnet writer up to the stature of a ‘most excellent [. . .] maker’, compared, like Sidney’s rare poet, to the divine Maker, can be understood in social terms as elegant repair work, mitigation against potential trouble the venture might equally effect. As ‘first’ reader of the sequence, Thorpe orients readers to a sense of a higher purpose in the ‘ensuing sonnets’, avoiding any sales pitch that might court scandal or invite salacious voyeurism. Whoever finalized the order of the sonnets may have had a

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similar plan, setting forth the idealistic procreation sonnets at the front end and the cynical and salacious sonnets of adultery and sexual obsession at the back. Thorpe’s presentation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the preliminaries is as if to say, ‘There’s nothing here to shock, nothing to offend’. It says to the admired writer, ‘This printed book does you honour, pays tribute to your poetic excellence, wishes you well. It does you no offence.’ The well-wishing greeting is so framed as to preempt blame. It is as if the publisher, recognizing the potential distress of the author, had imagined, ‘I have a device to make all well. [Let me] write a [well-wishing greeting as] prologue, and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm.’40 What I am suggesting then is that, beyond Thorpe’s attention to the economics of print publication, he is a publisher aware he has ‘power to hurt’, and in this particular case he registers with his epigraph his ‘will [to] do none’ (Sonnet 94.1). This is the dynamics of personal interaction which Shakespeare himself understands to be at work in a genre like greeting. In his plays greetings are not merely inert, formulaic or phatic but alive to the nuances of human relations, to the life in social dialogue. This is not to say that Thorpe’s gesture would necessarily work, but the chosen addressee would at least recognize the effort. In indirect address to the reader, the publisher also benefits by constructing himself as the author’s well-wisher (and not an antagonist or advantage-taker). As Arthur Marotti has explained, a preliminaries page in an early modern printed book is a ‘site of contestation and negotiation among authors, publisher/printers, and readership(s)’.41 Thorpe’s emended epigraph can productively be read not merely as an advertisement for the reader, as Foster reads it, but as a complex negotiation of the publisher with the author. For the reader too, it says much more than ‘buy this book’. Thorpe’s paratext works to shape the reader’s idea of the author as a true poet and to construct a selective reading process that engages, at the threshold of ‘SHAKE -SPEARES SONNETS ’, with the idealist themes of poetry as creation and commemoration.

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Notes For generous advice on drafts of this essay, I am grateful to Paul Stevens and to the volume editors. 1

Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642, ed. Thomas L. Berger and Sonia Massai, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), I, xi, highlights the importance of Ben Jonson’s commendatory poem in the First Folio of 1623, but it does not address a specific Shakespearean text.

2

William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, textual ed. Lynne Magnusson and critical ed. Walter Cohen, in The Norton Shakespeare 3E, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 2241–303. On the rationale for the emendation, see Magnusson, ‘Textual Introduction’, 2248–9 (and Textual Comment 1 in the digital edition).

3

Sonia Massai, ‘Shakespeare, Text and Paratext’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 11.

4

Donald W. Foster, ‘Master W.H., R.I.P.’, PMLA 102:1 (1987), 42–54. The paraphrase is from Foster, Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 23. See also J.M. Nosworthy, ‘Shakespeare and MR . W.H.’, The Library, series 5, 18:4 (1963), 294–8.

5

Foster, ‘Master W.H.’, 42.

6

See, for example, George Downame, A Treatise Concerning Antichrist (London, 1603); William Cowper, Three Heauenly Treatises (London, 1609); William Est, The Triall of True Teares (London, 1613); for further variants, see Foster, ‘Master W.H.’, 44.

7

G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Sonnets (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 109; Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Nashville, TN : Thomas Nelson, 1997), 52; Colin Burrow, ed., The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 100–2.

8

Foster, ‘Master W.H.’, 50.

9

Arthur F. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 222.

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10 See, for example, On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, ed. Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth ScottBaumann (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2016). 11 Foster, ‘Master W.H.’, 46. 12 The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ix, xi. 13 Ibid., 126, 138, 129, 139. 14 Ibid., 144, 149, 155. 15 Ibid., 159 (emphasis added), 170. 16 Quotation taken from the Bishop’s Bible (1568). 17 Cummings, Common Prayer, 127. 18 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 101. 19 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), Cir. 20 As annotated in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 2. Elsewhere in the Sonnets, Shakespeare tends to use ‘only’ as ‘sole’. 21 On deixis as an important literary device of early modern lyric and of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, see Heather Dubrow, Deixis in the Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors like ‘Here’, ‘This’, ‘Come’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 22 Lynne Magnusson, ‘A Play of Modals: Grammar and Potential Action in Early Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 69–80. 23 Leona Rostenberg, ‘Thomas Thorpe, Publisher of “Shake-Speares Sonnets” ’, Bibliographical Society of America, Papers 54 (1960), 18. 24 Ibid., 18. 25 Christopher Marlowe, trans. Lvcans First Booke (London, 1600), Aiir. See W.W. Greg, ‘The Copyright of Hero and Leander’, The Library 4 (1944), 165–74, and David Kathman, ‘Thorpe, Thomas (1571/2–1625?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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26 Barnaby Rich’s dedication to Greenes Newes both from Heauen and Hell (London, 1593), A2r, features a ‘most gristly ghost wrapped up in a sheet’. 27 Marlowe, Lvcans First Booke, Aiir. 28 Ibid., Aiiv. 29 Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 150. 30 Ben Jonson, Volpone (London, 1607), A3v; Seianvs his fall (London, 1605), A2r–A3v. 31 See Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 102–27. 32 Coryats Crambe (London, 1611), H1v. 33 The Odcombian Banqvet (London, 1611), P4v. 34 Jonson, Seianvs, L4v–M2r. 35 For an adaptation of politeness theory to Shakespearean encounters, see Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 36 Epictetvs Manuall (London, 1616), A2r; Saint Augustine, Of the Citie of God (London, 1610), A3r. 37 Jonson, Seianvs, A2r. 38 Measure for Measure 1.4.34. 39 Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1993), 35–49. 40 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.15–7 (emphasis added). 41 Marotti, Manuscript, Print, 222.

3 ‘Our brains beguiled’: Ecclesiastes and Sonnet 59’s Poetics of Temporal Instability Kristine Johanson

If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled, Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss The second burden of a former child? O that record could with a backward look, Even of five hundred courses of the sun Show me your image in some antique book, Since mind at first in character was done, That I might see what the old world could say To this composed wonder of your frame; 55

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Whether we are mended, or whe’er better they, Or whether revolution be the same. O sure I am, the wits of former days To subjects worse have given admiring praise.1 What is it that hath bin? that that shalbe: and what is it that hath beene done? that which shalbe done: and there [is] no new thing under the sunne. Is there any thing, whereof one may say, Behold this, it is new? It hath bene alreadie in the olde time that was before us. There is no memorie of the former, neither shalt there be a remembrance of the latter that shall be, with them that shall come after. (ECCL. 1.9–112)

‘No ordinary baby’: Margreta de Grazia’s amusingly apt summation of Sonnet 59’s metaphorical infant announces not only the child’s singularity, but also its temporal incongruity, its out-of-timeness which occupies the entire first quatrain.3 The poem’s temporal obsessions manifest early, drawing the reader’s attention to her own use of time. Sonnet 59 orchestrates such attentiveness from its extra-ordinary beginning, and such awareness is both implicit in Shakespeare’s use of Ecclesiastes and explicit in his commonplace metaphor of ‘labouring’ that this initial quatrain works.4 Here, Shakespeare introduces the idea of the poet’s wasting time: ‘if there is nothing new’, then ‘our brains’ repeat what has already been done, and ‘Labouring for invention, bear amiss / The second burden of a former child’ (ll. 3–4).5 To labour for creation suggests of course childbirth and the work to find a topic (inventione), both of which are progresses through time. ‘Labouring for’ (emphasis added) and the imagery of pregnancy emphasize these temporal movements, while the repetition of ‘for’, the sound of

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the past, curtails that idea of progress. Indeed, ‘for’ brackets the poem, as the speaker’s iambs stress it throughout the first quatrain in ‘before’, ‘for’ and ‘former’ (ll. 2, 3, 4) until it is sounded finally in the ‘former’ of the sonnet’s penultimate line. That sound and this sonic repetition matter: they create a temporal tension with the notion of progress always linked to a fore, a tension between past and future that presents itself as these initial lines ask implicitly: why labour to invent? Why labour to make something that already exists – or rather, existed? Why write (or read) this poem? These tensions and questions urge a sense of temporal discontinuity and an incomplete understanding of time that the sonnet voices as it reveals the elusiveness of knowing the present. In Sonnet 59, Shakespeare offers a poetics of temporal instability as his speaker attempts to chart the tension between the security of constancy through repetition and the knowledge that everything must change, that tempus edax rerum (as Sonnet 60 reminds us). Shakespeare crafts a formal instability in Sonnet 59 that is dependent on its context, and analysing that context invigorates our understanding of the speaker’s invocation of biblical and Stoic ideas in the poem’s first line. I demonstrate both how Shakespeare’s echoing of Ecclesiastes participates in a tradition of versifying this popular biblical book, and how that participation repurposes Ecclesiastical ideas, as my discussion of Shakespeare and the poet Henry Lok below will make clear.6 Additionally, in attending to this poem’s temporal ideas, my analysis nuances what has long been a central, commonplace concern of the sonnets: time. Yet Sonnet 59 has rarely featured in critical discussions of time, a lacuna perhaps explained by the absence of the word ‘time’ from the sonnet, while there are thirty-six other poems that explicitly invoke it and its effects.7 The current renewed interest in time as a critical category invites a return to thinking about time and temporalities in Shakespeare’s poems.8 My essay intervenes in these discussions by questioning the stability of the idea of time that is offered by the sequence, and by Sonnet 59 in particular.

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Moreover, in this essay I analyse Henry Lok’s Ecclesiastes poems and place them in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a means to two ends. First, this analysis brings into clearer relief how Ecclesiastes’ temporal concerns shadow Sonnet 59, and, significantly, how Shakespeare evokes Ecclesiastical ideas only to have his speaker turn away from them. Consequently, it becomes evident how Shakespeare’s ambivalent attitude towards Ecclesiastes interrogates temporal ideas such as nostalgia (and Ecclesiastes’ own anti-nostalgia, which I discuss below). Thus Sonnet 59’s uncertainty has broader implications for Shakespeare’s temporal discourses, including nostalgia, within and without the sonnets. As I have argued elsewhere, Shakespeare’s dramatic work is deeply suspicious of nostalgia, and he invokes it to highlight its use as a political rhetoric.9 Shakespeare’s dramatic nostalgic discourses rely for their success on a viable sense of return and renewal, a sense not often addressed in contemporary conceptions of nostalgia but which is evident in Renaissance conceptions of time, as line 12 exemplifies in the speaker’s wondering if ‘revolution be the same’. (‘Nostalgia’ depends etymologically upon ‘return’, as ‘nostos’ signifies that very word.10) The interrogation of time as knowable and of the past as superior to the present that happens in Sonnet 59 and elsewhere in the sequence mirrors the ideas expressed in Ecclesiastes. Shakespeare’s speaker reorients this questioning to insist on the beloved’s singularity. But as I show in the final section of this essay, this singularity itself becomes uncertain as Sonnet 59 insists upon questioning the knowledge of time and of the young man. Shakespeare’s use of Ecclesiastes reflects his preference for the book (it appears to have been one of his favourites), and simultaneously represents and participates in a larger cultural and literary interest in this biblical text.11 Chapter  1 of Ecclesiastes was read as the first lesson at the evening service on 10 July, with succeeding chapters read at evening and morning prayers until the final chapter was read at morning prayer on 16 July.12 Ecclesiastes was also one of the texts Shakespeare would have ‘laboured over’ in the lower-form grammar school

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curriculum.13 Works including or about Ecclesiastes were published in Latin and English consistently throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as print and manuscript evidence demonstrates. It was known outside of its Old Testament context and reproduced in early modern England as a stand-alone volume or often with other books attributed to its accepted author, King Solomon. All told, between 1573 and 1609 at least fifteen works were published which either printed Ecclesiastes with other Wisdom books or printed the book with commentary. Ecclesiastes texts circulating at the time of Shakespeare’s writing include: Thomas Tymme’s The schoole of wisdome (1601) and Joseph Hall’s Salomons diuine arts (1609); sermons by George Gifford and Henry Smith; and translated commentaries by Martin Luther, Jean de Serres and Theodore Beza.14 Scribal publication also suggests an active readership and circulation of Ecclesiastes during the same period.15 Like the Geneva Bible marginalia, texts such as the anonymous manuscript A riche cheyne and Luther’s and de Serres’s exegeses interpret the temporal concerns of Ecclesiastes; that is, these texts are interested in guiding their respective readers through the hermeneutic process of reading the biblical book. Such guides would have primed Shakespeare’s readers to consider interpretations of Ecclesiastes immediately available upon first reading Sonnet 59. As this essay’s epigraph indicates, from its first chapter Ecclesiastes is consumed with thinking about time. From those verses perhaps best known in Western culture – ‘To all things [there is] an appointed time, and a time to every purpose under the heaven’ (Eccl. 3.1) – to the refrain of ephemerality ‘all [is] vanitie’ (1.14, 2.17, 3.19, 12.8), to the less familiar antinostalgic dictate ‘Say not thou, Why is it that the former days were better than these?’ (7.12), the book’s proffered wisdom is tied to its thinking about the past, present and future.16 Little surprise then that a writer as immersed both in his biblical culture and in temporal thinking as Shakespeare would turn to this text in writing a sequence that begins and ends by invoking time’s brutal effects. (That ‘time’ never appears explicitly in

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Sonnets 127–154 is one reason I accept the bracketing of 1–126 as its own sub-sequence.) Shakespeare also had a precedent for invoking Ecclesiastes in his poetry. Sidney’s Defense of Poetry included Ecclesiastes in those books that exemplify the genre of divine poetry, and decades earlier Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey paraphrased the first five books of Ecclesiastes into rhyming couplets.17 Importantly, Surrey introduced the idea of tempus edax rerum to his Ecclesiastical paraphrases, an idea that the biblical book does not explicitly articulate. Surrey thus wedded classical and biblical ideas in a familiar early modern manner, imagining the cycle of invention, eradication and resurrection that Sonnet 59’s first quatrain considers, while time’s wasteful power redounds throughout Shakespeare’s sequence (as at Sonnets 30, 60, 77 and 126). Howard’s Ecclesiastes poems gesture to the larger corpus of versifying and paraphrasing of scripture that occurred throughout the Tudor period.18 This corpus strongly influenced late-Tudor poetry, including that of Henry Lok.

A poetic context: Ecclesiastes and Henry Lok Comparing Lok’s 1597 Ecclesiastes with Shakespeare’s poetry evinces how the latter works with, and turns away from, Ecclesiastical ideas in his sequence. The son of the devotional poet Anne Vaughan Locke, Henry (d. 1608) was a prolific poet in the 1590s, and had ‘high hopes’ for political preferment – he dedicated both his Sonnets on the Sundry Christian Passions Contained in Two Hundred Sonnets and Ecclesiastes to Queen Elizabeth.19 Beyond their shared poetic interests, significant points of connection between Lok and Shakespeare emerge. In 1593, Richard Field printed both men’s poetic debuts: Lok’s Sonnets and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Of the eight works EEBO ascribes to Field in that year, only two of them are poetry: Lok and Shakespeare’s respective works. Both Lok

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and Shakespeare were unknown poets in 1593, and the literary economy of early modern London – one which Richard Field understood intimately – afforded these men equal place in it, equal space for success or failure. By 1597, when Venus and Adonis and Lucrece (also printed by Field) had established Shakespeare’s poetic career, Field had ‘pass[ed] on the chance’ to keep printing Shakespeare’s works. However, he printed Lok’s Ecclesiastes that year, a signal of his remaining interest in Lok’s work, which he must have believed he could profit from.20 That Field’s shop was ‘one of the most sophisticated and accomplished printing houses in London’, and was interested in developing and defining ‘high literary status’, indicates that Field considered Lok’s work to be part of that development.21 Furthermore, Lok and Shakespeare were chasing the same patron: Henry Wriothesley. The Earl of Southampton, dedicatee of both Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, is among the sixty Privy Council members and various elite Elizabethans for whom Lok wrote sonnets of address appended to Ecclesiastes.22 Given these potential points of contact, that Lok’s ‘Extra-Sonnets’ were dedicated to various important persons at Elizabeth’s court, and the possible overlap of those circles with that of one of Shakespeare’s oft-noted ‘private friends’, it is plausible that Shakespeare knew Lok’s poems, and Lok knew Shakespeare’s. Finally, the Returne from Pernassus (written 1598–1602, printed 1606) takes an interest in both men’s works, as it includes ‘disparaging allusions’ to Shakespeare’s narrative poems and derides Lok’s poetry ‘as fit only “to lie in some old nooks amongst old boots and shoes”’.23 The Returne’s inclusion of both authors might suggest that early modern readers connected these poets in a literary way, rather than separating their works into ‘religious’ poems and secular sonnets, as contemporary critical practice is often inclined to do. Analysing Lok and Shakespeare together enables us to see how ideas about time circulating through Shakespeare’s sonnets are articulated in a specifically Ecclesiastical context in the work of Lok. These ideas include the assertion of a

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providential moment for all creation (to every thing there is a season); the inherent temporality of that creation; the foolishness of longing for a time gone by; and that everything that is now has been before. In repurposing such temporal ideas from an explicitly biblical source or sequence, Shakespeare’s sequence reorients its temporal discourses away from their exclusively soteriological implications and towards a specific object-subject: the beloved. Such a shift crucially announces that beloved’s singularity by attaching to him discourses originally associated with the soul’s salvation through abnegation of the ephemeral.24 For example, Lok’s Ecclesiastical poetry makes ‘devouring time’ a central element in its warnings against wasting time and ascertaining knowledge of the past or the future. He writes that, with our predecessors, our ‘fames with theirs shall vanish with the wind’ and that ‘Devouring time, shall desolate our name’.25 These lines attempt to abolish the idea of time’s progress or of our superiority to the past: fame ‘leaves us at the grave’ (1.11.12 and cf. 9.5.5, 9.11.11). In rejecting the possibility for lasting fame on earth, Lok offers an antithesis to the faith and power accorded by Shakespeare’s speaker to poetry and the beloved. Indeed, this antithesis and the appearance of tempus edax rerum in Lok’s Ecclesiastes offer just two of numerous links with Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence that exemplify how these poets use similar means to achieve contrasting poetic ends. Lok and Shakespeare also use metaphors of theatricality – metaphors absent not only from Ecclesiastes, but significantly from sonnet sequences like Philip Sidney’s Astrophil to Stella and Samuel Daniel’s Delia, neither of which think about the theatre (the words ‘actor’ and ‘stage’ are conspicuously absent from these works, for example). Lok uses theatrical metaphors to stress the mortality that defines the world: ‘as on stage new actors issue still, / Untill each part expir’d, the play be done: / So generations newe the world do fill, / And ages newe past ages ouer-runne’ (1.4.8–11). Thus, as the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 imagines that ‘this huge stage

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presenteth nought but shows’ (15.3), so too for Lok we are actors, our lives played out on a stage and followed by future generations. And like Shakespeare’s ‘unperfect actor on the stage, / Who with his fear is put besides his part’ (23.1–2), Lok imagines of fools and wise men that, ‘As on a stage, each step they tred awrie / Is markt’ (2.16.1–4). But again, where Lok uses this metaphor to highlight in his poems the vanity of the physical, ephemeral world, conversely Shakespeare’s speaker draws attention to that ephemerality and finds immortality and agency there. His material ‘books’ offer a legacy that must serve ‘love’s fine wit’ (23.9, 14). But it is Sonnet 59, in its unmistakably Ecclesiastical language, that so compellingly demonstrates Shakespeare’s poetic interest in rejecting commonplace biblical ideas, and Lok’s Ecclesiastes offers a revealing foil to this sonnet. In Lok’s poems on the ‘nothing new under the sun’ verses (Eccl. 1.9–11), time devours, but it also produces ‘like things’ in ‘former’ and in ‘new times’ (1.10.5, 6). Again, these poets’ respective works share formal and conceptual elements: they rely on plural pronouns to engage their reader and – in the case of Shakespeare – subject. And perhaps it is unsurprising that two poets thinking about newness invoke both ‘invention’ (Lok 1.9.9, Shakespeare 59.3) and the notion of ‘former wits’ (Lok 1.9.9, Shakespeare 59.13). Shakespeare’s inclination towards rhetorical playfulness is shared by Lok in his early paraphrases, as in the first stanza of 1.10. Here, he takes up the ‘new’ of ‘nothing new under the sun’, asking, ‘What one thing can we say is new indeed’, and repeats and redeploys ‘new’ through the rest of the stanza (1.10.3, 5, 6), echoed in ‘renewes’ (1.10.2) and ‘newely’ (1.10.6). Both poets, through their extended (Lok) and attenuated (Shakespeare) invocations of Ecclesiastes, introduce modes of thinking about time in their poems that move through past, present and future. Lok’s contrast of the ‘golden age’ with ‘this wicked age’ (1.10.8, 1.10.3) nostalgically envisions a time ‘When Will on Wisedome tended as a Page’ (1.10.8). However, even in that golden age ‘all things flourisht sure that now we see, / And actions all, that are, or that may bee’ (1.10.13–14).

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Ecclesiastes rejects the idea of a golden age, and consequently Lok’s invocation of a ubiquitous early modern trope in an explicitly Ecclesiastical text emphasizes how believing in that age is problematic. This continuity that Lok identifies between past and present is rooted in sin and vanity. Indeed, for Lok the present demonstrates human vanity: ‘We thinke our world with wisdome doth abound’ (1.9.10, emphasis added). He contrasts this conceit with his surety of the ‘sinnes’ of both past and present, and the past’s superiority (1.10.3, 4); for then ‘nature[’]s strength was in her youthful prime’, and ‘love of vertue, banisht many a crime’ (1.10.8, 10). Yet the past shares its sins with the present ‘wicked age’ which has ‘not other [sins] then first age did use’ (1.10.4). Consequently, despite Lok’s characterization of the past as superior, the shared vices of past, present and future flatten any temporal hierarchy previously suggested. Shakespeare’s speaker resists such surety, wishing he could look back to know ‘Whether we are mended, or whe’er better they, / Or whether revolution be the same’ (ll. 11–12). Lok’s 1.10 poem concludes with his confident repetition of Ecclesiastes’ ideas of time’s continuity and ‘renew[al]’ (1.10.2), intimating here an idea of cyclical time that Sonnet 59 also considers from its first line. ‘If there be nothing new but that which is hath been before’, sets up the possibility that perfection, ascribed solely to the past in Lok’s poems, may in fact exist in the present in Shakespeare’s sonnets – in the form of the beloved. Indeed, Sonnet 59’s speaker is ‘sure’ that the young man’s beauty is superior to the past (l. 14). Yet Shakespeare rejects the temporal certainty about the past that Lok’s wistful invocations of an earlier, more virtuous time suggest.

Writing temporal instability Say not thou, Why is it that the former dayes were better then these? For thou doest not enquire wisely of this thing. (ECCL. 7.12 )

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My discussion of Ecclesiastes and Lok’s poems has contextualized the opening lines of Sonnet 59 beyond the traditional editorial acknowledgement that Shakespeare parrots a familiar idea voiced in the Bible. We have seen that Shakespeare’s use of Ecclesiastes participates in the period’s particular engagement with this biblical book and that such participation highlights the sonnets’ ambivalent use and rejection of Ecclesiastical commonplaces. While his use of Ecclesiastes may align Shakespeare’s writing with the book’s resistance to a knowable past and its repudiation of nostalgia, Shakespeare’s poetic aim in Sonnet 59 depends upon equivocation. For it is in establishing this dual attitude towards Ecclesiastes that Shakespeare’s speaker can abandon any concerns for salvation that are originally linked to the book and claim the phenomenal nature of the beloved. To achieve this, Sonnet 59 creates a poetics of temporal instability as it disrupts the reader’s Ecclesiastical expectations from the very beginning of the poem and continues that temporal destabilization throughout the sonnet. Shakespeare’s construction of such formal destabilization offers an antithesis to the kind of interpretive practice that was an essential part of post-Reformation biblical culture and in which Lok’s Ecclesiastes participates.26 Indeed, Shakespeare’s first line sets up a paradox in its form, if we follow Q’s punctuation: ‘If their bee nothing new, but that which is,’ uses a final comma to suggest briefly – for the time it takes to read the line – that the only things that are new are those that are now.27 That punctuation is important: it creates the idea that the only newness is now, and it allows that idea to be temporarily closed off in its assertion. In closing the line with a comma, Q radically changes the expected Ecclesiastical ideal, replacing the notion of temporal cycles with that of absolute newness, of absolute modernity. Thus from the very beginning, Shakespeare playfully (and so, characteristically) recalls an old maxim and rewrites its meaning. He presents the past and present in one line, almost simultaneously, unsettling the reader temporally (and temporarily) and performing that essentially Renaissance

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act of both distancing the reader from the past while making that past feel proximate. That unsettling begins again in the first line of the second quatrain, with the wish ‘that record could with a backward look [. . .] / Show me your image in some antique book’ (ll. 5, 7). This desire for memory and history to recuperate the past performs a temporal move that brings the reader and speaker towards that past just as it affirms its distance. Furthermore, the third quatrain’s first line reintroduces the distance offered at the poem’s beginning; naming the ‘old world’ (l. 9) implies again that that which is ‘new’ is now, and readers are thus invited to recall ‘if there be nothing new’. From the first line onward, each of the sonnet’s successive new structural elements (second quatrain, third quatrain, couplet) begins with a return to the past: record’s ‘backward look’, the ‘old world’, ‘wits of former days’ (ll. 5, 9, 13). Consistently, Sonnet 59 creates moments of return in the experience of reading, and the reader participates in the return even as she progresses through the poem. This movement suggests, like the poem itself, a notion of cyclical time that is again both ancient and Christian, an implicit biblical time of revelation. Moreover, the sonnet’s readerly returns function as pivots, as the present-reader looks to the past and to the future, and these pivots provide an apt figuration of how those modes of temporal discourse articulated at lines 11 and 12 – ‘Whether we are mended, or whe’er better they, / Or whether revolution be the same’ – could exist side by side in the Renaissance. In these lines, Shakespeare summarizes the conflict that his speaker seems confidently to dismiss elsewhere in the sequence, albeit in contradictory ways. This summary also emphasizes how Sonnet 59 is atypical in the sequence in its pursuit of temporal uncertainty. For example, in Sonnet 32, the beloved should compare the speaker’s verse ‘with the bett’ring of the time’ (l. 5), but at 123, the speaker rejects such notions of progress: ‘Time [. . .] shalt not boast that I do change, / Thy pyramids [. . .] are nothing novel, nothing strange’ (ll. 1–2, 3). This contradiction of progress and stasis may simply indicate different speakers in the sequence. However, the sonnets do

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invite readers to consider a single speaker through shared elements such as images or rhymes, and particular moments when one poem picks up from another (as 16 does from 15, for example). Sonnets 38 and 106, two poems bound with 59 through their couplet rhymes of ‘days / praise’, like 59 take up a mediation of the speaker’s relationship with the beloved by thinking of past texts and their future implications. In 38, the beloved’s singularity is determined by his role as a creative source; for the speaker, he ‘pour’st into my verse / [His] own sweet argument’ (ll. 2–3). Like Juliet teaching ‘the torches to burn bright’, the beloved ‘give[s] invention light’, and enables ‘he that calls on’ him to craft ‘eternal numbers to outlive long date’ (38.8, 11, 12). Compared with 59 or 106, this sonnet’s speaker lingers more explicitly on the present, as he worries about his invention’s ability to ‘please these curious days’ even in light of the beloved’s superiority as a Muse (l. 13). Throughout 38, the speaker imagines that his relationship with the beloved is mediated by how the representatives of a given time – past, present or future – will evaluate the youth (and thus the speaker) in verse. Sonnet 38 voices the speaker’s abhorrence that the youth’s rarity, his ‘too excellent’ self, will be eradicated through ubiquity, as the beloved will be ‘rehearse[d]’ by ‘every vulgar paper’ of the speaker’s contemporaries (ll. 4, 5). ‘Excellent’ and ‘vulgar’ articulate the distance between the beloved and those who attempt to write him, as does the use of ‘rehearse’ itself, which implies both repetition of others’ words and a repeated entombment (re-hearse).28 Similarly, 106 focuses much (two quatrains) of its attention on the past and past writers’ ability through their ‘divining eyes’ to ‘prefigur[e]’ the youth (ll. 11, 10). In the speaker’s invocation, and mild dismissal, of the form of this praise – the blazon (ll. 5–6) – Shakespeare again implies that the past is not sufficient to capture the present. The blazon, here aligned with an older form, ‘would have expressed / Even such a beauty as you master now’ (ll. 7–8), but in the end these poems’ writers ‘had not skill enough your worth to sing’ (l. 12). Sonnets 38 and 106 doubt the ability of present and past modes of writing to record present beauty, to capture the

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phenomenon of the beloved. Sonnet 32 is certain of the future’s superiority; Sonnet 123 of the speaker’s static nature. Each of the moments highlighted above offer together, across poems, a sense of temporal instability that Sonnet 59 achieves both in form and content. Yet the tantalizing idea of a return to the past that 59’s speaker seems to desire – a return that would supply evidence of the beloved’s beauty for the present – is problematized by the Ecclesiastical injunction not to perform that return. As the epigraph of Eccl. 7.12 makes clear, the book of Ecclesiastes denounces the practice of comparing past and present circumstances (a practice performed at 59.11, and wished for in the second quatrain). The verse suggests that to prefer past to present, to ask, ‘Why is it that the former dayes were better then these?’, is to question God’s omniscience and providence. This verse enjoins against performing a discursive return to a preferable past and so implicitly reminds the reader that ‘there is no new thing under the sun’ – ‘revolution [is] the same’. Many of the sonnets’ readers would have been knowledgeable students of Ecclesiastes, and such readers would recognize that the same interrogation of Ecclesiastes which begins the poem is present again in the connecting ‘or’s of lines 11 and 12. These conjunctions, together with the consistent returns made in the (temporal) act of reading discussed above, again function to undermine any authority the speaker grants to Ecclesiastes in that equivocal first ‘If’. As a result, any temporal security initially suggested by the speaker’s invocation of Ecclesiastes and its proverbial analogue is further disrupted. Moreover, that ‘If’ plays an additional role in moving the reader through time in the poem. The sonnet moves from the rhetorical (un)certainty of that word to a rhetorical and temporal surety in the first phrase of the couplet: ‘O, sure I am’ (l. 13). That surety is open to interpretation, but whether it is a rhetorical foregrounding of the poet’s confidence in his ‘subject’ after extended questioning, or whether it belies a ‘desperate insecurity’, the move from ‘If’ to ‘sure I am’ designates a

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movement in time itself, for both the speaker and the reader.29 The lapse of time is evident in the change from doubt to security, and I would argue that this change parallels the movement we see in Sonnet 57. There, the speaker begins: ‘Being your slave’ (l. 1), and in the poem itself time unfolds, and the speaker is no longer a slave; rather, he is ‘But like a sad slave’ (l. 11, emphasis added). In Sonnet 59, this ‘modulation’ or movement offers a sense of temporal constancy that the rest of the poem, through both form and content, resists.30 Ultimately, if past, present and future remain elusive and unstable, what is knowable is ‘this composed wonder of your frame’ (59.10). The image of composition and harmony is evident both in the young man’s beauty and in the speaker’s own poetic construction of that beauty. The sonnet form can mark time’s movement for speaker and reader, and in that capacity it can suggest stability. Yet such formal potential directly juxtaposes the temporal disjunction and discontinuity that the rest of 59 considers in its concerns with time’s various possible constructions and that which the poem performs in its creation of moments of readerly returns. In fact, the ‘miracle’ of this form is that it exists at all: the poet attempts to capture time in the instant, with the writing and reading of this poem.31 The speaker attempts to possess the present despite his own acknowledgement that sonnet-writing itself is a ‘labour’ of time and that the present is past when the reader reaches the couplet’s final word (l. 3). Sonnet 59 suggests both that the sonnet form itself can hold past and present together, simultaneously, and that the young man himself invites this temporal simultaneity; the poem invites such a temporal collapse by intimating that the ‘see’-ing of the poet and ‘say’ing of ‘the old world’ could occur together – and do occur together in the same line – at the same moment (l. 9).32 If ‘beauty becomes for Shakespeare that privileged natural feature that time particularly enables and attacks’ and ‘time [. . .] makes us decline from ourselves’, then Sonnet 59 sets once more the young man out of time.33 This poem poses essential, existential questions – how do I use my time? what is that time?

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– yet even with that uncertainty, with the temporal instability of past and future and present, the beloved remains. In explicitly invoking Ecclesiastes in Sonnet 59, Shakespeare ironically disturbs any security in comprehending time that his sonnet sequence might offer elsewhere. The poem’s couplet, ‘O sure I am, the wits of former days / To subjects worse have given admiring praise’ (ll. 13–14), seems to be a collapse after the sonnet’s expansive imagining of time’s possibilities in lines 11 and 12. Regardless of its possibly bathetic or ironic undertone, this conclusion colludes in the poem’s resistance to knowing the present because it implies that the extraordinary beloved is not so rare after all. Ecclesiastes and its anti-nostalgia demand that readers attend to the present; and yet like the past and the future, that present remains enigmatic even in the seemingly concrete mode of writing, the mode that will cement the present in language. Sonnet 59 offers a poetics of temporal instability, achieved through the poem’s performance of a series of returns and progressions, while the temporal shifts that the sonnet performs destabilize the reader from any definite temporal stance. My analysis of Henry Lok’s 1597 Ecclesiastes alongside Shakespeare’s sonnets demonstrates that Shakespeare’s evocation of Ecclesiastes is not simply an isolated event or a striking allusion, but rather that his poems – particularly 59 – repurpose Ecclesiastical ideas about time and ephemerality. Lok and Shakespeare share poetic means, but their contrasting ends emphasize Shakespeare’s rejection of the temporal certainty which the book of Ecclesiastes and Lok’s Ecclesiastes pursue. Additionally, I have offered evidence that Shakespeare, too, pursues an anti-nostalgia line proffered in Ecclesiastes. Yet of the many differences between these poets and their work, one of the most striking is that Shakespeare formally crafts his rejection of stability. Through its cohesion of form and content, Sonnet 59 evidences the ‘false distinction’ between an ‘aesthetic Shakespeare and a Shakespeare of ideas’.34 A product of his syncretic culture, Shakespeare challenges that culture by writing, in the poem, the instability such syncretism inevitably creates. Sonnet 59 attempts to record

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the instability that pervades any experience of the present, and in doing so it argues that the closest one can come to knowing that present is to know the beloved.

Notes 1

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 1997).

2

The Bible (London: Christopher Barker, 1583), [Fffviv]–Gggir. The brackets are included in the text. Future references will be made in the text to this Geneva edition; Shakespeare most frequently used the Geneva translation. Cf. Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 9–11, 16. I have silently modernized the i/j and u/v for all early modern texts.

3

Margreta de Grazia, ‘Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 61.

4

Cf. Sidney’s Sonnet 50 in Astrophil and Stella and Shakespeare’s 76, Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 228, and Samuel Daniel’s Delia, 2.1–2 in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 498. The dedicatory preface to Venus and Adonis also suggests this metaphor, as Shakespeare worries that ‘the first heir of my invention [may] prove deformed’, The Norton Shakespeare 3E, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015), 666.

5

Kerrigan’s use of ‘!’ to close line 4 captures the potential exasperation; The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (New York: Penguin, 1986), 106.

6

Studies of Shakespeare’s use of the Bible have focused on his plays, but editions of the sonnets and critical works demonstrate its centrality to his poems. Cf. Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark, DE : University of Delaware Press, 1999); Hamlin, Bible; and Beatrice Groves, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Genevan Marginalia’, Essays in Criticism 57:2 (2007), 114–28. Duncan-Jones identifies biblical

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allusions or echoes in many sonnets, including 2, 3, 11, 30, 34, 42 and 45. 7

Notably (accepting the traditional sonnet sequencing), 59 is bookended by two sonnets that do explicitly discuss ‘time’ (58 and 60).

8

Works representative of this temporal turn in early modern studies include Lucy Munro’s Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Simona Cohen’s Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden: Brill, 2014); David Houston Wood’s Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Jonathan Gil Harris’s Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and Philip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin’s Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (New York: SUNY Press, 2002).

9

Kristine Johanson, ‘Never a Merry World in England: The Rhetoric of Nostalgia in Elizabethan England’, in Representations of Elizabeth in Early Modern Culture, ed. Alessandra Petrina and Laura Tosi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2011), 210–227, and Johanson, ‘On the Possibility of Nostalgias’ and ‘In the Mean Season: Richard II and the Nostalgic Politics of Hospitality’, in Parergon (2016).

10 ‘Nostalgia, n.’, Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com [accessed 15 December 2015]. To discuss ‘nostalgia’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is more challenging than criticism might have us believe: the word doesn’t appear until 1688, and then as the potentially fatal disease of homesickness. 11 Hamlin, Bible, 55, 112. Shakespeare ends the entire sequence with an allusion to the Song of Songs, intimating this preference for the Wisdom books. 12 The booke of common prayer, and administration of the sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1609). The 1549 and 1559 editions offer different dates from 1595 and 1609 editions, which also differ from the 1662 edition. (I consulted the 1595 and 1609 editions as this time period is representative of when Shakespeare was

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likely working on the sonnets.) Katherine Duncan-Jones states that this verse was read every 29 October (Sonnets, 228); however, it is the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach) that would have been read on this date. While abbreviations for both books are used interchangeably in some editions, in all the editions I consulted the Kalendar moves to a new biblical book following ‘xii’, the final chapter in Ecclesiastes, a strong marker that the whole book was read in successive first lessons. See also The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 228. 13 Hamlin, Bible, 29. 14 Additional examples of Ecclesiastes printed alone or with other biblical books, and/or exegeses on Ecclesiastes, appeared in the following years: 1534, 1535, 1539, 1541, 1545, 1546, 1547, 1549, 1550, 1572, 1577, 1585, 1589, 1591. 15 Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.a.519. The riche cheyne conteyning all the parables & sentences wrytten in the two bookes of Salomon intituled the Proverbes and Ecclesiastes collected & suted unto such consequence as best might helpe memorye to get them all by heart (1589). 16 Ecclesiastes repeats ‘vanity’ thirty-two times. 17 The work appeared posthumously in Certayne chapters of the prouerbes of Salomon drawen into metre by Thomas sterneholde (London: Edmund Whitchurch, 1549–1550). See Andrew Taylor, ‘Suffering and Scholarship: The Contexts of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s Ecclesiastes’, Translation & Literature 22:2 (2013), 167–81. 18 A few examples include Joannes Campensis’ 1532 prose, Latin paraphrase of Ecclesiastes (of which Miles Coverdale was the likely translator); John Hall’s Certayne chapters take[n] out of the Prouerbes of Salomon, wythe other chapters of the holye scrypture, and certayne psalmes of Dauid, translated into Englysshe metre by John Hall (London, Thomas Raynalde, 1550); and the anonymous, The riche cheyne Folger MS V.a.519. Henry Lok suggests that ‘If in any thinge I seeme to swarve from thy conceit of many points, I pray thee confer farther therein, with D. Gregorius, Neocerasiensis Epis. Olimpioderus, D. Salonius Epis., Viennie[n]sis, Theod. Beza,

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Joh. Serranus, Anth. Corranus, Tremilius, all translators and paraphrasers in prose upon this worke, and I. Lectius, Ro. Lemmansis, I. Vivianus, reducers thereof to Latin poesie’, Ecclesiastes (London: Richard Field, 1597) [Avr]. On Campensis, see Taylor, ‘Suffering and Scholarship’, in which he notes that Campensis’ Latin prose paraphrase of the Psalms – ‘with which his Ecclesiastes regularly appeared’ – was a ‘European bestseller’ when it appeared in 1532 (170). 19 James Doelman, ‘Seeking “The Fruit of Favour”: The Dedicatory Sonnets of Henry Lok’s Ecclesiastes’, ELH 60:1 (1993), 15. 20 Adam G. Hooks, ‘Shakespeare at the White Greyhound’, Shakespeare Survey 64 (2011), 267. 21 Ibid., 263, and citing Colin Burrow, 264. 22 Lok, ‘To the Right Ho. Earle of Southampton’, Ecclesiastes (London: Richard Field, 1597), Xiiir. 23 Gabriel Egan, ‘Parnassus Plays’, in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, general ed. Michael Dobson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 337. Michael G. Brennan, ‘Lok, Henry (d. in or after 1608)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/16949 [accessed 15 June 2015]. 24 Vendler interprets this singularity as blasphemous; see Sonnets, 282. 25 Lok, Ecclesiastes, 1.11.4–5, 7. In this notation, 1.11 represents the biblical chapter and verse the poem paraphrases, and 4–5, 7 the lines of the poem itself. All further notations will be made in the text using this system. 26 Hamlin, Bible, 32–3. That Lok’s text places original biblical verses alongside his poems and abstracts the verses into rhyming couplets are just two ways of his connecting his Ecclesiastes interpretations to the source text. 27 William Shakespeare, Shake-speares sonnets Never before imprinted (London: G. Eld for Thomas Thorpe, 1609), Er. 28 Kerrigan sees the repetition of words in Sonnet 21’s ‘rehearse’; Sonnets, 201. 29 Vendler, Sonnets, 282. Booth, Kerrigan and Duncan-Jones do not comment on the If-to-sure movement.

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30 Vendler discusses the ‘modulat[ion]’ of Sonnet 57; see Sonnets, 274. 31 Ingram and Redpath define ‘composed wonder’ as ‘impeccably proportioned miracle’ in Sonnets, 139, Kerrigan as ‘well proportioned and assembled miracle’ in Sonnets, 248; see also Vendler, Sonnets, 282. 32 Kerrigan notes the connection of hearing through sight that is a repeat of Sonnet 23; see Sonnets, 247. 33 Lisa Freinkel, ‘The Name of the Rose: Christian Figurality and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 254–55. 34 Bradin Cormack, ‘Decision, Possession: The Time of Law in The Winter’s Tale and the Sonnets’, in Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation among Disciplines and Professions, ed. Bradin Cormack, Martha Nussbaum and Richard Strier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 46.

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4 Unfulfilled Imperatives in Shakespeare’s Sonnets John Roe

The imperative form is bold and declarative. It naturally fits affirmations of love, such as occur with great frequency in Shakespeare’s sonnets, particularly in the ‘young man’ sequence (Sonnets 1–126). And yet, certain of these are strangely fraught with doubt. The imperatives work almost as a hope cloaked in insistence that anger and suspicion can be overcome; that a spirit of redemption may temper those offences that undermine love. One senses the speaker’s anxiety to save love from failure. Whether delivered in the third person (impersonal), or second (vocative), all imperatives aim to make something happen.1 And yet, in the majority of the sonnets I shall look at, the use of the imperative seems to be undermined by the attempt to force its conclusion. The sonnet’s outcome resists the imperative and leaves the situation unresolved. As the sequence unfolds and the poet’s relationship with his young friend reaches its unhappy denouement, it becomes clear that imperatives either fail to fulfil their aim or, if they achieve it, do so in unexpected ways. Commands may falter, or they may be refused (something we discover by implication), or they may 77

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suggest, in their very manner of delivery, a doubt that they will succeed. Sonnets such as the celebrated ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ (116), or ‘Let not my love be called idolatry’ (105), afford examples of the impersonal imperative, as opposed to the vocative ‘you’ form. They make a general assertion, not aimed at anyone in particular, but one that is no less forceful for all that. As ancient orators all observed, in such cases negative affirmation (‘Let me not’ [emphasis added]) – a kind of litotes – is so phrased as to carry greater effect than positive affirmation. Vocative forms, for their part, occur throughout, beginning with the ‘procreative’ sequence (1–17). For example, ‘Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another’ (3.1–2). This is a relaxed form of imperative and falls into the character of disinterested advice-giving, the clear source for which seems to be Erasmus’s praise of marriage (Encomium matrimonii) and which, as scholars have established, Shakespeare would have found most readily in Thomas Wilson’s 1559 The Arte of Rhetorike.2 At the conclusion to the friendship with the young man the poet signs off with a final injunction to him to take heed of offending nature: ‘Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure: / She may detain, but not still keep her treasure!’ (126.9–10). Here the advice is more cautionary, and the verse strikes various ominous notes, suggesting that the deficiency in the young friend is now of a moral sort, and not just the tardiness of one who has not yet got round to finding a wife. I will examine occurrences of the imperative in several sonnets by Shakespeare (Sonnets 18, 73, 90 and 120), as well as in one Petrarchan sonnet, Canzoniere 248 (‘Chi vuol veder quantunque po’ natura’), which I think compares interestingly with one of the Shakespearean examples. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (18) offers the recipient a life eternal, or quasi-eternal, in verse (‘as long as men shall breathe or eyes can see’), as compensation for the shortness of life actually lived. It is a version of Ars longa vita

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brevis est, which normally offers the artist or poet himself the kind of immortality that here Shakespeare in his sonnet offers the young friend. The imperative is expressed in the verb ‘shall’ (ll. 9, 11): Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor loose possession of that faire thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men shall breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. One among several questions that occurs is how certain can the poet be of such an assurance. What substance does his promise have? What do we who are reading now see with our eyes? We do not see a specific young man in his particular beauty. We see rather a generic kind of sonnet beauty that is being celebrated and which could apply as easily to a woman. Many readers, including some critics, would maintain the addressee is a woman.3 Be that as it may, the poem by dint of its being in words rather than existing as a visual image is indeterminate as to what particular beauty or likeness it is celebrating. If you compare it with, say, Bronzino’s 1530s ‘Portrait of a Young Man’, or indeed any number of portraits of about this time, then the difference between pictorial and verbal representation is clear enough.4 Bronzino’s likeness suggests the recovery and preservation of a real person, someone whom contemporaries would have recognized. Even if the sitter is unknown to us personally, he is nonetheless

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more obviously physically present than is the subject of the sonnet. A second difficulty with responding to the promise of Shakespeare’s sonnet is that, unlike the portrait sitter, the young friend may be pure fiction. We all know about the speculation over identity in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and the claims put forward by rival schools for preferred favourites (e.g. the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Pembroke), but if he was an invention like the characters of the plays, what then?5 However, let us suppose he did exist. Is it then that Shakespeare is deceiving us, and for that matter the young friend, and that his real purpose is to prove Ars longa vita brevis est, and that what we are responding to is the art of the poetry alone? What is eternal is the verse. We are invited to imagine something that is not there, and yet we are encouraged to see it as if it were there. The poet is invoking the reader’s ‘eye of mind’, which is very powerfully compliant in any artistic representation. Take the relevant stanza from The Rape of Lucrece, where the poem shows us the stricken heroine gazing on a picture of the Fall of Troy, following her rape by the king’s son Tarquin: For much imaginary work was there, – Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles’ image stood his spear Gripp’d in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head Stood for the whole to be imagined. (ll. 1422–8) 6 Here Shakespeare makes use of a visual arts convention to show how poetry produces its images, many of which are like those deployed in the depiction of Achilles – that is, incomplete until the reader supplies them. This constitutes a major difference from the Bronzino portrait.7 With the Achilles

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example, despite the fact that entire physical details remain out of view, the spectator knows exactly how to supply them. - or feels certain how to make the picture complete. Similarly, in the sonnet representation we seem to see the young man, even though we are really seeing nothing. Shakespeare’s boast of conferring immortality on the subject of the sonnet is then in some sense true, but perhaps not quite along the lines at first suggested. There is another way of looking at this. (I am continuing to suppose there was a relationship between the poet and a young man, which inspired the sonnets.) The sonnets record and preserve not the people but their friendship, which in turn inspires those who read of it, centuries after the event. We have no specific persons or relationships that we can, with certainty, identify or refer to.8 We are nonetheless responding to what the poet wrote about himself and his friend, including the poet’s evocation in words of the friend’s beauty. We must be careful here, as the words tell us very little – indeed, almost nothing – in physical terms of what the young friend looked like. If he were to be more precise, then we would be given only a generic portrait of Renaissance male good looks. Anything less, for example, a verbal portrait with Rembrandtlike natural blemishes, would fail the contemporary criterion for beauty, and would be inadmissible. So what we do respond to is the intensity of feeling that the young man has caused in the poet. Of that there is no question. That makes him seem vividly present to the reader. Furthermore, all readers recognize and empathize deeply with the feelings conveyed, some straightforward and direct, others extraordinarily complex. In that respect the poet is speaking truthfully when he invokes the impersonal imperative to tell his young friend that his verses shall confer immortality on him.9 Its claim lies in its expressiveness, its accurate representation of a state of mind or feeling, delivered with a conviction that makes us feel we are seeing a real person. Of the examples of imperative with which I am dealing, Sonnet 18 is on these terms very close to achieving fulfilment.

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Now what of the others? In the second sonnet I am looking at, number 73, the poet contemplates his own mortality and asks what he, or more properly they, should do about it: That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang; In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self that seals up all in rest; In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed, whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by; This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well, which thou must leave ere long. The solution, if it can be called a solution, is completely different from what was earlier proposed in Sonnet 18. There is no longer any aspiration towards eternity, except of course for the achievement of the ‘eternal lines’ themselves of the sonnet. What we have in terms of the human theme is a strong plea, an emotional imperative, to make the most of whatever quantity of life is left to the lovers to enjoy together: their summer, or whatever of summer they may hope to share in his winter. This comes to the fore in the final couplet, which is the sonnet’s resolution: ‘This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well, which thou must leave ere long’. What he, the addressee, perceives is strong evidence of the effects of age in his older friend, the poet. So, no eternal life is promised; only an intensification of this life in the face of impending death. Hovering between the words ‘love’ and ‘leave’ we may hear the carpe diem imperative, ‘live’.10 We attend to a form of carpe diem (seize the day), not spoken in the usual way, that is, to urge the beloved to love in return, but

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delivered with a similar sense of urgency in the face of mortality. Unlike the usual carpe diem convention, the poet has his beloved’s assurance that he returns his love with equal intensity. Or has he? Is there perhaps not something a little desperate or wish-fulfilling about the end? I do find the last couplet puzzling in its manner of affirmation. It is the choice of words that arrests my attention: ‘To love that well, which thou must leave ere long’. Who is doing the leaving, if not the poet rather than the young man? The young friend will be left hanging around. The way it is put, however, is as if the young man himself must go into that dark night that awaits the poet. Others have found this reversal odd, and some editors have suggested that ‘leave’ is a mistake in transcription, and emend to ‘lose’.11 Not that that helps all that much, as it still places the young man, rather than the poet, in the position of suffering. Of course this in itself is reasonable enough, as the young friend, being left behind, will be bereaved, or the poet likes to assume that he will be. Nonetheless, it says, in effect, ‘you must go’ (‘thou must leave’), whereas the more expected form of expression would be to stress the poet’s own leave-taking.12 There may be a purely stylistic justification for the verb ‘leave’: it echoes the choice of ‘leaves’ in l. 2 and so performs a nice symmetry: ‘When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang’ (emphasis added). However, I still find the order disconcerting, and I suspect that it is meant to disconcert.13 It is as if Shakespeare surprises himself in the act of composition, making the line suggestive of more than a straightforward reading. He certainly surprises the reader. We are taken in a different direction from what we expected, as if another kind of imperative has taken over. If we take what we know of the relationship of the poet and the young friend from other sonnets in the collection, and always assuming that these other sonnets are about that relationship, then we may conclude that the line arrives as it does to promote a sense of uncertainty, a sense of unease, which we find further elaborated on as the ‘young man’ sequence reaches its conclusion.14

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My third sonnet is by Petrarch and it follows thematically in one important sense from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, in that it too deploys the carpe diem imperative in a novel and unexpected way.15 This is Canzoniere 248: ‘Chi vuol veder quantunque po’ natura’: Chi vuol veder quantunque po Natura e ‘l Ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei ch’è sola un sol, non pur a li occhi mei, ma al mondo cieco, che vertù non cura; [If you would see what Heaven and Nature may achieve here among us, come and gaze on one who not for me alone is the sole sun, but for the world that’s blind to virtue’s way;] He then strikes a note of urgency: e venga tosto, perché morte fura prima i migliori, e lascia stare i rei: questa, aspettata al regno delli dei, cosa bella mortal passa e non dura. [and come in haste, for death too soon will prey upon the best and let the bad remain: so she, awaited in the gods’ domain, a lovely mortal thing, must pass away.] (ll. 104–5) 16 Petrarch moves at a slightly more leisurely pace, in order to dwell on the beauty of the lady, known as Laura by readers of the Canzoniere, but, like Shakespeare, at an opportune point he adapts the carpe diem manner of address.17 Act now or it will be too late and you will regret it. Both poets modify the terms of carpe diem, Petrarch more radically than Shakespeare, who may just possibly have had an eye on the Italian poet. Most readers see no direct connection between Petrarch and

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Shakespeare, but one can never be sure.18 Each poet varies the idea by making death appear more urgently present, Shakespeare by emphasizing the aging qualities of the speaker now, in this instant, rather than at some indefinite future time. Petrarch speaks of a real death, which is rapidly approaching: ‘venga tosto, perché morte fura / prima i migliori’ (‘come in haste, for death too soon will prey’), and this death has a particular historical significance. Petrarch is writing at the time of the Black Death, which ravaged Europe in 1348, and he implies that Laura is one of its victims.19 Petrarch is more radical than Shakespeare in his adaptation of the carpe diem convention because he makes it work in favour of a spiritual appeal, which it normally opposes. What he is saying to his audience is, ‘if you do not come and look upon her now it will be too late for you’. The imperative is thus directed at the reader and not at her, as it normally is by the lover. She is perceived at the moment of transition from this world to the next, and at this moment we are given a glimpse of divinity through her, such as we are not likely to see again. Vedrà, s’arriva a tempo, ogni vertute, ogni bellezza, ogni real costume giunti in un corpo con mirabil tempre; allor dirà che mie rime son mute, l’ingegno offeso dal soverchio lume; ma se più tarda, avrà da pianger sempre. [You will behold, if you arrive in time, each virtue, beauty, royalty of mind joined in one body to a wondrous temper, then you will say that silent is my rhyme, excess of lightning striking invention blind; but more delay will make you weep forever.] (ll. 9–14) Petrarch has co-opted a form of argument that he would normally want to use for different purposes as a lover, and he

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perhaps surprises himself (as Shakespeare may have done at the end of Sonnet 73) by producing an argument that runs against his original intentions, which would be those of a Troubadour lover pleading for mercé. At the same time, he makes his lady live for posterity too – that is, for we who necessarily arrive too late; he presents her to us with the same vividness but lack of specificity that Shakespeare finds for his ‘portrait’ of the young friend in Sonnet 18. Sonnet 90 affords an example of what might be called anticipatory or preventive imperative, in the sense that the commands it issues fly in the opposite direction to what the speaker really wants. ‘Then hate me when thou wilt’ comes at a juncture where the poet is beginning to feel that he may be being outflanked by other, superior poets, who are persuading the young friend that they (one of them, at least) have more to offer than he has. Sonnet 86 (‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse’) generally holds the position as the outstanding contribution to this set (which begins with Sonnet 76, just a couple of poems after the heartfelt plea of ‘That time of day’). As things crumble around him and the poet fears that his ousting from the youth’s affections is imminent, if not actually happening, he manoeuvres the situation so that he seems to be controlling the feelings that have taken charge of the friend, even though those feelings (dislike, indifference) are the last things a lover can command: Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now, Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross, Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, And do not drop in for an after-loss. Ah, do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow, Come in the rearward of a conquered woe; Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, To linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, When other petty griefs have done their spite; But in the onset come, so shall I taste

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At first the very worst of fortune’s might; And other strains of woe, which now seem woe, Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so. The expression ‘drop in for an after-loss’ means effectively to pile one injury on top of another. The stratagem behind this imperative is to persuade the friend that the loss of his love is tantamount to, indeed greater than, the world’s denunciation. The sonnet executes a return, though in an inverse manner, to the terms of Sonnet 29, the famous, ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. There the assurance of the young man’s love enables the speaker to transcend fortune (and all other threats or obstacles to his happiness): Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising, From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate. (ll. 10–12) He appears literally to rise above the world; in Sonnet 90 he sinks below it, but with an undiminished sense of allencompassing emotion. The youth’s withdrawal of his affection will be a blow of cosmic proportion to the speaker, rivalling the effects of fortune (named twice in the poem). The unspoken motive of the argument is to deliver a eulogy to the young man, and in such a novel way as to make him think twice about giving up the poet. It thrives in particular on the sonnet form’s adeptness at antithetical manoeuvring, so that as in – though not precisely as – Sonnet 29, the young friend’s abundant gifts emerge as the basis of the appeal. Sonnet 90 is about emotional timing, and as such itself enacts the imperative: ‘do it now, not later’. The poet anticipates rejection and attempts to pre-empt this with his sonnet, as he orders the young man to get in first, ‘in the onset come’, an imperative that in fact pleads for its inverse: ‘Do not do it, neither now nor later’. Whether or not this ploy, in addition to that of standing in awe of the lover’s all-powerful (all-destructive) majesty, will work,

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remains uncertain, but the intensification of the appeal is curiously salvationary: ‘And other strains of woe, which now seem woe, / Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so’ (ll. 13–14). For ‘loss of thee’ substitute ‘love of thee’, which is the affirmation lying beneath the desolate statement the words make. The finale of the poem exhilaratingly swells with an assurance that runs counter to its literal meaning; perhaps – who can foretell? – such a powerful declaration of the speaker’s potential loss will make the young friend think again before finally abandoning him. Dejection paradoxically finds a persuasive voice. In terms of the narrative sequence, we cannot be sure whether or not this desperate imperative, which pleads its antithesis, has been fulfilled. A rapprochement between them appears to have occurred by the time we get to the celebrated, and celebratory, Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’), though the circumstances even here suggest that the poet is battling with fears of inconstancy. Everything takes a fresh turn for the worse in the sequence beginning 117, where the poet’s own infidelity begins to come under scrutiny. Of this set of sonnets, Sonnet 120 has a particular way of finding the nadir. ‘That you were once unkind befriends me now’, delivers its key imperative – ‘must’ – in the last line: That you were once unkind befriends me now, And for that sorrow, which I then did feel, Needs must I under my transgression bow, Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel. For if you were by my unkindness shaken, As I by yours, you’ve passed a hell of time, And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken To weigh how once I suffered in your crime. O that our night of woe might have remembered My deepest sense how hard true sorrow hits, And soon to you, as you to me then tendered The humble salve which wounded bosoms fits! But that your trespass now becomes a fee, Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me.

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This poem comes late in the sequence of sonnets addressed to the young friend, always supposing the order is reliable. Something about the atmosphere and mood, with the emphasis on night and painful intimacy, might qualify it as a ‘dark lady’ sonnet. It is always possible, but that will not affect our reading.20 The extraordinary and perhaps miraculous thing about Shakespeare’s sonnets is that despite the multiple difficulties attempting to contextualize them presents us with, there is no difficulty in understanding and responding to the feelings expressed, particularly in a case like the present one. Having said that, I must admit some of the lines here are more complex in expression than any of those in the three earlier sonnets of Shakespeare’s that I have looked at. Clearly the poem is not celebratory, as is Sonnet 18, nor does it affirm the strength of the young friend’s love, as Sonnet 73 tries to do. Nor does its speaker plead to be loved, as in the ingenious, inverse procedure of Sonnet 90. It is on the contrary desperately penitential, and pleads instead for forgiveness. It is about betrayal – this time the poet’s betrayal of the young friend – and as such it marks a change of direction in the record or account of the relationship between the poet and the young man. Art is well placed to represent or comment on the duplicity that exists in life, as lovers play each other false. Previously the poet has suffered pain at his friend’s hands; now he himself is guilty of a ‘transgression’, as he puts it, and he strives in an agony to make amends. To paraphrase the sonnet: the poet is remembering how he once suffered hurt (‘how hard true sorrow hits’) and he is hoping that the friend’s offence may be drawn upon to offset or compensate for the injury that the poet is guilty of inflicting.21 The friend’s own previous penitence clearly worked, as the poet forgave him. This I think is clear from the lines, ‘As you to me then tendered / The humble salve, which wounded bosoms fits’ (ll. 11–12). Will it work in reverse? The poet seems to fear that it might not. He appears to have missed a possibility of making amends: ‘O that our night of woe might have remembered / MY deepest sense,

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how hard true sorrow hits’ (ll. 9–10). ‘Remembered’ means ‘reminded’, so that the lines indicate that in the present anguish that they share, if only he had been able to recall (‘my deepest sense’) just what it is to suffer such affliction, he might have been able to do something to assuage his friend’s pain. That word ‘might’ suggests that he has not. The plea in the last couplet, that having been hurt himself makes up for the hurt he has just inflicted, may not quite work either, as he has not really found a way to heal the wound. The young friend is apparently holding out on him. The poet having inflicted the injury is nonetheless the one who is suffering because he is not being forgiven. There is something desperate about the imperative, ‘yours must ransom me’. Is he going to be ransomed? Notice incidentally that while it was the young man’s fault or trespass that originally required forgiveness from the poet (and we assume the pardon was delivered), now it is the whole person of the poet that is at stake: it is not my offence that requires pardon but me, me in my entirety.22 Arguments follow a logical pattern but they keep being thrown out of their expected development. In Petrarch’s case, which we looked at above, a familiar idea is deployed but in a fashion that utterly inverts its normal application. In Canzoniere 248, the rhetorical gambit achieves what it wants do, and carpe diem is made to serve the spiritual. For Shakespeare’s speaker in Sonnet 120, success is less assured. Heather Dubrow notes the use of the rhetorical device of euphemismos, whereby he attempts to make his fault felix – something that is easily achieved for the young man in Sonnet 41 (‘Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits’) but which contributes here to the sense of emotional strain.23 Expressions of painful intimacy, such as we see in Sonnet 120 of Shakespeare, are unique in an Elizabethan sonnet sequence, and I have no doubt that that is the reason why Shakespeare was reluctant to publish them.24 A line such as ‘you’ve passed a hell of time’ uses idiomatic language in an intimate familiar way that shocks sonnet decorum and has no equivalent anywhere in the plays. Although the word ‘hell’

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occurs frequently in Shakespeare’s theatre (169 times, in fact), it is not pronounced with the disturbing colloquial force that it has here. Will the poet ever be forgiven by or truly reconciled to the young friend? The formal resolution of the last couplet, enacting the imperative ‘must’, ‘But that your trespass now becomes a fee, / Mine ransoms yours, and yours must ransom me’, is not matched by any confidence that what it demands will be fulfilled. Despite the fact that the sonnet form, with all its regularity, appears dedicated to closure, I suggest that this does not happen easily, nor with any sense of finality or security. The more urgent the imperative, the more evasive is its conclusion.

Notes 1

For an excellent discussion of making things happen in the sonnet, see David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially the Introduction and Chapter One, ‘Performatives: The sonnets, Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It’.

2

See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 135.

3

Consider in addition Heather Dubrow’s argument that ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets may be ‘Young Man’ sonnets, in ‘ “Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47:3 (1996), 291–305.

4

Metropolitan Museum of Art: H.O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of Mrs. H.O. Havemeyer, 1929.

5

The practice of proposing identities for the young man has generally lapsed, but Katherine Duncan-Jones has recently made a determined bid in favour of Pembroke. See her Introduction to the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Arden, 2010), 52–69.

6

E.H. Gombrich traces the theory behind this to the ancient commentator on art Philostratus in his Imagines, books 1–4.

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See Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 4th edition (London: Phaidon, 1972), 176–7. 7

Except for the question of facial expression, and that too is different from the technique Shakespeare celebrates in the Achilles portrayal. Art critics differ notoriously on their interpretation of the kind of feeling conveyed by a face. (Who knows how to read the features of the Mona Lisa?) Even though everything is present in a portrait, often something remains unexpressed.

8

Compare note 5.

9

As with Petrarch’s ineffable and elusive Laura, we feel in reading an intensity of presence that owes nothing to external indicators.

10 See Anthony Mortimer, ‘Shakespeare et le vrai mystère des Sonnets’, Le Temps (Geneva, Switzerland), 16 March 2016. 11 Gerald Massey was the first to do so in 1866. See Hyder Edward Rollins, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. The Sonnets 24:1 (Philadelphia and London: Lippincott, 1944), 189. 12 Ingram and Redpath offer ‘part with’ as opposed to ‘depart from’, which puts the young man in a slightly more passive role. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. W.G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), 169. 13 Stephen Booth records the echoing of ‘leaves’ by ‘leave’, and observes in the ‘double action’ the ‘contrariness that the poem manifests throughout’. See Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1977), 260. Helen Vendler, however, takes a more positive view of the symmetry, arguing that the poem’s perspective fits the natural laws of nourishment and consumption. See The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997), 336 14 Sonnet 120 (see below) is after all the culminating sonnet in a quartet (117–120) in which the poet unsparingly scrutinizes his own culpability for the damage done to the friendship. 15 I first mooted the carpe diem argument about Petrarch’s sonnet, Canzoniere 248, in my paper, ‘Translation: Petrarch and Ronsard and Carpe Diem’, delivered at the Renaissance Society of America conference, in Venice (Session: Poets, Artists, and Whores, 10 April 2010, Università Ca’ Foscari – San Basilio.

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Organizer: William J. Kennedy, Cornell University; Chair: Wayne A. Rebhorn, University of Texas, Austin). 16 Petrarch, Canzoniere, trans. Anthony Mortimer (London: Penguin Classics, 2002). 17 Petrarch never uses the name Laura as such, but indicates it by repeated punning, as in l’aura, l’auro and laurea. See, for example, Canzoniere 5, 90 and 246. 18 Gordon Braden argues convincingly that what draws the two poets together is the twin theme of happiness recollected in absence and the foreboding sense of betrayal. Notwithstanding, this does not mean that Shakespeare took his ideas directly from Petrarch. See ‘Shakespeare’s Petrarchism’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 2000), 163–83. 19 The truth of Laura’s existence has been debated as much as that of the man or woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets. For example, see the thorough but sceptical study by J.B. Trapp, ‘Petrarch’s Laura: The Portraiture of an Imaginary Beloved’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001), 55–192. 20 Compare Dubrow’s conclusions, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”’, 303. 21 Joseph Pequigney claims the word ‘once’ implies that the young man commits ‘a single slip into licentiousness, immediately repented’. Pequigney is keen to emphasize the youth’s comparative innocence, laying stress on what he sees as the poet’s obsessive jealousy in the quartet of sonnets to which 120 belongs. See Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 142–3. 22 If as is generally assumed the poet is thinking back to no. 34, with its ending, ‘Ah but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds / And they are rich, and ransome all ill deeds’ (ll. 13–14), then we are made to understand that the young friend has an unanswerable advantage (his beauty) which cancels his transgression – an advantage which sadly is denied to the poet. The idea of the pardon required for the whole person of the poet is a point well made by Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 510.

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23 Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 211. 24 The sonnets came out a decade after the vast majority of them were written, after the sonnet vogue had peaked, and probably without Shakespeare’s blessing; they circulated among friends, but he was not anxious to get them into print. I suspect the frankly sexual nature of the ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets is another reason. For a contrary view, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets really unauthorized?’, Review of English Studies 34 (1983), 157–71.

PART TWO

The Sonnets in Context

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5 Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Event Colin Burrow

In an essay from 1934 Elizabeth Bishop compared writing a poem to shooting clay pigeons. It is all a matter of timing, she said: A man stands in a shooting gallery with a gun at his shoulder aiming at a clay pigeon which moves across the backdrop at the end of the gallery. In order to hit it he must shoot not at it directly but a certain distance in front of it. Between his point of aim and the pigeon he must allow the necessary small fraction of space which the pigeon will cross in exactly the same amount of time as it will take the bullet to travel the length of the shooting gallery. If he does this accurately the clay pigeon falls, and his timing has been correct. In the same way the poet is set on bringing down onto the paper his poem, which occurs to him not as a sudden fixed apparition of a poem, but as a moving, changing idea or series of ideas. The poet must decide at what point in its movement he can best stop it.1

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Bishop’s way of talking about the creation of a poem clearly registers the aftershocks of imagism and modernism. Writing a poem is about achieving temporal arrest, about stopping something mid-flight and about precision timing. The poem is a singular event, in which a moment is captured. It explodes into someone else’s mind, like the apparition of faces in the crowd or petals on a wet, black bough. This view of poetry as a singular event, pitched into a moment, is profoundly alien to the poetics of Shakespeare’s period. If one had asked an Elizabethan to talk about a poem as an ‘event’ they would have responded with a blank look. The word ‘event’ in Shakespeare’s period did not mean a ‘happening’ or a ‘seismic shift’ or a ‘sudden revelation’. An ‘event’ was usually a contingent future occurrence, which could turn out one way or the other. The meaning of the English word was strongly coloured by the Latin word eventus, which was defined in Thomas Thomas’s Latin dictionary of 1587 as ‘Happe, chaunce, successe’.2 An ‘event’ might be the outcome of a battle before it had been fought, or the result of a hazardous financial venture before it had been completed. The most famous usage of the word in Shakespeare illustrates this sense: when Hamlet accuses himself of ‘thinking too precisely on th’ event’ (4.4.40) he means that he is paralysed by reflecting on an unknown future outcome – and one surrounded with hazard, which he has to keep on reimagining – rather than acting to bring it about. That is to say, in early modern English, ‘events’ were generally things which had not yet occurred, rather than sudden explosions, or epiphanies, or the stuff of the here and now. This essay has two main aims. The first is to argue that Shakespeare’s sonnets should be thought of as ‘events’ in this future-centred, early modern sense of the word. These poems, I will argue, can be usefully be regarded as ‘events’ in the sense that Jonathan Culler uses the word in his recent study of lyric poetry. Culler argues that the fundamental characteristic of lyric ‘is not the description of and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an event in the

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lyric present’.3 That is to say, lyrics do not address one time or occasion, but many possible occasions. The second aim of this essay is to explain why critics since the late eighteenth century have tended to treat the sonnets as relating to ‘events’ in a rather different sense, as more or less oblique representations of the ‘events’ (in the present-day sense) of Shakespeare’s life. Perhaps the most difficult and important task facing the critic of the sonnets is both to explain why people have thought of the poems as autobiographical, and to suggest why they are wrong to do so. I shall suggest that thinking of these poems as ‘events’ in the early modern sense is a helpful way of solving this conundrum. When the book called Shakespeare’s Sonnets was first published, a little more than four hundred years ago, it was something of what we would now call a non-event.4 The existence of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets among his private friends’ had been trumpeted by Francis Meres over a decade before.5 Had the collection of 154 sonnets been published then, in the aftermath of the success of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, they would have been an event in the modern commercial sense: a literary sensation, a happening. By 1609, however, they were distinctly belated, and, like their author, ‘beated and chapped with tanned antiquity’ (62.10).6 The fashion for sonnet sequences had more or less passed in England (though not in Scotland), and by 1609 Shakespeare’s name in print was associated principally with plays rather than poems. There are few signs that many readers made much of them: Ben Jonson and John Milton both occasionally echo their phrasing, and there are signs that Michael Drayton also read them, but they did not generate anything like the excitement that greeted Venus and Adonis in 1593.7 It was not until the late eighteenth century that they were subjected to serious critical attention. Shakespeare’s Sonnets came to be associated, more explicitly than any other poems from Shakespeare’s period, with the events or supposed events of their author’s own life. By the mid-nineteenth century a fairly consistent set of questions were asked about them. Was the ‘Mr W.H.’ referred to in the

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publisher’s dedication to the 1609 volume to be identified with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, or with William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, or with an actor called Willy Hughes, or with the Lancashire gentleman William Haughton, or with William Hathaway, or (more recently) with William Holme the stationer, or with some other W.H.?8 Was he the same person as the young man to whom many of the first 126 sonnets appear to be addressed? The literary-critical equivalents of gossip-columnists had (and continue to have) a field day with these unanswerable questions, which tingle with sexual possibility. Along with the real people came a story.9 In the first seventeen sonnets, it came to be said, the poet addresses a vain young nobleman who refuses to marry, and whom the poet comes subsequently to love. The youth commits a number of unspecified wrongs (‘those pretty wrongs that liberty commits’, 41.1); there is a separation during which a rival poet appears on the scene; then there is a period of reunited and freshened love, followed by a set of poems to a dark woman, with whom the young man seems also to have been involved. Even sophisticated readers have been driven to read the sonnets in this narrative way. John Berryman, for example, bleakly summarizes the relationship of poet and young man by declaring: ‘He and the poet are often separated. He is unfaithful to the poet with the poet’s mistress.’10 Why have critics wanted to believe that the sonnets narrate a set of events which in turn relate to the events of Shakespeare’s life? The chief reason is that many of the poems appear to adopt the modes of address that usually accompany exchanges between two (or three) people. They have an ‘I’ and a ‘you’ (who is sometimes a ‘thou’) and a ‘she’, as well as a ‘now’, a ‘then’ and an awareness of the future. These personal and temporal deictics appear to embed them in a complex of relationships, social, spatial (the friends sometimes separate), temporal and emotional (the poet has ‘passed a hell of time’ and imagines the friend has done so too; 120.6). The forms of address used in the sonnets also suggest a complex mingling of

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social and emotional relationships – sometimes even to the extent of seeming to be supplications or epistles to a social superior: Sonnet 26, indeed, is presented as a ‘written ambassage’ to the ‘Lord of my love’ (ll. 1–3). The poems therefore seem socially locatable, and yet they do not provide details of specific events – names, places, dates. This combination at once stimulates and frustrates post-Romantic desires to embed the sonnets in a single situation or story.11 It took the growing interest in Shakespearean biography at the end of the eighteenth century – notably in the editorial and biographical work of Edmond Malone – to marry these rhetorical features of the poems to biographical speculation. Once that marriage had occurred it was one to which it was hard to admit impediments. Its medium-to-long-term consequence was that critics and editors right through the nineteenth century up until the present have wanted to relate Shakespeare’s sonnets simply to events, in the modern sense of the ‘events of Shakespeare’s life’. This is not just critically naive. It is a mistake. We can see why it is a mistake by briefly considering the way Shakespeare generally treats love lyrics within his plays. In plays from the 1590s in particular, lyric poems are presented as complex forms of social action. The dissemination of what (in the loose terminology of Shakespeare’s period) would be called sonnets – short poems, often about love – does not reveal facts. It creates reactions. The clearest example is Act  4 of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Here the courtiers, who have abjured the love of women, all compose lyrics to advance their secret passion for their newfound mistresses. They rehearse their ‘sonnets’ in anticipation of delivering them to their mistresses, in private, as they believe. In fact, each of them is overheard by Berowne, and sequentially by each other. Each is found to have betrayed his oath when he is caught red-handed as the author of a lyric. This scene suggests that in Shakespearean drama love lyrics are social actions which can go wrong. As a result, instead of declaring ‘I love you’ to their addressee, they tell an audience ‘he loves her’. Usually the audience knows that ‘she’ is the wrong person for the author of

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the lyric to be loving. This raises questions about the fidelity and credibility of the author, but it also suggests something more: that for Shakespeare one danger and perhaps also a delight of a lyric poem is the way it addresses more occasions than its author can imagine. The audience of a lyric can only be partially anticipated, since a lyric is both an interpersonal event and a document which can go astray. This means in turn that the ‘event’ (in the early modern sense of ‘the outcome’) of lyric poetry is uncertain. A poem might be created as an act of address to one beloved, but once it is ‘published’ – in the loose sense of being witnessed by anyone other than its author and its apparent addressee – it can have a force and effect which is entirely unpredictable by its author. This has consequences for the interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Their publication in 1609 may have been ‘authorized’ by Shakespeare, or it may not have been.12 Either way these poems are preoccupied with the future and with how they will be read. At a purely statistical level they are not particularly future-heavy: the auxiliary verbs ‘will’ and ‘shall’ appear in them with slightly less frequency than they do elsewhere in the Shakespearean canon.13 But that fact obscures the extent to which these poems meditate on ‘events’ in the early modern sense. They reflect on death, decay, the ‘millioned accidents’ (115.5) of time, on what would happen to the young man or his estate if he were to die without issue. Repeatedly too the poems reflect on their own physical persistence after the immediate fictional occasion of address, on what they will mean to future readers and on what kinds of immortality they might or might not enjoy or convey. The group of poems traditionally called the ‘rival poet’ sonnets (78–86) link these concerns with an interest in the effects of disseminating poems. The group of sonnets about the unnamed rival or rivals are about many things – about how the plain repetition of truth can acquire an almost liturgical validity, about verbal ornament and about fashion. But they also raise other questions. How is it possible to replicate and disseminate sonnets of praise and love without destroying the

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intimacy on which they are based? How do you differentiate your praise of a love object from other people’s praise of the same object? How can you convey the beauty of your addressee to future readers without encouraging other poets to praise him too? The unnamed rival(s) produce ‘richly compiled’ poems ‘with golden quill’ (85.3), and present ‘dedicated words’ marked with the ‘fresher stamp of the time-bettering days’ (82.3, 82.8). They are flashy calligraphers, but they may also use the ‘stamp’, as some commentators have believed, in the sense of the printing press. These poets are almost certainly not identifiable individuals. Indeed, the most persuasive recent study of the rival poet suggests that this figure is a fictional composite prompted by Shakespeare’s association with his rivals Ben Jonson, George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe in around 1598.14 The group of poems about the rival poet, though, is also the product of anxieties about publication in the broad sense of dissemination of a poem beyond the occasion of interpersonal exchange. If the image of the beloved is disseminated, others might love and praise him too, and (as it were) over-disseminate him. This might vulgarize or sully the love object, and it might also lead him to reward other people more and our poet less. This means that the ‘rival poet’ sub-group is concerned at least in part with managing the future effects of the sonnets. This is the principal reason why right in the middle of them is Sonnet 81, a poem concerned with the future life of the sonnets and the young man: Or I shall live, your epitaph to make; Or you survive, when I in earth am rotten; From hence your memory death cannot take, Although in me each part will be forgotten. Your name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, to all the world must die; The earth can yield me but a common grave, When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie. Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

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Which eyes not yet created shall o’er-read, And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead. You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. This poem instantly signals its concern with contingency: ‘Or [. . .] Or’: either this, or that. It also marks itself heavily as concerned with the future by repeatedly using ‘Shall [. . .] shall [. . .] shall’. The future spreads, even forcing the grammatically present form ‘are dead’ (l. 12) to register death in the future, and suggesting that your (present) being is also a future being, related by ‘tongues to be’. Editors have often suggested that Sonnet 81 is misplaced, and that it does not belong to the ‘rival poet’ sub-group.15 But it does respond to the same concerns as that sub-group, and in doing so sets out one of the main paradoxes of the sonnets. They are presented as the products of the pen rather than the ‘stamp’ or printing press. As a result, they appear to belong to the register of intimate personal exchange rather than a public dissemination. And yet they attempt to give to the pen a magical vitality, a fertility which enables the young man to exist in the future. That dissemination is, peculiarly enough, not dependent on ink or the recitation of the young man’s image, name or virtues in print, but on oral testimony: on ‘breath’ and ‘tongues’. These are not just oral forms of testimony: they are biological forms of reproduction, which give to readers in the future an almost physical intimacy with the young man. He may not breed, but in breath and tongues he shall ‘live’ in a way that is more than simply textual. The poem places the beloved, in Culler’s words, in ‘the special “now,” of lyric articulation’, which is at once interpersonal and iterable.16 That is to say, the sonnets present themselves at once as specific conversational acts, and as ‘events’ in a chronologically extended sense that takes them beyond and outside the conventions of normal conversation. I have suggested that for Shakespeare the lyric is associated with the social consequences of public utterance, and that the

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sonnets often adopt grammatical forms associated with interpersonal address. These features of the poems have led a number of critics to approach them through ‘speech act’ theory deriving from J.L. Austin and John Searle. Helen Vendler repeatedly finds ‘speech acts’ in individual poems, and David Schalkwyk has argued that a social drama is enacted in the poems’ modes of address.17 It is alluring to think of the sonnets as being, or as using, speech acts: that is, as kinds of discourse in which saying something also does something – as when we say ‘I promise to pay you five pounds’. Thinking about them in this way presents a way of explaining their interpersonal energy, and of explaining why they might act on readers now without being in any simple way related to Shakespeare’s biography. But the many attempts to read the sonnets in the light of speech act theory have tended to gloss over the fact that the tradition of analytic philosophy in which Austin and Searle operated was extremely squeamish about fiction, which it frequently presents as resembling ‘real life’ discourse but with something missing or lacking. Austin declared that a ‘performative utterance’ such as promising will be ‘in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem’, and that such usages were ‘etiolations’ parasitic on normal usage.18 ‘In a peculiar way’ presumably indicates that Austin does not really understand what the effect of an oath performed by an actor might be, but that he knows the actor is not bound by its terms. John Searle suggests that fictions contain ‘pretend’ speech acts – and in using that word he claims not to intend to denigrate fiction, but to suggest that fictional utterances suspend ‘the normal operation of the rules relating illocutionary acts and the world’.19 It is self-evidently the case that a poem does not make a promise in the way that a couple make promises when they participate in a ceremony of marriage. That, however, does not mean a poem cannot be part of a subtler subset of linguistic performances which act upon another person without being in the philosophical sense speech acts such as promising or swearing.20 We are invited by

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a poem to imagine the situations in which a particular utterance might take place, and are consequently invited to imagine its action on its actual or fictional recipient or audience. As a result, we can appreciate, and perhaps even for a moment experience, the interpersonal force of an utterance or speech act – the social force of a promise which cannot be fulfilled, for instance, or of a hyperbolical claim like ‘You are my all-theworld, and I must strive / To know my shames and praises from your tongue’ (112.5–6). This, though, leads to two further problems which result from bringing speech act theory to bear on the sonnets, both of which can be at least partially alleviated by thinking about the sonnets as lyric ‘events’. The first is the obvious coyness of the sonnets about names and places, which makes the illocutionary forces of the poems intrinsically unfixable: who is speaking to whom? When and why? The second problem arises from the sonnets’ preoccupation with the future. Speech act theory generally presupposes the presence of an interlocutor.21 Any address to an unknown future audience necessarily brings contingency into any speech act. Who will hear it? How will they respond? Each of these features of the sonnets makes them operate in a creatively duplicitous way across the normal conventions of conversation, and marks them as lyric ‘events’: readers are invited to be both inside the moment of reading and outside it. They are tempted into the past and into the future, as they imagine the circumstances of the utterances which they read; but they are also often invited to reside within their own bodies. Take that final couplet in Sonnet 81: ‘You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen, / Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men.’ The couplet is an act of defiance or even a triumph against time. It may give us each the momentary delight of imagining that we are the ‘you’ who is addressed: ‘you now who read this shall live’. But at the same time the reader is required to be not the addressee of the poem but the future, one of those mouths which read aloud the praise. That displaces us from the present of the poem, but it makes us

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again participants in its action. We make it into an event in the here and now as we, by reading and reciting the poem, make its promises to eternize the young man come true.22 But then again we might step back. ‘Where breath most breathes’ promises the breath of life, and ‘mouths’ may suggest even a carnal union with the young man: he is almost imagined dallying on our tongues, in a French kiss that is also a birth. But ‘breath’ also connotes insubstantiality, a nothingness. The whole phrase recalls the paradoxical fusion of body and air which Montaigne terms ‘this ayrie body of the voice’.23 This allows the sonnet simultaneously to suggest that the young man may have quasi-bodily life in the mouths of men but that he is also unnamed, a breath, a type of the impermanent. The ‘event’ of the poem remains unresolved even during its future performance, since its promised life is no more than breath. Those who validate its claim to make its addressee immortal by future performance are also reanimating its doubts. This is typical of the peculiar way in which the sonnets act on those who read them: they repeatedly suggest that their readers are being directly acted on, now, in an almost corporeal way (‘even in the mouths of men’). They also often suggest that their full force will operate only in the future. That is how these poems function as ‘events’ in the early modern sense. They seek futurity, and they even do it now; they also repeatedly suggest that their event (in the sense of ‘their outcome’) is as uncertain as the events from which they appear to spring. These rather gnomic remarks may be clarified by Sonnet 107, which comes from the climactic group of poems to the young man. This poem shows the formidable complexity with which the sonnets can deal with what is happening, what has happened and what will yet occur: Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come, Can yet the lease of my true love control, Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,

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And the sad augurs mock their own presage; Uncertainties now crown themselves assured, And peace proclaims olives of endless age. Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes, Since, ’spite of him I’ll live in this poor rhyme, While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes; And thou in this shalt find thy monument, When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent. This sonnet has often been related to particular historical events. Samuel Butler (and later Leslie Hotson) argued that the ‘mortal moon’ referred to the defeat of the crescent-moonshaped forces of the Spanish Armada.24 This would place the poem in the late 1580s. Others have proposed dates as late as 1609. Recent editors have tended to suggest that it was written around 1603–4, and that the ‘mortal moon’ alludes to the death of Queen Elizabeth I in March 1603.25 The fact that commentators have proposed a twenty-year spread in dates should alert us to the extraordinary fluidity with which Sonnet 107 manipulates time and tense. It is temporally capacious, probing past, present and future. The first quatrain presents a limitless futurity of love which evades all mortal imaginings. The poem may focus on a present in the second quatrain, a time of succession and change, but that quatrain opens out to include past prophesies which are now proved incorrect, and finally to envisage ‘olives of endless age’ stretching out into the futurity in which the poem itself is imagined as living on. Peter Robinson has seen the poem as a speech act which requires us to participate in making its promises of future life come true, but that is perhaps to take it too straightforwardly as a hymn to the perpetuity of love or verse.26 Its repeated emphasis on false past prophesies (the world dreaming on things to come, the sad augurs) contaminates its own final prophecies of permanence. It is, as it were, a self-fulfilling prophecy which undoes itself. By claiming to be a monument it becomes a monument; but it claims to be a monument in a poem about

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failed prophecies in a way that suggests the vanity of its own prophetic stance. The poem declares that ‘Incertenties’ (in the quarto) now ‘crown themselves assured’, and that phrase of blinding complexity throws up a variety of possibilities: does the act of being self-crowned magically transform uncertainties into certainties? Or does that phrase describe an act of foolish self-assertion, in which a completely uncertain thing usurps the state and pretends that it is ‘assured’, certain? The poem offers no way of arbitrating between these alternatives. The final quatrain is the most startling of all. It seems to focus on the present, on the ‘Now’ of ‘this most balmy time’, the moment when the poet’s love looks fresh. But does that temporal indicator refer to ‘now’ in the future while we sit reading the sonnet, bringing the love back to life? Or does it refer (say) to the moment when the Earl of Southampton (the dedicatee of Shakespeare’s narrative poems and one of the prime candidates to be identified as ‘Mr W.H.’) was allowed out of the Tower of London on 10 April 1603, and so escaped the ‘confined doom’ to which he had been consigned after being implicated in the Essex rebellion of 1601? The ‘now’ of the present becomes the future; the ‘now’ of the poem is the place in which the poet dwells and in which the ‘thou’ of the poem also finds his monument. This ‘now’ is an ‘event’ in the early modern sense, a contingent thing which may turn out one way or another. The poem is an ‘event’ receptive to futurity, but it cannot, as a result, be fixed in a single occasion or moment. What are the larger critical implications of this discussion? One is historical. That moment four hundred and more years ago when the great event – or non-event – of the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets occurred was one of anxieties about publication. Publication could be a means of disseminating and multiplying the image of the person praised or the beloved. But it was also potentially a moment of risk, when poems which presented themselves as private addresses to an individual might reach the eyes of uncomprehending or unsympathetic interpreters. The features of the sonnets on which this essay has dwelt are defensive responses to the intrinsic awkwardness of a

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printed sonnet sequence. A published sonnet sequence publicizes a relationship which it represents as intrinsically private. The poems it contains therefore seek anxiously to manage their own reception. They do not identify their occasions or addressees, and imply that their force is dependent on future readers. The other aspect of the argument presented here, though, is counter-historical. The philosopher H.P. Grice argued that speech acts within a conversation must obey what he calls the ‘Cooperative Principle’. Such speech acts must, Grice argues, be perspicuous, avoid falsehood and supply the right level of information. These austere principles might bring to mind injunctions written on the walls of a certain type of English public school (‘boys must not run in the corridors, and must be perspicuous and avoid falsehood at all times’) rather than most people’s experience of actual conversations, which generally consist of occasional confidences, jokes, partial truths forgotten or misremembered, a dash of performance and a measure of anxiety. Even Grice, though, as he attempts heroically to transform all conversation into a solemn tutorial in analytic philosophy, does acknowledge that some utterances disobey the rule that we should ‘be perspicuous’. Revealingly, he takes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, addressed to the ‘mastermistress’ of his passion, as an example of a deliberately ambiguous speech act. And perhaps even more revealingly, our headmasterly philosopher misquotes the poem: Partly because of the sophistication of the poet and partly because of internal evidence (that the ambiguity is kept up), there seems to be no alternative to supposing that the ambiguities are deliberate and that the poet is conveying both what he would be saying if one interpretation were intended rather than the other, and vice versa; though no doubt the poet is not explicitly SAYING any one of these things but only conveying or suggesting them (cf. ‘Since she [nature] pricked thee out of [sic] women’s pleasure, mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure’).27

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There is of course a major equivocation in the lines which Grice attempts to quote: the quarto’s ‘prickt thee out for womens pleasure’ means both ‘selected you for’ and ‘equipped you with a penis’. Stephen Orgel has also suggested a more complicated, homoerotic reading for the unmodernized text of these lines, which Grice’s misquotation suppresses: that ‘use’ can function as a verb as well as a noun, so ‘thy loves use their treasure’ could mean ‘your love is mine and I being your love will use my treasure, which is your penis’.28 Curiously enough, perspicuity Grice produces a mangled text of these lines which also has homoerotic overtones: what does ‘pricked thee out of women’s pleasure’ (emphasis added) mean? Could it suggest that nature is pricking the young man away from women’s pleasure and commending him instead to the pleasure of men? How can one deal with such an unruly interlocutor as Shakespeare, who fails to obey the rules, who fails to cooperate, who even manages to suggest homoerotic intent within an explicit disavowal of homoerotic intent? Of course: he can only be a poet, and is therefore not ‘SAYING ’ (in capitals) anything at all. Which is why, perhaps, Grice feels free to misquote him. There is, as I have suggested and as even Grice recognizes, a stubbornness to lyric poetry. Shakespeare’s sonnets do not limit their implicatures in orderly ways to those appropriate to a single occasion. These poems imply a level of shared knowledge between author and addressee which their readers in the future lack, and which the poems themselves do not provide. Their stubbornness in this respect generates hermeneutic permanence. That is, in order to validate their claim to offer perpetual praise the poems must not be limited to time or date, or to particular events. They must invite their readers to suppose circumstances which they know they can never know, and which are continually reimagined and reassessed. That means there is, as it were, an uncooperative principle built in to lyric poetry, which is an enabling condition of its iterability.29 A sequence of lyric poems may imply an event or set of events or a scenario; then it might provide an additional fragment of information which suggests the scenario

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is different from that originally implied. It is because poems can do this that they are not situated utterances, but rather partially situable utterances, which would not yield up everything which they could be even if the exact circumstances which prompted them were known. That places my argument in a complex relation to historical criticism. I am prepared to offer a high-level historical account of why Shakespeare’s sonnets are as they are. Shakespeare’s particular way of dealing with publication anxiety, I would suggest, can explain why readers have traditionally wanted to provide a narrative for the sequence, and to identify its principal characters – the dark lady, the young man and so on. Readers supply what he leaves as blanks. My historical account also suggests that readers are misguided if they seek to lock the poems into a particular interpersonal relationship. These poems are not about ‘events’ in the sense of ‘the events of Shakespeare’s life’ or ‘the Earl of Southampton’s release from the Tower’. They are themselves ‘events’ in Hamlet’s sense – objects not fully knowable, stubbornly full of futurity. That means my historical account of the sonnets is finally the enemy of historical interpretation as it has often narrowly been conceived. Any attempt to relate a poem to a single occasion necessarily ignores what we might term the uncooperative principle of lyric, which is central to the trans-historical vitality of poetry. The hermeneutic consequences of the uncooperative principle are that poems are event-full not in the modern but in the early modern sense – they evoke situations, invite hypotheses, anchor themselves for a moment in the tones of interpersonal address, and then they uncooperatively unsettle themselves from that setting. This, I would suggest, is how we should think of Shakespeare’s sonnets as ‘events’: the ‘event’ is always still to come. They do not behave like interpersonal speech acts. They generate a readerly restlessness, as we feel ourselves being manoeuvred now within and now outside the social situation partially implicit in the poems, looking now from an imagined inside and now from an imagined outside. And that process is temporally and ethically exhilarating: it

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encourages readers to feel themselves now part of the poem, then slightly outside its conversational structures. At such moments readers are invited to experience not the poem’s historicity as much as their own futurity in relation to the poem, and perhaps also the future potential of the poem – that another world, another tongue, might read the poem again, differently. The most destructive thing that can be done to these poems, perhaps to any lyric poem, however, is to think precisely on its event. If we seek to shoot it down, like a clay pigeon, and fix it in a single moment, we kill it.

Notes 1

Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 274.

2

Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (London: Richard Boyle, 1587), X5r.

3

Jonathan D. Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA , and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 226.

4

See Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘What Are Shakespeare’s Sonnets Called?’, Essays in Criticism 47 (1997), 1–12.

5

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (London: P. Short for C. Burbie, 1598), fols. 281v-282r.

6

Quotation here from William Shakespeare, The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Arden modernizes ‘chopt’ as ‘chopped’.

7

Jonson echoes ‘lines of life’ from Sonnet 16.6 in Underwood 70.64; Louis Schwartz, Milton and Maternal Mortality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 86–7, persuasively argues for connections between Milton and Shakespeare’s sonnets.

8

The major theories are discussed in William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1944), II. 166–241. For Holme, see Geoffrey Caveney, ‘ “Mr. W.H.” Stationer William Holme (d. 1607)’, Notes and Queries 62:1 (2015), 120–4.

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For a critique of the imposition of narrative on the Sonnets, see Heather Dubrow, ‘“Incertainties now crown themselves assur’d”: The Politics of Plotting in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996), 291–305.

10 John Berryman, Berryman’s Shakespeare, ed. John Haffenden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 286. 11 See Burrow, Complete Sonnets and Poems, 118–38. 12 Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’, Review of English Studies 34 (1983), 151–71, argues for, and Colin Burrow, ‘Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems’, Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1997), 15–50, argues against. 13 The frequency of ‘shall’ and ‘will’ (including variant forms such as ‘ile’, ‘shalt’ and ‘wilt’) is roughly 0.79 per cent in Sonnets, roughly 0.83 per cent in Hamlet, and roughly 0.84 per cent in All’s Well. In Shakespeare’s earlier drama, frequencies tend to be a little lower (0.77 per cent in Love’s Labour’s Lost and 0.71 per cent in As You Like It). The relatively low incidence of future modals in the sonnets may be affected by the presence in the sequence of a number of poems of early date. See A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘When Did Shakespeare Write “Sonnets 1609”?’, Studies in Philology 88 (1991), 69–109. On Shakespeare’s ways of indicating futurity see Jonathan Hope, Shakespeare’s Grammar (London: Thomson, 2003), 150–1. 14 See MacDonald P. Jackson, ‘Francis Meres and the Cultural Contexts of Shakespeare’s Rival Poet Sonnets’, Review of English Studies 56 (2005), 224–46. 15 ‘Most commentators would eliminate 81’, The Sonnets, ed. Rollins, II , 277. 16 Culler, Theory of the Lyric, 226. 17 See David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Peter Robinson, ‘Pretended Speech Acts in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Essays in Criticism 51 (2001), 283–307. See also Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997), passim. For Searle’s views on fiction and speech acts see John R. Searle,

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Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 58–75. 18 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 22. For the literary aspects of Austin, see in particular J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6–62. 19 Searle, Expression and Meaning, 67. 20 On the latter, see John Kerrigan, Shakespeare’s Binding Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 21 This point lies at the heart of Derrida’s response to Searle, Jacques Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c . . .’, Glyph 2 (supplement) (1977), 1–81. 22 Cf. Robinson, ‘Pretended Speech Acts’, 305, on Sonnet 107: ‘By reading it, we keep the prophetic truth of his promise: “I’ll live”, he says, and live he does.’ 23 Michel de Montaigne, The Essays or Morall, Politike and Millitarie Discourses, trans. J. Florio (London: Valentine Sims for Edward Blount, 1603), 220. 24 Samuel Butler, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Athenaeum (30 July 1898), 161; Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Dated and Other Essays (London: Rupert Hart Davis, 1949), 4–21. For a full list of occasions for this sonnet, see The Sonnets, ed. Rollins, II . 263–8. 25 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 1997), 1–4; Burrow Complete Sonnets and Poems, 594. 26 Robinson, ‘Pretended Speech Acts’. 27 H.P. Grice, ‘Logic and Conversation’, in Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, Syntax and Semantics Volume 3: Semantics (New York, San Francisco and London: Academic Press, 1975), 54. The first quarto of 1609 reads here ‘But since she prickt thee out for womens pleasure, / Mine be thy loue and thy loues vse their treasure’ (C1r). 28 Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57. 29 ‘Si l’on admet que l’ecriture (et la marque en général) doit pouvoir fonctionner en l’absence de l’emetteur, du récepteur, du

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contexte de producion, etc., cela implique que ce pouvoir, cette possibilité est toujours inscrite, donc nécessairement inscrite comme possibilité dans le fonctionnement ou la structure fonctionelle de la marque’, Derrida, ‘Limited Inc a b c . . .’, 20. Although John R. Searle, ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’, Glyph 1 (1977), 198–208, persuasively shows that Derrida has not fully appreciated the type/token distinction here, the principle of iterability presents a far more serious critique of the application of speech act theory to literature than Searle acknowledges.

6 A Lingering Farewell: Sonnet 87 Ann Thompson

Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou knowst thy estimate; The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing; My bonds in thee are all determinate. For how do I hold thee but by thy granting, And for that riches where is my deserving? The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving. Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking; So thy great gift upon misprision growing Comes home again, on better judgement making. Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. 117

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‘Farewell’ is the ostensible theme of this sonnet; the poet is saying goodbye to the loved one, who has withdrawn his or her affection. It is not one of the very best-known sonnets, but is often anthologized, somewhat to my surprise. It is included in the selections offered by The Golden Treasury, for example, and in two of the Oxford Books of Verse edited, respectively, by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Helen Gardner, as well as in The Norton Anthology of Poetry and in the various collections edited by Ted Hughes.1 Perhaps this is because the sonnet’s subject has a broad appeal, crossing any historical or geographical boundaries: we can all identify with the fear or indeed the experience of losing the affection of the person we love. This sonnet is easily extracted from the sequence to stand alone: it does not necessarily participate in any narrative relating to a rival lover or a rival poet; it has no gender-specific pronouns which would identify the loved one (or for that matter the poet) as male or female, though the word ‘king’ in the last line needs some degree of negotiation. It has no historical or literary allusions to puzzle a modern reader; its vocabulary is mainly familiar and its metaphors, drawn from legal and financial transactions, are still current: we have no difficulty in recognizing terms like ‘estimate’, ‘charter’, ‘bonds’ and so on. ‘Patent’ has become more restricted in meaning to its commercial sense, but we can guess easily enough that it means ‘right of ownership’. The word ‘dear’ still means ‘costly’ or ‘expensive’ as well as ‘beloved’, and this ambiguity helps to give the poem its memorable first line. In fact, the opening lines alone have become a familiar quotation in anthologies which categorize Shakespeare’s poems under topics such as ‘Farewells’: George Rylands used the first four lines of this sonnet in his collection The Ages of Man, Logan Pearsall Smith used just the first line in the ‘Sonnets’ section of his collection The Golden Shakespeare, and Jane Armstrong used the first two lines under the topic ‘Farewells’ in the more recent Arden Dictionary of Quotations.2 Yet there is a much darker undertone to this sonnet. The basic tone is one of accusation. The poet is not just saying

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goodbye or lamenting the loss of the loved one; he is saying, in effect, ‘you took back your gift’: the love itself is seen as ‘this fair gift’ in line 7 and terms related to ‘gift’ and ‘giving’ are repeated: Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking; So thy great gift upon misprision growing Comes home again [. . .] And it gets worse in that the poet suggests the reason why the lover has taken back the gift, saying in effect ‘You gave me your love, then you took it back when you realized that you are worth much more than I am’. It is of course a commonplace in love poetry for the poet to see the loved one as more worthy than himself or herself (the theme is continued in Sonnets 88, 89 and 90), but in this instance it is the loved one who has made (or is accused of having made) this judgement, causing it to seem particularly cold and self-serving. In his Cambridge edition G. Blakemore Evans suggests five possible paraphrases for line 2 (‘And like enough thou knowst thy estimate’): You know how much I love you You know how much you deserve to be loved You have a very high opinion of yourself You know how much others love you You know the value of the opinions of (a) me, (b) yourself, (c) others), (d) all of us.3 Evans omits ‘like enough’ from his paraphrases, but the tone of even these two words can be read differently: I had always assumed they were ironic, even sarcastic, but Carl D. Atkins says this colloquial expression makes the poem seem ‘personal and warm’.4 Philip Terry, a creative writer who specializes in ‘experimental translation’, offers a blunt paraphrase for the entire sonnet: ‘Good riddance! You’re too much for me. / And you don’t half fancy yourself.’5

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It is this kind of accusation or complaint which in fact puts this sonnet with others addressed to the young man, where the question of relative worth arises frequently, especially in relation to social class. We are frequently told that the young man is of a much higher class than the poet or, as here, that the poet is too cheap and the young man too dear for the one to possess the other. This issue does not arise in relation to the dark lady, where questions of worth and class do not seem to be relevant and the accusations or complaints tend to centre around questions of sexual fidelity. I want to look in more detail now at three particular aspects of this sonnet: first, the metaphors drawn from legal and financial transactions; second, the unusual rhyme scheme; and third, that somewhat problematic reference to ‘a king’ in the last line.

The legal and financial metaphors Although we have no difficulty in understanding the legal and financial metaphors of Sonnet 87, we probably would not expect to find them (or to use them) in a love poem written today. Gerald Hammond finds them ‘conspicuously ill-chosen’ and comments that ‘Legal and financial imagery dominates several sonnets in the sequence, but never so narrowly as here’.6 For Dympna Callaghan, the ‘relentlessly financial’ language contributes to what she sees as the ‘embittered tone’ of this sonnet.7 The metaphors can strike us as cold and calculating, and in the context of Sonnet 87 they surely are. But Shakespeare uses them elsewhere in a more neutral or even positive sense. Juliet, for example, anticipating her first night with Romeo, exclaims O, I have bought the mansion of a love But not possessed it, and though I am sold, Not yet enjoyed. (3.2.26–8)

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Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, presents herself in similarly material terms, telling Bassanio: I would be trebled twenty times myself, A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich, That only to stand high in your account, I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends Exceed account: but the full sum of me Is sum of something. (3.2.153–8) Offering to pay Antonio’s debt to Shylock, she assures Bassanio, ‘Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear’ (3.2.312). One might find a slight edge to Portia’s words at this point (especially when comparing the use of ‘dear’ with that in Sonnet 87), and there is a tension again in the words of Posthumus to Imogen on their parting in the opening scene of Cymbeline: As I my poor self did exchange for you To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles I still win of you. (1.2.50–2) He is basically saying ‘In the same way that I benefit more than you from our marriage because of my lower status, my gift to you (the bracelet) is not as valuable as yours to me (the ring)’, but his willingness to assess what the ‘exchange’ has cost Imogen seems slightly ominous. Later, repenting of his rash decision to have his wife killed, Posthumus is still thinking in financial metaphors when he prays to the gods: For Imogen’s dear life take mine, and though ’Tis not so dear, yet ‘tis a life; you coined it: ’Tween man and man they weigh not every stamp; Though light, take pieces for the figure’s sake, You rather, mine being yours. (5.4.22–6)

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As in Sonnet 87, there is an uncomfortable link between social status and material worth. Here Posthumus’ metaphor recalls his earlier disgust with female sexuality: We are all bastards, And that most venerable man, which I Did call my father, was I know not where When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools Made me a counterfeit. (2.4.154–8) But by Act 5 he sees both himself and Imogen as having been ‘coined’ by the gods and bearing their image, though he is ‘lighter’, that is of less worth, than she. These metaphors from the ‘stamping’ or printing of coins, and the associated notions of forgery and counterfeiting, are frequent in Shakespeare, as for example in Measure for Measure when Angelo rejects Isabella’s plea for mercy for her brother, who has made the unmarried Juliet pregnant: It were as good To pardon him that hath from nature stolen A man already made, as to remit Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image In stamps that are forbid. ‘Tis all as easy Falsely to take away a life true made, As to put mettle in restrained means To make a false one.8 (2.4.42–9) In Cymbeline the financial language comes in part from the wager story that is one of its sources, but modern readers and audiences might well find (as indeed with The Taming of the Shrew) something distasteful about men betting on their wives’ chastity or obedience. In Measure for Measure sex is widely regarded as a commercial commodity but in the sonnets there is no such ‘justification’ from a narrative source.

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A more straightforwardly negative example of similar metaphors being used critically in respect of the relationship between romantic love and what it costs in material terms can be found in Troilus and Cressida when Hector and Troilus argue about what it is costing the Trojans to keep Helen. Hector says Let Helen go. Since the first sword was drawn about this question, Every tithe soul ‘mongst many thousand dismes Hath been as dear as Helen. (2.2.17–20 ) Line 19 is difficult: in his Arden 3 edition, David Bevington paraphrases it as follows: ‘every human life exacted by the war as a tithe – and there have been many thousand such exactions’. (Some North American editions clarify by printing ‘dimes’.9) Hence the war is seen as requiring the Trojans to pay ‘tithes’ or taxes consisting of one tenth of their property or income – here one tenth of the population of Troy – in order to pay for Helen. Hector concludes bluntly ‘she is not worth what she doth cost / The holding’ (2.2.51–2). Hence it is not unusual for Shakespeare to use legal and financial metaphors when writing of sexual relationships, especially those between married or betrothed couples, or to associate the ‘worth’ of a person with a material equivalent, but in the plays the narrative context can offer a kind of explanation that is not available in the sonnets.

The rhyme scheme Sonnet 87 is unusual in its persistent use of so-called feminine endings, that is where the rhyme falls on the next-to-last syllable rather than on the last one: ‘deserve’ and ‘swerve’ would be masculine rhymes, as would ‘mistake’ and ‘make’,

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but the rhymes we find here, ‘deserving’ / ‘swerving’; ‘mistaking’ / ‘making’, and so on are feminine ones.10 Feminine rhyme does occur in other sonnets, including in some of the most wellknown ones. For example, in Sonnet 29 (‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’), Shakespeare rhymes ‘despising’ with ‘arising’, and in Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’), he rhymes ‘shaken’ with ‘taken’, but those are the only instances of feminine rhymes in those sonnets, whereas in Sonnet 87 all the rhymes except ‘estimate’ and ‘determinate’ are feminine, and ten of the words involved are present participles ending in ‘ing’. This is exceptional, almost unique. The only other sonnet with a comparable rhyme scheme is Sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion. A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hues, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth; And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting, And by addition thee of me defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing: But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure. In the case of this sonnet, Helen Vendler tells us that ‘the feminine rhymes enact the originally intended feminine sex in Nature’s creation of the young man’, while Gerald Hammond says they are appropriate to the comic or even grotesque tone of that poem.11 Neither of these arguments would seem relevant to Sonnet 87. In Shakespeare’s own time at least one other sonneteer, Samuel Daniel, expressed considerable doubts about the use of

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feminine rhymes and rewrote some of his sonnets in order to eliminate them. A notable example of this is his sonnet that begins ‘The star of my mishap imposed this paining’ in 1592 (Sonnet 27 in his Delia sequence), which is altered to ‘The star of my mishap imposed this pain’ in 1594; a further six feminine rhymes in the poem are similarly revised (‘waning’ becomes ‘wayne’, ‘speedy becomes ‘speed’, ‘need I’ becomes ‘need’, and three lines are more substantially rewritten to replace ‘assailing’ with ‘relief’, ‘aspiring’ with ‘wings’ and ‘mourning’ with ‘fears’). Joan Rees notes that Daniel altered thirty-seven feminine endings in revisions of his poems between 1594 and 1601, having become convinced that they were a blemish on his work.12 He writes about this in his Defence of Rhyme (1603): Besides, to me this change of number in a poem of one nature sits not so well, as to mix uncertainly, feminine rhymes with masculine, which, ever since I was warned of that deformity by my kind friend and countryman Master Hugh Samford, I have always so avoided it [. . .] Holding feminine rhymes to be fittest for ditties, and either to be set certain, or else by themselves.13 Daniel does not deplore feminine rhyme altogether, but objects to poets mixing feminine and masculine rhymes and asserts moreover that feminine rhymes are more appropriate to ‘ditties’ – presumably lightweight songs or lyrics. Other writers of the period describe them as ‘falling’ metres. John Harington in the 1590s saw two-syllable rhymes as being ‘sweet’ or cloying and associated them with languages other than English: They be so approved in other languages, that the French call them the feminine rhyme, as the sweeter, and the one syllable the masculine [. . .] I would have the ear fed but not cloyed with these pleasing and sweet falling metres.14 Ben Jonson also seems to be alluding to feminine rhyme when he writes

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Others there are, that have no composition at all; but a kind of tuning, and rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides, and only makes a sound. Women’s poets they are called: as you have women’s tailors. They write a verse, as smooth, as soft, as cream; In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.15 It seems curious that, in a kind of synaesthesia, feminine rhymes become associated with taste (‘cloying’) and oversweetness. Poetic sound becomes food, like music in the opening line of Twelfth Night – ‘If music be the food of love’ – which is quickly followed by the notion of falling: ‘That strain again, it had a dying fall’ (Twelfth Night 1.1.1–4). This does not seem to have deterred some writers, notably John Fletcher, from using them extensively in the drama, and indeed Shakespeare’s usage of feminine rhymes in his plays increases in the course of his career.16 Modern critics and editors have been troubled by the rhymes in Sonnet 87 and disagree as to their precise effect. George T. Wright, in his magisterial study of Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, argues that they ‘impart a playful spirit’ to these lines, contributing to ‘the light mockery which the speaker apparently directs at the young man, at himself, at his own argument, at his own predicament’, yet he goes on to cite a passage from The Rape of Lucrece (ll. 428–34) where he says the feminine rhymes ‘have the effect of increasing the wildness of [Tarquin’s] turmoil’ – so they are not always ‘light’.17 Gerald Hammond agrees that the effect ought to be playful: ‘feminine rhymes best fit a comical poem, or a piece of grotesquery like Sonnet 20, but here they stand at odds with the declared solemn intent of the sonnet’.18 Helen Vendler asserts that the feminine endings ‘enact the poet’s unwillingness to let the young man go’, finding a ‘back-and-forth movement’ between the speaker and the addressee which reflects the giving and taking back of affection; Heather Dubrow says the endings ‘create an impression that the lines are trailing off indeterminately, an effect that parallels the speaker’s

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difficulty at ending the relationship’, while Carl D. Atkins finds that the rhymes give the sonnet a ‘flowing gentleness’.19 Dympna Callaghan says the rhymes deliberately evoke the Petrarchan tradition: ‘The young man is behaving exactly like a capricious Petrarchan mistress who spurns the poet, the only difference being that the poet’s ruin is as much economic as it is emotional.’ She adds in a later section that ‘The feminine rhymes in this sonnet may reflect [the poet’s] dependence on the youth’, though it is not quite clear how they would do this.20 Several editors and critics use the word ‘elegiac’ in relation to the rhyme scheme and it is Helen Vendler who calls the sonnet ‘a lingering farewell’. One might argue that, in addition to being a technical tour-de-force and an opportunity for virtuosic display, the feminine rhymes in this case have a slightly plangent effect, expressing a sense of regret at the loss of love, despite the clear-eyed recognition of the cause. They give the verse a ‘dying fall’, as Orsino says. Thus the tone of Sonnet 87 seems complex, with a romantic or nostalgic attitude to the relationship deriving from its rhyme scheme mingling with the implied accusations of coldness and calculation prompted by its legal and financial metaphors.

A king In a poem with ten of its fourteen lines ending in ‘ing’, the internal rhyme of ‘a king’ and ‘waking’ in the last line is especially striking (and perhaps some of the plangency I have suggested comes from the way both suggest ‘aching’). I have always read ‘a king’ as a reference to the poet, thus the couplet would mean ‘I possessed you in the same way as a dream gives us pleasure: in sleeping I thought I was a king, but on waking I found I was not’. But a number of editors and critics, for example Stephen Booth, say that ‘a king’ might refer not to the poet but to the loved one, so the last line would mean ‘in sleeping I thought you were a king, but on waking I found you

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were not’.21 Colin Burrow also admits this ambiguity. He paraphrases lines 13–14 thus: So I have possessed you as one in a self-deceptive dream: while I was asleep I dreamed I was a king who owned all, but when I awoke I realised I was no such thing. But he then adds ‘There is also a suggestion of disillusionment with the loved one: “In my dreams you were a king”.’22 I do not find the ‘you were a king’ reading enormously convincing, but I am curious that it should persist. It is perhaps given some plausibility by our knowledge of one of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters, Falstaff, who did in a sense fantasize that he possessed a king, but woke to find Hal dismissing him as a dream: ‘I long have dreamt of such a kind of man / [. . .] But being awak’d I do despise my dream’ (2 Henry IV 5.5.49, 51). A further dramatic parallel might be found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Bottom wakes up to reflect on his relationship with Titania: ‘I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was [. . .] Methought I was – and methought I had – but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had’ (4.1.203–5, 207–9). Has Bottom ‘had’ his fairy queen any more than Falstaff has ‘had’ his prince? Have all four characters been dreaming? Hal at least would say that he was wide awake all along, as he makes clear in his first soliloquy: ‘I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyoked humour of your idleness’ (1 Henry IV 1.2.185–6).23 A more plausible parallel for the ‘I dreamt I was a king’ reading of Sonnet 87 is the experience of the beggar Christopher Sly at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew when he is cruelly tricked into thinking that he is really a lord. ‘It would seem strange unto him when he wak’d / Even as a flatt’ring dream or worthless fancy’ (Induction 1.42–3), the tricksters speculate. In the only good text we have of the play (in the First Folio) this awakening never happens, though it does in the anonymous play The Taming of A Shrew, and some

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productions of The Shrew indicate, by having a single actor double the parts of Sly and Petruccio, that the whole taming plot is Sly’s dream.24 Sly is alone in his imposed dream, but in Sonnet 87, as in 2 Henry IV and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there is at least a suggestion that two people dreamed the same dream for a while, but one of them woke up first, resulting in a brutal wake-up call for the other. A similar question arises as to what exactly ‘misprision’ refers to in line 11 of the sonnet. The most obvious meaning of the line is that the ‘great gift’, the friend’s love, originated in a mistaken judgement: Katherine Duncan-Jones borrows the poem’s own terminology when she glosses ‘upon misprision growing’ as ‘coming into existence as the result of a false estimate’, and that is how most editors read the line, but Stephen Booth says that ‘misprision’ can also mean ‘contempt’ (the Oxford English Dictionary supports this meaning from 1595), and hence ‘upon misprision growing’ could mean ‘contempt having increased’, implying that the friend’s original judgement was not necessarily wrong, but his scorn for the poet has grown over time.25 This is Shakespeare’s only use of the word ‘misprision’ in the sonnets, and it means ‘mistake’ or ‘misunderstanding’ on five of the six occasions when it occurs in the plays. But in All’s Well That Ends Well it seems to mean both ‘mistake’ and ‘contempt’ when the King chides Bertram for refusing Helen: Proud, scornful boy, unworthy this good gift, That dost in vile misprision shackle up My love and her desert. (2.3.152–4) He goes on to say ‘Check thy contempt’ four lines later at line 158. The association of ‘misprision’ with the ‘gift’ of offered love is striking here and may support Booth’s reading.26 Booth’s willingness to suggest multiple meanings reminds one of William Empson’s bravura reading of Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none’) in Some Versions of

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Pastoral, where he begins by puzzling over whether the flower, lily, ‘owner’ and person addressed in that sonnet are seen as being like each other or opposed to each other. He goes on: One would like to say that the poem has all possible such meanings, digested into some order, and then try to show how this is done, but the mere number of possible interpretations is amusingly too great. Taking the simplest view (that any two may be alike in some one property) any one of the four either is or is not and either should or should not be like each of the others; this yields 4096 possible movements of thought, with other possibilities. This would ‘dazzle [or dozy or dizzy] the arithmetic of memory’ as Hamlet puts it (5.2.116; different copies of the Second Quarto reads ‘dazzie’ and ‘dosie’, the Third Quarto reads ‘dizzie’ and the First Folio omits the line), but Empson very sensibly remarks that: one has honestly to consider what seems important [. . .] There is no reason why the subtlety of the irony in so complex a material must be capable of being pegged out into verbal explanations [. . .] One can’t expect, in writing about such a process, to say anything very tidy or complete.27 This is daunting for anyone attempting a close reading of a poem like Sonnet 87, but Booth and Empson both stand as examples of critics whose refusal to reduce poems to a ‘tidy or complete’ meaning is inspirational (as well as sometimes maddening).

Farewell The ‘farewell’ proposed in Sonnet 87 does not, however, happen immediately: there is no sense of a specific occasion being invoked, as there is for example in Michael Drayton’s

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Sonnet 61 in his 1593 Idea’s Mirror sequence, which begins ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’. Drayton’s sonnet purports to dramatize a particular moment in a relationship which seems to have come to an end, though it could yet be revived by an intervention on the part of the loved one. Rather, Shakespeare’s sonnet reiterates a more generalized fear or apprehension of separation that he has expressed before, in Sonnet 49 for example, which begins ‘Against that time, if ever that time come, / When I shall see thee frown on my defects’, and which similarly expresses a sense of his own unworthiness as the object of love. The sonnets that follow 87, namely 88 (‘When thou shalt be disposed to set me light / And place my merit in the eye of scorn’), 89 (‘Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault’) and 90 (‘Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now’), all form a kind of mini-series by continuing the general theme of a separation between the poet and his friend caused by a recognition of a disparity in their relative value, with Sonnet 90 in effect urging the friend to abandon him ‘now’, when other things in his life are going wrong: the loss of the friend will make other misfortunes seem trivial. But again, as in Sonnet 87, there is that underlying sense of accusation; here an implication that this is exactly the kind of thing the poet would expect his friend to do. Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets are written in anticipation of an imminent ‘farewell’. In most of them, the separation is mediated by a third party, whether the rival poet (in the poems preceding Sonnet 87), the dark lady or, most importantly and generically, the passage of time. Sonnet 87 is unusual in that the separation is attributed to something more like market capitalism, even though the metaphors derive from giving rather than buying and selling. It is as if the friend’s gift came with a price-tag on it and he has just realized that he has spent too much and has decided to take his gift back. The sequence continues, however, and some thirty more sonnets addressed to the young man follow in the 1609 text before the ‘dark lady’ sequence begins with Sonnet 127. If Raymond Chandler had

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given a title to these poems it would not be Farewell, My Lovely so much as The Long Goodbye.28

Notes 1

The Golden Treasury, ed. Francis Turner (London: Palgrave, 1861, and many subsequent editions); The Oxford Book of English Verse, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900 and 1939); The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1950, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, and many subsequent editions); The Norton Anthology of Poetry 5E, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: Norton, 2005); A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1971, revised and republished several times under various titles; see Reiko Oya’s essay in this volume). Sonnet 87 is not, however, included in Christopher Ricks’ Oxford Book of English Verse (1999), nor in Stanley Wells’ An Oxford Anthology of Shakespeare (1987).

2

The Ages of Man, ed. George Rylands (London: Heinemann, 1939 and 1960); The Golden Shakespeare, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (London: Constable, 1940); The Arden Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Jane Armstrong (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Mark Jay Mirsky uses ‘Farewell Thou Art Too Dear’ as a chapter title in his book The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Satire to Decay (Madison, WI : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011); the chapter covers Sonnets 83–101. I am indebted to my former PhD student Anne Isherwood for some of this information about anthologies: her thesis (‘Cut Out into “Little Stars”: Shakespeare in Anthologies’, King’s College, London University, 2014) was on the ways that ‘Shakespeare’ is created in anthologies from the 1590s to the present day.

3

The Sonnets, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23–5.

4

Carl D. Atkins, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with Three Hundred Years of Commentary (Cranbury, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007), 226–7.

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5

Philip Terry, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010).

6

Gerald Hammond, The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), 109–10.

7

Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 85.

8

For a longer discussion of metaphors from printing and coining in relation to sexuality, see Ann Thompson and John O. Thompson, ‘Meaning, “Seeing”, Printing’, in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 59–86.

9

For example, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997 and 2008) prints ‘dimes’, but the word appears as ‘dismes’ in the newly edited text in the third edition of 2015.

10 Some modern critics see the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ as sexist and prefer to write about ‘stressed’ and ‘unstressed’ syllables, or ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ rhymes, but these terms can be equally problematic. 11 The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Helen Vendler (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 381; Hammond, The Reader, 109. 12 Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), 21. 13 Quotation from Samuel Daniel: Poems and A Defence of Rhyme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1930, reprinted 1965), 156–7. 14 John Harington, preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 15. 15 Ben Jonson, ‘Timber, or Discoveries’ (1641), in Ben Jonson: The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1975), 396. 16 See George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988), 160–4.

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17 Wright, Metrical Art, 161–2. 18 Hammond, The Reader, 109. 19 Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 381; Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 220; Atkins, Sonnets, 226–7. 20 Callaghan, Sonnets, 87–8, 131. 21 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 291. 22 The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 23 William Empson develops possible parallels between the poet and his friend in the sonnets and Falstaff and his prince in 1 Henry IV in his chapter on Sonnet 94 (‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none’) in Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935). 24 This happened in Michael Bogdanov’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1978 when Jonathan Pryce played both Sly and Petruccio, and again in an even darker production for the same company directed by Conall Morrison in 2008 when Stephen Boxer doubled the roles. 25 Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 2010); Booth, Sonnets, 291. 26 The play on ‘prison’ and the idea of ‘false imprisonment’ or ‘wrongful arrest’ suggested in the All’s Well passage is also present in Twelfth Night (1.5.52). The other occurrences of ‘misprision’ are in Love’s Labour’s Lost (4.3.97), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.2.90), Much Ado About Nothing (4.1.184) and 1 Henry IV (1.3.26). 27 Empson, Versions of Pastoral, 89–90. Some time ago, John O. Thompson and I attempted to explore the complex metaphorical language of Sonnet 63 in a somewhat similar way by using the idea of ‘differentiation’ (how words can have different meanings in different contexts), borrowed from the philosopher J.F. Ross in his book Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This approach could perhaps also be applied to Sonnet 87. See Chapter 4 of our book, Shakespeare,

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Meaning and Metaphor (Brighton: Harvester Press and Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1987), 132–62. 28 Farewell, My Lovely was first published in 1940, The Long Goodbye in 1953. (It seems appropriate in this context that Chandler was educated at Alleyn’s Dulwich College.)

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7 Enduring ‘Injurious Time’: Alternatives to Immortality and Proleptic Loss in Shakespeare’s Sonnets J.K. Barret

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 145 contains fewer syllables than any of the poet’s other sonnets, but the quickened pace of the iambic tetrameter is hobbled by a lumbering conceit: the poem tells the story of the tense construction of a single sentence. Over the course of fourteen lines the ‘lips’ of the beloved ‘[b]reathe[. . .] forth’ a notably unidiomatic and inelegant formulation: ‘I hate not you’.1 Or, if we take the sonnet’s repetitions to be the beloved’s distinct utterances, ‘I hate [. . .] I hate [. . .] I hate [. . .] not you’. ‘Many commentators’, notes Stephen Booth, ‘have hoped that [Sonnet 145] is not by Shakespeare’.2 Even as he dubs it the ‘slightest of the sonnets’, however, Booth grants the poem a certain reflexive power, since ‘what the speaker tells us happened to him as he listened to his lady is what actually 137

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happens to a reader time after time as he reads these sonnets’ – that is, the ‘effect’ of ‘being surprised by a sentence that signals one direction and then takes another’.3 Yet this reversal, common though it is to many of Shakespeare’s sonnets, constitutes only a part of the drama conveyed in Sonnet 145, whose speaker – the anxious auditor of the sentence – also has a hand in shaping it. This marks the centre of Sonnet 145’s innovation: the exaggerated slow motion of the poem’s ‘plot’ puts the temporality of its syntax and grammar on conspicuous display. Time often appears in less subtle guises in the sonnets, repeatedly figured as fast, dangerous and relentless: ‘swiftfooted’ (19); ‘devouring’ (19); a ‘bloody tyrant’ (16); ‘neverresting’ (5). In Sonnet 145’s slow build, time’s passage is neither subject nor theme, but an element of the act of verbal construction it foregrounds. Line 9, for example, offers the speaker relief by indicating a lexical shift that parries the statement he most dreads: ‘“I hate” she altered with an end’. But that ‘end’ – ‘not you’ – is pointedly deferred until the sonnet’s final line. In the intervening lines, the speaker’s celebratory tone reveals that he already knows how the sentence will turn out, but he transfers his anticipation to the reader instead of speeding up his revelation. From the poem’s beginning, the speaker expects ‘doom’, which leaves him ‘languish[ing]’ in a ‘woeful state’, and this nervous surmise affects the path to the remedy at its end. The sonnet gives the sentence uneven momentum, halting, strained and grammatically awkward. The beloved’s power to speak the lover’s ‘doom’ is countered by the poet’s ability to anticipate, interrupt and run ahead of the narrative. That is, to control time through language. Sonnet 145 puts on peculiar display a phenomenon widespread in the sonnets: rather than a force always external to them, time is embedded in their very unfolding. Shakespeare’s sequence famously begins with poems that propose procreation as an antidote to time, and, as Michael Schoenfeldt has noted, ‘the poet of the Sonnets seeks out various bulwarks against [. . .] “Time’s thievish progress to eternity”’.4 However,

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Shakespeare’s sonnets are not merely subject to time, whether reproduction’s promised future or the violence of ‘time’s injurious hand’ (63). Instead, Shakespeare claims that the poet can provoke Time to ‘do thy worst’ (19), because poetry, with the Muse’s aid, can ‘prevent’ time (100) and the poet can ‘forbid’ it (19). On the one hand, this invokes a familiar story: even if procreation is a surer and more verifiable antidote to time’s passage, poetry will be read in ‘the age to come’ (17), it will become ancient (the ‘stretched metre of an antique song’; 17) and, ultimately, immortal. On the other hand, when Shakespeare imagines futures for his poems, he does not merely reproduce an immortality topos borrowed from antiquity. Rather, as Sonnet 145 makes strikingly, even painfully, explicit, Shakespeare’s array of temporal manipulations includes logical, grammatical and syntactical contortions that work to dislodge a poem’s speaker – not the poem itself – from time. The tortuous, and sometimes tortured, temporalities of poetic language open the sonnets, and the relationships they describe, to uncertain eventualities, for better and for worse. In addition to articulating fantasies about immortality, the sonnets also portray present moments overwhelmed or motivated by an anticipation of future loss. As Joel Fineman writes, ‘even that which one possesses, because it is possessed in transient time, carries with it, even at the moment of possession, a sense of loss’.5 Though not all sonnets ‘weep to have that which [they] fear[. . .] to lose’ (64), Fineman identifies a powerful undercurrent in sonnets concerned with the unpredictability of time and its fleeting nature. Amanda Watson offers a notably different account: ‘the sonnets do not memorialize an already lost beloved; instead, they look ahead to a time in the future when others, or at times the young man himself, will look back and try to remember [. . .] [T]he speaker deploys as many strategies as he can to ensure that something remains’.6 Yet neither Fineman’s melancholic reading nor Watson’s attention to industrious preservation accounts for Shakespeare’s tendency to highlight the contingencies and

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conditions he builds into the grammar of his poems, or his efforts to jostle and obscure a speaker’s position in time. In order to bring these alternative currents into focus, I concentrate on sonnets that foreground absence and distance – by turns, unremarkable and dreaded – to develop their temporality through seemingly simple structures like conditional phrases and repetitions, which unexpectedly complicate mechanisms for both anticipation and preservation. Shakespeare frequently employs such forms only to disrupt them, scrambling the signals on which both readerly expectation and logical argumentation rely: an initial ‘if’ is forgotten over the course of a sonnet, making the whole seem more determined than it is; a sequence of ‘when’s never generate the ‘then’ they predict; an enabling condition turns out to have been temporary. Time need not be thematized to be managed through these grammatical constructs, conditional phrases and freighted repetitions; rather, abandoning a formal pattern becomes a way for the speaker to operate independent of his own temporal frameworks or locate himself outside of them. In this essay, I propose that it is by way of such manoeuvres that Shakespeare charts alternatives to both proleptic mourning and recuperative ambition. Regardless of the outcomes announced in a pithy couplet, the temporalities that emerge in these poems compete for interpretive precedence because they are bound up in shifting grammatical patterns. In detailing the evolution of a sentence that can only build forward, no matter how awkwardly, rather than reverse course, Sonnet 145 exaggerates the twists and turns a thought put into words can take. As in its sentence, sonnets often double back on, supplant and leave strategically incomplete the building blocks of their composition. Whether they are contemplating imagined loss or resisting the losses they predict, individual sonnets display strategies of temporal manipulation that do more than despair or aspire to redeem. Instead, the sonnets demonstrate how the making of poetic sentences furnishes crucial resources for illuminating the uncertainty of patterns and anticipated outcomes. The control of time in the operations of language

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affords Shakespeare a reach distinct from ruin or immortal monument, one that extends beyond poetry’s interest in the power to eternize.

I Sonnet 55 is a traditional touchstone for Shakespeare’s employment of the immortality topos – it begins by echoing the opening lines of Horace’s Odes III .30 and the final lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, both of which celebrate poetry’s capacity to outlast even the most celebrated material objects: ‘Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’7 Yet, recent studies of the sonnets have questioned the critical ‘tendency to see Shakespeare’s sonnets as a monolithic endorsement of poetic immortality’, and have identified innovations that deviate from the familiar relationships to time for which the sonnets are well known.8 Beyond uniform or explicit pronouncements on immortality, the sonnets register a variety of perspectives that not only privilege how poems or individuals might lament or challenge time, but also explore how they can be located within it. In both Sonnets 29 and 30, for example, the absence of the fair youth does not function as a precursor to loss and lamentation. Instead, it showcases the restorative power afforded simply by thinking about him. In Sonnet 29, a relatively straightforward octave offers a comprehensive account of what the speaker does ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’ (29.1); the self-pitying activities prompted by that opening conditional (‘when’) are so all-consuming that the fair youth is not mentioned until line 10. Unlike the assured suffering implied by the preceding lines, the speaker presents the shift to the young man as a matter of chance: ‘Haply I think on thee, and then my state [. . .] sings hymns at heaven’s gate’ (29.10, 12). The young man – absent, but conjured by happy accident – alters the outlook of a speaker ‘alone’ and ‘in disgrace’: ‘For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I

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scorn to change my state with kings’ (29.13–14). Notably, however, this new perspective does not redress his lamentable circumstances. The modesty of the sonnet’s about-face mirrors the uncertain adverb ‘haply’, which is decidedly less secure than the ‘when’ that structures the poem’s initial conceit. Sonnet 30 offers a sturdier construct to keep its opening condition – ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’ (30.1) – on course. The formulation is explicitly answered by subsequent quatrains that begin with ‘then’, supplying a tighter, more predictable sequence. Not only is the young man absent, but the ‘remembrance of things past’ (30.2) that the speaker ‘summon[s]’ also has nothing to do with him. Rather, ‘old woes’ feel all the more burdensome for their repetitive diction: the speaker can ‘grieve at grievances’, ‘from woe to woe tell o’er’, and relate a ‘fore-bemoaned moan’. Far from disrupting the logical flow, these redundancies reinforce it. The second and third quatrains reveal that ‘sweet silent thought’ has also ‘summon[ed]’ extreme and unusual affective responses such as stirring tears in ‘an eye (unused to flow)’ (30.5). For this reason, it is all the more surprising that the couplet proposes the beloved as an antidote to loss, regret and suffering despite his absence: ‘But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored, and sorrows end’ (30.13–14). The late reference to the young man emphasizes the contingency of the condition that introduces him (‘But if’) even as the speaker reveals him to be a kind of secret weapon. The word ‘if’ in line 13 defeats the cloying, immersive mourning of a dredged-up past and recasts what has come before it. Sophie Read has claimed that the couplet’s reversal ‘strains credibility because it interferes with the elaborate temporal economy’ set up in earlier lines. She pinpoints the ‘deliberately cultivated and dangerously indulged’ flavour of ‘painful reflections’, which renders the ‘present thought [that] makes restitution for remembered grief’ difficult to believe.9 Yet, the sonnet does more than carefully manufacture emotion only to overturn it. Whether or not the sonnet’s amplified sentiments are disingenuous, the ‘temporal economy’ that Read cites develops

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from Shakespeare’s use of conditional phrases; those conditions order time because Shakespeare pairs the young man’s power with the speaker’s shifting grammar – ‘think[ing] on’ the ‘dear friend’ supplants other thoughts and emotions just as ‘if the while’ supplants the ‘when-then’ structure that governs the first twelve lines. Far from suggesting the sonnet’s own potential as a preservative vehicle, the speaker disavows any link between absence and loss. Instead, absence proves a flimsy obstacle echoed in the poem’s shifting grammar. Whereas ‘when’ usually conveys more certainty than ‘if’, Sonnet 30’s couplet troubles that balance. The poet replays the sonnet’s abrupt volta in miniature – an earlier condition (indicated by ‘when’) turns out to have been temporary. Just as the temporal expectations indicated by such words render visible the emergence of the poem’s logical structure only to show that it can be abandoned or left incomplete, ‘losses’ can be ‘restored’ despite continued absence. The removal of the young man does not hamper his restorative potential. Although they both reveal it late, Sonnets 29 and 30 rely on that lack; the absent youth, once invoked, provides relief and resolution. What is more, his belated revelation emphasizes the role that incomplete and amended grammatical and logical structures play in altering and prompting temporal signals. Notably, the strategy of conjuring him in memory does not carry over to animate sonnets that fearfully anticipate his exit, but the contingencies announced via grammatical shifts recur and continue to expand available perspectives. They register competing temporalities. Sonnet 49, for example, heightens the distinction between absence and loss established in Sonnets 29 and 30. Its first two quatrains give voice to a speaker who imagines the agony of the disfavour and disinterest of a painfully present beloved. The poem is structured by the repetition of its opening phrase: Against that time, if ever that time come, When I shall see thee frown on my defects; Whenas thy love hath cast his utmost sum,

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Called to that audit by advised respects; Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass, And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye; When love, converted from the thing it was, Shall reasons find of settled gravity; Against that time do I ensconce me here, Within the knowledge of mine own desert, And this my hand against myself uprear, To guard the lawful reasons on thy part: To leave poor me, thou hast the strength of laws, Since why to love, I can allege no cause. Critics have long noted that the repetition of the phrase ‘Against that time’ raises questions about the speaker’s place in time relative to reported and imagined action. The ‘when’ invoked (repeated in lines 2, 3, 5 and 7) seems so pointedly to articulate the crushing snub the speaker dreads that many readers hear in it a specificity that sounds more like past action than projection. Heather Dubrow has offered a compelling account of the critical tendency to interpret ‘Against that time’ to mean ‘in anticipation of’ rather than ‘in defense against’. She argues that privileging ‘in anticipation of’ enables the sonnet’s suggestion that ‘the feared event is already present’, which also ‘assum[es] that the speaker accepts the addressee’s rejection [. . .] abjectly, determinedly, and [. . .] consistently throughout the poem’.10 Her approach productively trains focus on the difference between the two interpretive options. In insisting on the ambiguity of the sonnet’s repeated phrase as a tool for understanding whether ‘predicting a dreaded eventuality’ will ‘paralyse one’ or ‘impel a successful resistance’, Dubrow maps the binary between proleptic mourning and diligent recuperation onto the sonnet’s loaded phrase.11 However, the duality of the phrase has more jarring temporal implications. Not only does ‘in anticipation of’ produce a disorienting temporality by highlighting the speaker’s fear of his own past and present circumstance in the language of the future, but it also operates in a manner distinct from the temporality implied

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by ‘in defence against’. The latter option restores and maintains a future at arm’s length. To be sure, Dubrow persuasively advocates that both meanings ‘remain in play – and at war – throughout this lyric’ and ‘exemplif[y] the unsettling coexistence of readings’.12 What is more striking, however, is that the simultaneous availability of the two meanings unmoors the speaker from a singular time, and locates him instead in a poem that supports distinct, even contradictory, temporalities. However ‘Against that time’ is glossed, in this sonnet ‘that time’ urgently invokes a particular occurrence or set of occurrences that the speaker fearfully enumerates, which build momentum through the sonnet’s confident repetition. Michael Clody has suggested that the repetition is generative, and itself accomplishes the prevention to which Sonnet 49 aspires. He argues that the recurrence of the opening phrase ‘actively engages and reengages in the refusal of time’s deadly procession [. . .] the verse insists on the movement of repetition by bringing novelty to that which has already been said in its attempt to hold time’s scythe at bay’.13 Curiously, however, it is in the first line, rather than in the elaboration that follows, that the unwanted future is deemed most tentative. The repetition of that initial phrase abandons the condition set in the latter half of the sonnet’s first line, which furnishes protection by marking uncertainty – ‘if ever that time come’ holds out the possibility that it never will. This unmentioned adjustment complicates delay fuelled by repetition – a strategy that a fourteen-line form promises to exhaust. Sonnet 30 introduces a contravening ‘But if’ in line 13 to recast what had come before it. Sonnet 49 reverses this procedure in that its forward momentum leaves behind the safeguard afforded by the ‘if’ clause, and makes what follows seem markedly more determined. By the sonnet’s conclusion, it is at least equally apparent that the poem works against itself – and heightens the force of the loss it anticipates – precisely because it was in its first instance, rather than in the subsequent argument, that the ‘dreaded eventuality’ seemed most distant. Sonnet 49’s structure, then, abounds in contradictions. Its early safeguard (‘if ever that time come’) falls away even

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though repetitions of ‘against that time’ accrue. The competing meanings of the repeated phrase to which Dubrow calls attention also exaggerate the duality of the poem’s narrative time scheme: the fair youth’s cold shoulder seems at once to be avoidable and already chillingly enacted. Approaching the repetition attentive to what is missing from the first line offers access to the sonnet’s method of cycling through available forms of protection and resistance. Rather than determining the speaker’s best course, the sonnet’s ambiguities and incomplete structures highlight its capacity to make temporality indeterminate as well as multiple. The speaker inhabits temporalities proliferated by the sonnet’s ambiguities and incompletions. The sonnet engenders forms for destabilizing the inevitability of the loss it fears, at least some of which are made visible because the protections it articulates are abandoned. The partial repetition showcases the sonnet’s capacity to examine (and discard) possibilities. The repeated phrase might reinforce a binary inherent in the speaker’s dual efforts to work ‘against that time’, but it also reveals how such competing options enable a speaker to inhabit the variety of temporalities created by the poem’s distinct interpretive tracks.

II In his 1640 Poems, John Benson joins five of Shakespeare’s sonnets (60, 63, 64, 65 and 66) under the heading ‘Injurious Time’, and, as is typical of that collection, they appear typographically continuous, as if one long poem.14 Because Benson omits sonnets 61 and 62, time’s ‘cruel hand’ (60.14) resounds three lines later in ‘time’s injurious hand’ (63.2), and in the lines that follow the speaker works to rescue his addressee from oblivion and age. By contrast, Sonnet 64 makes no mention of Shakespeare’s verse as a resource that might combat ‘time’s fell hand’ (64.1). Instead, Sonnet 64 stands out because of a simple disruption: each quatrain opens with the

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same construction – ‘When I have seen’ – yet these statements are never met with a summational ‘then’: When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main, Increasing store with loss, and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded, to decay, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate: That time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. Anne Ferry has called Sonnet 64’s ‘when’ that anticipates a ‘then’ that never arrives a ‘violation’ of the ‘pattern’ predicted by the repetition of the former word. She writes that the ‘measured repetitions of “When”’ do not advance a narrative, which makes the ‘closing lines of Sonnet 64 more pointed and more shocking’.15 Ferry wishes for a volta that would allow the speaker to ‘assert his control’, but finds instead the poem’s ‘inability to create a verbal order that allows the possibility of preserving his “loue” from “Ruine”’. In other words, doubt is cast upon the ‘validity of his language [. . .] by the way this sonnet deviates from the pattern it seems to predict. It expresses disbelief in the miraculous power of poetry triumphantly asserted’ elsewhere in the sequence.16 Sonnet 64 makes no explicit mention of poetry, miraculous or otherwise. But it is the case that instead of a ‘then’ that overturns, the speaker offers a puzzling pivotal line: ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate’. Without the syntactical consequence of an apodosis for those abandoned, conditional ‘when’ clauses, the pedagogical function of ‘ruin’ remains

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obscure. The phonetic and orthographic proximity of ‘ruminate’ and ‘ruinate’ underscore a relationship inherent in the poem’s logic: in one strand of the poem’s narrative, the anticipation of loss is so powerful and so paralysing that it collapses thinking (‘rumination’) with ruination. The ruin/ ruminate pairing sounds a warning, suspicious of time spent looking back. But that warning is not the sonnet’s lesson; instead the verse prioritizes the possibility for an incomplete grammatical structure – a string of discarded ‘when’s – to dislodge the speaker from time. The situation recalls the altered, ambiguous repetition of Sonnet 49 on more dramatic terms. The structural open-endedness of the incomplete ‘when’ draws attention to a series of anticipations that, lacking conclusion, result instead in temporal ambiguity; without a ‘then’, we cannot determine whether the speaker’s ‘when’s gesture towards repeated past actions (‘in the instances that I have seen’) or forward to a causational limit point (‘once I have seen’). Has the speaker, for example, seen intact those ‘sometime lofty towers’ that are now merely rubble? The effect of the misdirection of a repetition that holds out the promise of a structuring logic is made more pronounced because Sonnet 64 also upends the immortality topos; Shakespeare invokes Horace’s ‘aere perennius’ – ‘brass eternal slave to mortal rage’ – without trumpeting poetry’s ability to outlast.17 Where does the speaker stand in relation to the sights described in the first three quatrains, and exactly how much time is covered by them? With an ironized allusion to the ancient trope of poetry’s unique longevity familiar from Sonnet 55, as well as references to both major political shifts and regime change, and even shifts in the natural landscape, the sonnet’s scale here looks surprisingly expansive – Shakespeare’s speaker seemingly boasts a vantage of ‘deep time’ in the sense of geological time, the long view required to see ‘states’ overturned or significant, perceptible shifts between the land and the ocean. Where we would expect a (ruined) artifact to gesture to its former wholeness, Shakespeare’s slippery phrasing allows the sense that the speaker has witnessed the process of ruin in

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question. The immortality topos lacks force in a poem that expands time’s scope without ever mentioning verse’s power to eternize. As a result, the speaker’s strange prospect elevates anticipated loss, but also pointedly arrives in a poem that does not propose verse as a preservative vehicle. Rather than heightening a construction by subtly shifting a repetition or manipulating that construction (an ‘if’ that competes, or an ‘if’ that tempers), Sonnet 64 simply abandons its formal pattern. In addition, the line ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate’ undermines its own capacity to be determinative because it looks in two directions – the referent of ‘thus’ is ambiguous. Does ‘thus’ look backward to the three self-sufficient quatrains that advance no narrative? If that is the case, then a manner of thinking that resembles copia comes under heavy fire (‘as a death’). But the ‘when’ clauses do not much resemble the rehearsal of options that distinguished Sonnet 49’s strategy for inoculating ‘[a]gainst that time’ by allowing the speaker to inhabit distinct times simultaneously. Instead, the speaker in Sonnet 64 is repeatedly positioned outside of time, poised even to outlast the circumstances predicted at the close of the sonnet. In this way, the couplet is an intensification – thinking is like ruin because it is like death. However, this ‘loss’ does not signal the young man’s decision to abandon the speaker, but instead the effect that time has on the young man. Time will take him away from the speaker, which also strangely implies that the speaker will continue to exist in time. Sonnet 64 adds to the discourse an instance that accords with Fineman’s description of possession and loss – the fair youth is not yet lost, but the speaker acts in the present as if that feared future has already come to pass. Even with the hint that the speaker operates in ‘deep time’, he compromises his present by filling it with the anticipation of loss – it is ‘as a death’. In their ruined state, the remnants of antiquity have a predictive power. This aspect of the poem is reinforced if ‘thus’ refers to the imminent conclusion offered in the next line: ‘That time will come and take my love away’. In this regard, the couplet does not correct the poem’s grammatically obscured

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engagement with time, but instead enables a present moment overwhelmed by the anticipation of future loss – an extreme version of ‘I miss you already’. By leaving the grammatical ‘when-then’ structure incomplete, Shakespeare communicates temporal peril both by exposing uncertainty and by suggesting the power the imagined future can wield ‘now’. Yet, rather than a ‘parody of eternizing verse’, Sonnet 64 also sidesteps immortality to offer access to a different vantage on what it might mean to get outside of time.18 It does so, however, on terms that neither defuse its transience nor transcend it. Shakespeare’s incomplete grammatical structures render temporality indeterminate, as evidenced by the speaker’s expression of prolepsis in recursive terms. Yet, the speaker’s formulation also generates an antidote of sorts by suggesting that he will persist to feel the loss he fears. The sonnet innovates the anticipation of loss not merely by divorcing it from familiar invocations of immortality, but also by manipulating temporal signals and logical patterns to destabilize the inevitability of that loss. Although Sonnet 64 does not celebrate the immortalizing power of verse, it participates in thinking about the balance of the influence of antiquity against its potential to overwhelm both the present and the future. By contrast, the sonnets that anticipate mortality seem less chilling than the ‘thought’ that is ‘as a death’ in 64. Take for example Sonnet 74, which includes blunt reference to decomposition (‘worms’). Its pun on ‘remains’ employs a deictic play of demonstratives that is no less referential than Sonnet 64’s ‘[t]his thought’. However, though the earlier sonnet boasts a reference to Horace, it is Sonnet 74 that points to itself to celebrate poetry’s ability to outlast physical decay: ‘The worth of that, is that which it contains, / And that is this, and this with thee remains’ (74.13– 14). This extraordinary transitive chain elevates poetry only to bury it cheerfully with the beloved. Similarly, the grave imagined in Sonnet 81 when the poet considers who will lie ‘rotten’ in the earth entails future readers in its decaying ‘part[s]’ by cataloguing those ‘eyes not yet created’ and ‘tongues

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to be’ (81.10–11). Compared to these treatments of death, the sonnets that anticipate loss seem haunting, even when the loss imagined is not as crushing as the killing ‘thought’ of Sonnet 64. Time’s fundamental ‘transience’ might occasion melancholy, but even the elusive perspective in Sonnet 64 grants poetic language control over time in expansive terms. Even if, as J.B. Leishman has claimed, ‘the topics of carpe diem and carpe florem do not occur at all’ in the sequence, the sonnets produce a broader range of temporalities than those articulated as the poems’ thematics.19

III Loss and anticipation in the sonnets are both heightened and undermined through incomplete and shifting grammatical structures that undergird complex outlooks on time – an awareness especially of how temporary the present is, which can, for example, prompt both despair in the moment of possession or a full embrace of that present. By employing the mysterious label ‘after-loss’, Sonnet 90 furnishes a vocabulary for an anticipation of loss that underscores its endurance: Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now, Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross, Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, And do not drop in for an after-loss. Ah, do not, when my heart hath ’scaped this sorrow, Come in the rearward of a conquered woe; Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, To linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, When other petty griefs have done their spite; But in the onset come, so shall I taste At first the very worst of fortune’s might; And other strains of woe, which now seem woe, Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.

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The sonnet offers a glimpse of a foregone conclusion: the young man will leave the speaker, and the poem goes on to imagine the scale of the suffering that will follow. Its opening recalls the ‘if’ clause at the start of Sonnet 49. However, whereas that condition (‘if ever that time come’) worked to stave off an unwanted future, Sonnet 90’s ‘if’ attempts to hasten it by making a possibility a fact. The first line is packed with the language of condition (‘then’, ‘when’, ‘if’), but these words turn out to be false signals. Instead, the speaker’s complaint posits loss as a temporal problem whose level of suffering is determined by sequence. Unlike Sonnet 49, which saw its best defence diluted by altered repetition, this sonnet gives rise to an extended meditation on an unexpected feature of belatedness – all ‘other strains of woe’ will be more difficult to bear if they begin a sequence, that is, if they are followed by ‘loss of thee’. The comparative logic claims that the beloved’s rejection would surpass all other pain. The repetitive couplet attempts to counter the possibility that the young man’s dreaded exit is a final position – ‘rearward’, what comes ‘after’ or that which ‘linger[s]’. In line 9, the sonnet seems to have restored a more traditional relationship between cause and effect – ‘if’ precedes the sentence’s apodosis, which makes the prospect of being left more tender and less inevitable, and makes the comparatives that consider pain and ‘woe’ relative not absolute. Notably, loss is not mentioned among the ‘petty griefs’ that Sonnet 90 imagines. Despite its stated sentiments, which carefully parse between ‘woe’ and its impostors (‘seem woe’), the sonnet does little to disguise the temporal sleight of hand on which the speaker’s argument depends. Loss is never really distinguished from ‘after-loss’, and the potential collapse of the two categories damages the sonnet’s claim, undercut because the supposedly more devastating cumulative effect is expressed in language that fails to recognize itself as inherently secondary. The sonnet advocates a reversal that reorders affective experience, but ‘after-loss’ extends the temporality it would prevent. In asserting the idea that sequence determines the intensity of ‘woe’, Sonnet 90 succeeds in redefining

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devastation to be a matter of degree, but fails to anticipate the consequence that this also perpetuates it indefinitely. Unlike those sonnets whose manipulated conditions and formal expectations alter the speaker’s place in time, Sonnet 90’s vocabulary exposes the continuity between loss and ‘afterloss’, and unwittingly emphasizes that temporality entails more than sequence. Sonnet 64 ostentatiously suggests that speaker – not poem – operates outside of time. The dynamics there exaggerate the sonnets’ habit of using its underlying grammatical and syntactical structures to steer temporal expectation; the result is not preservative. Schoenfeldt has noted that despite the seventy-eight occurrences of the word ‘time’ in the sonnets, it is ‘hardly present at all as a theme or issue in the last 28 poems’.20 Margreta de Grazia has argued that whereas the first 126 poems broadcast the ‘poet’s repeated disavowal of change in favor of repetition’, the remainder of the sequence is characterized by ‘frenzied repetitions’ in which ‘no future is designated’.21 To be sure, the urgent ‘expense of spirit’ and ‘waste’ so prominently discussed in Sonnet 129 are heightened by the rush of verb tenses in its tenth line: ‘Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme’. The rapid succession of verbal forms communicates insatiability but, far from ‘haywire temporality’, the linear sequence that the verse records relies upon an ordered notion of time’s continuity by invoking past, present and future in turn.22 Because the desires don’t change, verbal tense furnishes a resource for recording both their difference and their continuity. As in the laboured construction of a sentence in Sonnet 145, these later sonnets announce ever more forcefully the grammatical and logical adjustments that proliferate temporalities not tethered to concerns about preservation and loss. Aaron Kunin has recently isolated in the procreation sonnets an apocalypticism that pushes the familiar ‘preservation fantasy’ to an uncomfortable extreme.23 In addition to innovating strategies for survival, Shakespeare’s sonnets foreground less straightforward tactics for disrupting completion that push against, extend and multiply our

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approaches to time. In a system that never quite distinguishes between loss and ‘after-loss’, these poems parade a host of temporal manipulations that prompt adjustments to expectation by logical, grammatical and syntactical means, including conspicuous contortions and strategic discontinuations of the very formal patterns they establish. In dislodging a poem’s speaker from time, they also contradict the alleged threats to the present that the poems often narrate. Through structures that render patterns, progress and outcomes uncertain, the language of the sonnets introduces even more expansive temporal horizons for verse than immortality.

Notes 1

All references are to William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: Arden, 2010). Sonnets and line numbers will be cited parenthetically in text.

2

William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 500.

3

Booth, Sonnets, 500.

4

Michael Schoenfeldt, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 72.

5

Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 47.

6

Amanda Watson, ‘“Full character’d”: Competing Forms of Memory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2010), 356.

7

As Booth notes, these are ‘two famous classical passages, passages so regularly echoed in the Renaissance that it is impossible and unnecessary to guess whether a poet who uses them had them at first hand or not’; Sonnets, 227.

8

Emily Vasiliauskas, ‘The Outmodedness of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, ELH 82:3 (2015), 768. Vasiliauskas claims that

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Shakespeare’s ‘experiments’ uniquely privilege ‘persistence rather than revival’ (762). In ‘Afloat in Thick Deeps: Shakespeare’s Sonnets on Certainty’, PMLA 104:5 (1989), Lars Engle usefully points out that Sonnet 55 is importantly different from the poems of Shakespeare’s ancient predecessors in ‘offer[ing] immortality to another’ (837). Vasiliauskas argues that though some poems invoke that version of the immortality topos that privileges ‘the capacity of a text to outlive human flesh [that] becomes a promise of authorial invulnerability’, Sonnet 107 instead ‘mounts an original critique of this convention’ when the speaker uniquely ‘asserts that a poem will perpetuate his own life’ (768). 9

Sophie Read, ‘Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 72.

10 Heather Dubrow, ‘“Against” Interpretations: Rereading Sonnet 49’, in Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts, ed. Russ McDonald, Nicholas D. Nace and Travis D. Williams (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 156, 154. 11 Dubrow, ‘“Against”’, 155, 157. 12 Dubrow, ‘“Against”’, 155. 13 Michael C. Clody, ‘Shakespeare’s “Alien Pen”: Self-Substantial Poetics in the Young Man Sonnets’, Criticism 50:3 (2008), 479–80. 14 Benson rearranges and groups Shakespeare’s sonnets in his collection, Poems: vvritten by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent, ed. John Benson (London, 1640). ‘Injurious Time’ is the second grouping of the book. As Margreta de Grazia notes, his version provided the ‘only printed form in which [Shakespeare’s sonnets] were published for some 150 years’; see her chapter ‘Revolution in Shake-speares Sonnets’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 58. 15 Anne Ferry, All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1975), 25–26. 16 Ibid., 26, 28. 17 Horace, ‘III .30 – The Poet’s Monument’, in Horace: Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004), 217.

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18 Ferry, All in War with Time, 35. 19 J.B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 99. 20 Schoenfeldt, Cambridge Introduction, 69. 21 de Grazia, ‘Revolution’, 65, 67. 22 Ibid., 67. 23 Aaron Kunin, ‘Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy’, PMLA 124:1 (2009), 101.

8 ‘Thou single wilt prove none’: Counting, Succession and Identity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets Shankar Raman

– ‘Sledge was right, you are one crazy white motherfucker’. – ‘How can you tell?’ – ‘I counted’.1 The need to conjoin singularity and exemplarity drives a range of Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets in the ‘young man’ subsequence. Standing for ‘a singularly perfect nature’ as well as for ‘the yet more total perfection of the Nature of nature’, as 157

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Joel Fineman puts it, the young man ‘represents not only the particular token and general type of ideality, but, also [. . .] the harmoniously organic way these are related to one another’.2 Often, these sonnets achieve their end by projecting the relationship between ideal and actual onto biology; they conflate the metaphysical ‘pattern’ – to borrow a word from Sonnets 19 and 98 – embodied by the young man with the reproductive generation, potentially ad infinitum, of his likenesses. This underlying logic derives, as Fineman further notes in passing, from an engagement, more or less explicit, with an inherited mathematical tradition: Only if we grant the unitary arithmetic of idealism does it make sense that the young man, multiplying himself after his own kind, will father the ‘many’ that will prove him ‘One’. And only if we accept the tidy categoriality of genus and species will we understand how the young man spawns a series of particulars whose lineal succession embodies the young man’s universality: ‘Proving his beauty by succession thine’.3 Fineman’s evidentiary instance comes from Sonnet 2, where the notion of ‘succession’ brings together the biological iteration of sameness with the sequential unfolding of cardinal numbers, ‘proving’ the currency of this ‘unitary arithmetic’ by opening a passage between the idea of a (real) biological series (‘like father, like son’) and the series of whole numbers, based on the repeated addition of the idealized unit or the one.4 Since my own rumination here on the relationship between mathematics and Shakespeare’s verse will lean heavily on Sonnet 2, let me first reproduce it in its entirety: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now, Will be a tottered weed, of small worth held: Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;

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To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise. How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use, If thou couldst answer this fair child of mine Shall sum my count and make my old excuse Proving his beauty by succession thine. This were to be new made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.5 The plea expressed in these lines will no doubt be familiar to readers of the sonnets, many of which ring inventive changes on the theme: father a son so that you can defy time, preserving yourself through him. Familiar too is the complexity with which the sonnet articulates an apparently simple idea. For instance, one’s progress through the octet compromises the expectation of the straightforward ‘when-then’ structure projected by the poem’s opening line. A fleeting ‘then’ is experienced over the course of lines 3 and 4 – even though the word does not occur there – insofar as we may read them as responding to the poem’s opening ‘when’. That is, when you reach the age of forty years, you will [then] have lost the beauty you now possess. However, the arrival immediately thereafter, in line 5, of the anticipated ‘then’ forces a recalibration. Not only are we required to expand the scope of the ‘when’ clause to include lines 3 and 4 but, rather than encountering a direct description of the situation that would pertain at that time, we confront a convoluted hypothetical, concluding in subjunctive valuation: if you were asked then, where your beauty has gone, to reply [then] that it lies in you as you [then] will be, would be a shame.6 And this judgement motivates the turn to the sestet which imagines a contrasting hypothetical response, the succession that redresses the condition intimated by the poem’s opening: the inevitability of aging (and, ultimately, dying). Though by no means undemanding, the sonnet’s syntax nonetheless holds complexity in check, tightly coupling its temporal unfolding to the logic of its argument. And yet it does not take much to unloose these bonds and let the poem’s

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paradoxes proliferate. Consider, for example, the final couplet. Despite claiming that numerical and biological succession preserve the ideal, singular beauty of the young man, these lines nonetheless reveal an inescapable fracture at the heart of that singularity by repeating the self-division that opens the poem, paradoxically redoubling the difference between the ‘thee’ now and the ‘thee’ at forty. After all, the couplet echoes the very situation imagined in the poem’s opening line, the reverberating adverbs of ‘when thou art old’ (l. 13) and ‘when thou feel’st [thy blood] cold’ (l. 14) sharply maintaining the very distinction that succession seeks to overcome. The continuity of blood may appear to bridge this gap, but only at the cost of emphasizing a disjunction between discrete exemplars, the young man and his ‘fair child’ (l. 10). Thus, even here the poem enacts a paradoxical separation internal to the self, between the warm blood one sees and the cold blood one feels. The contrast between feeling and seeing marks the difference between the blood of one’s own body, knowledge of which is corporeal experience as such, and ‘thy blood’ as something apart from the self, something external that can only be seen – that is, known mediatedly through perception – because it belongs instead to the child (whose blood is nonetheless the same as one’s own in the sense of the colloquial phrase ‘of my flesh and blood’). Helen Vendler’s remark on these lines is likewise apposite. ‘What we see’, she writes, ‘is a double exposure: the forty-year-old sunken-eyed bachelor feeling his blood cold in his veins superimposed on the fortyyear-old proud father seeing his blood warm in his son.’7 The very weakness of the ‘and’ connecting lines 13 and 14 offers the further possibility of undoing the dependence of the latter upon the former. In other words, rather than reading the final line as taking place at the same ‘when’ as the penultimate, it can be read as temporally autonomous, specifying rather the effect of the poem’s own logic upon the youthful now, disturbing this very moment when one’s ‘proud livery’ is so ‘gazed on’ (l. 3). The coldness felt in the present because of imagining one’s own inevitable decline is reversed

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by the thought of being perpetuated through one’s progeny, so that the immediately experienced warmth of one’s blood now becomes also a present object of knowledge, one’s current liveliness being seen as if from the outside. How such repetition produces the non-identity of the self is central to Fineman’s claim that Shakespeare’s sonnets invent a new type of poetic subjectivity, one that ‘continually call[s] up and deploy[s] a poetics of ideal unity only to distance [itself] from that ideal at the very moment and in the very way’ that it repeats it.8 As he argues, Shakespeare’s sonnets repeat an epideictic poetic tradition that they inherit, but repetition always involves difference, and the poems internalize such difference in order to found upon it a new modality of selfhood. The ‘circuitous fracture or self-division’ that Fineman demonstrates across a range of the sonnets (and not just the more obviously mathematically inflected ones) opens up ‘by implosion a heterogeneous internality in the very heart of the ideal, an unlocalizable inside that disrupts the smooth internal complexion of homogenous interiority’.9 ‘Reflections, echoes, doubles and souls do not belong’, Gilles Deleuze writes, ‘to the domain of resemblance or equivalence; and it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another’.10 My reading above of Sonnet 2’s concluding couplet grows out of these insights, registering how the internal echoes within the poem disrupt the posited ideality of succession and its desired consequence, the eternization of the young man’s singular beauty. The twist that repetition provides is especially well captured in line 12: ‘Proving his beauty by succession thine’. The apparent simplicity of what the phrase says rests upon a complicated double movement. To echo Stephen Booth’s astute commentary: the words ‘proving’ and ‘by succession’ evoke a legal situation whereby ‘a son demonstrates his right to his deceased father’s possession (“proving thine to be his”)’. By contrast, ‘his beauty’ and ‘thine’ offer ‘a different but related demonstration’ in that they present ‘evidence of the source of what the son indubitably possesses (“proving his to be

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thine”)’.11 In repeating the father, the son succeeds him, taking possession of what was once the father’s property, but by the same token he establishes the property as always being the father’s (and thus his, insofar as he too will in time face the same dilemma – that is to say, will repeat his father by becoming a father himself).12 As intimated earlier, though, ‘succession’ also directs us to the sonnet’s investment in arithmetic. More particularly, it evokes the word’s etymological root in arithmos (αριθμος), the Greek term for number, whose meaning, as Jacob Klein emphasizes, was determined by ‘the fundamental phenomenon [. . . of] counting off [. . .] of some number of things’.13 In the remainder of this essay, I want to pursue the arithmetical underpinnings of Shakespeare’s poetics, to propose that the distinctive conjunction of repetition, identity and difference so evident in Sonnet 2 expresses (and indeed repeats) at its deepest stratum persistent issues in mathematical thought concerning the nature of numbers. Sonnet 2’s own arithmetical arc extends from the initial ‘forty winters’ to which the young man’s face must, one by one, render account; to the child who redeems time by ‘sum[ming]’ his ‘count’; and, finally, to the legal, biological and numerical ‘succession’ through which the young man, in the language of Sonnet 38, ‘outlive[s] long date’ by partaking the life of ‘[e]ternal numbers’ (l. 12). Operative throughout, too, is the dual early modern sense of ‘count’, as both enumeration and account.14 Thus, on the one hand, the child’s beauty will settle his account by repaying a debt it never owed. By repeating the young man, the child compensates for the accumulated deficit of years gone by, and thereby eternizes his beauty as singular. On the other hand, the ‘One’ of ideality also governs an additive process: each successor adds itself to the one that preceded, generating thereby the succeeding generation much as the lineage of natural numbers unfolds by repeatedly applying ‘one’ to the preceding number. Indeed, for both Greek and early modern arithmetic, the simple value of the positive integer had its basis, and its ideal

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type, in the One, out of which all positive numbers are generated. Klein’s insistence that the different things being counted have to be taken as uniform, as being of a single kind, expresses just this dependence of αριθμος upon the One: ‘they are, for example, either apples, or apples and pears, which are counted as fruit, or apples, pears, and plates which are counted as “objects” ’.15 As Alain Badiou points out, the Greek conception of number expressed by Euclid makes the ‘being of number [. . .] entirely dependent upon the metaphysical aporias of the one’.16 Early modern mathematical treatises in turn faithfully echo the two sequential definitions available in Book 7 of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry: number ‘is a multiplicity composed of units’ (Definition 2); and a unit is ‘that on the basis of which each of the things that exist is called one’ (Definition 1).17 Thomas Masterson’s oft-reprinted Arithmetick, for instance, reproduces the Euclidean definitions thus: ‘Unitie, unit, or one is, by which every thing that is, is said one’. The declaration that expands on this statement draws out more fully its epistemological and ontological implications: Unitie, unit, or one is, by which we distinguish, discerne, know, name, or expresse any thing that is, to be one: as one God, one spirit, one voice, one thing, one stroke, one world, one star, one house, one man, one yeare, one minute, one mile, one elle, one pound, one graine, one piece, &c. infinitely. This remarkable sequence comes close to enumerating, one by one, a theological ladder descending from the essence of being, through language and time, to matter itself. Masterson’s brief definition of number follows directly from this conception: ‘Number is, a multitude or a many of units [. . .] by whiche we expresse what certaine quantity or multitude of those things, quantities, or magnitudes we desire to have named, knowne, or signified’.18 Implicit in Masterson’s exposition is the numerical peculiarity of the One or the Unit. It echoes the long-standing

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debate over whether ‘one’ was a number at all or whether it was something that made counting possible without itself being a number – a conception no doubt strange to us but well-nigh commonplace in early modernity. Evidence of this debate abounds in Shakespeare’s verse, whether explicitly – as in Sonnet 136 where the speaker says ‘Among a number one is reckoned none’ (l. 8) – or implicitly – as in the paradox with which Sonnet 8 concludes, ‘Thou single wilt prove none’ (l. 14).19 While echoing Euclid’s definitions, John Dee’s 1577 Mathematicall Preface to the English translation of the Elements further elaborates upon the subtle metaphysical distinction between Unit and Number: Number, we define to be a certain Mathematicall Summe, of Units. And an Unit is that thing Mathematicall, Indivisible, by participation of some likeness of whose property, any thing, which is in deed, or is counted One, may reasonably be called One. We account an Unit, a thing Mathematicall, though it be no number, & also indivisible because of it materially, Number doth consist.20 It may be recalled that ‘things mathematical’ constitute for Dee an ontologically intermediate state between the immaterial, incorruptible and unchangeable ‘things supernatural’ and the material, compounded and changeable ‘things natural’. Not only do things mathematical partake of both worlds, but the very form of their immateriality points towards ‘the principal example or pattern in the mind of the Creator’.21 What succeeds is a remarkable paean to arithmetic: O comfortable allurement, O ravishing perswasion, to deal with a Science, whose Subject is so ancient, so pure, so excellent, so surmounting all creatures, so used of the Almighty and incomprehensible wisedome of the Creator, in the distinct creation of all creatures: in all their distinct parts, properties, natures, and vertues, by order, and most absolute number, brought from Nothing, to the Formality

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of their being and state. By Numbers property therefore [. . .] we may both wind and draw ourselves into the inward and deep search and view, of all creatures distinct virtues, natures, properties, and Formes: And also, farther, arise, clime, ascend and mount up (with Speculative wings) in spirit, to behold in the Glasse of Creation, the Form of Forms, the Exemplar Number of all things Numerable: both visible and invisible: mortal and immortal, Corporal, and Spiritual.22 As we see, Dee’s numerology endows number – and in particular the notion of the immaterial Unit of which number is composed – with a singular and formal generative power. This potency derives from a fundamental distinction that turns up regularly in arithmetical texts of the period: between a thing as it is and a thing in so far as it counts-as-one. It underlies, too, the ensuing discussion in Dee’s preface of the difference between ‘number numbered’ (i.e., number as the ‘counting off’ of existing things) and ‘number numbering’ (i.e., as a collection of pure units that makes the very existence of a certain number of things possible): Number numbring therefore, is the discretion discerning, and distincting of things. But in God the Creator, this discretion, in the beginning, produced orderly and distinctly all things. For his numbring, then, was his Creating of all things. And his Continuall numbring of all things, is the Conservation of them in being. And, where and when he will lack an Unit: there and then that particular thing shall be Discreated.23 Translated into Dee’s language, biological reproduction in Sonnet 2 is the ‘orderly’ producing and ‘distincting’ of successors on the pattern of the Unit which the young man embodies. Likewise, it is his ‘continuall’ enumeration in his children that ‘conserv[es]’ him (and them) ‘in being’, holding at bay lack, death, discreation.

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A later stanza from Du Bartas’ 1605 Devine Weekes and Workes expresses a similar exultation over the powers of the One, separating the Unit as the ‘roote’ of all enumeration from the ‘infinite’ numbers it makes possible, and thus locating the actuality of all other numbers in the ‘potential[ity]’ of the One: Marke here, what figure stands for One, the right Roote of all Nomber; and of Infinite: Loves happiness, the praise of Harmonie, Nurcerie of All, and end of Polymnie: No Nomber, but more then a Nomber yet; Potentially in all, and all in it.24 Shakespeare’s second sonnet shares this sense of how singularity offers itself as the very pattern or basis, whose repetition produces and preserves reality – and, indeed, Du Bartas’ passing reference to music in the phrase ‘praise of Harmonie’ should also be borne in mind when we turn to Sonnet 8 later in this essay. The fecundity of the distinction between a thing and its counting-as-one is not confined to the Greek past with which early modern arithmetic contends. Quite the contrary: the pressure that Shakespeare and Dee (among many others) exert on the ‘One’ remains vital in the futures to which number leads. To hear the resonance between the Shakespearean aesthetics of subjectivity and the modern mathematical conceptualisation of number, let us therefore leap ahead to the nineteenth-century German logician Gottlob Frege’s Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, which develops – at least at first blush – a very different account of number. For all the vast difference between Shakespeare’s arithmetical poetics and Frege’s set-theoretical language, it is my contention that they are connected by a shared sense that subsisted in all attempts to grasp the very nature of numbers, that is to say, to respond to the problem of articulating a conceptual basis for number that would underpin and be adequate to our easy, often unthinking, use in everyday life. My use of sense draws on

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Deleuze’s complex unfolding of that term, and Claire Colebrook offers a lucid account of one direction (sens) in which it leads. ‘For Deleuze’, she writes, [a]ny language or system of signs [. . .] is only possible because of a prior problem. The formation of a language responds to a way of approaching the world, so that language is an action, or a constant question and creation in response to experience. So words are dependent upon tasks or paths [. . .] through which we approach what is other than ourselves; a word gives order to a sense which preexists it [. . .] Language is more than a set of actual words; it is also the virtual dimension of sense, or the problems that our words organise and articulate. Because language is always more than its actual elements, we can have the same [. . .] sense, but in different languages [. . .] Philosophical concepts create new problems and new milieus of sense.25 Frege’s own language for establishing numbers relies on the mathematical resources made available by the freshly minted domain of set theory, and – unlike Greek or early modern arithmetic – he uses the notion of ordinality rather than cardinality to define what a number is. (While a cardinal or counting number tells how many of something there are, ordinal numbers tell the order of something, that is, their position in a set or sequence.) It should be evident that, despite its dependence upon the idea of αριθμος, Shakespeare’s use of ‘succession’ in Sonnet 2 necessarily involves notions of both cardinality and ordinality – the question of how many is entangled with that of an ordered series of different samenesses stretching out in time. As I will show below, the ‘One’ and the ‘None’ index a shared sense that flows alike through Shakespeare’s sonnets and Frege’s Grundlagen, giving rise to two languages, poetic and set-theoretical, that respond to the One’s paradoxical status as well as testifying to the enduring vitality of the metaphysical concerns it initiates.

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Frege aims to institute a strictly logicist theory, in the sense that it would exclude entirely from number any whiff of the empirical reality that cardinal numbers exude. As mentioned above, in Aristotle for instance, number remains closely tied to the things it enumerates. To cite Klein again: These things, however different they may be, are taken as uniform when counted [. . .] Insofar as these things underlie the counting process they are understood as of the same kind [. . .] that word which is pronounced last in counting off or numbering gives the ‘counting-number’, the αριθμος of the things involved [. . .] Thus the αριθμος indicates in each case a definite number of definite things. It proclaims that there are precisely so and so many of these things. It intends the things insofar as they are present in this number, and cannot, at least at first, be separated from the things at all.26 By contrast, Frege seems closer in this respect to Dee’s quasiPlatonic positing of numbers as ideal forms (number numbering) that make possible the actual counting of things (number numbered) – with the difference, though, that Frege’s account turns to logic rather metaphysics as the basis for number. For Frege, a number is less a concept in itself than a trait or name associated with or assigned to a concept. A concept in turn ‘is only defined and exists solely through the relationship which it maintains’ to the objects that fit it, that fall under that concept.27 This set of objects he calls the extension of the concept. Thus, for instance, the concept ‘is a sonnet by Shakespeare’ has as its extension all the objects for which it is true that they are Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it is assigned a number (154 in this case, if based upon the 1609 volume as published). But what does this number mean? And how do we construct it? Before we can address these questions, though, a core feature of Fregean number needs to be emphasized. The system rests, as Jacques Alain Miller points out, upon a redoubled

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concept: the concept of identity to a concept. The concrete empirical thing such as a particular Shakespeare sonnet is not the same as the object that is contained in the extension of the concept ‘is a Shakespeare sonnet’. The sonnet has to shed all its characteristics, has to disappear as a thing, in order to become such an object; it retains only the minimal logical requirement that it counts as an object that is identical to or falls under the concept. It is this abstraction – different from the Aristotelian abstraction that understands the things being counted as being of the same kind – that makes numeration possible. Miller’s example makes this difficult idea clearer: [I]f I group what falls under the concept ‘child of Agamemnon and Cassandra’, I summon in order to subsume them Pelops and Teledamus. To this set I can only assign a number if I put into play the concept ‘identical to the concept: child of Agamemnon and Cassandra’. Through the effect of the fiction of this concept, the children now intervene in so far as each one is, so to speak, applied to itself – which transforms it into a unit and gives it the status of an object which is numerable as such. It is this one of the singular unit, this one of identity of the subsumed, which is common to all numbers in so far as they are first constituted as units.28 This repetition of the concept, which relies only on the ostensibly logical condition of the self-identity of a thing to itself, leads Frege to his general definition of number: ‘the number assigned to a concept F is the extension of the concept “identical to the concept F” ’.29 To grasp the intuition underlying Frege’s definition, we should understand number not as a predicate ‘belonging’ to any individual set, but as a trait shared by all sets that are of ‘of the same size’. ‘Being of the same size’ as the extension of F – the set of objects that fall under the concept F – is therefore not defined by first counting the objects in that set (since doing so would assume precisely what we need to define, that is, the

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series of natural numbers) but relationally, by mapping each element of a set onto each element of another. To take Frege’s example, for a waiter to know that he has laid out the same number of forks as knives, it is not necessary that he first count the forks and knives separately. He need simply ensure that for each fork he lays down, he places a knife on the other side of the plate. The two sets are equinumerate and thus share the same number without our having enumerated each of the two sets individually. And it is upon this relationship of equinumeracy – which assumes only that each object in a particular set is identical to itself (and thus counts-as-one) – that Frege’s definition of number is built.30 The contrast with Aristotle – and thus with Greek and early modern conceptions of number more generally – is again instructive in this regard. Speaking in the Physics about the sense in which two numbers are to be considered equal, Aristotle remarks: It is rightly said, too, that the number of the sheep and dogs is the same if each is equal to the other, but the decad [that is, the group or set of ten] is not the same [in these cases], nor are the ten [sheep and dogs] the same ten things.31 The implication here is that number is always concrete or specified, a number of something, be these sheep or dogs, or even, ‘in the limiting case’, as Klein says, ‘’‘pure” units, accessible only to thought’.32 And so Aristotle will continue, shifting his example from sheep to horses, ‘the [horse-]number and the [dog-]number do not differ by a difference in number [for in both cases there are ten]; but the decad is not the same, for the things of which it is asserted differ; one group are horses, and the other dogs’.33 In contradistinction, Frege’s account of equinumeracy, out of which the trait that is number emerges, eschews this Aristotelian insistence on the concrete multiplicity of whatever is being counted. Frege’s set-theoretical approach to numbers may seem far removed from early modern numerical concerns, but in fact his

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theory revives issues very much of the moment in the earlier period. The sharp distinction Frege draws – between an empirical object (a knife, a fork, a child of Agamemnon and Cassandra, or a Shakespeare sonnet) and that same object in so far as it counts-as-one in relation to a concept – presses precisely on the question of whether one was a number at all. Indeed, for Aristotle (as for many early moderns), only ‘that can be counted which is not one. Neither an object of sense nor one “pure” unit is a number of things or units: the character of the unit is such as makes counting possible at all – but for this very reason, it cannot itself be a number’.34 We simply apprehend one thing as one, but we only begin counting with two, when we apply this apprehension of counting-as-one to a multiplicity of things. Locating both in Frege’s theory of number and, via Fineman, in Shakespeare’s sonnets the intertwining of repetition, unity and identity brings us a good way towards grasping the relevance of mathematical thought to the sonnets. But another set of steps needs to be taken if we are to express the other central principle at work in Shakespeare’s verse: non-identity. For Frege’s general definition of number does not as yet lead in any obvious way to the whole numbers as we know them, that is, to a sequence in which each number naturally follows its predecessor ad infinitum – and it is, after all, just this notion of the child as natural successor to the father that remains key to how Shakespeare’s young man preserves his oneness, his singularity. In Sonnet 3, for instance, the speaker asks the young man to ‘look in thy glass’, and tell his image that it is ‘time that face should form another’ (ll. 1–2). Without the natural successor formed in his image, in the manner that the image copies the original face, his very singularity would be threatened – as would its perpetuation: ‘Die single, and thine image dies with thee’ (l. 14). The subsistence of the one is bound with the many that it generates – and vice versa. This double dependence echoes the logic of the sequence of natural numbers, and to generate this numerical succession, Frege will call forth another special number, the zero, which will in effect

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take up the place of death or absence in Shakespeare’s sonnets. For it is upon the zero that all other numbers – including the One – will be built. To recall: Frege’s definition of number rests upon the principle of the identity of a thing with itself, a logical condition of truth and knowledge explicitly derived from Leibniz (who called it the identity of indiscernibles). To create from this principle the ordered succession of numbers, Frege proposes the following definition: ‘zero’ is the number associated with the concept ‘not identical to itself’. Given the Leibnizian condition of truth, this is necessarily a concept whose extension is empty: since every thing that counts-as-one is identical to itself, there can be no object that falls under the concept ‘not identical to itself’. And to this concept Frege assigns the number 0. Miller’s comment brings out what is paradoxical about Frege’s procedure: ‘the zero understood as a number, which assigns to the subsuming concept the lack of an object, is, as such a thing[,] the first non-real thing in thought’.35 Now, to generate a sequence of numbers from this paradoxical beginning, we simply need to define the number 1. All the remaining whole numbers can be generated inductively thereafter via the notion of a successor (to the preceding number), with 0 and 1 responsible for getting the sequence going and establishing the rule of succession. ‘One’ is consequently defined by Frege as the number assigned to the concept ‘identical to the concept of zero’. Since only one object – the number 0 itself – satisfies this criterion, the extension of this concept contains only one object, thus providing a ‘natural’ definition for 1. And the rule of succession simply involves repeatedly applying this idea to each precedent number to generate its successor. So, for instance, once we have defined the number 3, say, this number serves to constitute the concept ‘member of the natural series ending with 3’. The extension of this set has four elements, viz., 0, 1, 2 and the number 3 itself; thus it is assigned the number 4. The procedure preserves the fundamental distinction between numbers and reality: ‘in the order of the real, the 3 subsumes 3 objects. In the order of

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number [. . .] it is numbers which are counted: before the 3, there are 3 numbers – it is therefore the fourth’, and thus 3 serves to define the number 4.36 By reconfiguring the idea of counting-as-one in terms of what Miller calls the ‘fiction’ of the concept ‘identical to the concept’, Frege shifts the basis of number away from cardinality – that is, counting how many of something there are – to ordinality or place in a succession. Cardinality emerges as the effect of ordinality, counting as the result of succession.37 What returns this Fregean discussion to Shakespeare is its central, constitutive paradox: at the heart of the principle of identity is non-identity, the impossible object of pure lack whose naming (as ‘zero’) is essential to secure oneness and succession. The lack of the object must be named as such: while excluded from the real as pure lack, the contradiction of the non-identical object must be repeated as name so that it can count-as-one, and thereby generate succession. No doubt, what spurs this common interest in the numerical fecundity of the zero is quite different: behind the interest of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the One and the none lie such classical texts as Plato’s Parmenides, whereas for Frege it is Cantor’s set theory that provides the philosophical impulse. But between Plato and Cantor lies the mathematical revolution that would make earlier metaphysical concerns urgent yet again, albeit in a new form: the spread of Hindu-Arabic numeration, whose key difference from Greek or Roman numeration was that it explicitly introduced a sign for absence or no-thing, the zero. Anticipating Frege’s conclusion, if not his method, the sixteenth-century Dutch polymath Simon Stevin (remembered for his invention of decimal notation) would argue forcefully that while one was indubitably a number, zero was not – for, in his account, the zero takes the place of the One, making counting possible while not itself being a number. ‘What belongeth to Numeration?’, Thomas Blundeville’s His Exercises asks, and answers as follows: ‘Two things, to know the shapes of the figures, and signification of their places.’ And how many figures are there? ‘These ten’, Blundeville

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informs us, ‘1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.0’, but immediately qualifies this list by insisting upon the zero’s exceptional status: ‘whereof the tenth made like an o. as you see here, is called a Cypher, which is no number of it selfe, but serveth only to fill up a number’.38 The two central distinctions made here between the figure and its place, and between the cipher and regular numbers, echo a farrago of earlier arithmetical treatises. Humfrey Baker’s The Well Spryng of Sciences, for instance, describes the expression of value through numeration as deriving ‘partly by the diversity of the fygures, but chiefely of the places wherein they be orderlye set’, a place being in turn defined as ‘the seate or roome that a figure standeth in’. There are, he continues, ‘ten fygures [. . .] which are used in arithmetic, whereof nine of them are called signifyinge figures, and the tenth is called a ciphar [. . .] and of it self signifieth nothinge, but it beynge joyned with any of the other figures, encreaseth their value’.39 Or again, we read in Dionis Gray’s The Store-house of Brevitie in woorkes of Arithematike: ‘Ciphers made like the letter O [, t]he which being of no value in proper signification, the same notwithstanding [. . .] are of necessarie use in practise of Arithmetique, only to keepe the places, whereby is expressed infinite nombers, which without the help of them, the other figures could not performe.’40 The cipher operates via a principle quite different from that governing the so-called simple numbers: eschewing the monotonic repetition of a singular unity, it relies on the emptiness of its signification to produce the fullness of its effects. Its positionality or its site – that is, its ordinal relationship to the elements that go before it – lends it its supernumerary powers, allowing it to suture the gap. It is equivalent, as Badiou puts it, to the empty or null set in Cantor’s set theory, ‘a pure mark [. . .] out of which it can be demonstrated that all multiples of multiples are woven’.41 The concluding rhyme of the very different-seeming Sonnet 8 echoes – an appropriate verb, given the poem’s sustained reliance on the metaphor of music – the earlier Sonnet 2’s intimation of the necessary relationship between unity and

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lack: ‘Whose speechless song being many, seeming one, / Sings this to thee: “Thou single wilt prove none”’ (ll. 13–14). Booth’s footnote to this couplet reminds us that the song’s warning to its hearer alludes ‘to the ancient mathematical principle that “one is no number”, which – as the embodiment of the quibble on the number “one” and “one” as opposed to a multitude – became proverbial’.42 Among other contemporaneous evidence, Booth cites Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586): ‘The proverbe saith, one man is deemed none, / And life, is deathe, where men doo live alone’.43 Whitney’s version of the adage makes explicit the threat voiced here (as well as in Sonnet 2): remaining unmarried, without establishing a line of succession, will lead to your extinction; thus, remaining alone, you will prove yourself to be nothing at all, a zero. In Frege’s theory of numbers, as we have seen, the number zero itself proves necessary to define the number one, which is assigned to the concept ‘identical to the concept of zero’. Thus, as Miller puts it, Frege’s system ‘is [. . .] constituted with the 0 counting as 1. The counting of 0 as 1 (whereas the concept zero subsumes nothing in the real but a blank) is the general support of the series of numbers.’44 Such a logic is arguably at work in Sonnet 8 as well. The assertion that one’s ideal unity demands a multitude – only through ‘being many’ can the individual ‘seem [. . .] one’ – itself rests upon naming, in the poem’s final word, the absence, the ‘no[t-o]ne’, that will have ‘prove[d]’ itself to be the truth of the ‘one’ – unless generation intervene, producing from the One’s paradoxical singularity the multitude that will putatively ensure his permanence. Following the classical Greek categorization, the medieval and Renaissance quadrivium designated music as the sister science to arithmetic. Proclus’ commentary on Euclid, for instance, claimed that the Pythagoreans considered all mathematical science to be divided into four parts: one half they marked off as concerned with quantity, the other half with magnitude; and each of

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these they posited as twofold. A quantity can be considered in regard to its character by itself or in its relation to another quantity, magnitudes as either stationary or in motion. Arithmetic, then, studies quantities as such, music the relations between quantities, geometry magnitude at rest, spherics [that is, astronomy] magnitude inherently moving.45 It is worth noting, too, how regularly Shakespeare’s sonnets assert poetry’s distinctive conjoining of arithmetic and music by drawing on the connotations afforded by the word ‘number’. Sonnet 38, for instance, plays with arithmetical multiplication (‘Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth / Than those old nine which rhymers invocate’; ll. 9–10), in order to set up the poem’s own ‘eternal numbers’ that may ‘outlive long date’ (l. 12), thereby connecting poetic creation with the potential infinity of arithmetical succession. In Sonnet 17, the speaker worries that to ‘write the beauty of your eyes, / And in fresh numbers number all your graces’ (ll. 5–6) would lead only to scorn, to the poet’s repeated enumeration of the addressee’s virtues being dismissed as ‘a poet’s rage / And stretched meter of an antique song’ (ll. 11–12). English poetry’s characteristic coupling of rhyme and metre, the aural and the numerical, these sonnets suggest, reveals its dual engagement with the related sciences of music and arithmetic. It is not surprising, then, that Sonnet 8 unfolds the paradoxes inhering in numbers through a series of connected metaphors taken from music. To cite Booth’s perceptive observation, ‘the wit’ of the poem’s opening quatrain ‘is derived from a playful perversity in which a commonplace observation – that music often makes its listeners feel sad and that listeners enjoy the feeling – is treated as if it revealed a serious logical inconsistency’.46 The sonnet opens with the query that it will subsequently address: ‘Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?’ (l. 1). The paradoxical lack inherent in singleness, with which the poem closes, is perhaps already anticipated here in the missing self, which we must supply in order to make sense

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of the question. That is, in order for the ostensible paradox to be audible, we need to add a subject to the dependent clause: ‘[Thou being] music to hear’, or, as Booth proposes, ‘You, whose voice is music to hear’. (If we at first understand the opening phrase as ‘Given music to hear’ or ‘In order music to hear’, this initial projection has to be corrected once we reach the line’s end.) The reason behind the addressee’s contradictory behaviour, the poem goes on to suggest, lies in how music’s generation of singleness out of multiplicity reveals to the listener the contradiction that marks his own being, the fact that he ‘confounds / In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear’ (ll. 7–8). The word ‘confound’ is especially rich here. On the one hand, a substantial subset of its connotations – to waste, to destroy, to suppress, to confuse, etc. – functions to ‘chide’ (l. 7) the addressee for his mistaken insistence on the primordial singularity of his being. On the other hand, the etymological sense of ‘confound’ – from the Latin confundere, meaning to pour or mix together – expresses exactly what the sonnet recommends as the alternative (ll.8–12) to his refusal to ‘bear’ his ‘parts’, since the singleness of musical harmony or polyphony arises directly out of the ‘confounding’ of individual notes to produce the ‘true concord of well-tuned sounds / By unions married’ (ll. 5–6). It is only in the commingling of many ‘parts’ – musical, social and personal – that true unity, that is, an eternally lasting unity, comes into being, by making succession possible. The simultaneity of many sounds producing one note turns thereby into a figure for a temporal succession that prolongs the ‘One’ in time, both negating his singularity and turning that negation itself into the means whereby singularity is preserved: Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering, Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother, Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing [. . .] (ll. 8–12)

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No doubt, the musical union invokes the paradox of the Holy Trinity here – the ur-figure for multiplicity in unity serving here as its converse: the unity arising out of multiplicity. But the punning echo of the ‘not’ from lines 2 and 3 – ‘Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy; / Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly’ – in the ‘note’ of line 12 signals that it is ultimately out of lack or absence that everything – and especially the re-iterated (and thereby divided) ‘one’ of this line – originates.47 It is only apt that that paradox-turned-proverb which this note sings be described as ‘speechless song’ (l. 13), the words emerging from wordlessness and silence.48 In the beginning is the void.49 Let me conclude by returning to Sonnet 2, which spurred my path through the thickets of number, classical, early modern and modern. At its heart is the imagined – and immediately rejected – answer to ‘being asked’, at the age of forty, ‘where all thy beauty lies’ (l. 5): ‘within thine own deep-sunken eyes’ (l. 7). The pit of himself (his eyes/ ‘I’s) into which the young man is forced to stare is the culmination of the inevitable temporal decay announced in the poem’s opening metaphor, which represents the forty years that will inescapably come to pass as digging ‘deep trenches’ in the young man’s face, wrinkling him deep in time. He will then be the living face of death itself, the stand-in for the void beyond temporal existence, as indicated by the military images of the sonnet’s opening lines, where the deep trenches of the enemy’s siege also suggest the graves of those fallen in battle. It is indeed there that the young man’s beauty ‘lies’, in the double sense of a physical outcome (there, in those very creases on your brow, your beauty lives and dies) and of a constitutive untruth (your condition then will give the lie to your beauty now, to its claim to endure). And precisely in response to this void, which it rejects as ‘all-eating shame and thriftless praise’ (l. 8), the poem’s speaker offers the generative alternative of numerical and biological succession. As numbers go, so go self and life.

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Notes 1

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (New York: Penguin Press, 2009), 18.

2

Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 251.

3

Ibid.

4

Mary Crane points to the ‘ongoing abstraction of mathematics’ as a necessary condition for ‘sum[ming] my count’: ‘Only if the “one” attached to the father is conceived of as abstract can his “increase” in the form of a son be commensurable with itself. Otherwise, father and son are two different individuals and cannot be added together.’ See Losing Touch with Nature: Literature and the New Science in Sixteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 129. As we shall see below, this abstraction was already part of the Aristotelian legacy bequeathed to early modern arithmetic.

5

I cite from Katherine Duncan-Jones’ edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), but follow the 1609 quarto punctuation for Sonnet 2.

6

We might note in passing that the implied ‘then’ of the clause which answers the hypothetical situation (of being asked a question at some point in the future) is not quite the same as the temporal ‘then’, primarily indicative in force, which opens line 5.

7

Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997), 55. Note, too, how the fiction of an ideal parthenogenesis suppresses the actual reality of biological inheritance by eliding the child’s ‘other’ blood, derived from the mother who is absent here – but who will be recalled in Sonnet 8’s ‘Resembling sire [. . .] and happy mother’ (l. 11).

8

Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, 250.

9

Ibid., 247.

10 Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 1. 11 Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 138.

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12 Booth’s other observation regarding this line is also pertinent. Only upon hitting ‘thine’ do we realize that line 12 has not in fact been spoken by the young man, whose ventriloquized voice had governed most of the preceding two lines (‘this fair child of mine / Shall sum my count and make my old excuse’). Instead, the poem’s speaker has reasserted his possession over the poem. See Booth, Sonnets, 138. To Booth’s comments, we might add that the possessives ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ reiterate the question of who owns what (be it the treasure or the poetic line itself), encoding via their rhyming both repetition (the rhyme) and difference (between the initial consonants). 13 Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1968), 46. 14 For a description of the dense network radiating out from counting and accounting, see Patricia Parker’s ‘Cassio, Cash, and the “Infidel 0”: Arithmetic, Double-entry Bookkeeping, and Othello’s Unfaithful Accounts’, in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, ed. Jyotsna G. Singh (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2009), 223–41. 15 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 46. 16 Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 59. 17 Cited in Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 59. 18 Thomas Masterson, Masterson’s Arithmetick (London, 1634), 1 19 See also Crane, Losing Touch with Nature, 127–31, on the idea that ‘a single unit doesn’t have an inherent, indivisible unity’ (131). 20 John Dee, ‘His Mathematical Preface’, in Euclides Elements of Geometry (London, 1661), (a) 1v. 21 Numbers ‘bridged the gap’, Margaret Healy’s book on Shakespeare and alchemy observes, ‘between the world of forms and that of matter – they were an accessible route to knowledge of absolute truth. The “shadowes of heavenly thing” (To the Hebrewes 8: 5) were observable in numerical patterns [. . .]’. See Shakespeare, Alchemy and the Creative Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82.

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22 Euclid, Elements, (a) 2r. This brief foray into the early modern contexts underlying Shakespeare’s engagement with numbers draws on my essay, ‘Death by Numbers: Counting and Accounting in The Winter’s Tale’, in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London: Routledge, 2008), 158–80. 23 Euclid, Elements, (a) 2r–2v. 24 Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, Devine Weekes and Workes, trans. Josuah Sylvester (London, 1605), 472. Also cited in Healy, Shakespeare, Alchemy, 84. 25 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), 20. See also Deleuze’s chapter ‘Third Series of the Proposition’, in The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 12–22. 26 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 46. Emphasis in the original. 27 Jacques Alain Miller, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’, Screen 18:4 (1977/78), 27. 28 Ibid., 28. 29 Ibid. 30 See Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 85ff. 31 Aristotle, Physics, δ14 224a2ff, cited from Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 47. Translations modified. 32 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 48. 33 Aristotle, Physics, δ14 224a2ff, cited from Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 47. Translations modified. 34 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 49. 35 Miller, ‘Suture’, 30. 36 Ibid., 30–1. 37 It was only after completing this essay that I stumbled upon the very last footnote to Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye to find – with some chagrin – that I here tread a line of thought that he had already, albeit fleetingly, envisaged. In a brief aside directed at Sonnet 136’s concluding line (‘Among a number one is reckon’d none’), Fineman suggests that Shakespeare here edges closer to ‘a more modern (Fregean) conception of number’ in that the sonnet ‘seems to distinguish between ordinal and

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cardinal numbering: “one” is the “first” because it is “none”. This ordinal conception sanctions cardinal numbering, “zero” now functioning as a placeholder that warrants counting’ (357). This seems to me exactly right – though, as I have been claiming, we do not need to wait until the 136th sonnet in the sequence to experience how Shakespeare deploys the tension between cardinality and ordinality. 38 Thomas Blundeville, His Exercises (London, 1613), 1. 39 Humfrey Baker, The Well Spryng of Sciences (London, 1568), 2. 40 Dionis Gray, The Store-house of Brevitie in woorkes of Arithematike (London, 1577), 1r–1v. Parker gathers a number of other examples in ‘Cassio, Cash, and the Infidel 0’, 226. 41 Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 46. 42 Booth, Sonnets, 147. 43 Geoffrey Whitney, Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), 66. Cited in Booth, Sonnets, 147. 44 Miller, ‘Suture’, 30. 45 Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. Glenn Raymond Morrow (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1992), 29–30. 46 Booth, Sonnets, 144. 47 Booth points out that, while the two words were ‘apparently never homonyms, they may have been pronounced enough alike for a Renaissance reader to have heard a complex play on not, note and “knot” in this context of negation, music and union’. See Sonnets, 144. Much Ado about Nothing offers, of course, the most sustained Shakespearean engagement with the nearhomophonic pair of noting and nothing, note and not. 48 Or, as Keats’ version of this paradox would later assert, ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter’. See ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, stanza 2, lines 1–2. 49 See Badiou’s discussion of the axiom of the void in Number and Numbers (London: Polity Press, 2008), 56–7.

PART THREE

Afterlives of the Sonnets

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9 Desire is Pattern Matthew Harrison

Mapping and meaning Early modern studies has turned away from narrativizing, teleological accounts of the past and its textual artifacts. Many terms theorize and locate such resistance to teleologies and sequence – queer theory, teleoskepticism, weird reading, material philology, medium-close reading and so forth.1 Likewise, digital humanist critics such as Johanna Drucker, Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels have advocated for critical approaches that ‘reveal interpretive practices’ by imagining them as ‘performative and constitutive’, relating the processes of knowing to our objects of study.2 What these different approaches share is a powerful sense of the importance of relation: the way one detail sparkles in the light cast by another. In ‘Weird Reading’, medievalist Eileen Joy describes this insight beautifully: Any given moment in a literary work (all the way down to specific words [. . .] and [. . .] up to the work as a whole), like any object or thing, is ‘fatally torn’ between its deeper reality and its ‘accidents, relations, and qualities: a set of 185

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tensions that makes everything in the universe possible, including space and time’, and literary criticism might repurpose itself as the mapping of these [. . .] tensions and rifts, as well as of the excess of meanings that might pour out of these crevasses, or wormholes.3 Weird reading continually re-maps surface to substance, essence to accident, allowing new streams of ‘excess . . . meanings’ to flow forth. This remapping is at the heart of recent approaches to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, from Miriam Jacobson’s ‘reorientation’ of canonical texts to consider the classical and Ottoman Mediterranean to Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’s network topologies.4 The relatively narrow, traditional field of sonnet studies offers a model, I argue, for reading by rearranging. Shakespeare’s sonnets are forever mapped and remapped, in rearrangements that create as many ‘wormholes’ as they do coherent clusters. From Benson’s grouped sonnets to the dizzying array of commentary in the Variorum, an excess of meaning pours forth from efforts to control and contain. Caught between the infinite interpretability of a poem and our awareness that the patterns we find refract our own desires back to us, Shakespeare’s sonnets have long invited us to confront our own methodologies and to reflect on which connections we are justified in making. Always at stake is the status of literary argument itself: how do the patterns critics observe – or make – come to mean? From the efflorescence of glosses in Stephen Booth’s edition through the tremendous mass of secondary criticism, we confront an overabundance of significance at every level. We have, as F.T. Prince writes, ‘far more evidence than we can hope to exhaust the meaning of’.5 The essay that follows considers Shakespeare’s sonnets in three ways: first, as objects of perpetual reorganization from Benson in 1640 through to today; second, as instances of a poetics that itself makes meaning by rearranging; and finally as objects of editorial activity that reimagines how form can be arranged and deranged. In so doing, it traces lines of affiliation among interpretive practices often treated as separated by

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rifts. If our methods and tools shape the questions we ask, so too might the history of our practice help us to think through the affordances of our methods. What emerges is a weirdcritical genealogy that navigates and transforms the topology of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reckoning with the poems’ tension between linearity and distant relations, sequence and association.

Reading surfaces: from sonnets to screens I begin by comparing two scenes of reading. First, a methodological proposal by Arthur Acheson in his 1922 volume, Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story, which seeks to restore Shakespeare’s sequence to its original order.6 Explaining his method to an imagined sceptical reader, Acheson proposes an experiment: [T]ake two copies of the Sonnets in Thorpe’s order [. . .] cut out the leaves and spread the sonnets out from one to one hundred and twenty-six, and for the present forgetting [. . .] Thorpe’s sequential order, move the sonnets here and there, grouping them according to subject or theme, [and] they will be found to divide naturally into seven groups.7 Having found these groups, ‘any intelligent student’ will be able to cluster the sonnets within them, and then ‘a working knowledge of [. . .] the progressive development of Shakespeare’s style’ will suffice to arrange the groups chronologically.8 And voila! The first 126 sonnets, reorganized. Yet Acheson cannot quite stick to his rhetoric of ease, determined as he is to prove his knowledge and labour. He reveals that when a student spent a few weeks spreading out the poems according to this method, he, ‘not having as intimate a knowledge of the sonnet story, failed to give the

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sequences the same consecutive order, and having considered the subject for a very much shorter time, his order within the sequences differed somewhat from mine’.9 When Acheson describes this method again, sixty pages later, he adds that he has spent two decades re-evaluating and reconsidering. Rather than a reliable map, he produces a shifting surface that makes new rifts visible. A story that intends to demonstrate, immediately and clearly, the manifest rightness of a given order becomes instead a prescription for a lifetime of reading and constant evaluation, appealing to many types of knowledge and tempered by subjective ‘preconception and obsession’.10 Compare Bruce Andrews, writing in 2003 about the practice of reading electronic poetry: We can think of the textual surface as an instrument panel, the screen as a flat & opaque workspace, given enormous fluidity, activating the user’s body. Action replaces both the passive representation of conventional literature & the passive spectacle of animated, programmed work. It embraces navigation, micro-evaluations, conceptual animation, freezeframing, editing, blending, filtering, subliminal cut & paste, time compressions & expansions, frame resizing: practically everything we need to sidetrack closure.11 The field has rotated 90 degrees, transforming the flat surface on which Acheson ‘spread out’ and then ‘moved’ the sonnets into a different sort of desktop.12 But the set of operations Andrews describes mirror those of Acheson’s hypothetical rearranger: navigating and evaluating, animating and compressing, sorting and blending. This juxtaposition relates recent questions about digital readings and digital editions to traditional ones about Shakespeare’s sonnets, their order, and the connections among them. Lev Manovich has proposed that the database has replaced narrative as the defining form of ‘the computer age’.13 Where narrative draws a privileged line through disparate

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events, the database offers multiple orders, mediated by user and interface, with temporal sequence only one option among many. Database forms – the list, the matrix, the catalogue, the encyclopaedia – offer not cause-and-effect or other sequential forms but rather a multiply traversable topology. As such, databases lend themselves to what Alan Liu describes in contemporary criticism as ‘micro-, hetero-, and poly-ism’: attention to the motility of the detail within a matrix of larger forces.14 Both Manovich and Liu attend to what I call the digital surface, theorizing granular, local, hyper-detailed and highly mobile forms of attention that have long been critical to literary study. What Shakespeare’s sonnets, in particular, teach is that sequence is always both found and created, that it is ‘invented’ in both its early modern and contemporary senses. In all the cases surveyed above, what is at stake is how to close-read a field, a network, a database. Acheson and Andrews imagine reading as an active, evaluative and even creative engagement with a world of almost infinitely recombinable texts. Against sequential organization of the individual textual element – left to right, top to bottom, beginning to end – the work surface maps a terrain of association and adjustment, visual hierarchy and serendipitous connection that constantly shifts under us. A series of critical turns (New Historical, rhetorical, sociological, digital) has put new pressures on the shapes of textual argument: we think now less in terms of adjacency and sequence than in terms of distributed intensities and networks of association. Laying out tabs on laptop screens like sonnets on the desk, we trawl through EEBO , the MLA Bibliography and the OED tracing and inventing the connections that make meaning. Yet to think about our scholarly procedures demands that we look for continuities as well as disjunctions, for predecessors of the modes of critical assemblage that make up ‘the way we read now’. Constantly reordered and reconsidered, Shakespeare’s sonnets help us to map a new topology of critical reading.

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Lyrics in sequence: intensity and extensivity The sonnet is among the most architectural of lyric forms: well-shaped, with familiar furniture and clearly articulated functions. To read a sonnet is to think through the relationship between artifactuality and the perceived immediacy of lyric, as the vivid turn and the gathering or exhausting force of the couplet seem to escape the conventions that contain them. Stefano Boselli calls the sonnet ‘a tiny chamber black-box theatre whose essential walls are its limited verses’.15 A theatre whose plot, walls and script are made of the same verbal materials. And its curtain. As soon as a sonnet ends, there is another sonnet. Another room, another utterance, and we begin again the process of reading. As A.C. Hamilton writes, ‘A sonnet shines brilliantly for the moment that it is read, only to fade entirely before the next sonnet’.16 Sonnet sequences are like ‘stars against a black sky rather than related points on a narrative line’.17 And yet in fading, sonnets do not vanish: to read a whole sonnet sequence is to be faced with the constant return of things half-forgotten. Even reading two or three together, one sees in these stars the beginning of a constellation, imagined lines of connection that give shaping form to isolated objects. For Hamilton too, then, what is conventionally called a sequence is more accurately a shifting topology. Reading sonnet criticism, one finds this insight repeatedly: Bernadette Mayer describes spreading her sonnets out on the floor to survey them; Samuel Butler lays Shakespeare’s out on a desktop, ‘shifting them again and again tentatively’; Katherine Duncan-Jones and Tom Stoppard both describe a shuffled deck of cards.18 This encounter between local intensity and distant relations encourages two contradictory strategies of attention: the unfolding of the carefully staged moment of the particular poem, rife with what Lyn Hejinian refers to as ‘vertical intensity’, as well as the slow, haphazard sense of repetition

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and association that animates and alienates what we have already read (Hejinian’s ‘horizontal extensivity’).19 The first timeline is that of the complicated, enjambed tease of the first lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 13: O that you were yourself! But, love, you are No longer yours, than you yourself here live; Against this coming end you should prepare [. . .] The speaker lingers with the hope that ‘you’ are ‘love’, for as long as he can, hoping to hold off that deadly predicate. Over the break, ‘love’ collapses into a mere vocative, as a reminder of the inevitability of death replaces the longed-for identity. The lines are not about self-possession at all, until they are, and the realization jars in face of the ‘coming end’. In the second timeline, we hear something else, the radical charge with which this first ‘you’ bursts into the sequence, transforming the series’ erotic intensity. With it, ‘love’ reaches new heights: what was empty ‘self-love’ in 3, the purely visual ‘loveliness’ and ‘lovely’ of 4 and 5, and kind affection in 9 and 10’s ‘love towards others’ and ‘love to any’ becomes the deeply personal vocatives that bookend this poem (in lines 1 and 13). Reading a poem does not necessitate comparing the semantic range of each lexical item against all prior ones. Yet this effect, however dimly felt, is very much part of the radical surprise of this poem’s first line. In Thorpe’s ordering, it is here that the young man becomes beloved. We need both readings to hear what is ventured at this moment and what is lost. Other words, images and conceits similarly become laden with meaning, though the particulars change with every reading and reader. Richard Blackmur describes a ‘constant interflow of new relations, of new reticulations – as if the inner order were always on the move’.20 Arguments about the sonnet order continually appeal to our sense of such connections, whether in defence of the current order – Don Paterson detects the ‘meticulously careful, sensitive and playful way that can only indicate the author’s hand’ – or opposition to it.21

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Indeed, reading rearrangements, however sceptically, one is struck with such connections. Bringing together Sonnets 62 and 22, Bray’s 1925 edition teases out the dialectic of ‘selflove’ and difference in these two poems about looking in the mirror, letting their interest in beauty and comparison transform Sonnet 18, which here follows them. So, too, Clara de Chambrun has Sonnet 43 delightfully repair 113: in the latter of these (according to Thorpe), absence distorts the features of the waking world, turning every object into the form of the beloved. Its new sequel, 43, reflects on the eye’s best sight at night, when dreams portray the beloved.22 Its couplet now resolves the tensions evoked by the earlier poem as well: ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee, / And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me’. Such resonances have a strange status. We are right to be sceptical that they are signals to some hidden, final order, right to doubt that they are intentional at all. Yet the slow accumulation of such effects, even more than any narrative, is what makes reading Shakespeare’s sonnets so rich. These moments of constellated rationality are a defining feature of sonnet sequences more broadly. Alice Notley refers to it as a ‘relational tension’ (describing The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan): ‘The pieces of the self are allowed to separate and reform: one is not chronology but its parts and the real organism they create.’23 We might therefore imagine the turn towards relation in early modern studies as a shift from vertical intensity to horizontal extensivity – in the study of The sonnets themselves and in our treatment of the volume’s engagement with the outer world. Alongside modes of analysis, critics have turned to assemblage: we limn networks of association, juxtapose compelling intertexts, meditate on the matrices of forces within which a poem swirls. It is time to engage this history of weird sonnet readings, not for their rhetoric but for their topology, for the sparks that fly from the grinding of brains against poems. Doing so reveals the contiguity of these projects with contemporary work on reading digital poetry. The ‘links’ between poems – associative,

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imagistic, rhyme, narrative – can be productively read beside Susana Pajares Tosca’s work on the ‘lyrical quality of hyperlinks’ and Peter Whalley’s account of the ‘rhetoric of hypertext’.24 As earlier scholars trace the thin affiliations between lyrics, these later ones propose a lyrical aesthetics of hypertext. So, too, as traced above, the project of shoring up narrative through order speaks to Lyn Hejinian’s account of poetic closure. As I will show in the next sections, the continued possibilities of their strategies of rearrangement, erasure and association, as found in contemporary poets’ engagements with the sonnets, might help us to rethink the potential of digital editions. The vibrating relationality that animates Shakespeare’s sequence becomes a poetic principle itself in the work of Ross Goodwin, Paul Hoover and Jen Bervin. Where before I asked how the affiliations between poems rewrites the order as we read, I now turn to ask: how does order itself double back and inflect, or rewrite, the sonnet?

Revising poetics 18. This verse distills your trespass now Becomes a tyrant have devised what is best make Eternity which borrowed from this sums Themselves be bevel by sweet that partake If now approve desire is pattern That shall will in others works in like see The judgment that arise yourself saturn Returned from thee for nimble thought story Compare them with the time removed from thee The canopy with that muse that thou style This sorrow comes in the praise wrongfully Be good slander doth prepare the beguile It no it is but mutual render A worthier pen him in thy splendor 25

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The eighteenth sonnet of Ross Goodwin’s collection meditates on the idea of sequence, ‘distill[ing]’ the tyranny of its ‘trespass’ on Shakespeare’s sonnets into the startling observation that ‘desire is pattern’: that we ‘shall/will’ (with the customary pun on ‘Will’) ‘in others’ works [. . .] see / the judgment that arise[s]’ from ourselves. We interpret the material through the bevelled lens of our own desires. But rather than rejecting such fantastic interpretation – our ‘nimble thought story’ – the poem courts it, describing a sort of ‘good slander’. Not least in its pun on ‘render’ – both to transform and to represent – the sonnet imagines readers and texts might improve each other, making both ‘worthier’ and more splendid. To offer this reading is partially to indulge myself: Goodwin’s sonnet is among ten thousand written by a computer program, Sonnetizer.py, that rearranges the language of a textual corpus – here, Shakespeare’s sonnets – into poems of fourteen lines of ten syllables, rhyming in the traditional pattern. The patterns I trace are not authorial, not even intentional, save in the play of my mind against the algorithm, a nimble thought story of my own creation. Bits and pieces of Shakespeare’s text have drifted together, billowing up into dunes of association. The very volatility of Shakespeare’s text infuses this poem with meaning against its Will. After all, Shakespeare’s sequence does interrogate the relation of desire to pattern, repeatedly finding a type of loving anachronism in which desire transforms the meanings we make of the world. Goodwin’s (or Sonnetizer’s, or Shakespeare’s) sonnet asks to be read with the same loving eyes that enable the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98 to find all of nature ‘but figures of delight, / Drawn after you, you pattern of all those’ (ll. 11–12). We find that same type of loving reading in 114, where the beloved’s ‘love’ teaches the speaker’s eye to ‘creat[e] every bad a perfect best’ (ll. 4, 8). Goodwin’s sonnet weaves together several strands of Shakespeare’s lyric and prompts reading them together: the sonnet speaker’s idolatrous reading of his beloved melds with the sequence’s visions of loving interpretation. Rearranging

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sense (and even syntax), we invent a pattern that precedes our making. From their first printings, Shakespeare’s sonnets have sparked this desire to rearrange them, to find in and make of them what we want to hear. The poems’ earliest editors (Jaggard in 1599, Benson in 1640, perhaps Thorpe in 1609) move, combine and change them. Subsequent anthologizers wrest the poems into new contexts, while a long line of rearrangers search out the true order of the sonnet sequence. Nor are contemporary critics free of this urge: the clusters by which we understand the poems (both the division between young man and dark lady and the more tentative splitting that forms groups like the ‘rival poet’ series) are distinctly modern ways of threading our minds through the text. So too, many poets repurpose and rearrange Shakespeare’s text, including Goodwin, K. Silem Mohammad (who writes new sonnets anagrammatically from the letters of Shakespeare’s), and two I will discuss below: Paul Hoover and Jen Bervin. To be sure, reordering Shakespeare’s sonnets now seems old-fashioned and misguided. Annemarie Jagose (in Lesbian Utopics) has shown that efforts to defend or revise the sonnet sequence have been ‘structured by the closet’, positing a true (and inevitably sexual) meaning at the heart of the sequence only made visible by reading right.26 The very notion of a ‘true’ or ‘secret’ meaning seems outdated: after Manovich, Liu and Andrews (among others), scholars conceive of texts as distributed networks of significance that shift under the weight of interpretation. But Goodwin’s example proposes considering such revisionary strategies as experiments in bringing out the dynamics of an interpretive field. How different, I wonder, is building a reading of one of Sonnetizer’s sonnets from developing an argument from the results of a ‘full-text search’? Or, for that matter, from Acheson’s assembly (and subsequent reading) of a group of poems containing ‘mine eye’? In what follows, I read a pair of contemporary poets’ engagements with the sonnets as a means of thinking about critical practice, juxtaposition and associative reading.

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Paul Hoover’s Sonnet 56 riffs on Shakespeare’s poem through a variety of forms, from experiments in the inventive genres of Oulippo poets (noun plus seven, homosyntactic) through the traditional (villanelle, sestina, limerick, haiku). Most interesting are those in which tight constraints transpose Shakespeare’s imagistic and conceptual density into a thick linguistic materiality, as here in ‘Alphabetical I’: kill love let love like love love more might more may makes more not new of oceans of perpetual parts27 Here in compressed form is the insistent pleading of the ‘young man’ sonnets, the potentiality those sonnets conjure up to figure desire as abundance (‘more might’, ‘more may’ – ‘makes more’), and their omnipresent worry about death and time. Against the pretence of novelty implicit in the sonnet form, with its constant new beginnings and metaphors, the reader is reminded that this is ‘not new’, rather a swirling sea that recombines the same fragments. Like Goodwin’s lines on desire and pattern, this work gathers together broken fragments of Shakespeare’s whole. The poetics of fragmentation, parody and distortion are now familiar. Goodwin’s work offers instead the prospect of a criticism (even a poetics) of reassembly and recuperation, of trawling through the ‘oceans of perpetual parts’. What is crucial about the sonnet sequence, as a genre, are the constantly shifting affiliations that let one poem reappear momentarily in another. But to read such affiliations, to trace such connections and hold them up to the light, is always partially creative, picking and choosing among many possibilities. It is ‘invention’, finding what may or may not be already there. One image for such reassembly comes in Jen Bervin’s volume Nets, which erases words from Shakespeare’s sonnets

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to create new poems. The original text is printed in a light grey, with a few words emboldened to make a new poem. Sonnet 8 thus turns into a lyric meditation about this fragmentary volume itself: In singleness the parts Strike each in each speechless song, being many, seeming one.28 Where Goodwin’s algorithmic sonnets maximize the horizontal extensivity of Shakespeare’s sequence, stretching it out into a vast landscape of perpetually rearranging parts, Bervin maximizes their vertical intensity, finding in each a single composed moment. As her Sonnet 134 asserts: I use the whole, and yet I am not Here, too, poetic history is engaged, including Ronald Johnson’s beautiful erasure of Paradise Lost, concrete poetry, and early work on cyberpoetics.29 But equally striking is the way these poems resonate with recent work on digital editing. The web versions of Bervin’s poems look similar to the book’s, until you move your cursor over them and make the greyed text disappear, leaving only the bolded words.30 As such, they resemble the visualizations constructed by Alan Galey for his Visualizing Variation project: animated text boxes that allow readers to encounter multiple versions of Shakespearean cruces, like Hamlet’s ‘Oh that this too, too sullied/solid/sallied flesh would melt’. Drawing on many traditions that influenced Bervin, Galey proposes that digital techniques enable readers to encounter textual variation ‘not as a problem to solve, but as a field of interpretive possibility’.31 We need not limit ourselves to textual variation: Bervin’s animations open up a broader field of possibilities, within the ‘interpretive field’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Among the

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affordances of digital editions is their availability for sequencebreaking, for deformative reading, and data-mining. These contemporary poets help us to think through what such strategies can tell us about Shakespeare and ourselves.

Textual surfaces To speak of an interpretive field in this way is to conflate two different senses of the term. First, the imagined (and constantly shifting) plane of meanings that surrounds a given text: as readers, Galey suggests, we navigate this field of variations. But the metaphor evokes a second tradition, considering the poem as a ‘field of action’ (to use William Carlos Williams’ term) or of ‘composition by field’ (as Charles Olson puts it).32 These poets reimagine stable structure as a kinetics on the page, in which the relation of words to words (and ideas to ideas) is one of movement. The ‘interpretive fields’ we encounter as scholars are those we create: the ‘high-energy constructs’ (Olson) invented and arranged on the scholar’s desk or screen. It is well within this tradition that we should read our engagements with the form of digital editions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Such editions do more than enable us to visualize alternative possibilities; in making possible new types of rearrangement, they offer a new kinetics of meaning. Take a moment from one such edition.



From

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fairest creatures we desire increase ,33 This is a snippet of the XML code that organizes the Folger Digital Texts edition of the sonnets, encoding the beginning of Shakespeare’s sequence. Even without experience with encoded texts, one can make out a careful structure here in the patterns of anaphora and parenthesis. The code marks the beginning of the ‘document’, of the ‘Sonnets’ text, and of the first ‘sonnet’, each enclosing the next like nested baskets. Then, it defines a new unit, a ‘line’, and lists the units that comprise it. Finally, each ‘word’, ‘punctuation character’ and ‘space’ is given its own address. The code carefully models a book composed of poems themselves composed of lines and so forth. The resulting website text bears a close resemblance to the paper Folger edition on which it is based: ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’, in familiar Times New Roman. Yet for this purpose, all that structuring hierarchy was unnecessary: one need not name every comma and space to display a line of text on screen. Rather, structuring information is encoded into the sonnets so that we can read against and around it: we might ask for every ‘line’ containing the ‘word’ ‘desire’, the first ‘word’ of every ‘line’ that isn’t preceded by a comma (a ‘punctuation character’), or a list of the ‘words’ in the ‘document’ organized by frequency. We might readily display the poems in reverse, or in the orders suggested by Bray or Acheson. Or, imitating Raymond Queneau, we might explore the billions of poems emerging when the first line of one poem is combined with the second of another, and so forth.

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The object here – the Folger Digital Texts edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets – enfolds into form a host of possibilities already present in the sequence. What we realize, looking at this encoded sonnet sequence, is that structure (or form) is not the opposite of deformance, distortion and rearrangement – it is its precondition. Without identifying what a line is, implicitly or explicitly, we can’t refer to a certain line and certainly cannot rearrange it. Imagine a second encoding scheme organized not around the units of the Folger text (sonnet, line, word, character, punctuation) but some other constructs that offers totally different affordances: say, ‘syllable’, ‘phrase’, ‘quatrain’ or ‘couplet’, and poetic ‘grouping’. We could then algorithmically call up the closing phrase of each quatrain of the ‘rival poet’ poems. Or substitute the closing couplets of the ‘young man’ sonnets into the ‘dark lady’ poems. Again, the categories that order the code enable what can be done with it. Someone interested in the material book might prefer a third schema – say, ‘edition’, ‘copy’, ‘gathering’, ‘page’, ‘line’, ‘mark’ – and its own possibilities for reference and rearrangement. A given text admits many potential organizational schemas; in structuring a text, these models allow for its manipulation. As Michael Witmore argues in ‘Text: A Massively Addressable Object’, what is fundamental about our conceptual engagement with texts is the ability to formulate many such schemas and to use them to engage with textual specifics at many levels of scale.34 For Witmore, what is useful here is the way that massive computational power will allow us to use our encoded structures to test our concepts against the data. Claude Willan writes, similarly, that the digital humanities offer ‘extraordinary supplements and methodological improvements through durable and measurable principles of selection’.35 But recent monographs and journals offer another sort of argument informed by digital humanities, one not at all concerned with ‘methodology’ as something that can be improved or ‘principles of selection’ that can endure. Rather, such digital humanists are developing a type of argument by juxtaposition,

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comparison, analogy and suggestion, made possible by deep databases and long lists of searches. Some of our best critics work by collage, holding up fragments in a web of their own making that transforms the ‘objects’ of study as much as it illuminates them. They offer handwritten maps of impossible locales, detailing possibilities that were not or that are not yet. In returning to Joy’s image of weird reading, I am also rehearsing a long history of scholars of electronic textuality thinking less about knowledge-as-important-fact than how we choose to arrange and derange the infinitely arrangeable text: [A] cybertext is not a static artefact. The conditions of its existence are tenuous, a feature that can be exploited for aesthetic purposes through continual morphing. If a text is in a profound sense produced in each reading, and if no text is ever fully self-identical, then cybertexts embody those premises with even greater flexibility.36 Always becoming, cyberpoems are emergent, heterological and heterogeneous in their constant spooling, transferences, hyperlinking and recomposition. The poem has shifted from bricolage to morphosis . . . Made of textual typographic fragments constantly moving into and out of focus, resolution and degrees of proximity, the cyberpoem is more like an installation or event than a document etched in metal or printed on paper. The reader navigates through a sea of signs visiting information ports. There is no horizon line and any scratched in reference to one is nostalgic since we see beyond what the naked eye can see via satellites, microscopes, cable and data mirrors.37 Drucker’s ‘cybertext’ and Brereton’s ‘cyberpoem’ both demand to be read like Acheson reads Shakespeare’s sonnets: as a ‘sea of signs’, an ‘ocean of perpetual parts’, less ‘static artifact’ than an ‘event’ or environment to be navigated. We might say that the affordances of the medium – the ease with which words on the screen can be rearranged – indulge and support our sense

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of reading as transformative and productive. More so than page or plaque, the screen for these writers makes clear the temporary and contingent nature of our readerly experience, becoming a work surface that holds the objects of our attention. So, too, our scholarly inventio and dispositio, at this moment, at least, is mirrored in our artifacts: arrangement is both arbitrary and essential, an attempt to model in flat text our glimpses of morphosis. We read less the text than the work surface that we assemble around and with the text. Or rather: we make surfaces about surfaces. If we follow this line of thought backwards, from electronic text to cybertext to cyberpoem, we end up not with computers at all, but with form, that precondition of all disruption. Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics – they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number, and velocities of a work’s motion.38 The unity of a work is not a closed symmetrical whole, but an unfolding dynamic integrity [. . .] The sensation of form in such a situation is always the sensation of flow (and therefore of change) [. . .] Art exists by means of this interaction or struggle.39 Today’s criticism is always a scrambling and rearranging of yesterday’s. Here, an account of the unfolding of a text’s form in time becomes spatialized in Hejinian, who (like Olson) is interested in the dynamics of field composition. Brereton allegorizes, turning the movement of characters on screen into a figure for such dynamics. And Drucker abstracts this move once more, from typography to identity. All these accounts understand reading as navigating a constantly shifting field of significance, simultaneously prompted by the text and invented by the reader. This sense is a fair shorthand for many of our critical practices now. We have searches open in tabs, database queries, poems, all arrayed on the darkling plains of our minds

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and we start to draw connections, start to assemble not objects exactly but fields of meaningful relation that we can sketch out again for others. Blackmur’s ‘constant interflow of new relations, of new reticulations’, is the great pleasure and achievement both of the sonnets and of criticism itself. From a twenty-first-century perspective, Blackmur’s is just about the final word on Shakespeare studies’ own critical history of rearranging and restructuring, distorting and deforming, morphosis and bricolage. Reading descriptions of sonnet rearrangers’ processes – spreading the poems out on a desk or table or floor and tracing connections – I see shades of Brereton’s cyber-reader, trying to bring order to a constantly shifting morphosis. I see Andrews’s active electronic reader. I see myself, cutting and pasting to see how one poem sparkles in the light of another. I see the invention and arrangement of an endlessly productive surface. The sonnet sequence – and Shakespeare’s in particular – juxtaposes moments of brilliant local intensity with the tenuous, shifting, faint connections of extensivity, prompting us to trace our own constellations in the night sky. These rearranging critics seem to have fallen short from our perspective, unable to convince us of their evidence, much less their claims. Their names (Acheson, Butler, de Chambrun and so forth) seldom appear in our editions. The work itself seems outdated, responsive to historical speculation we find absurd and ethical concerns we no longer share. In the absence of evidence, we have largely given up the questions they have tackled as impossible (when we’re feeling charitable) or uninteresting (when we’re not). But, then, this will happen to most of us, too. What remains, what attracts my eye when I am reading their work and what I am laying out on the table for you is this: their misguided work of ingenuity truly ignites the poems with new possibilities. Their criticism, by all standards of contemporary discourse, is flawed, suspect, unreadable, unimportant. And yet it moves.

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Notes 1

What these diverse schools of thought share is their sense that critical acts of assemblage offer a mode of resisting, complicating or correcting too-simple historical narratives. Methodological approaches originating from the ‘temporal turn’ in sexuality studies have become invaluable to scholars working on a broad range of other questions. For discussion of these issues, see Valerie Traub’s ‘The New Unhistoricism’, PMLA 128:1 (Jan 2013), 21–39, and the replies by Carla Freccero and Madhavi Menon in the ‘Forum’ in PMLA 128:3 (May 2013), 781–6. See also Frecerro’s ‘Queer Times’, South Atlantic Quarterly 100:3 (2007), 485–94, and Menon’s Unhistorical Shakespeare (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). ‘Teleoskepticism’ is Traub’s term. For ‘weird reading’, see Eileen Joy, ‘Weird Reading’, Speculations 4 (2013), 28–34. ‘Material philology’ is Miriam Jacobson’s term for the tracking of symbolic networks around material objects to approach poetic meaning, in Barbarous Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 285. For ‘medium-close reading’, see Matthew Zarnowiecki, Fair Copies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 7. I am grateful to Laura Kolb, Tim Turner, Erin Julian, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

2

Quotations drawn from Drucker, ‘Reading Interface’, PMLA 128:1 (Jan 2013), 219. For McGann and Samuels, see ‘Deformance and Interpretation’, New Literary History 30:1 (Winter 1999), 25–56.

3

Joy, ‘Weird Reading’, 30. Joy’s quotations are from Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism (Ropley: Zero Books, 2010), 150.

4

For ‘reorientation’, see Barbarous Antiquity, particularly the introduction. Six Degrees of Francis Bacon maps early modern social networks – see sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com.

5

F.T. Prince, reviewing Hyder Rollins’ Variorum edition in the Review of English Studies 1:3 (1950), 255–8.

6

Arthur Acheson, Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story (London: Quaritch, 1922).

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7

Ibid., xxi. Two copies are necessary, presumably, because sonnets are printed on both sides of the page.

8

Ibid., xxii.

9

Ibid., xx.

10 Ibid., 45. 11 Bruce Andrews, ‘Electronic Poetry’, Cybertext Yearbook 2002–2003, ed. John Cayley and Loss Pequeño Glazier (Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 2003), 32. 12 Acheson, Shakespeare’s Sonnet Story, 44. 13 Lev Manovich, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’, Convergence 5:2 (1999), 81. 14 Alan Liu, Local Transcendence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 113. 15 Stefano Boselli, ‘Virtual Theaters in Miniature Rooms: The Early Italian Dialogic Sonnets’, Italica 88:4 (Winter 2011), 500. 16 A.C. Hamilton, ‘Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella as a Sonnet Sequence’, ELH 36:1 (Mar 1969), 61. 17 Ibid. 18 Bernadette Mayer, ‘Note on Sonnets’, in Sonnets (Berkeley, CA : Tender Buttons, 2004), 83; Samuel Butler, Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), iv; Katherine Duncan-Jones, ‘Was the 1609 Shake-Speare’s Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’, Review of English Studies 34:134 (May 1983), 151–71; Tom Stoppard, Travesties (New York, 1984), 35. 19 Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 55. 20 Richard Blackmur, ‘A Poetics for Infatuation’, in Shakespeare (with interpretive essays by Edward Hubler et al.), The Riddle of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Routledge, 1962), 131. 21 Don Paterson, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Guardian, 16 October 2010. www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/16/shakespearesonnets-don-paterson [accessed 15 December 2015]. 22 Clara de Chambrun, The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913).

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23 Ted Berrigan, Collected Poems, ed. Alice Notley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 667, 4. 24 Susana Pajares Tosca, ‘The Lyrical Quality of Links’, in Hypertext 99, ed. Klaus Tochtermann et al. (New York: ACM , 2009), 217–8; Peter Whalley, ‘An Alternative Rhetoric for Hypertext’, in Hypertext: A Psychological Perspective, ed. C. McKnight, A. Dillon and J. Richardson (Chichester: Ellis Horwood Limited, 2009), 7–18. 25 Ross Goodwin, Ten Thousand Sonnets by William Shakespeare. http://rossgoodwin.com/10000sonnets.pdf [accessed 15 December 2010]. I have capitalized the initial letter of each line. The Sonnetizer program is available to download from Goodwin’s website: http://rossgoodwin.com/sonnetizer. 26 Annemarie Jagose, Lesbian Utopics (London: Routledge, 1994), 89. 27 Paul Hoover, Sonnet 56 (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2009), 46. 28 Jen Bervin, Nets (New York: Ugly Duckling, 2004). 29 See Ronald Johnson, Radi os (Berkeley, CA : Sand Dollar Press, 1977). The cyberpoetics tradition is discussed below. 30 Jen Bervin, ‘From Nets’, Conjunctions. www.conjunctions.com/ webcon/bervin.htm. [accessed 15 December 2015]. 31 Alan Galey, ‘Overview’, Visualizing Variation. http://individual. utoronto.ca/alangaley/visualizingvariation/ [accessed 15 December 2015]. 32 William Carlos Williams, ‘The Poem as a Field of Action’, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), 280, and Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 33 XML code from the Folger Digital Texts’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5& play=Son&loc=Son-001 [accessed 15 December 2015]. Folger Digital Texts is licensed the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/deed.en_US . No changes have been made in our reproduction of their code. 34 Michael Whitmore, ‘Text: A Massively Addressable Object’, Wine Dark Sea, 31 December 2010. http://winedarksea. org/?p=926 [accessed 15 December 2015].

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35 Claude Willan, ‘We Write Sentences. About Sentences’, Claude Willan personal blog. https://claudewillan.wordpress.com/ 2015/08/19/we-write-sentences-about-sentences/ [accessed 15 December 2015]. 36 Johanna Drucker, ‘Theory as Praxis: The Poetics of Electronic Textuality’, Modernism/Modernity 9:4 (Nov 2002), 688. 37 Kurt Brereton, ‘The CyberPoetics of Typography’, Jacket Magazine 1 (Oct 1997). http://jacketmagazine.com/01/ cyberpoetics.html [accessed 15 December 2015]. 38 Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, 42. 39 Yurii Tynianov, ‘Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse’, cited in Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, 48.

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10 Regifting Some Shakespeare Sonnets of Late Jonathan F.S. Post

As every Shakespearean knows, the sonnets can ignite a writer’s inner voice. ‘A lightening rod for nuttiness’ is Helen Vendler’s description of the syndrome.1 Mine was sparked of late by Don Paterson’s eccentric and often brilliant new commentary, written in part against the formidable roll-call of scholarly editions already on the table: those by Booth, Kerrigan, Vendler, Burrow and Duncan-Jones, to name the obvious fabulous five reduced metonymically in Paterson’s edition to their initials, as is the YM (young man), the RP (rival poet), the DL (dark lady) and, of course, WS , but not DP himself.2 It then took a strange turn, in part stoked by the contemporaneity of Patterson’s commentary, which smoulders with little asides about current poets as well as personal responses of his own as a Poet (with a capital P) to the individual sonnets. As chance would have it, one evening I was reading the poet Alice Fulton (not mentioned by Paterson) and her beautiful, sometimes baffling, recent collection of verse, just published 209

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by Norton, bearing the provocative title Barely Composed.3 It is the seventh book of poetry by the former MacArthur Fellow, who teaches at Cornell, and occupies the position held by her teacher, A.R. Ammons. Fulton is not an easy poet to classify, and before going on in the second half of this essay to address other uses poets of late have made of Shakespeare’s sonnets, I want to speak of her contribution in the particular. She is sometimes referred to as maximalist with regard to the generous breadth of her vision and use of sweeping forms (like Ammons in this regard, and before Ammons, Whitman), but she is also among the most punctilious of poets, fully invested in the microcosmic aspects of language, its sensuous immediacy and multivalent meanings, and, like Dickinson – her other American forebear – she has a hankering for discontinuous syntax and disruptive utterance. ‘Intricately crafted and yet expansive – even majestic – in its scope and vision’, reads the introductory sentence describing Fulton’s verse in American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry.4 The title of her volume of critical essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, for instance, packs a lot into its length with regard to the simultaneous heightening of language and feeling, the necessary fusion of one with another, that she admires in other poets and is evident in her own work.5 More pointedly, Felt, the title of her 2001 collection of poetry, underlines a primary but often overlooked connection between feeling and texture, emotion and materiality. ‘Felt’ is a nice grammatical equivocation, a dance between noun and verb. As Fulton says, playing on both possibilities: ‘Felt is often a small or hidden part / of a familiar == and thus escapes attention’ (‘About Music for Bone and Membrane Instrument’).6 Along with being one of the brainiest of poets – through the concept of ‘fractal’ poetry she gives detailed local habitation to what is sometimes postmodernist airiness – Fulton can be remarkably funny and tough. In an earlier life, she was a radio DJ. She has something of the dyer’s hand about her, as does Paterson, and, of course, Shakespeare himself.

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Almost halfway through Barely Composed appears the following poem, a sonnet, although not obviously so. It foregoes most of the usual formal markers, whether Petrarchan or Shakespearean or some hybrid combination of the two, including a refusal to adhere strictly to the pentameter line, but embraces the sonnet’s usual subject matter, love and loss: It’s like a prison that makes itself at home in you, like so not worth it, so not mattering, and so fair King of Not, you self-release, secede, sowing misgivings as you go. You’re it, you’re all, all eyes on you, you own this minute, this misdream, itch, and ache. Want air? Is this where you came in? Want like straightforwardness, footloose yelp, rue, am I not making myself dear? I’m animate, you know, if on hold, deterred, deposed. Deflattered. And you – you’re like bye-bye. You judge me and leave me, but the dreamswerve, regifting, grows intimate, into what’s at stake. Isn’t it rich? Isn’t this it? This caustic awakening, as is. As us. This knot of not mattering, isn’t it like enough? Barely composed, indeed. The more fool I for wandering into this postmodern forest of ardour; and yet, I find myself seriously attracted to this poem, ‘So rich with rush’, as Fulton remarks in ‘Claustrophilia’ from the same collection. The sonnet is one of enticing mystery and remarkable urgency, its diction immediate and commanding, its repetitions compelling, its logic disconcerting, its phrasing full of little shifts and surprises, its diction punningly ejaculatory: ‘You self-release, secede, sowing’. ‘Isn’t it like enough?’ I take it that an emotional meltdown of some kind is happening, and a language is being invented to describe it, that is, to give the experience a voice or multiple voices as the imagined situation requires. At one level, the poem is more controlled than something by Sylvia Plath, that is, less ‘theatricalized’ emotion. No ‘Lady Lazarus’ here: Fulton has only one life to live, although the

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poem is still written on the edge, although the edge of what isn’t perfectly delineated and, because not, is made more perilous in the process. ‘am / I not making myself dear?’, the speaker endearingly says, walking several wobbly lines at once, stumbling over the enjambment, as if her blood alcohol were well over the limit, and confusing ‘dear’ and ‘clear’. No, or perhaps yes, you are making yourself perfectly clear when, animatedly and as a sign of your animation, you confuse ‘dear’ and ‘clear’. You are desperate about being left, being put on hold. The slippage is everywhere revealing. But no, everything else seems a question mark, unclear, as the cascade of questions at the end suggests, and the address at the beginning intimates. In contrast to most sonnets, we are not sure of the gender of the speaker (although we might assume it to be female), or who the ‘you’ is, what has happened, and whether the speaker is offering advice at the outset, or arguing against herself or himself or against something more abstract, an emotion, like jealousy being released, like poison. But there is enough torque in the double negatives – ‘This knot of not mattering’ – to sense that things nonetheless matter a great deal. There is even the sense that this riff or rift, whatever it is, ‘this caustic awakening, as is. As us’, is profoundly ‘them’, that this ‘not’, this negative, forms a ‘knot’, like a marriage ‘knot’. Thoughts of leaving – ‘you’re like bye-bye’ – are so well enacted, or exacted, that they create the illusion of a ‘dreamswerve’. But that swerve doesn’t altogether cancel out the worry that the high-stakes game being played between the two is ‘like enough’. How that phrase just hangs there at the end, a holdover of earlier uses of ‘like’ in the poem. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Or maybe for the moment it is or has become so – a dreamswerve, a swerve from a dream that is now ‘like enough’. Let’s slow down for a moment and ask the usual question: where does a poem like this come from? ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made’? I wonder how many will spot or hear the source text for this poem? It’s not easy. The poem doesn’t possess a single telling echo (although ‘prison’

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for ‘misprision’ gets close, and ‘prison’ is only one letter off from becoming ‘poison’). Nor is there a resonantly locating phrase as is the case, for instance, in the sonnet Fulton selects to inaugurate her collection, with its italicized allusion to the apocalyptic element of Sonnet 55: ‘Not nuclear warheads / on the sea’s floor nor the violet glow over the reactor / will outlive this sorrowful rhyme’. Indeed, if anything, the italicized line in the quoted poem borders on non-sense, or at least distraction, which is one of its mimetic functions. But her poem, in at least one respect, is thoroughly and fully, even if nearly invisibly, Shakespearean in its composition. Not wanting the reader to miss the ‘felt’ from which her poem is derived, Fulton tell us in a note that ‘Peroral’, as the poem is titled, is ‘composed of recombinant words, prefixes, suffixes, and homonyms from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87, and an anagram of its first line, “Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing” ’. How strange and barely recognizable, and yet so it is. The anagram, made from the thirty-seven letters in Shakespeare’s opening line, appears in scrambled form in the thirty-seven letters of the italicized line (trust me; it’s there). It is also possible to find Shakespeare’s first line anagrammatized, the lettering in proper order, in the poem at large, although compared to the other challenges Fulton faced in writing her poem this seems rather small potatoes, the equivalent of spotting, as some would wish, the name of Shakespeare’s ‘only begetter’ lurking among the letters in a given sonnet, whether the name is ‘Henry Wriothesley’ or ‘William Herbert’.7 And so the rest of her poem is made out of those small words so easily passed by in a given reading of Shakespeare, little function words such as ‘so’, ‘like’, ‘this’, ‘you’, or some of the larger concept words but now dressed up in shrouds: ‘deflattered’ for ‘flattered’, the rousing ‘King of nots’, for King, ‘stake’ for ‘mistake’, the last a ‘swerve’ on Fulton’s part that also turns ‘misprision’ into ‘prison’, her poem paradoxically into an opening, an ‘ache’ (or ‘ake’). If you missed the source text, it’s perfectly understandable. Many of the familiar markers from Sonnet 87 are missing. The

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famous feminine line endings in Shakespeare’s poem are drastically reduced from twelve to two in number, ‘sowing’ and ‘regifting’, interesting words, nonetheless, for a poem stitched out of another, in which the complex web of financial tropes in Shakespeare, so carefully explained by Colin Burrow in his edition of the sonnets,8 are simplified, ‘regifted’ into the single word ‘Rich’, which means something like emotionally complex, not financially wealthy in Fulton’s sonnet. And along with these recombinations the social hierarchy specifically underscoring Shakespeare’s painfully acknowledged inferior position in his relationship with the YM , which is struck with clarion-like pathos in the reference to ‘King’ in the couplet (a key-word, as Vendler would say), more or less collapses, as one might expect, in twenty-first-century America. But the sense of anguish (what Fulton calls elsewhere ‘the universal language’) remains, in this case sounded in little plain-style intensifiers such as ‘you’re it, you’re all’.9 The imbalance between the two people, speaker and addressee, is everywhere. In this regard, my favourite homonym in Fulton happens when she tricks up Shakespeare’s diminutive preposition ‘by’ (in the line ‘For how do I hold thee but by thy granting’) into ‘You’re like bye-bye’, the most incidental-sounding pop phrase for the resonant sentiment out of which Shakespeare’s whole poem is spun. ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’. Fulton’s colloquialism possesses a tonal authenticity and complexity of its own. I can imagine it being said any number of ways, like Shakespeare’s first line: teasingly, mockingly, even caustically. Fulton’s textual tinkering with the bare bones of Shakespeare’s sonnets gives another meaning to ‘barely composed’, as in that which is grammatically composed out of the skeletal anatomy of another, and her practice here bears superficial resemblance to the gamesmanship of postmodern poetry generally and, more particularly, to what is sometimes called ‘conceptual poetry’. In this view, the author is likened to an ‘information architect’, in which the emphasis falls less on the artist as creator, in the Romantic sense, and more on the

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writer as an arranger of already ‘extant’ materials, ‘inaugurating a series of engagements with assembled sets of words’.10 But to press that comparison hard would be to gallop off, I think, in the wrong direction. ‘Without ardor / Theory suffers’, writes Fulton – again with sympathetic equivocation – in another sonnet from a brief sequence from the same volume called ‘Triptych for Topological Heart’. Fulton rarely leaves ardour out of the mix, and ‘Peroral’, a poem painstaking stitched or sewn from another – another reason for all that wordplay with ‘so’? – comes from the heart in more than one sense. ‘I’ve always loved Sonnet 87’, she remarks, ‘it’s one I know pretty well: individual lines go through my head at times’. Then, elaborating more fully, she continues: As I worked on the MS that became Barely Composed, I had a vague notion of writing poems that interacted with the audience at readings. For instance, a poem toward the end of the book, ‘My Task Now Is To Solve The Bells’, was written for a reading at UCB erkeley. I knew ahead of time that a carillon would ring in the middle of my reading, and the bells were right outside the window. I was teaching at Berkeley that semester, and I’d seen other readers combat this deafening carillon, which had its say for quite an interruptive time. Rather than compete, I thought I’d write a poem that collaborated with it, a poem meant to be performed with the bells. ‘Peroral’ began with a similar intention. Over the years, I’d attended many poetry readings at universities where students abruptly and noisily left in the middle of a poem. All too often they made no effort to leave quietly, between poems, etc. I guess most poets have had this experience. It certainly has happened at my own readings. Mostly, though, it was my years as an audience member, watching students abandon poets, that gave me the idea of writing a poem to be read at those awkward moments. ‘Peroral’ started with this trivial catalyst and took on a life of its own as I worked on it, becoming something different, and, I hope, larger than my narrow intention.11

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A remnant of the original occasion might be seen in the italicized line marking a gleeful exit: ‘footloose, yelp’ and the desire for something ‘straightforward’, which rarely happens in poetry readings or in life, as the poem beckons outward, towards something different, larger. But the crucial concept for our purpose is better contained in the phrase: ‘Rather than compete, I thought I would write a poem that collaborated with it’ – ‘it’, in our case, not being the bells at Berkeley but the tolling of Shakespeare’s remembered lines and the weight of his authority. I think I arrived at the formal constraint, deriving my poem’s vocabulary from the morphology of sonnet 87, as a way to get closer to Shakespeare’s sonnet, to understand it better, and also as a way to distance my poem from his. I soon realized that any poem built only of the sonnet 87’s words would be a weak version of sonnet 87 rather than a poem in its own right. But breaking Shakespeare’s words into their composite parts and recombining those parts enlarged the possibilities, as did the use of homonyms and puns.12 The curious title ‘Peroral’, of which so far nothing has been said, points to the practice by which a dose of medicine is taken by mouth – a metaphor for the therapeutic value often attributed to poetry but also, I think, a description of the creative process itself: the ingestion of the past but in small doses. If one thinks of influence as influenza or illness, as Harold Bloom does in The Anxiety of Influence,13 then the ‘formal constraint’ of ‘Peroral’ is a way of ministering to this condition, a means of being intimate with something without necessarily being silenced by it or turned into a reply, an ‘echo’. This response, moreover, need not entail an agonistic masculine struggle to the finish as it does with Bloom. In fact, we might think of Fulton’s declared method of composition as itself a deliberately less oracular mode of writing and yet still one involving the mouth. Some poems are to be chewed and swallowed, reduced to their alimental elements, and then

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remade anew, in a different language. For Fulton, this means, I think, writing a sonnet not as Shakespeare or a follower of Shakespeare would have done it, according to the idea of Euclidean order prized by his culture, with all its symmetries and ordering devices, as Russ McDonald has beautifully illustrated and explained; but as authorized by a different world view and explanatory science, a different grammar of spoken being.14 ‘Fractal poetics’, Fulton argues elsewhere, ‘is composed of the disenfranchised details, the dark matter of Tradition: its blind spots, recondite spaces, and recursive fields’.15 Her meltdown includes melting down the past, transmuting Shakespeare’s aureate language into something basic, rich and strange, a ‘barbaric yelp’ (not ‘yawp’) an ‘oh! of pain’ of her own, and yet not her own, as her note reminds us. So far as I know, Fulton’s ‘Peroral’ is a one-off, sui generis in its methods regarding its Shakespearean source, although her interest in pointing to the stitching of the felt that goes into the heady creation of a poem is everywhere apparent in her work, as is her interest in the tiniest of grammatical details. In this regard, ‘Peroral’ differs altogether from some other, perhaps more familiar uses of Shakespeare’s sonnets of late. (Late is a relative term in the history of these amazing poems, in which the regifting began with their second editor, John Benson, in 1640.) Wendy Cope’s delightful series of ‘Strugnall’s Sonnets’, for example, published in 1986 in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis,16 belongs to the venerable tradition of English parody, as one might expect in a book with Kingsley Amis’s name in the title, and is further lightened by a touch of satire in the invitingly boorish male figure of the speaker, Strugnall, a poet. Each of the seven sonnets is spun out of a comically twisted first line from one of the sonnets (‘The Expense of spirits is a crying shame’, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true swine’, etc.). The poems then run a happy course through a number of contemporary references and colloquialisms to their usually bathetic conclusion in the final couplet, utilizing along the way the familiar tracks of Shakespeare’s rhyme scheme, but in a

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decidedly lower register. So appealing is the series that Paterson maintains that her ‘splendid parody [of Sonnet 55] beginning, Not only marble, but the plastic toys / From cornflake packets will outlive this rhyme is the superior work, and by some distance’.17 You have to admire the chutzpah of Paterson’s pause, and then the further emphasis, ‘and by some distance’. Paterson’s judgement seems wilfully bizarre (although in keeping with his lovely version of Antonio Machado’s ‘Poem’), as does much of his commentary on this sonnet; but commentary that brings Cope’s sonnet into view can’t be all awry. It is perhaps best to regard this later poetic adaptation as value added to the original (even if that perspective also implicitly questions Paterson’s claim), and the kind of useful information almost always missing from even the best scholarly editions of the sonnets. Carol Ann Duffy’s often anthologized ‘Anne Hathaway’, by contrast, finds no place in Paterson, but her sonnet might have been cited as a robust response to Sonnet 145, the anaemic ‘hate away’ sonnet in tetrameter, a ‘curiosity’ that otherwise amuses Paterson for three pages.18 Shakespeare’s wife, Hathaway herself, is the imagined speaker of Duffy’s dramatic monologue collected in The World’s Wife (1999). The speaker is introduced with an epigraph quoting the famous bequest in Shakespeare’s will: ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed’.19 The body of the sonnet then forms Hathaway’s fourteenline response, which begins by observing in the first quatrain the rhyme scheme made famous by her husband but soon departs from it through increasing gestures of lineal freedom. At the end she returns to embrace the Shakespearean form in the final couplet, emphatically rhyming ‘head’ with ‘bed’ – her ‘widow’s head’, in fact – with what she now calls ‘that next best bed’, underscoring a reciprocal connection between the two that extends beyond life: ‘I hold him in the casket of my widow’s head / as he held me upon that next best bed’. The surprise, especially for anyone reading this post-Sylvia Plath, post-Adrienne Rich poem in the further context of the animosity between the couple as described in Stephen

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Greenblatt’s 2004 biography, Will in the World, is the utter absence of malice in the poem between husband and wife. It is a true-blue romantic love sonnet, warm with humour and romance, an ‘outlaw’ poem in a collection that otherwise might be construed, or rather misconstrued, as ‘essentialist’ feminist rewritings of male-centred myths.20 Indeed, the poem’s nearly fathomless spiral of remembered pleasure unites the speaker and her never-explicitly-named male lover, through the mutually creative act of making love and making poetry. Her body, as bed, may initially be recalled, in the past perfect, as ‘now a softer rhyme / to his, now echo, as assonance; his touch / a verb dancing in the centre of a noun [. . .] a page beneath his writer’s hands’. But by the poem’s end she has become verb to his noun. No longer ‘a softer rhyme/ to his’, she is the holder of his body in her head, he the passive principle in death. And of course, she is the author of the poem, shaping the memory she recalls. The situation of imagined intimacy in Duffy gets us close to Fulton, however different their methods and means of expression. A further look at this brief anthology of modern rewritings of the sonnets ought to include Jan Bervin’s Nets, or more accurately (but for the fact that my typography cannot faithfully reproduce the shadowy portion under erasure) THE SON NETS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE . In almost every way imaginable, Nets is the reverse or inverse or even obverse of ‘Peroral’. It is a book for the eye alone, not the ear, mouth or tongue, the last an important instrument for Fulton. As such, it is composed of sixty of Shakespeare’s sonnets (but not Sonnet 87), in which a few words in each are (randomly?) bolded; and it belongs to a now familiar postmodern preoccupation in the arts richly explored by Brian McHale in an essay aptly titled ‘Poetry under Erasure’. Beginning with the familiar example of Robert Rauschenberg’s erasure of a Willem de Kooning ‘Drawing’, the viewer-reader is treated to art that is, in McHale’s words, ‘part vandalism, part homage’.21 The earlier work is seen but not venerated, or, as in the case of Nets, it is, through the aid of technology, written over, an action or event that is meant to invite consideration, even from the author. In

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a ‘Working Note’ placed at the end of her book, Bervin observes: I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets’ to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible – a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.22 In practice this means – to take a simple example from a familiar poem included in Nets – highlighting the following few words against a pale but still visible Sonnet 129: ‘extreme’, ‘trust’, ‘to make the’, ‘having’ and ‘extreme’. The immediate question becomes: why these words in particular? Or maybe, having asked it, we see that it’s the wrong question to ask, the main point being that we are invited to see, again and again, through a random selection of words, a disruption, a disfiguration of the original, which could, I suppose, be seen to constitute ‘a divergent elsewhere’, but not, as happens with ‘Peroral’, to constitute a new poem in any meaningful sense of that term. Some readers have also seen in the highlighted lettering the markings of a gravestone, with each sonnet becoming an epitaph, and the whole plot a cemetery, another instance of Shakespeare being buried, erased from memory. A dreary thought indeed, but of course this is not really the case, since Nets would be nil without the sonnets. An altogether different idea – of remembering, owing, challenging and renewing, not burying – underlies the commemorative publication in 2016 of On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration.23 A neatly conceived gathering of sonnets composed by thirty poets from the Royal Society of Literature, the anthology pays homage to the enduring power of Shakespeare’s verse by pairing a contemporary rendition of a sonnet with its putative Shakespearean number. The whole is cleverly introduced by Roger McGough’s deliberately modest ‘Cento’, on the impossibility of the task before him: ‘What

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poverty my Muse brings forth’. Stitched together from the opening lines of fourteen sonnets and perfectly arranged to retain the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, the thought riding the crest of each quatrain, with a couplet firmly encasing its subject, ‘Cento’ forms, as only it can, a Platonic ideal that marks the deviations and variances, in subject, form and idiom, that give renewed life to the subsequent contributions. Some spin off from a single line, like Douglas Dunn’s ‘Senex on Market Street’, from Sonnet 1, ‘Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament’; others from a newly perceived situation, as in Jackie Kay’s ‘Thirty Five’, a maternal revision of Sonnet 11 (‘As fast as thou shalt wane’), viewed from the perspective of middle age, but with her declining mother as subject, not the young man. A good many are free-wheeling in relation to their Shakespearean sources or prototypes. It takes a note by Simon Armitage to decode the reason for his poem in Morse code based on Sonnet 20, but not to decode it himself (I’m told it means ‘he loves him, he loves him not’, repeatedly). And Mimi Khalvati, in ‘Hearing Voices’, takes the sun/son pun in Sonnet 33 in a personal direction Shakespeare wouldn’t have anticipated. The image of the sea and breaking waves is particularly conducive to improvisation, as in the case of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s ‘Time’s Fool’, Ruth Padel’s ‘Your Life as a Wave’ (Sonnet 60) and Robin Robertson’s ‘Storm, Nissaki’ (65). (Robertson is from ‘the northeast coast of Scotland’.) All the while, Alan Jenkins’ nicely titled ‘Salvages’ (not Eliot’s ‘Dry Salvages’) rides Shakespeare’s ‘saucy bark’ in Sonnet 80 into new social waters in one of the wittiest, Larkinesque updates in the volume, in terza rima no less (in homage to W.C. Williams’ ‘Yachts’?). Shakespeare’s obsession with temporality is a marked concern as well, but without the accompanying confidence in the perpetuity of rhyme or love’s transcendence. Shorn of Strugnell, Wendy Cope resurfaces, now coping with her aging ‘self’, in response to Sonnet 22 (‘My glass shall not persuade me I am old’). With rueful desperation, she begins, ‘My glass can’t quite persuade me I am old – / In that respect my ageing eyes are

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kind’, and ends with a couplet that, like many of Shakespeare’s, registers uncertainty through overstatement. So, too, somewhat ‘Beated and chopped’, a more worldly Carol Anne Duffy reappears with characteristic immediacy. In bed again (‘Our two heads on one pillow’), she is one of three poets in the volume to grapple with Sonnet 116, Shakespeare’s ‘marriage sonnet’, in her case retitled as ‘CXVI ’ to indicate, graphically, the admission of love’s now rocky impediments, as the sun rises over what turns out to be a solemn aubade to a younger, more innocent other: ‘Love is not love. / Your heart on mine, I feel a marriage rite – / but on the floor there lie no wedding clothes’. Although not without a glimpse over the edge, Gillian Clarke’s ‘Magnetism’ offers a more domestically comforting revision of Shakespeare’s marriage poem, one challenged, however, if not put completely to the test in the elaborate stanzas and painful ambiguities of Elaine Feinstein’s ‘Betrayal’. Not that a belief in poetry’s significance is lacking, but its presumptions are more limited. For an anecdotal Michael Longley, a partial response to Sonnet 55 resides in the material presence of a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets that accidentally saves a soldier-poet’s life in World War I. John Burnside’s ‘Still Life’, stemming from Sonnet 71 (‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’) is an especially elegant, twofold, twentyeight-line unravelling of two words so close in sound and yet contrary in meaning, ‘work’ and ‘worm’; the latter gets the perishable last word, although not without working its way into the future, ‘in sheets / of newsprint, humming torch songs to yourself / till dusk, beyond the point where I am gone’. More trenchant over a narrower terrain is Paul Muldoon’s ‘A Graft’, a tightly woven dilation on Sonnet 15, with its play on graph and grafting, on renewal through writing anew, which admits shades of Frost and Heaney along the way but retains throughout the exact order of Shakespeare’s rhyme words in the process, right down to the final couplet: ‘a thought compounded by the cow dung you / had plastered there till old wood wrote the new’ – surely a pastoral vision of how tradition might be supposed to work.

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Form is a powerful signifier. Only four authors in the volume depart altogether from the sonnet, or some remnant of fourteen lines, whether doubled or, in the cases of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, possessing an extra line and thus following Shakespeare’s anomalous instance of fifteen lines in Sonnet 99. So it is nothing special that Don Paterson’s offering is a sonnet, except that it is by Don Paterson. His poem ‘Two’ is a rewriting of Sonnet 36 (‘Let me confess that we two must be twain, / Although our undivided loves are one’). The note to the poem does not suggest what drew him to this sonnet, although his fascination with numbers, including non-numbers, like zero, is long-standing, indeed one of his trademarks. (Nil Nil is the title of his first book of poems.) But his strong response to the sonnet in his New Commentary offers a clue: first his irritation over Shakespeare’s continued wailing, ‘WS really does push the whipping-boy routine to extremes, here’; then his admission that ‘We can’t help but hear in that first line one heart-breaking allusion: while their love might be undivided, they cannot be “one flesh” (as man and wife are described in Ephesians’. The sentiment continues in the gloss supplied for lines 6–8: ‘regardless of the separable spite (something like “the terrible vexation that keeps us apart”) our love is unchanged, but it steals hours that we might have spent together’.24 Paterson’s sonnet erases what he doesn’t like in Shakespeare’s, the distance signalled by ‘twain’ and the volley of pronouns and apologies that pour forth as a consequence, and expands on what he does: an imagined fusing and re-fusing of two into one against a backdrop of nothingness. In a sonnet that is not Shakespearean but Petrarchan (and the only one in the volume), a single thought emerges, as if shot from a canon, propelled by a desire to fathom the meaning of Shakespeare’s second line – ‘Although our undivided loves are one’: These two, if two, can only half-exist, their being so lost, so inwardly inclined that were somehow the universal mind

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to make its inventory, they would be missed, their bodies having slipped between the hours and dropped down to this silent underland, the white torque of their sheet still in her hand like the means of their escape. From the light purse of their mouths, they pass their only coin endlessly, so none may buy or sell. Each has drawn so long and drank so deep From the other’s throat or root, they cannot tell tongue from tail or end from origin. Sleep will halve them so they will not sleep. This is a poem alive with metonyms, not metaphors, crucial images marking but not limiting a relationship: the ‘white torque of their sheet’, a ‘coin’, a ‘tongue’, ‘her hand’. The only pause – not a true volta – is in the tenth line, where we momentarily catch our breath, but only, like the nameless ‘two’, to drink deeper. ‘A sonnet is, first and foremost, just a square of text on a white ground’, Paterson has written in Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets,25 and in this sonnet he gives us a brief glimpse of the ‘underland’ of love, ‘love’ being a word not admitted here because unnecessary. Not to know ‘tongue from tail or end from origin’ is to form your own perfect circle (in sound as well as sense: ‘tongue’ connected to ‘tail’ by force of alliteration and the pun on ‘tale’; ‘end’ sonically contained in ‘origin’). But the poem does not quite turn back on itself. One of the virtues of the Petrarchan over the Shakespearean form is the ready avoidance of the summary couplet. ‘Since poetry is largely the art of saying things once and only once, a pithy summary of the poem within the poem is thoroughly redundant’, Paterson observes.26 ‘Two’ simply stops on a dime, with a single sentence, a chiasm that is a chasm, leaving the unnamed ‘them’ linked, awake for eternity, undivided, resistant, especially if we hear ‘halve’ as ‘have’, as indeed the poem insists. Although his poem allows me to end where I began, Paterson is not the volume’s last word. In their UK -centricity, the poems

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help to balance the US concentration early on in this essay, and to answer, by way of a head count, the suggestion about whether there is something particularly compelling about Shakespeare’s sonnets for female poets. By a count of two to one (twenty to ten, male to female), the answer would seem to be no, although it is certainly possible to spot differences that might be accounted for by gender. Perhaps more significant, the magic carpet of Shakespeare’s sonnets allows a glimpse of what is happening on both sides of the Atlantic, and furthermore, a means to understanding the great originals in a form that allows readers a portal to the past.

Notes 1

Quotation from James Schiffer, ‘The Incomplete Narrative of the Sonnets’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Malden, MA : Blackwell, 2007), 52.

2

Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2010).

3

Alice Fulton, Barely Composed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015).

4

American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, ed. Cole Swensen and David St John (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009), 123.

5

Alice Fulton, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (St Paul, MN : Graywolf Press, 1999).

6

Alice Fulton, Felt (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2001), 31.

7

R.H. Winnick, ‘ “Loe, here in one line is his name twice writ”: Anagrams, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and the Identity of the Fair Friend’, Literary Imagination 11 (2009), 254–77.

8

The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

9

Fulton, ‘Claustrophilia’, in Barely Composed.

10 Brian Kim Stefans, ‘Terrible Engines: A Speculative Turn in Recent Poetry and Fiction’, Comparative Literature Studies 51 (2014), 180. To the examples of poets offered by Stefans, one

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might add K. Silem Mohammad, The Sonnagrams (Slack Buddha Press, 2009), an anagrammatized version of Shakespeare’s sonnets. 11 Email, AF to JP, 1 January 2015. 12 Email, AF to JP, 1 January 2015. 13 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 14 Russ McDonald, ‘ “Pretty Rooms”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 486–504. 15 Alice Fulton, ‘Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions’, in Feeling as a Foreign Language, 69. 16 Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1986). 17 Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 164. 18 Carol Ann Duffy, The World’s Wife (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1999). 19 Shakespeare’s last will and testament: made 25 March 1616, proved 22 June 1616, The National Archives PROB 1/4. 20 For a helpful discussion of this ‘outlaw’ poem in relation to other poems in The World’s Wife, see Avril Horner, ‘ “Small Female Skull”: Patriarchy and Philosophy in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy’, in The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, ed. Angelica Michelis and Antony Rowland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 99–120, esp. 113–14. The same poem is also the subject of Pilar Abad-Garcia’s ‘Generic Description and the Postmodern Lyric Discourse/Mode: Carol Ann Duffy’s “Anne Hathaway” ’, in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 265–76. 21 Brian McHale, ‘Poetry under Erasure’, in Theory into Poetry, 277. By framing the concept of erasure with references to the Holocaust, at one extreme, in the poetry of Paul Celan and Edmond Jabès, and at the other with ecological disaster as manifested in the poetry of James Merrill, McHale recognizes a range of seriousness accorded to the postmodernist use of this topos (279, passim).

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22 Jan Bervin, Nets (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, 2004), 151. 23 On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, ed. Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016). 24 Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 109–10. 25 From ‘A Note on the Sonnet Form’, 486. 26 From ‘A Note on the Sonnet Form’, 490.

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11 The Scar on the Face: Ted Hughes Reads Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reiko Oya

Ted Hughes believed that Shakespeare had a deep scar on his left temple. In an early draft of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992; revised 1993), the poet marvelled at the Elizabethan dramatist’s powerful expression of raw love towards his young aristocratic patron in his sonnets, wondering: ‘how could he be unguarded – so unguarded against damaging comment on both himself and on his noble recipient’?1 As a follower of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’ (‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’), Hughes was convinced that ‘[t]hat law which poets almost without exception observe, that flexible law of self-concealment, must have deep roots in nature and the social contract’, and made it a rule not to include personal, identifiable facts and anecdotes in his own poems.2 He was 229

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shocked at, but deeply impressed with, Shakespeare’s ‘naked’ biographical confessions in the sonnets, and associated this self-revelatory aspect of the 1609 sequence with a disfigurement on the playwright’s face: How is it that Shakespeare obeys a different law? Was his weakness (or genius) for total, unconditional, self-sacrificial love the result of some mental abnormality – maybe connected to that deep, vertical scar beside his left eyebrow that shows up on the Chandos and Droeshout portraits (and on the fugitive death-mask)? Something as radical?3 Hughes regarded Shakespeare as a mythic shaman carrying the scar as a mark of fundamental inner transformation.4 By the 1990s, mainstream scholarship on Shakespeare’s sonnets had moved away from his biography to focus on the role of texts in the formation of modern selfhood. Hughes’ psychologizing and mythologizing of the apparent facial scar in the portraits (which was very probably an optical illusion created by some irregularities on the canvas) look not only naïve but unacceptably eccentric when compared to, say, Joel Fineman’s poststructuralist analyses published in the mid1980s.5 After receiving negative comments from critic and friend Keith Sagar (‘The mark by Shakespeare’s left eye in the portraits could be a scar, but could it not equally well be prominent veins?’), Hughes deleted this passage, saying that it was only a joke.6 However, his seemingly frivolous suggestion assumes a deep, personal resonance when we recall that his first wife, American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, carried a lasting scar on her face from her suicide attempt at the age of twenty-one, and that, to him, her scar was certainly a mark of her singular genius (‘that scar / Which signed and sealed you extraordinary / And guaranteed you for real reality’).7 Hughes himself bore a permanent, if invisible, wound, too. He and Plath were instantly attracted to each other when they first met at a ‘wild St Botolph’s Review party’ in 1956. He went down to kiss her ‘bang smash on the mouth’,

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while she bit him so ‘long and hard’ on the cheek that he was left with ‘the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks / That was to brand my face for the next month. / The me beneath it for good’ (‘St Botolph’s’).8 This chapter surveys Hughes’ treatment of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his poetic anthology A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, and his critical tome Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, with reference to his poetical and prose works as well as personal letters.9 Hughes’ reading of the 1609 sequence did not simply reflect but helped transform the ways in which he wrote about the traumatic events in his family life, most importantly Plath’s death by suicide in 1963. Exploring the connection between Hughes’ reading of the sonnets and his Birthday Letters, which he published in the final year of his life (1998), this chapter aims to elucidate the former poet laureate’s dictum – ‘Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist’ – in the context of his critical and creative engagement with Shakespeare’s ‘scar’.10

Managing the unmanageable event Hughes once explained to Nicholas, his son with Plath, that his ill-fated first marriage was ‘the big unmanageable event’ in his life ‘that had somehow to be managed – internally – by me. Somehow through my writing – because that’s the method I’ve developed to deal with myself’.11 For a long while, he believed that ‘the real accounting for [his] dealings with Sylvia would have to emerge inadvertently, in some oblique fashion, through some piece only symbolically related to it – the authentic creative way’.12 Working on Crow (1970), he thought he had found a ‘way of dealing with it – not by writing about it directly, but dealing with the deep emotional tangle of it indirectly, through other symbols, which is the best and most natural way’.13 The character of Crow enabled Hughes to overcome ‘a moral reluctance to deal with the episode’ of Plath’s death ‘directly’, by serving as a symbol (as

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distinguished from a deliberate metaphor) for the traumatic experience. However, the suicide of Hughes’ partner Assia Wevill in 1969 ‘knocked Crow off his perch’ and this ‘arrest’ of creative energy continued for over two decades. In the end, the poet ‘cracked’ and published the transparently autobiographical Birthday Letters, saying that ‘any traumatic event – if writing is your method – has to be dealt with deliberately’, and that his previous ‘high-minded principal [sic] was simply wrong’.14 Birthday Letters is linked to Shakespeare in a curious manner. The realization that Hughes ‘had to rid [himself] of the whole log-jam pile-up’ by publishing personal poems about his life with Plath ‘dawned’ while he was writing the Goddess and he ‘sometimes wondered’ if that Shakespearean book ‘wasn’t the poem I should have written – decoded, hugely deflected and dumped on shoulders that could carry it’.15 Meanwhile, Hughes assumed an attitude of indifference, if not of outright dismissal, towards the sonnets. On 15 August 1997, confiding in Sagar about the imminent publication of Birthday Letters, he distinguished between ‘[t]wo different attitudes to poems’, the first being ‘the making of stylistic artefacts – where the subject matter is simply usable material’, while the second ‘the truth-seeking exploration of the subject matter, where you’re simply searching out the electrical life and the circuits’. Hughes added that ‘Shakes’ sonnets are the first – wrought-doublets and costly codpieces’, while the ‘big speeches in the plays are the second’.16 The first artificial kind of poems, including Shakespeare’s sonnets, are characterized as ostentatious and formulaic, but Hughes rather unexpectedly prefers them to the second category of psychologically searching poems: I suppose the ideal desirable thing is the first – using material which has been put through the process of the second internally and exhaustively. Is the best of Yeats like that? The best of Frost? The first is entertainment, creating beauty objects. The second religion/science.17

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Explicitly extolling the virtues of the first, artificial kind of writing, Hughes goes on to declare, quite proudly, that his own Birthday Letters is ‘[v]ery much the second kind of voice’: – rough. Not even that. Basically, my model was ‘a letter’. Poetical effects incidental. Very self-exposing, I suppose, unguarded – my attempt to write about those things without aesthetic exploitation or concern for my artistic reputation. I no longer give much thought to that. Except to write clearly and expressively. Simply. No style. Plain.18 Hughes’ explanation of the relative values of these two poetic styles, and the place of Birthday Letters in them, is somewhat puzzling: if he appreciated so-called artificial poetry so highly, why was it important for him to publish rough and plain poems? In fact, his statements concerning the collection were often mystifying and sometimes even positively misleading. For instance, he wrote to Sagar that he was ‘[s]till thinking whether to pub[lish] or not’ on 2 October 1997, even though the manuscripts had been with the publisher Faber & Faber since August. He also noted nonchalantly that the number of the poems would be ‘about 90–100 pieces’ when the actual number, eighty-eight, was of vital importance to him for Cabbalistic reasons.19 Critics question if Hughes’ portrayal of his first marriage in Birthday Letters is as candid and simple as the poet alleges it to be. More probably, the book presented ‘a public statement’ and was ‘an attempt to adjust the public record’ about the poet’s life with Plath ‘in the wake of her confessions and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them’.20 Hughes’ contrast between his 1998 book and Shakespeare’s sonnets cannot quite be taken literally either. In the 1991 Choice and the 1992/3 Goddess, he had characterized the sonnet sequence very much as the second, artless type of poetry, arguing that Shakespeare ‘is not wanting to make a poetic artefact’ and that he ‘never shows the slightest anxiety to present the admirable, shapely object that communicates the feeling but reserves the

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secret’.21 Employing a similar set of adjectives (‘unguarded’, ‘simple’, ‘unselfconscious’, ‘naked’, ‘private’, among others) to those used to portray Birthday Letters he, most tellingly, defines Shakespeare’s love poems as ‘letters’ to one specific addressee, clearly anticipating the most important metaphor for his own epistolary collection.22 Indeed, Hughes’ intensely personal exploration of the sonnets in the early 1990s was a prelude to the publication of his autobiographical poems, I will suggest.

Exploring a ‘knot of obsessions’ Hughes was a life-long admirer of the plays and poems of Shakespeare, but he worked on them professionally for the first time only in 1971, when he edited A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse. While excerpting long and self-contained passages of ‘top pressure poetry’23 from the plays for the anthology, he noticed something curious: the verses that answered his requirements had ‘a strong family likeness’ and were linked by ‘a particular knot of obsessions’.24 We can easily argue that Hughes’ selection, rather than Shakespeare’s fixation, was responsible for the unity among the excerpts, but the discovery sparked the poet-editor’s imagination. He surmised that Shakespeare’s poetic art was rooted ‘in a sexual dilemma of a particularly black and ugly sort’, which in its turn reflected the ‘prevailing psychic conflict’ of the English Reformation. Shakespeare’s narrative poems mythologized this erotic and religious impasse. In the first piece, Venus and Adonis (1593), a ‘severely puritan’ Adonis rejects the advances of the goddess of love and, while out hunting, is gored by a wild boar and dies. The wound inflicted by the boar transforms Adonis into the Tarquin of the second, ‘complementary’ narrative of Lucrece (1594), where the lust-ridden king destroys a puritanical heroine.25 Shakespeare repeats these motifs of lust, violence and rebirth in his middle and late plays, in order symbolically to salvage ‘Lucrece from the holocaust and Adonis from the boar’.26

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Hughes would expand on this struggle between the Great Goddess (whom he equated with both Venus and Catholicism) and the Goddess-destroying God (Tarquin and Puritanism) with recourse to world mythologies and mysticisms in the 500odd pages of Goddess some twenty years later. Reviewers savaged Hughes’ eccentric interpretation of Shakespeare in Goddess. They sneeringly called attention to the fact that the Shakespeare who emerged from Hughes’ study was ‘a poet of primitive violence, animal energies, dark irrational forces and incessant sexual strife’ and was ‘a mirror image of the Laureate himself’.27 Even the more sympathetic critics found in Goddess a verification of Oscar Wilde’s dictum that criticism is ‘the only civilized form of autobiography’.28 Hughes was aware of the self-reflexive/self-referential nature of Shakespeare studies, too, as he noted: ‘anybody can find anything in Shakespeare’s plays. Most especially they find themselves.’29 However, the Wildean thesis would be given a further twist when Hughes went on to reuse the tenets of his sonnets criticism to justify the publication of his own autobiographical poems in 1998. In Hughes’ 1971 essay appended to his Shakespearean verse selection, the sonnets did not feature prominently and were dismissed as ‘the smaller and different poetry’ and ‘the early or marginal work’ of the sex-obsessed playwright.30 Turning to ‘the psycho-biological/religious/mystical root-system of Shakespeare’s dramatic vision’ in the revised edition of Choice and in Goddess, however, Hughes paid special attention to the 1609 sequence. Inspired by A.L. Rowse’s idiosyncratic interpretation, Hughes read Shakespeare’s sonnets biographically, identifying the young man in Sonnets 1 to 126 as Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, and the dark lady in Sonnets 127 to 154 as Emilia Lanier.31 Hughes also followed Rowse’s early dating of the sonnets (1592–4/5), to argue that, after urging Southampton to marry in the first seventeen poems, ‘[b]etween Sonnets 17 and 18 Shakespeare has fallen in love with this powerful, unstable, tempestuous, ambitious, unpredictable, extravagant nobleman’.32 Hughes

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believed Shakespeare’s ‘two loves [. . .] of comfort and despair’ in the sonnets to be the ‘matrix’ of Venus and Adonis, which in its turn provided the ‘template’ for Lucrece and the plays from All’s Well That Ends Well to The Tempest: there is a real subjective link between the love expressed in Sonnets 18 to 126 and the love expressed by the figure of Venus [. . .] in the long narrative poem Venus and Adonis. At the same time [. . .] there is a similar real subjective link between Shakespeare’s attitude to the woman in Sonnets 127 to 154 and the attitude of Adonis to Venus in the same long poem.33 Identifying the sonnets as the cradle of Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic works, Hughes attended to the sonneteer’s confessions, and just as importantly to his silences, in the 154 poems.

Remaining silent Central to Hughes’ understanding of Shakespeare were the powers of silence and the ineffability of truth. To him, Cordelia’s curt reply, ‘Nothing’, to her father (King Lear 1.1.87, 89) was ‘at the heart’ of Shakespeare’s ‘ethical system’,34 and he initially even intended to call the whole of the 1992 book ‘The Silence of Cordelia’.35 Lacking her sisters’ ‘glib and oily art, / To speak and purpose not’ (1.1.226–7), Cordelia could not find for herself ‘any language at all that would truly express’ her love.36 Hughes sensed the same misgivings over language in Troilus’ distressed cry, ‘Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart’, at the discovery of Cressida’s infidelity (Troilus and Cressida 5.3.108), and Timon’s dismissal of the whores of Alcibiades who will ‘swear, terribly swear / Into strong shudders and to heavenly agues / Th’immortal gods that hear you’ (Timon of Athens 4.3.138–40). Ineffability of truth, and the inadequacy of language

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to express truth, also informed Hughes’ reading of the sonnets, in which ‘Shakespeare in his own person was trying to communicate – and prove – his own love’. Echoing the legal metaphor of Cave Birds (1978), Hughes conceived that Shakespeare’s ‘very particular ego’ writing the sonnets was on trial in court, and that he ‘wanted to make himself clear, man to man, in an especially urgent matter, as in a letter to a particular listener – Henry Wriothesley, his patron’. Here Shakespeare was speaking for himself and was therefore ‘liable’ for what he said.37 As Hughes saw it, Shakespeare reaches out for ‘a language made of objects simply as they are’ in Sonnet 84 and is reduced to near tautology (‘Who is it that says most? Which can say more, / Than this rich praise: that you alone are you’, ll. 1–2), while, in Sonnet 130, he diametrically opposes conventional poetic similes: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head [. . .] (ll. 1–4 ) It is noteworthy that Shakespeare’s mistrust of poetic expression as explored in Goddess was echoed by Hughes himself in one of his Crow poems (‘Crow Tries the Media’), where hackneyed poetic figures were similarly denounced: He wanted to sing about her He didn’t want comparisons with the earth or anything to do with it Oversold like detergents He did not even want words Waving their long tails in public With their prostitute’s exclamations He wanted to sing very clear But this tank was parked on his voice

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And his throat was nipped between the Roman Emperor’s finger and thumb Like the neck of a linnet38 Crow shares his frustration with stale poetic similes (‘comparisons with the earth [. . .] oversold like detergents’) with the poet of the sonnets, and wants the language to tread firmly ‘on the ground’ (Sonnet 130) rather than strut like a harlot. According to Hughes, Shakespeare’s ‘heart’s truth, his “sacred love”, the real god in his pantheon, remains, essentially, a “word within a word, unable to speak a word” ’.39 The ‘Shakespeare’ conceived by Hughes was honest due to his ‘near-pathological’ abhorrence of lies. Hughes quotes Sonnet 76 to illustrate this point: Why is my verse so barren of new pride, So far from variation or quick change? Why with the time do I not glance aside To new-found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word almost doth tell my name, Showing their birth, and where they did proceed? O, know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument: So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told. The poet’s steadfastness in love makes the sonnets repetitive both in theme (‘all one and ever the same’) and style (‘a noted weed’). The ‘plainness’ and ‘simplicity’ Hughes attributes to such verse40 must be taken with reservations. As Fineman points out, the questions the sonneteer poses in the octet are, in themselves, highly rhetorical and the poem is actually far from simple.41 Hughes, however, takes the poet’s protestation of his naivety at face value and attributes this alleged simplicity

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to Shakespeare’s capacity for hurt: ‘[t]hat same plainness, so alert internally, is the calm of what [. . .] was both a perfect fearlessness and an unflinching, total vulnerability’.42 Hughes was keenly interested in how a poetic statement can achieve a particular kind of veracity. In the plays, dramatic action tests the honesty of the characters, as their utterances are either confirmed or quashed ‘if not immediately, at least by the end of the play’.43 Hughes elaborates on the relationship between truth and dramatic action in Goddess: The words of immobilized actors convince nobody, except of the pathos of words without action, the pathos of fantasy. To convince the observer, truth needs actions. All the possible meanings of a developing action can be contemplated, and any verbal accompaniment can be interpreted, but the truth will only appear when the action is in some way completed.44 Meanwhile, ‘the Sonnets lack both the time, which could test them, and the immediate context of action, which could prove them’ and ‘the judge, Henry Wriothesley, as Shakespeare sees, can only suspend judgement’.45 Deprived of the eloquence of physical action, Hughes’ scarred Shakespeare reaches for a language of suffering in his sonnets.

Staying true Shakespeare’s wound haunted Hughes. Writing in 1994 to cultural historian Nicholas Haggar, whose ‘thoughts coincide with mine’ on the sonnets, Hughes could not help adding: ‘But what do you think of the deep scar on Shake’s left temple (in the Chandos, & on the mask). And of his “lameness”?’46 Even though the reference to Shakespeare’s facial scar had been dropped from Goddess, his supposedly damaged leg stimulated Hughes’ speculation on the thigh-wounded heroes in Shakespeare’s poems and plays. In Poem 9 of Passionate Pilgrim, which Hughes was tempted to believe to be genuinely

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by Shakespeare, Venus recounts a story of a ‘fair sweet youth’ who prefigures the fate of Adonis: ‘Once’, quoth she, ‘did I see a fair sweet youth Here in these brakes deep-wounded with a boar, Deep in the thigh, a spectacle of ruth! See, in my thigh’, quoth she, ‘Here was the sore!’ (ll. 9–12 ) According to Hughes, Shakespeare calls up the gored thigh of both this unnamed youth and Adonis when he ‘indulges his special interest in Ulysses’ in Troilus and Cressida. The name Ulysses literally means ‘thigh wound’ and refers to the famous identifying mark on his leg. To Hughes, Ulysses was an Adonis who had survived the impact of the boar, and was like ‘the heroes of Shakespeare’s late Theophanies, Posthumous, Pericles and Leontes, but more like the epitome of them all, Prospero’.47 It is worth noting, however, that Shakespeare does not even mention Ulysses’ thigh wound in Troilus, and shows no awareness of the etymology of the Greek hero’s name. Once again, it is clearly Hughes, rather than Shakespeare, who is obsessed with the thigh wound. It is not surprising, therefore, that Hughes paid special attention to the references to lameness in the sonnets. Critics normally take the ‘lameness’ mentioned in Sonnet 89 (‘Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt’; l. 3) figuratively, but Hughes believed otherwise, as the statement was ‘coming after the particularly down-to-earth, confrontational separating of the facts from the falsehoods of’ the young man (‘Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault, / And I will comment upon that offence’; ll. 1–2). This sounds ‘like a touchstone, pointed reference to an accepted, in-the-bone, and indeed self-evident personal flaw’.48 Underlying Hughes’ interest in Shakespeare’s wound was his deep-seated belief that ‘[t]he inmost spirit of poetry [. . .] is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain’.49 Art was to him ‘the psychological component of the

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autoimmune system’ which ‘works on the artist as a healing’ but which also ‘works on others too, as a medicine’.50 Particularly noteworthy in Hughes’ interpretation of the sonnets, however, is the way in which Shakespeare’s suffering and pain is associated with, and even testifies to, his truthfulness and forthright confessionalism. Discussing the lameness in Sonnet 37, Hughes attends to ‘the carefully literal’ comparison of the first two lines (‘As a decrepit father takes delight / To see his active child do deeds of youth’) to the next two (‘So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite, / Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth’).The parallelism between the decrepit father and his son on the one hand, and the lame poet and his young friend on the other, is so complete that the simile feels almost tautological, but Hughes cherished the tautology and extolled the directness and plainness of the poetic language: This ‘lameness’ appears later as the chief of three grievous complaints when Shakespeare contrasts his patron’s plainly itemized ‘beauty, birth, wealth, wit’ – the unfigurative roll call of the young Lord’s undoubted and again self-evident advantages – of his own condition of being just as selfevidently ‘lame’, ‘poor’, and ‘despised’.51 In Hughes’ interpretation, Shakespeare’s suffering from the thigh wound is linked to the ‘plain’, ‘self-evident’ candour of his poetic statements. Shakespeare’s alleged simplicity and directness defines Hughes’ understanding of Sonnet 66, which starts by listing social iniquities: Tired with all these for restful death I cry: As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimmed in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted [. . .]

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Hughes sees a tacit reference to Shakespeare’s lameness in the next two lines (‘And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, / And strength by limping sway disabled’), which are followed by further disclosures: And art made tongue–tied by authority, And folly, doctor–like, controlling skill, And simple truth miscalled simplicity [. . .] Hughes attends to the ‘simple truth’ of Shakespeare’s statement, arguing, if Shakespeare’s manifest effort to record a few straightforward truths is to be taken seriously, then the meaning of these lines is also straightforward enough: they make a plain declaration of the burdensome subjective side of his life as a professional dramatic artist.52 In Hughes’ mind, Shakespeare’s lameness is linked to his ‘dogged loyalty to misunderstood, against-the-stream, true simplicity’ and supposed confessionalism.53 To him, Shakespeare’s thigh wound was a mark of unflinching honesty, just as Sylvia Plath’s ‘cheek-scar [. . .] Served as a rifling groove / To keep you true’ in one of the Birthday Letter poems (‘The Shot’). The association of vulnerability, artlessness and selfrevelation which Hughes discovers (or indeed invents) in Shakespeare’s sonnets will characterize his recounting of Birthday Letters.

Stelling thy beauty’s form On the day of the publication of Birthday Letters, 29 January 1998, Hughes recorded his renewed admiration for Shakespeare’s sonnets in his journal and wrote down the first two lines of Sonnet 24: ‘Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeled, / Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart’.54 We

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cannot say for sure why Hughes transcribed this particular sonnet that day, but, as Jonathan Bate suggests, Plath’s ‘beauty’s form’ was no doubt ‘stelled’ as a trauma in the table of the laureate’s heart.55 Until 1998, Hughes had long refrained from discussing his doomed marriage to Plath even when feminist critics condemned him as a callous, faithless husband and held him responsible for her suicide: I have never attempted to give my account of Sylvia because I saw quite clearly from the first day that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to find me guilty. I know too that the alternative – remaining silent – makes me a projection post for every worst suspicion. That my silence seems to confirm every accusation and fantasy. I preferred it.56 As in King Lear, silence was the only way to deal with the unspeakable in Hughes’ life. When the silence became unsupportable, he tried to communicate his experiences symbolically in his poems, with recourse to mythology and Romantic supernaturalism, and ‘it began to emerge in exactly this fashion in Crow’.57 Hughes believed that life’s painful truths should be expressed ‘inadvertently’, in a way uncontrolled by ‘our own ego’, for if ‘we write from the ego, the petty prejudices of the ego become the stuff of the writing – and it is simply boring, & claustrophobic’.58 In the 1990s, however, his attitudes to what he called ‘ego-poems’, among which he included Shakespeare’s sonnets, gradually changed.59 When asked about his views on confessional poetry in a 1995 interview, he observed that ‘[m]aybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of’, adding that ‘until the revelation’s actually published, the poet feels no release’.60 When he broke his silence and published Birthday Letters, Hughes repeatedly explained to friends and family how and why the book came into being. According to his account, he

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started writing poems about Plath soon after her death but did not publish them immediately, and, ‘[e]xcept for a handful, I never thought of publishing these pieces until this last year’. They were ‘unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable’. But finally, he ‘cracked’ and published the poems: A thing that I [. . .] had always thought unthinkable – so raw, so vulnerable, so unprocessed, so naive, so self-exposing & unguarded, so without any of the niceties that any poetry workshop student could have helped me to. And so dead against my near-inborn conviction that you never talk about yourself in this way – in poetry.61 Hughes’ ‘only chance of getting past 1963’ at that stage was to assemble whatever he had written about his first marriage ‘and simply make it public – like a confession’.62 Publication of the poems written ‘quite privately’ over the years was a big ‘unburdening’ and a ‘release’ for Hughes. However, even though there was ‘no way’ Hughes ‘could have gone on letting all that business gag’ him, he felt some guilt publishing the intimate poems.63 Publication of ‘the direct letter’ which had been written ‘as an illegal transaction between her & me’ certainly felt morally hazardous.64 As Hughes notes concerning his laureate poems, ‘[v]erse written semi-privately or as if semi-privately to someone else and yet published openly is always somehow offensive’.65 Regarding Birthday Letters, Hughes also admitted that, ‘at bottom, somewhere, I do now have the feeling of having committed some kind of obscure crime, publishing them’.66 Indeed, the publication was seen by some as an exploitation of Plath’s tragic death and an attempt to enhance Hughes’ literary and personal reputations at her expense.67 Justifying the problematic publication, Hughes resorted to the ethics of the bared wound he had explored in Shakespeare’s sonnets. To Hughes, the rawness of the sonnets would only be possible if ‘the poems were written as absolutely private love

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letters’, but the ‘sugared sonnets’ were apparently passed around among Shakespeare’s ‘private friends’ and, as seen in Sonnets 70 and 71, the sonneteer ‘was aware that “mocking” comments might be made, damaging to his noble recipient’.68 Hughes considered Shakespeare to be unique in his willingness to submit his painful personal story to public scrutiny: In sonnet after sonnet, in ‘true plain words by thy true telling friend’, he deploys great art and no small ingenuity to be artless and simple, to proclaim his secret, to surrender himself, and to bare his wounds without making any move to protect them.69 According to Hughes, the soreness of the exposed wounds underwrites the sincerity of the love of Shakespeare, who ‘[n]ever attempts to transmute private hurt to public triumph’.70 Birthday Letters met with great acclamation as soon as it was published, topping the best-seller charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The book received several prestigious prizes: the Forward Poetry Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1998, and the Whitbread Poetry and Whitbread British Book of the Year in 1999. Hughes insisted, however, that he had only expected a backlash against the book. He wrote to his son: I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let your mother’s Academic armies of support demolish me, let Carol go bananas, let Frieda and Nick bolt for their bombshelters – I can’t care any more.71 Explaining and justifying the publication of Birthday Letters, Hughes drew an analogy between his own collection and Shakespeare’s sonnets in terms of their supposed simplicity and unpublishable rawness. By exploring Shakespeare’s imagined physical and emotional pain in his sonnets, Hughes

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was in effect rehearsing the rationale behind the publication of Birthday Letters. More than three decades after Plath’s suicide, Hughes was finally able to ‘sing about her’ without ‘comparisons with the earth or anything to do with it’, by aggressively asserting his simplicity, vulnerability and nakedness in an echo of the Shakespeare whom he believed lay behind the sonnets.

Notes 1

BL Add MS 78758, f. 52. All unpublished writings of Ted Hughes in this chapter are © 2016 Estate of Ted Hughes.

2

‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, 7th edition (London: Methuen, 1950), 53–4.

3

BL Add MS 78758, f. 54.

4

For Hughes’ intense interest in shamanism, see Michael Sweeting, ‘Hughes and Shamanism’, in The Achievements of Ted Hughes, ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 70–89.

5

Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

6

BL Add MS 78759, f. 111; to Sagar (30 August 1990), in Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes and Keith Sagar, ed. Keith Sagar (London: The British Library, 2012), 193. © The British Library Board.

7

BL Add MS 88918/1/3, f. 24.

8

In this article, my references to Hughes’ poems are to Collected Poems of Ted Hughes, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

9

Choice was published in 1971 in the US under the title With Fairest Flower While Summer Lasts, followed in the UK by A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1972). The revised US edition of Choice was entitled The Essential Shakespeare (New York: Ecco Press, 1991). Hughes’ Shakespearean criticism is studied perceptively in Theodore

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Leinwand, ‘Ted Hughes Reads the Complete Shakespeare’, New England Review 30:2 (2009), 9–25; Neil Corcoran, Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 181–240; Jonathan Bate, ‘Hughes on Shakespeare’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes, ed. Terry Gifford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 135–49; Bate, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life (London: William Collins, 2015), 457–74. 10 Cited in Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, A Lover of Unreason (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007), 166. 11 To Nicholas Hughes (20 February 1998), in Letters of Ted Hughes, ed. Christopher Reid (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 711. 12 To Seamus Heaney (1 January 1998), Reid, Letters, 703. 13 To Nicholas Hughes (20 February 1998), Reid, Letters, 711–2. 14 To Sagar (18–19 July 1998), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 269–71. 15 To Seamus Heaney (1 January 1998), Reid, Letters, 704. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 To Sagar (15 August 1997), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 256–8. 19 See Sagar, Poet and Critic, 258–9 and note. 20 Barry Spurr, ‘True Confessions? Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters’, Sydney Studies in English 27 (2001), 3. 21 Hughes, Goddess, 59, 60 22 See Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 54, 59; Goddess, 58, 61. 23 Hughes, Choice, 10. 24 Ibid., 181. 25 Ibid., 181–9. 26 Ibid., 198. 27 Terry Eagleton, ‘Will and Ted’s Bogus Journey’, The Guardian, 12 May 1993. 28 See, among others, Corcoran, Modern Poet, 214; Bate, Ted Hughes, 457, 471–3. See also Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Complete Works, ed. Vyvyan Holland (London: Collins, 1966), 1027.

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29 To Donya Feuer (31 May 1990), cited in Leinwand, ‘Ted Hughes’, 10–11. 30 Hughes, Choice, 10. 31 Hughes acknowledged his indebtedness to Rowse in a letter dated 15 April 1992, Reid, Letters, 608–10. He wrote a long section on Emilia Lanier for Goddess, but later deleted it completely at the suggestion of Keith Sagar. See his letter to Sagar (18 June 1990), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 183 and note. 32 Hughes, Goddess, 54. 33 Ibid., 50. 34 Ibid., 81. 35 See his letters to Sagar (4 April 1990; 27 May 1991), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 181; 212–13. 36 Hughes, Goddess, 276. 37 Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 54. 38 ‘Crow Tries the Media’. 39 Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 57. Hughes’ quotation is from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’. 40 Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 59–60. 41 Fineman, Perjured Eye, 148. 42 Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 59. 43 Ibid., 55. 44 Hughes, Goddess, 277. 45 Hughes, Essential Shakespeare, 55–6. 46 To Nicholas Haggar (19 March 1994), Reid, Letters, 664. Hughes referred to Shakespeare’s scar yet again in his letter to Sagar (10 January 1986), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 150. 47 Hughes, Goddess, 430–1. 48 Ibid., 459. 49 To Bishop Ross Hook (10 November 1982), Reid, Letters, 458. See also Daniel O’Connor’s insightful observation on Hughes and trauma, in ‘Trauma Theory Readings’, in Ted Hughes, ed. Terry Gifford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 131–44. 50 Ted Hughes, ‘The Art of Poetry No 71: Ted Hughes’, The Paris Review 134 (Spring 1995). www.theparisreview.org/

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interviews/1669/the-art-of-poetry-no-71-ted-hughes [accessed 15 April 2016]. 51 Emphases added, Hughes, Goddess, 459–60. 52 Emphases added, ibid., 460. 53 Ibid., 461. 54 BL Add MS 88918.1.2, f. 10. In Hughes’ quotation, the last word of line 1 is spelt ‘stelled’. 55 Bate, ‘Hughes on Shakespeare’, 148. 56 To Anne Stevenson (November 1989), cited in Erica Wagner, Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and the Story of ‘Birthday Letters’ (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 25–6. For a similar statement, see his letter to Victor Kovner (7 February 1987), Reid, Letters, 532. 57 To Sagar (18–19 July 1998), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 269. 58 To Frieda Hughes (6 December 1988), Reid, Letters, 548. 59 See his letter to Anne-Lorraine Bujon (16 December 1992), Letters, 628. 60 Hughes, ‘The Art of Poetry’. 61 To Sagar (18–19 July 1998), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 270–1. 62 To Nicholas Hughes (20 February 1998), Reid, Letters, 713. 63 To Sagar (18–19 July 1998), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 271. 64 To Seamus Heaney (1 January 1998), Reid, Letters, 703–4. 65 To Sagar (19 January 1986), Sagar, Poet and Critic, 156. 66 To Sagar (18–19 July 1998), Poet and Critic, 271. 67 See, for instance, Katha Pollitt’s review of Birthday Letters for The New York Times, 1 March 1998. www.nytimes.com/ books/98/03/01/reviews/980301.01pollitt.html [accessed 12 June 2016]. 68 Hughes, Goddess, 58–9. 69 Ibid., 60. 70 Ibid. 71 To Nicholas Hughes (20 February 1998), Reid, Letters, 713.

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12 Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Undergraduate Classroom Daniel Moss

As the ‘Shakespeare person’ in the English department of a middle-American liberal arts college, my pedagogical duties – aside from the occasional rearguard effort to save Spenser and a biennial vacation in Paradise Lost – tend to a pragmatic (if slightly numbing) division into two course-types: the Shakespeare survey organized around some subtitular theme, and the lower-level, anthology-centred introduction to poetry. My responsibility for the latter service course follows from my specialization in the poetry and verse-heavy drama of the Renaissance – I know my scansion well enough – and I suspect many youngish early modernists find themselves in this same pedagogical flip-flop between Shakespeare survey and poetry intro, semester after semester. Like everyone else, I have found that Shakespeare’s sonnets not only fit neatly into both of these courses, but indeed prove a powerful means to their success and a reliable source of pleasure both for instructor and students. Bridging the two courses I teach most frequently – 251

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gluing The Norton Anthology of Poetry to The Norton Shakespeare – the sonnets have become my great friends in the undergraduate classroom. So they have for many, and a steady stream of articles on why and how to teach these poems runs through the literature on Shakespearean pedagogy. Those with particular tastes or scholarly commitments may find accounts of classrooms turned into rigorous workshops on textual editing (Sofield), elaborately orchestrated recitation circles (Pierce), crash courses in rhetorical analysis (Vendler), and Empsonian paeans to the semi-scrutable Sonnet 94, ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’ (Schoenfeldt).1 The task of the present essay seems at once broader and more basic than these previous approaches: merely to suggest a few productive answers to the question, ‘What role should these famous poems play in our pedagogy, both at the most general level we teach (intro to poetry) and in the mid-to-upper-level survey primarily devoted to a different genre (survey of Shakespeare’s plays)? Indeed, should the lingering fame of a few of these poems privilege them when we ask ourselves which sonnets we should teach to undergraduates?2 Should we continue to teach the sonnets at all? After all, the situation may differ in Shakespeare’s homeland, but by now the great majority of American undergraduates have never heard the lines ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’, or ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing’, and have only the vaguest idea of the most famous of all, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ and ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’. Yet these latter they have heard – somewhere, anywhere, long ago, here and there – and thus they still provide that most precious of resources in the introductory classroom: unexamined preconceptions, instructive in the dismantling. That tentacle of the Shakespeare Industry that has reached our students before they arrive in our classrooms shows them nothing more than that Shakespeare was a genius, and that in addition to perfect plays he wrote a number of Valentine’s Day poems called ‘sonnets’. Despite the

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paltriness of this picture (though it is just, at least at my own institution), it offers an admirable starting point for instruction, and ought to be contrasted to the nothing students know of Herbert, Jonson and, increasingly, Donne and Milton. However vague, this initial sense of these two sonnets (as well perhaps as ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’) in fact provides the most consistent and extensive overlap between the professor’s comparatively vast experience of lyric poetry and the average student’s very limited foreknowledge of canonical verse.

Teaching the sonnets in an introductory poetry course Shakespeare’s sonnets belong in the introductory classroom because they are compact, reliable engines of ambiguity. The lingering fame of a few of these poems has nothing properly to do with why they should be taught, though secondarily their fame may facilitate teaching them. Alternative emphases, such as the sonnets’ putative autobiographical content, their relation to contemporary sequences or neighbouring genres, or their influence on later poets, suit courses focused more narrowly than the broad introductory survey envisaged here. In such a classroom, Shakespeare presents himself as a strong ally in our constant struggle against reductive reading, the average student’s predisposition to search for a single ‘meaning’ behind the poem or underneath the desk.3 A preliminary read-through, combined perhaps with paraphrase, has its uses in the classroom, of course, providing a point of departure for discussion. In the case of ‘My mistress’ eyes’, ‘Shall I compare thee’, and (to a lesser extent) ‘Let me not’, however, our culturally imposed predisposition to admire sonnets as love poems par excellence effectively replaces students’ usual first impressions of other classroom texts, providing shortcuts to close reading and productive discussion.4

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When reintroduced to ‘My mistress’ eyes’, most students will rely upon the only thing about the poem they think they know: that it is a love poem. The raised hands of those two or three who see better should be ignored until one of the amorous many identifies the kind of love the poem professes as ‘taking the mistress off her pedestal and bringing her down to earth’ (an observation as inevitable as never seeing a goddess go). That student’s invocation of this clichéd descent from the pedestal is the professor’s cue to show how and why Shakespeare instead puts the mistress in the stocks; here is our chance to teach our students satire, along with that initial, unforgettable blazon. An easily prepared handout, reproducing a ridiculous counter-example from the period alongside the famous and delightful illustration of the blazonic mistress from The Extravagant Shepherd (1654), facilitates any such lesson, but again this should be held in reserve until the students themselves recognize the absurd conceits underwriting Shakespeare’s satire and identify the targeted incisions of the satirical mode.5 To eavesdrop on my own classroom: ‘Why not “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the stars” (equally clichéd, same rhythm, easy rhyme)?’ ‘Because “the sun” is more absurd’, declares X. ‘It will blind the viewer!’ warns Y. ‘And burn the mistress!’ (X again). ‘And there’s only one sun [. . .] C’mon, does she wear an eyepatch?!’ cries my favourite student, Z. Continuing along this path further than the opening line is worthwhile; the trochaic splash of ‘Coral’ brings the conversation around to rhythm (‘Why does this sound so wrong?’), and Z will observe the satirist’s precise measurement of the distance between metaphors, beyond scoring individual points (‘Diving down for the coral makes so much sense after jumping at the sun!’). By now, most of the class will have travelled so far from the presumption of a love-poet’s sincerity that they will skip ahead to ‘the breath that from my mistress reeks’ to deplore the poor dark lady’s halitosis, offering the instructor opportunities to augment the lesson (noting, for instance, this poet’s predilection for synaesthetic metaphor) or to correct for its excesses (turning to the OED for help with ‘reeks’).6

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Such fun can be had with this poem in the classroom, but all is in vain if the instructor pays no attention to the holdout who insists ‘My mistress’ eyes’ remains a love poem, for all our cynical mockery of blazon-victims, appealing to the couplet to support her claim. ‘No’, confesses interesting student A, ‘I wouldn’t want to receive this poem for Valentine’s Day, but I would appreciate the effort at honesty, and would forgive the poet because he apparently loves me just for who I am, as opposed to pretending I’m some deity. I’d ask him to try again, to write me a better sonnet.’ Some of this, perhaps, will have to be coaxed from shy, thoughtful student A, but he will soon find allies in the class, ready to put a corrective, positive spin on ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare’ (ll. 13–14). The ensuing debate pits those students who acknowledge the inadequacy of vowing ‘by heaven’ (having once dismissed it) against those determined to resist their dawning sense that literary criticism entails sceptical reading. The result, naturally, should be inconclusive, and discussion of the last two lines can therefore be curtailed to suit the lesson plan – taking time, perhaps, to deduce the formal possibilities of the closing couplet or to consult the OED once again on ‘rare’.7 However, no matter how truncated the conversation about the couplet, the following should be clear: (1) that the sonnet hovers between sincerity and satire because the ambiguous couplet works against the impeachments of the preceding twelve lines; (2) that structural and tonal alternatives remain available to the sonneteer and ought to be required by any careful reader (or patient mistress) of Sonnet 130; (3) that the ambiguity generated by this one sonnet is likely to compound, not resolve itself, when set against any number of its 153 peers in the sequence. ‘Hang on’, perhaps wonderful student Z will caution, ‘Just because we can’t agree on the “meaning” of one sonnet doesn’t mean that every other Shakespeare sonnet will prove equally indecisive’. This logical objection arises from some students’ misgivings – manifest by the second week of most introductory

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English courses – that they are being taught to find indeterminacy everywhere, which is a fair and potentially useful challenge to our prevailing pedagogy. To the poetry professor who is also an early modernist, moreover, the same objection further cautions against an unearned overemphasis on the ambiguity of Shakespeare’s sonnets, as it accords with what we know (but the students do not yet know) about contemporary sequences, including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti, Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and many more: namely, that unambiguous sonnets abound in every sequence.8 After all, what of the more straightforward, even onedimensional sonnets comprising much of Shakespeare’s poetic output, perhaps the majority? The opening sub-sequence of ‘procreative’ sonnets, for example, though teeming with nuance and wordplay, are hardly ambiguous in themselves, nor do ‘writer’s block’ sonnets like Sonnets 103 or 105, or the naughty puns on ‘Will’ in Sonnets 135 and 136, or the tirade against lust in Sonnet 121, admit of much debate when read alone. To scholars of the period, such thematic variations between poems are recognizable from virtually any contemporary sequence, as are counterparts like Sonnets 44 and 45 (playing with nature’s heavier and lighter elements, respectively), or Sonnets 46 and 47 (recounting litigation and settlement between the persona’s eye and heart). Generically, these set pieces are entirely normative, but the textbook or anthology commonly assigned to undergraduates in an introductory poetry survey erases the intertextual rhythms within the sequence, leaving the false impression of self-contained, ‘representative’ Shakespeare poems. At key junctures in the lesson plans and syllabus, then, the professor must correct for what is ultimately a New Critical bias tending to crystalize meaning within the individual lyric. Hence some of the urgency of teaching judiciously selected groups or constellations of Shakespeare sonnets, rather than treating individual poems as discrete and self-sufficient texts. It still makes sense, at this juncture, to select from the bestknown examples; following an introductory discussion of ‘My

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mistress’ eyes’, it is time to turn to that other famous sonnet, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ (18.1). Once again, the students will think they know only one ‘fact’ about this poem upon a first reading: it is another timeless love poem. On this occasion, however, their preconception proves sound enough. This is not to say that the class can dispense with close reading Sonnet 18; to the contrary, the instructor must not miss the opportunities this sonnet presents to demonstrate that rigorous analysis of poetry may produce usefully determinate as well as indeterminate readings. While it will take a few students only a moment to observe that the answer to the question, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ is ‘You’d better not’, a careful discussion of the sonnet, line by line or quatrain by quatrain, unfolds a series of insights into the advantages and pitfalls of poetic form and style. Student X will observe the paradox that the ensuing seven lines do indeed compare the beloved (favourably) to summer; form-obsessed student Y will thereupon announce that unlike ‘My mistress’ eyes’, this poem turns decisively at the beginning of the third quatrain (insert quick glance at Petrarchan form); wise Z, noting that ‘eternal summer’ is like nothing in the world we know, now begins to gauge the consequences for how we think about metaphor and its (unlimited?) potential. From here, the conversation may proceed in many worthwhile directions, though my own preference, since my class will have encountered rhythm and metre only recently, is to bring the conversation back to form in earnest, magnifying close reading beyond the simplicities of rhyme scheme and volta to engage the possibilities of alternative scansion, which leads in turn to richer and more varied recitations. In other words, the students should recognize the potential for play in the rhythm – the consequences of emphasizing ‘thee’ in the first line, for instance, or ‘Thou’ or the initial ‘more’ in the second – and acknowledge that interpretation depends in large part on the reader’s choices, which the poet may predict and even guide, but never fully control. By this point, ‘Shall I compare thee’ will have emerged as the multivalent counterpart to ‘My mistress’ eyes’ – its formal

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balance set against the other’s imbalance; its superlatives against the other’s litany; its genderless admiration against the other’s misogynistic commonplaces; its self-revising rhythm against the other’s practised, unsurprising iambs. These are no great discoveries for the scholar, perhaps, but for the students, Sonnets 18 and 130, studied in tandem, usefully encapsulate many of the means and ends of Shakespeare’s lyric style. Together, these sonnets comprehend more of the sequence than closer pairings (such as the ‘slave’ poems, Sonnets 57 and 58), model the two prevailing formal templates that break meaning into units of 8/6 and 12/2 lines respectively, and reflect much of the sequence’s range of imagery and tone. There is always more to teach, of course, and the omission here of some frankly essential theme may prove intolerable to individual instructors (‘No mutability? No mythology?!’). Providing a supplementary lesson on, say, the tempus edax themes of Sonnets 60 or 65 or the rhetorical catalogues of Sonnets 66 or 99 can assuage this concern, but the students will benefit more from consolidation of the preceding counterpart discussions of Sonnets 18 and 130, by way of triangulation with that last still-famous sonnet, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’ (116.1).9 To begin by regarding Sonnet 116 as a love poem should be automatic by now, but its outsider’s perspective – the speaker’s reaction (or lack of reaction) to the mutual love of others – will be new. An initial reading easily finds superlatives akin to the ‘eternal summer’ of Sonnet 18: love (the speaker’s, anyway) becomes ‘an ever-fixed mark, / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken’ (ll. 5–8). The latter qualification is obscure enough to require comment, but the class’s focus should remain on the poet’s enumeration of love’s sublime qualities, until one of the more paranoid students detects the death threat in the third quatrain: ‘Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come’ (ll. 9–10).10 Taking a moment to acknowledge Time as the Grim Reaper before proceeding to ‘the edge of doom’ (l. 12), the discordance between this sonnet and the

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‘eternal summer’ of yesteryear should be clear enough. If asked, the students will describe that third quatrain as ‘going off-track’ or the speaker as ‘getting carried away’, but requiring them to use the poem’s own vocabulary to describe the catastrophe makes for an instructive, time-sensitive exercise: the sonnet ‘bends’ like a ‘sickle’ because the speaker has been ‘shaken’ as by a ‘tempest’. Several students will recognize this latter sensation as jealousy, the perennial Shakespearean obsession. Admittedly, alternative groupings of sonnets (Sonnets 2 and 60, for instance) better prepare students for the sinister, personified Time of Sonnet 116’s climax, but ultimately, having attended to the speaker at his most caustic in Sonnet 130 and to the rhythm at its most flexible in Sonnet 18 provides for a stronger reading of the sonnet overall. Reversing course back to the origins of the third quatrain’s ‘doom’ – simple enough after noting that ‘bending sickle’ echoes the first quatrain’s ‘bends with the remover’ (ll. 10, 4) – the key question emerges: how early in the poem did the speaker intimate his consuming jealousy? The students are more likely to register in retrospect the strange over-insistence in the fifth line’s ‘O no’, or the nowglaring paradox of ‘love is not love’. The latter allows for a quick discussion of the pressures a poet can apply to so basic a concept as enjambment, but as in the lesson on Sonnet 18 – where a broad gesture at the volta made way for a more fruitful analysis of the rhythm – here too the quatrains and their enjambments are stepping-stones to a more intensive discussion of rhythm and its effects on possibilities for interpretation. Challenging a few students to re-read the first few lines at this point should yield the stark alternatives of ‘Let me not’ on the one hand and ‘Let me not’ on the other (emphasis added), and make audible the difference between a simple stress on ‘true’ and sarcastic overemphasis on that bygone virtue. If anyone stumbles over ‘impediments’, and if time allows, the OED may be consulted for its suggestive etymology, but the upshot of the discussion of Sonnet 116 arrives once the class refers itself back to the preceding discussion of Sonnets 18 and 130.11 The

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latter poem’s satirical tone foreshadows the sardonic reading of ‘Let me not’, while the former’s sense of wonder prefigures this latest sonnet’s testimony to love’s perfection. Bringing a 90-minute class full circle to the text discussed at its opening offers an especially satisfying conclusion to a lesson, though done badly the pattern can also seem pat or contrived. In the case of the sonnets in the introductory poetry classroom, success may lie in a closing referral not to a single textual example, but to the class’s original glimpse of Shakespearean ambiguity, earned through the paired close readings of counterpart sonnets. ‘Let me not’ is surely the most difficult of these three sonnets to teach by itself, but ‘My mistress’ eyes’ and ‘Shall I compare thee’, taught in tandem, prepare the students to detect more quickly and clearly the divergence of generosity and jealousy in Sonnet 116. It is only a small step from their recognition of such ambiguity to their increasingly nuanced readings and recitations of these and other sonnets – a happy result for any introductory poetry class and a bridge to effective criticism of the plays.

Teaching the sonnets alongside the plays The sonnets have their place as well in Shakespearean or early modern drama surveys, at any undergraduate level, and once again fit neatly into various syllabi. A fruitful mutuality between the lyrics and the plays more than compensates for the inevitable disconnect of separate genres, and while certain combinations of texts naturally work better than others, key thematic bonds prove stronger and more numerous than initially appears. Having devoted a short time to consideration of the types and degrees of separation between lyric and drama, the class may properly begin with the working thesis that the plays unfold and animate the compact tensions of the sonnets, while the sonnets crystallize and capture (as metaphors) the

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actions and shifting relations of the plays. Adjustments and qualifications are possible at every point in such a thesis – at once too broad and too ornate – but a sense of balance or parity between the two kinds remains desirable. As the proper focus of the survey, of course, the plays will occupy more of the syllabus and ultimately more of the class’s attention than the poems, but the stronger this initial sense of balance, the better able the class will be to cross and re-cross the generic divide whenever occasion warrants. Conceivably, a different sonnet might be used to introduce each play assigned, and as always the game of pairing text to teachable text works well for a preliminary brainstorm. The sonneteer’s obsession with devouring time in the early 60s, for instance, provides a dozen emblems for Hamlet’s Yorick speech, while Sonnet 138 (‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’) primes the class for a cynical reading of Antony and Cleopatra even as it requires some less jaded account of mutual love. Less artificial and more practical than the poem-to-play approach, however, is a week or even a single class on a representative selection of sonnets early in the course. While holding an initial class on a few sonnets before proceeding to the first play assigned has its attractions – presenting Shakespeare’s language at once, for example, or (more obviously) providing a text for the first day – an interstitial class on the most ‘theatrical’ of the sonnets will likely prove most valuable to the students. As for what makes a lyric poem ‘theatrical’, the most obvious answers are not necessarily the best: the opening lines of Sonnet 23 (‘As an unperfect actor on the stage’), for instance, easily recall Quince’s inept prologue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, along with other Shakespearean miscues, but the simile is fleeting, quickly replaced by ‘some fierce thing replete with too much rage’ (l. 3), and the poet’s preference here – ‘O let my books be then the eloquence / And dumb presagers of my speaking breast’ (ll. 9–10) – essentially repudiates theatre instead of coexisting with it. In other words, Sonnet 23 offers little guidance to a class on the Dream, despite

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its promise of overlap. So too, the sonnets which seem at first most stageable, like Sonnet 144 akin to a dumb-show or jig, fall short of the plays’ complexity, and lead all too readily to clumsy, pseudo-biographical conjectures involving the hapless Shakespeare’s betrayal by the dark lady and the young man. More recondite, initially counterintuitive options provide better mileage in the classroom; the obnoxious ‘Will’ poems (Sonnets 135 and 136), for instance, seem too frivolous for a class’s attention, but within minutes either one will testify to the dense intricacy of Shakespeare’s puns across his genres, with the bonus of activating for the students the extremely common, but often overlooked pun on ‘will’. The latter point alone provides more help with Quince’s prologue – ‘If we offend, it is with our good will [Shakespeare? Kempe?]’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.108, emphasis added) – than the ostentatious ‘unperfect actor’ of Sonnet 23. As this example from the Dream suggests, the chronology of the plays’ composition, while still murky, should determine the timing of an interstitial class or two on selected sonnets, so as to align with the plays of the mid-1590s. To be sure, small chains or groups of sonnets sorted by theme may prove helpful when teaching earlier or later plays: the disturbing allusions to Ovid’s Philomela in Sonnets 102 and 106, for instance, work well alongside Titus Andronicus, while the cankered jealousy of the mid-1590s poems usefully portends Othello’s instability, and of course almost any grouping of sonnets can inform a class on either of the narrative poems. Here again, however, some of the more obvious pairings may yield less than promised; hence the ‘sonnets’ recited during the eavesdropping scene of Love’s Labours Lost, only one of which follows the traditional form, deliberately fall too far short of the sequence’s standards to allow for much discussion. They are rather objects of comedy’s ridicule, and spending more than a moment of class time on them would be equivalent to studying earnestly the repudiated similes of ‘My mistress’ eyes’. Romeo and Juliet, on the other hand – obvious though the pairing may be – likely offers the most instructive and farthest-

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reaching correlations between stage and page. In particular, the animated ‘kissing’ sonnet of Juliet’s first encounter with Romeo (1.5.93–106) can be read both as the consummation of the sonnet sequence and as the antithesis of the sequence’s prevailing metaphors for isolation, distance and jealousy. The lovers’ sonnet, moreover, provides students with a glimpse into Shakespeare’s poetic process (one version of it, anyway) within the template of the English sonnet form, as the first two quatrains’ development of a single metaphor gives way to the dialogic self-correction and recapitulation of the third, moving rapidly to the couplet’s climax. At the same time, the kissing sonnet plays against the usual structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, as the poem’s uneven distribution of eight lines to Romeo and six to Juliet better reflects the Italian convention than the English, while the over-perfect rhymes of the opening quatrains – ‘this / kiss’ with ‘this / kiss’ – sensibly outperform any two rhymes in the 154-poem sequence. The intricacy of the pilgrimage metaphor complements that of the richest sonnets in the sequence, yet the consummation enacted through dialogue, dance and kiss contrasts strongly and tellingly with the sonnet-persona’s solitude. Especially with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes (or before them Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting) in mind, we can imagine Romeo and Juliet’s pivotal dance as the 155th sonnet, capping any number of routes through the sequence: resolving the incompletion of the farewell to the beloved in Sonnet 126, for example, returning to a functional realism after the mythographic irrelevance of Sonnets 153 and 154, finding concord after the maladjusted tirades of Sonnets 129, 144 and many more. Best of all, the young lovers proceed to enact the sonneteer’s impulse to turn the page and start afresh – to write a sonnet sequence – managing an additional quatrain before the Nurse interrupts their flirtation. ‘Thank God for the Nurse, or those sappy teens would have gone on forever’, some jaded student, unlucky in love, may here opine, and for once his classmates should appreciate his point of view. After all, the play makes ample room for such

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cynicism in the speeches of Mercutio, and for an instructor to insist too heavily on the kissing sonnet as the consummation of Shakespearean lyric is tantamount to a naive overvaluation of ‘Shall I compare thee’ at the expense of ‘My mistress’ eyes’. A closer inspection of the lovers’ sonnet, in any case, will uncover the anxieties and tensions informing Romeo’s rash siege and Juliet’s half-hearted defence. Mercutio confuses undergraduates at first, just as his esoteric fencing terminology and semirelevant dream-weaving irritate his friends (2.4.24, 1.4.95–6), but soon enough his compelling admixtures of prose and verse, bonhomie and fury, levity and ‘gravity’, win our trust. In his complexity, he proves a surer guide to the heart of the tragedy than the mutually infatuated Romeo and Juliet themselves. Five minutes of mythologizing the character’s namesake – Mercury, laughing god of wit, overseer of crossroads, usher to the underworld – gives the students a powerful sense of his range and uncanny influence over the play.12 Closing a class on the first half of Romeo and Juliet with a discussion of Mercutio works well enough, but not as well, perhaps, as a return to the sonnets at their most complex. Mercutio himself is the theatrical analogue to ‘My mistress’ eyes’ – to the extent of satirizing the blazon (2.1.17–20) – while Romeo and Juliet’s kissing sonnet animates the marvel of ‘Shall I compare thee’. In a holistic sense, then, the coexistence of clown and lovers, sublimity and satire, cursing and kissing, handclasp and sword-thrust – in other words, the play as paradox – leads us once again to the most ambiguous sonnets: to ‘Let me not’, or (for something more theatrical) to ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, / That millions of strange shadows on you tend?’ (53.1–2). This sonnet (the fourth-most-famous?) provides a fantasy of the tiring-house: beautified as Adonis and Helen, the beloved has never looked better, yet the one is a thinly disguised memento mori, the other a byword for unchastity, and neither allusion is too remote for the best-read students to recognize and explain to the class. Through lenses smoked beforehand by Mercutio, in any case, the entire class will easily perceive the poet’s

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cynical puns on ‘shadows’ and ‘nun’. For the students, then, Sonnet 53 provides one last, landmark example of that most Shakespearean passage from ambiguity to anamorphosis, or the recombination of counterparts (like Sonnets 18 and 130) into an unstable and dynamic paradox. In Romeo and Juliet – as in Othello and Antony and Cleopatra later in the survey – the animation of that lyrical passage into paradox takes the form of tragedy, and if the students come to perceive this process in plays and poems alike, the sonnets will have more than earned their place in the classroom.

Notes 1

Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Making Shakespeare’s Sonnets Matter in the Classroom’, in Approaches to Teaching Shorter Elizabethan Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney and Anne Lake Prescott (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2000), 238–44. See also Robert B. Pierce, ‘Teaching the Sonnets with Performance Techniques’, in Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century, ed. James E. Davis and Ronald E. Salomone (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 43–9. For an editorial approach to teaching the sonnets, see David Sofield, ‘The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, EditorAnnotator(s), and Cruxes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 431–49. Helen Vendler provides multiple guides to her analytical approach, most fully demonstrated in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1997); but see also her paired chapters, ‘Poems Posing Questions’ and ‘Reading for Difference: The Sonnets’, in Teaching with Shakespeare: Critics in the Classroom, ed. Bruce McIver and Ruth Stevenson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 23–56.

2

A perennial question, to which Sonnets 18 and 130 are frequent answers; see, for instance, Chris Bower et al., ‘Teacher to Teacher: Which of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Do You Teach to Your Students?’, The English Journal 92:1 (2002), 18–21.

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3

Billy Collins’ attitude is representative, if cruel: ‘But all they want to do / Is tie the poem to a chair with rope / And torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means’ (ll. 12–16): ‘Introduction to Poetry’, in Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (New York: Random House, 2003), 3. This essay assumes that most students are quite capable of tying any Shakespeare sonnet to that chair as well, but that they are also prepared to give Shakespeare his due when guided into his poetry. Any token veneration for the famous name (or, paradoxically, the resistance of a few to popular bardolatry) has the salutary effect of raising the stakes in Shakespeare’s case.

4

Alternative lesson plans abound, of course, both in the literature and (increasingly) online. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s website, for instance, offers a range of ‘teaching modules’ for the sonnets, emphasizing close reading (especially Sonnet 138), intertextuality, performance, group imitation and the like. See www.folger.edu/teaching-modules [accessed 29 December 2015].

5

Stephen Booth reproduces the invaluable image in his edition of the Sonnets (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 453, though the image is now widely available online. For a straw counter-example to set against Shakespeare, Bartholomew Griffin’s ‘My Ladies haire is threeds of beaten gold’, from Fidessa, more chaste then kinde (London, 1596), D4, offers a full catalogue of grotesque corporeal metaphors, and closes with a howlingly bad pun on the poet’s own name.

6

‘reek, v. 1’, 4a, Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com [accessed 29 December 2015]. The quoted examples include Shakespeare’s line.

7

‘rare, adj. 1’, 4a, 5a, 5b, 5c are all operative. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com [accessed 29 December 2015].

8

Arguably, the first poem in each of these sequences provides a perfectly unambiguous counter-example to the criteria by which I have selected from Shakespeare’s sequence here. All are included in The Norton Anthology of Poetry 5E, ed. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 190, 213, 347.

9

Alas, let me not pretend that my students know Sonnet 116 as well as Sonnets 18 and 130. While many remain familiar with

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Amy Heckerling’s 1995 film Clueless, in which the flighty Cher (Alicia Silverstone), citing Cliffs Notes, initiates a romance by quoting ‘Shall I compare thee’, few have seen Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, also from 1995, in which the enthusiastic Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) acquires a dangerous fever while reciting ‘Let me not’ during a rainstorm. 10 The glosses in the Norton Anthology (and in the Norton Shakespeare) are insufficient; Burrow’s double paraphrase provides much more without plunging as far into the line as Booth. See his edition of The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 612. 11 ‘impede, v’. This etymology is more to the point than that provided for the noun ‘impediment’. Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com [accessed 29 December 2015]. 12 Portions of Natale Conti’s account of Mercury in the Mythologiae make for excellent handouts. See Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, ed. John Mulryan and Stephen Brown, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ : Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 361–71.

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Afterword Heather Dubrow

In spring 1966 – exactly fifty years before I wrote this afterword – I completed my undergraduate thesis on Shakespeare’s sonnets.1 Round numbers are likely to encourage reflection – and in the case of this particular chronology, the passage of half a century also invites both retrospection about the field and anticipation of future developments in it. As Matthew Harrison aptly observes earlier in this book, ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets have long invited us to confront our own methodologies and to reflect on which connections we are justified in making. Always at stake is the status of literary argument itself: how do the patterns critics observe – or make – come to mean?’ (see p.  186). Confronting our methodologies, as Harrison advocates, is particularly challenging in the instance of these poems. The stakes are high: the attention bestowed on and status of Shakespeare himself both within the academy and outside it can augment what Harrison terms ‘the status of literary arguments’. Thus the enthusiastic acceptance of favoured interpretations may carry more weight in terms of the career of their proponents and the future of their methodologies; widespread dismissal of other interpretations may have an intensified negative impact. Moreover, discussions of such 269

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issues demand inflection, not least because of the range and variety of scholarship and criticism on these poems. Distinctions among the several countries represented in this international collection also complicate an overview of critical methods; compare pedagogical practices in Britain with those in United States that Daniel Moss traces acutely in his essay. Nonetheless, observations about what Harrison terms ‘the status of literary argument itself’ (p.  186) can not only encapsulate some characteristics of the preceding essays but also synecdochally gesture towards larger issues about our field and even our profession. Measuring the affiliations between the state of play today and the critical approaches when I wrote that undergraduate thesis demands a measure of disinterestedness and, again, a distrust of unqualified, vast generalizations. On the one hand, an unbecoming eagerness to celebrate the achievements of one’s own circle can lead critics unduly to downplay connections with earlier generations. As I note below, many contributions to this collection exemplify the continuing potentialities of long-standing methodologies, despite – and because of – the fact they are approached here and elsewhere through revisionist lenses. (Of course writers themselves may downplay, or even deny, their affiliations with their predecessors. Although Alice Fulton certainly merits the praise Jonathan F.S. Post’s acute essay bestows on her, her championship of the fractal as a clear-cut distinction between poetry today and its antecedents resists acknowledging similar, and arguably even identical, patterns in earlier poetry, thus demonstrating tendencies present in many overviews of poetry by both those who write it and those who write about it.) Nonetheless, the methodological tools through which these poems may be approached have indeed changed significantly over the past half-century. Gender studies, arguably the most striking of many changes over the past fifty years, has come a long way since the era when W.H. Auden’s commentaries on Shakespeare’s sonnets, as he himself apparently admitted, had to conceal the sexualities in this sequence under the guise of a

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culturally normative and asexual male friendship.2 More broadly, perhaps the most fruitful change in critical approaches – reflected in many of the essays here – has been the rejection of the determined and even aggressive adherence to a single methodology that characterized certain periods in the halfcentury preceding this collection, especially in the United States. The widespread and typically unexamined assumption that New Criticism reigned as an absolutist monarch in that country during the 1950s and 1960s is complicated by both the continuing significance of Freudian criticism in some quarters and the continuing hegemony of intellectual and literary history in others. Nonetheless, the power of New Criticism during those two decades was unmistakable, as was the impact of the Leavisites in England for part of that era. These and later movements often gathered (and gathered in) their adherents by demeaning alternative practices; in the United States in the 1980s, for example, many critics posited an either/or choice between New Historicism and feminism. This collection, in contrast, demonstrates the triumph of more eclectic and catholic approaches to Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as to many other issues and texts. For example, source study, for some years rejected by many materialist critics as representing an old-fashioned emphasis on the literary rather than the cultural, has been recuperated, in part through its sibling, intertextuality; engagement with sources impels several essays in this volume, in so doing undermining those dismissive characterizations of it and powerfully interacting with other perspectives. The toolbox from which these essays draw also testifies to the current availability of other valuable resources, notably editions and digital media, from which earlier critics could not profit. The past fifty years have witnessed many significant editions of these sonnets. Through interpretations that undermined stable signification, Stephen Booth has made these lyrics safe for poststructuralist readings avant la lettre while avoiding a polemical defence or even overt acknowledgement of that approach, and a plethora of important critical editions

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succeeded his.3 Readings from these subsequent editions strengthen the close readings in this collection. Another change has been that certain earlier ‘onlie begetters’ of major editions, such as Gwynne Blakemore Evans and Hyder Edward Rollins, were primarily interested in, and identified with, editorial work rather than criticism in its other manifestations. In contrast, four contributors to this collection, Colin Burrow, Lynne Magnusson, John Roe and Cathy Shrank, have published, or are soon to publish, lengthy and influential contributions to critical discourses as well as editing these sonnets and related poems. But any celebration of editing these and other poems is necessarily edgy and polemical, in part because completing such volumes may in some instances take even longer than producing a slim monograph, while also garnering less respect in some quarters. Hence significant editorial work is arguably being discouraged by certain reward systems in the United States and by the Research Excellence Framework (like its progenitor the Research Assessment Exercise) in the UK . And the effects of the digital media on print editions are among the most debated and least resolved questions in our profession today. More to my purposes now, those digital media are another resource that was not a gleam even in the eyes of the MIT English Department fifty years ago. Harrison comments persuasively on their effects on both criticism of and poetic riffs on the sonnets; Shrank’s emphasis on word clusters is in dialogue with recent work on how the digital humanities can permit us to analyse such groupings.4 But, as I argue below, the effects of the new media on our undergraduates may be far less benign than their salutary impact on scholars and critics. Whereas the publication of new editions and the potentialities of the digital media have reshaped work on many texts by other authors, in at least two respects cognate recent developments in the criticism on these sonnets differ from the impact of those publications and potentialities as realized elsewhere. First, Shakespeare’s iconic status, and the iconic status of the sonnet form itself, explains the extraordinary outpouring of versions of his poems. Surely few if any other

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poets in his or different eras have inspired nearly as many versions, reversions and revisions as Shakespeare, and many essays in this collection explore this afterlife.5 Second, the cultural capital vested in Shakespeare and the challenging involutions of a poem like Sonnet 20 (‘A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted’) help to explain the attention lavished on the putative biographical significance of these poems and in particular on their author’s putative sexualities. Roe’s cogent reminder that the young man may not even correspond to any ‘real’ person synecdochally gestures towards Burrow’s lengthier condemnation of biographical readings. As Burrow aptly puts it in his essay in this collection, ‘The literarycritical equivalents of gossip-columnists had (and continue to have) a field day with these unanswerable questions, which tingle with sexual possibility’ (see p. 100). Irresponsible speculations of the type sketched by Burrow have distorted criticism of other authors as well; for example, the assurance that Donne’s irenic and respectful love poems were written about and under the influence of their author’s happy marriage are at best dubious. But such speculations are far more pervasive, and arguably far more destructive, when readers from undergraduates to senior scholars approach Shakespeare’s sonnets as what Burrow aptly terms ‘gossip-columnists’. One might well bemoan the expense of spirit in a waste of shamefully uninformed readings. In contrast, the valuable essays that characterize this volume demonstrate recurrent and more productive interests. Close reading of these poems never died out, of course, but the violent and virulent reaction against the New Criticism with which such approaches were problematically identified helps to explain why, until recently, so many critics in the United States not only concentrated on the plays but virtually ignored all the non-dramatic poems: those lyrics were tarred with the brush of close reading, while the dramas appeared to lend themselves more readily to a whole range of different methodologies. In their approach to the nuances of the text, the essays in this volume are exemplary in more senses than

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one – witness, to select only a few examples from among many, J.K. Barret’s attention to incomplete grammatical structures and Ann Thompson’s acute commentaries on feminine and internal rhyme. Unlike many earlier close readings, examples of that practice in this collection – notably Shankar Raman’s – devote attention to what Lynne Magnusson elsewhere calls ‘little words’, such as the deictics on which I also focused in a recent study of the sonnets.6 Post and other critics here allude to such words more briefly but fruitfully. ‘Less is more’, the mantra of many modernist architects, has also been embraced by these architects of critical analysis. Close reading analyses may be more valuable in our classrooms of 2016 than they were in 1966, enlisting Shakespeare, as Moss aptly puts it, as our ‘ally in our constant struggle against reductive reading’ (see p. 253). The popularity of digital devices among our undergraduates has encouraged them to read rapidly to extract the verbal equivalent of a sound bite of information. Possibly such habits of mind (or at worst of mindlessness) could themselves be enlisted in our teaching – might we try, for example, to compare and contrast couplets with the compression of tweets? Might we engage the interest of those less engaged with traditional types of reading by demonstrating the value of digital searches? But such suggestions might be, as Dr Johnson put it, the triumph of hope over experience, for by and large our students’ involvement with digital media, for all its advantages in other spheres, too often discourages the sort of slow and repeated readings and re-readings that texts like Shakespeare’s sonnets demand. Moss’s essay cogently demonstrates why that approach is important and how it can fruitfully unfold. In short, we need to teach our classes (and perhaps on occasion remind ourselves) that all that twitters is not gold. The essays in this volume also demonstrate the growing impact of what has been termed ‘New Formalism’. Its influence is evident in, for example, Shrank’s incisive discussion of memorialization and Thompson’s exploration of rhyme; Harrison too reminds us that the study of form is a precondition

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of, not enemy to, the types of criticism he advocates. The contributions to this collection themselves skilfully negotiate the possibilities and perils of New Formalism, but in so doing they alert us to the challenges of future work of that type, in relation to these sonnets as well as other poems. For example, although New Formalism and close reading are sometimes simply equated, they are in fact distinct procedures and sometimes even distant relatives. Many close readers are relatively uninterested in versions of form beyond linguistic and rhetorical ones, while New Formalists often concentrate on macro-level patterns like genre rather than the nuances of language.7 Moreover, New Formalists, unlike many close readers, typically though not unproblematically insist that engagement with historical and cultural developments is the signature of their readings. We need to re-evaluate the relationship of these approaches, encouraging their interactions when that would be fruitful (for example, broad statements about generic dialogues between Shakespeare’s sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint can often be nuanced through attention to details of language), while also recognizing that elsewhere these methods may appropriately remain separate (witness the relative paucity of close reading in the invaluable formalist work of a leading scholar of a previous generation, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski). As suggested above, approaching these sonnets in relation to other texts also proves fruitful in this collection. Although their connections to their author’s plays have hardly been neglected in the past, fresh and perceptive insights about those links appear in the contributions at hand. To winnow just a few examples, Thompson focuses on Sonnet 87, a sonnet that is also discussed by Post and that, as I have found, often generates particularly productive discussions in undergraduate classrooms and essays; she associates it with a number of plays, ranging in genre and date from Romeo and Juliet to Cymbeline and Troilus and Cressida. How and why these poems and their author’s dramas interact invites further attention from subsequent critics, though Burrow has already acutely commented on that issue in his edition. Shrank

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contributes new insights into links with Shakespeare’s longer poetry, expanding our understanding of the controversial relationship between the sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint.8 Exemplifying the preoccupation with religion that has characterized criticism in the past few decades, Magnusson demonstrates that both Thorpe and Shakespeare draw on the Book of Common Prayer, while Kristine Johanson traces connections with the Bible, especially Ecclesiastes. Insights about the dialogue between these sonnets and the work of other poets emerge from Reiko Oya’s analysis of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, a collection as fraught and controversial in its own way as Shakespeare’s poems, and Post’s commentary on Alice Fulton and several other contemporary poets. But if the essays in this collection demonstrate achievements in the current state of play, what do they suggest about opportunities – and desiderata – for future work? Not surprisingly, like so much earlier criticism, they engage productively with questions of time: for example, Barret demonstrates how words like ‘when’ and ‘if’ shape temporality, Burrow identifies their anticipatory mode, Johanson emphasizes time in connecting the poems to Ecclesiastes, and Shrank’s analysis of memorialization reshapes our earlier understandings of temporality throughout the sequence. But here, as in so many other discussions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, are we not in danger of stressing time at the expense of space, whose significance, though less central here than in, say, the sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth, should not be neglected? Space and time are often so closely connected in this sequence that focusing only on time risks a reading that is partial in many senses. Exemplifying the value of countering that risk, Magnusson demonstrates how her proximal and distant index words involve a relationship between the two concepts in question. Witness, too, the conflation of time and space in ‘My grief lies onward and my joy behind’ (50.14). Shakespeare often represents the ways writing can battle time in terms of how various and often competing agents can affect and even effect space and place. Thus time is implored – or is it commanded? – to ‘carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow’ (19.9), and time

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may ‘dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field’ (2.2). In such passages, space is reconfigured by time, which leaves its imprint literally and metaphorically. In Sonnet 2, for example, when read in isolation ‘field’ is laden with numerous connotations; time claims the addressee’s threatened beauty as a military field and announces its own victory therein. The text proceeds to reclaim and protect that beauty through its own advice. Such passages variously invite adaptations of and challenges to space theory. De Certeau, for example, influentially establishes walking as one way the disempowered may nonetheless achieve some agency in space; might writing be, as it were, a graphic analogue to walking?9 In addition, however, space demands more attention through its significance in many Shakespearean sonnets where it is not connected to time. I am hardly alone in noticing, for example, that these poems sometimes contrast enclosure as a form of entrapment with freer movement but sometimes blur those images; in these sonnets’ evocations of distance from the beloved, for example, literal, physical distance often figures emotional distance, while attempts to bridge such divides are often represented spatially.10 Magnusson’s argument that the dedication is a major and typically misread paratext, and Shrank’s commentaries on that prefatory material and on epitaphs, can encourage further attention to the role of paratexts in these and many other lyric poems. How, for example, does printers’ reliance on catchwords (the first word from the next page that appears in the bottom right of the page that preceded it) affect a reader’s sense of closure and anticlosure? Many critics today are interested in hypermediacy, sometimes defined as the consciousness of the medium that may be produced, inter alia, by the interaction of several different media, such as the television broadcasts sometimes now included within live productions of Shakespeare plays. Hypermediacy is a practice with many medieval and early modern analogues, even though students of the twentieth century sometimes attempt to claim it as springing fully formed from the head of poststructuralism. Attention to this concept might lead us to explore the influence of other types of

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paratexts on these and other poems. How about oral paratexts? Poets in our own era often precede readings of their poems with so-called patter, comments whose functions range from providing practical information to changing the mood to engaging the audience through jokes.11 It is likely, though not provable, that early modern poets did so as well – what happens if we imagine Shakespeare, or someone else, reading them aloud, probably to a small group? And how about the impact of authors’ handwritten notes on manuscripts of their poems?12 As the instance of paratexts indicates, this collection could and should also stimulate further work on lyric itself. Although Burrow compares Jonathan Culler’s emphasis on a lyric poem as an event in itself to his own acute argument here that the poems anticipate an event, contrasting the two models might introduce useful perspectives on commonplace generalizations about the immediacy of lyric, as well as on the complex relationship of other types of lyric to song. Essays by other contributors also gesture towards important issues about that mode; as noted above, Thompson, for instance, draws attention to the roles of rhyme (a subject too often neglected during decades when attention to that type of formal question was viewed as merely old-fashioned) and, in so doing, introduces broader issues about its workings in lyric. But perhaps the most significant, if most subtle, invitation issued by these essays is to defend and reinvigorate the concept of authorship. They suggest that we can acknowledge the role of other agents, such as collaborating writers and the publisher who created the dedication, without underplaying that of Shakespeare himself. They prove that we can celebrate the aesthetic and formal achievements of sonnets discussed so ably here without ascribing to them the concept of a beauty (not unproblematically associated with Kant) detached from its culture. They maintain that we can return to a revisionist version of the source study demonized in many circles of the profession without denying that the poems are shaped by their political and socioeconomic history as well as literary history.

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But whatever position we adopt in relation to, say, collaborations among early modern dramatists, this collection exemplifies the value of collaborative practices in our own profession – including drawing on rather than merely ignoring or dismissing criticism from the era when I was writing that undergraduate thesis, as well as participating in shared enterprises like this volume itself.

Notes 1

I am indebted to my student assistant, Elizabeth Light, for her meticulous and thoughtful work on this essay.

2

On Auden’s apparent renunciation of his earlier reading, and as an example of a pioneering repudiation of assertions that the sequence does not involve a same-sex relationship, see Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), esp. 79–80.

3

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).

4

For an important analysis of digital approaches to such clusters, see Daniel Shore, ‘Shakespeare’s Constructicon’, Shakespeare Quarterly 66 (2015), 113–36.

5

For one such volume of poems inspired by the sonnets, see On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration, ed. Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2016).

6

On those ‘little words’ see both Magnusson’s contribution to this collection and her essay ‘A Play of Modals: Grammar and Potential Action in Early Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey 62 (2009), 69–80; I discuss deictics, especially ‘here’, ‘this’ and ‘come’, in Deixis in the Early Modern Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like ‘Here’, ‘This’, and ‘Come’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

7

Among the best New Formalist essays on Shakespeare’s sonnets are Ben Burton, ‘Forms of Worship: Shakespeare’s Sonnets,

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Ritual, and the Genealogy of Formalism’, in The Work of Form: Poetics and Materiality in Early Modern Culture, ed. Burton and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 56–72; Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Reading Intensity: Sonnet 12’, in Shakespeare Up Close: Reading Early Modern Texts, ed. Russ McDonald, Nicholas D. Nace and Travis D. Williams (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 146–53. 8

John Roe, ‘Introduction’, in The Poems: ‘Venus and Adonis’, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, ed. Roe, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–72.

9

Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. Chapter 7.

10 On enclosure in these poems and modern adaptations of them, see Jane Kingsley-Smith, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Claustrophobic Reader: Making Space in Modern Shakespeare Fiction’, Shakespeare 9 (2013), 187–203. 11 Comments such as these are also sometimes provided in print; see, for example, the notes section at the end of Crawforth and Scott-Baumann, On Shakespeare’s Sonnets for an example. 12 I am grateful to Elizabeth Scott-Baumann for this suggestion about notes on manuscripts (private correspondence).

INDEX

Abad-Garcia, Pilar 226n. Acheson, Arthur 187–9, 195, 199, 201, 203, 204–5n. Allen, Donald 206n. Amis, Kingsley 217, 226n., 280n. Ammons, A.R. 210 Andrews, Bruce 188–9, 195, 203, 205n. Aristotle 27, 168, 170–1, 181n. Armitage, Simon 221 Armstrong, Jane 118, 132n. Atkins, Carl D. 119, 127, 132n., 134n. Attreed, Lorraine 13–14, 29n. Auden, W.H. 270, 279n. Austin, J.L. 105, 115n. Badiou, Alain 163, 174, 180n., 182n. Baker, Humfrey 174, 182n. Barker, Christopher 71n. Barnfield, Richard 26, 31n. Bate, Jonathan 243, 247n., 249n. Baumlin, James S. 72n. Benson, John 8, 18, 146, 155n., 186, 195, 217 Berger, Thomas L. 52n. Berrigan, Ted 192, 205n. Berryman, John 100, 114n. Bervin, Jen 8, 193, 195–7, 206n., 219–20, 227n. Bevington, David 123 Beza, Theodore 59, 74n.

Bishop, Elizabeth 97–8, 113n. Blackmur, Richard 191, 203, 205n. Bloom, Harold 216, 226n. Blount, Edward 44–5, 49, 115n. Blundeville, Thomas 173, 182n. Bogdanov, Michael 134n. Booth, Stephen 3, 10n., 75n., 91–2n., 127, 129–30, 134n., 137, 154–5n., 161, 175–7, 179–80n., 182n., 186, 209, 266–7n., 271, 279n. Boselli, Stefano 190, 205n. Boundas, Constantin 181n. Bower, Chris 265n. Boxer, Stephen 134n. Braden, Gordon 93n. Brae, A.E. 35 Braithwait, Richard 30n. Brassier, Ray 180n. Bray, Denys 192, 199 Brennan, Michael G. 74n. Brereton, Kurt 201–3, 207n. Bronzino, Agnolo 6, 79–80 Brooks, Douglas A. 133n. Brown, Stephen 267n. Bujon, Anne-Lorraine 249n. Burnside, John 222 Burrow, Colin 35, 52n., 71n., 74n., 113–15n., 128, 134n., 209, 214, 225n., 267n., 272–3, 275–6, 278 281

282

INDEX

Burton, Ben 279n. Butler, Samuel 108, 115n., 190, 203, 205n. Callaghan, Dympna 120, 127, 133–4n. Campbell, Gordon 30n. Campensis, Joannes 73–4n. Cantor, Georg 173–4 Caveney, Geoffrey 113n. Cayley, John 205n. Celan, Paul 226n. Chandler, Raymond 131, 135n. Chapman, George 103 Cheney, Patrick 265n. Clarke, Gillian 222 Clody, Michael 145, 155n. Cohen, Simona 72n. Cohen, Walter 52n., 71n., 133n. Cole, Peter 115n. Colebrook, Clare 167, 181n. Collins, Billy 266n. Combe, John 14, 29n. Conti, Natale 267n. Cope, Wendy 217–18, 221, 226n. Corcoran, Neil 247n. Cormack, Bradin 75n. Coryate, Thomas 46–7 Coverdale, Miles 73n. Cowper, William 52n. Crane, Mary 179–80n. Crawforth, Hannah 53n., 227n., 279–80n. Crossley-Holland, Kevin 221 Culler, Jonathan 98, 104, 113–14n., 278 Cummings, Brian 38, 53n., 73n.

Danes, Claire 263 Daniel, Samuel 16–17, 28, 30–1n., 62, 71n., 124–5, 133n. Davis, James E. 265n. de Certeau, Michel 277, 280n. de Chambrun, Clara 192, 205n. de Grazia, Margreta 50, 54n., 56, 71n., 153, 155–6n. de Kooning, Willem 219 de Serres, Jean 59 Dee, John 164, 180n. Deleuze, Gilles 161, 167, 179n., 181n. Derrida, Jacques 115–16n. DiCaprio, Leonardo 263 Dickinson, Emily 210 Dillon, A. 206n. Dobson, Michael 74n. Doelman, James 74n. Donne, John 46, 155n., 253, 273 Downame, George 52n. Drayton, Michael 16, 30n., 99, 130–1 Drucker, Johanna 185, 201–2, 204n., 207n. Du Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste 166, 181n. Dubrow, Heather 9, 41, 53n., 90, 91n., 93–4n., 114n., 126, 134n., 144–6, 155n. Duffy, Carol Ann 8, 218–19, 222, 226n. Duffy, Eamon 29n. Duncan-Jones, Katherine 10n., 31n., 35, 52n., 71n., 73n., 75n., 91n., 94n., 113– 15n., 129, 134n., 154n., 179n., 190, 205n., 209 Dunn, Douglas 221

INDEX

283

Eagleton, Terry 247n. Egan, Gabriel 74n. Eisaman Maus, Katharine 52n., 71n., 133n. Eld, George 5, 45, 48 Eliot, T.S. 221, 229, 245, 248n. Elizabeth I 60, 108 Empson, William 129–30, 134n. Engle, Lars 155n. Erasmus, Desiderius 78 Est, William 52n. Estess, Sybil P. 113n. Euclid 163–4, 175, 182n. Evans, G. Blakemore 35, 37, 52n., 119, 132n., 272

Galey, Alan 197–8, 206n. Gardner, Helen 118, 132n. Gifford, George 59 Gifford, Terry 247–8n. Glazier, Loss Pequeño 205 Golding, Arthur 20, 30n. Gombrich, E.H. 91–2n. Goodwin, Ross 193–7, 206n. Gratarolo, Guilelmo 24 Gray, Dionis 174, 182n. Greenblatt, Stephen 52n., 71n., 133n., 218 Greg, W.W. 53n. Grice, H.P. 110–11, 115n. Griffin, Bartholomew 266n.

Farley, Paul 223 Feinstein, Elaine 222 Ferguson, Margaret 132n., 266n. Ferry, Anne 147, 155n. Feuer, Donya 248n. Field, Richard 60–1, 74n. Fineman, Joel 139, 149, 154n., 158, 161, 171, 179n., 181n., 230, 238, 246n., 248n. Fletcher, John 126 Foster, Donald 34–40, 44, 47, 51, 52–3n. Frecerro, Carla 204n. Frege, Gotlob 166–73, 175, 181n. Freinkel, Lisa 75 Friedlander, Benjamin 206 Frost, Robert 222, 232 Fulton, Alice 8, 209–11, 213–17, 219, 225–6n., 270, 276 Fulwood, William 24–7

Haggar, Nicholas 239, 248n. Hall, John 73n. Hall, Joseph 59n. Hamilton, A.C. 190, 205n. Hamlin, Hannibal 71–4n. Hammond, Gerald 120, 124, 126, 133–4n. Hannay, Patrick 30n. Harington, John 125, 133n. Harman, Graham 204n. Harris, Jonathan Gil 72n. Hathaway, Anne 218, 226n. Hathaway, William 100 Haughton, William 100 Healey, John 49 Healy, Margaret 180–1n. Heaney, Seamus 222, 247n., 249n. Heckerling, Amy 267n. Hejinian, Lyn 190–1, 193, 202, 205n., 207n. Henderson, Diana 181n. Herbert, George 253

284

INDEX

Herbert, William, 3rd Earl of Pembroke 35, 49, 100, 213 Hieatt, A. Kent 114n. Hieatt, Charles W. 114n. Holland, Hugh 49 Holland, Vyvyan 247n. Holme, William 100, 113n. Hook, Ross 248n. Hooks, Adam G. 74n. Hoover, Paul 193, 195–6, 206n. Hope, Jonathan 114n. Horace 13, 19, 30n., 141, 148, 150, 156n. Horner, Avril 226n. Hotson, Leslie 108, 115n. Houston, David 72n. Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 60, 73n. Howard, Jean E. 52n., 71n., 133n. Hughes, Frieda 245, 249n. Hughes, Nicholas 231, 247n., 249n. Hughes, Ted 8, 118, 132n., 229–46, 246–9n., 276 Hughes, Willy 100 Hussey, Olivia 263 Ingram, W.G. 75n., 92n. Isherwood, Anne 132 Jabès, Edmond 226n. Jackson, MacDonald P. 114n. Jacobson, Miriam 186, 204n. Jaggard, William 195 Jagose, Annemarie 195, 206n. James, Clive 3, 10n. James, Elias 29n. Jenkins, Alan 221 Johanson, Kristine 72n.

Johnson, Ronald 197, 206n. Johnson, Samuel 274 Jonson, Ben 5, 30n., 37, 45–9, 52n., 54n., 99, 103, 113n., 125, 133n., 253 Joy, Eileen 185, 201, 204n. Kathman, David 53n. Kay, Jackie 221 Keegan, Paul 246n. Kempe, Will 262 Kerrigan, John 71n., 75n., 115n., 209 Khalvati, Mimi 221 Kingsley-Smith, Jane 280n. Klein, Jacob 162–3, 168, 170, 180–1n. Koren, Yehuda 247n. Kovner, Victor 249n. Kunin, Aaron 153, 156n. Lanier, Emilia 235, 248n. Lee, Ang 267n. Leinwand, Theodore 247–8n. Leishman, J.B. 151, 156n. Leland, John 31n. Lennard, John 30n. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer 275 Liu, Alan 189, 195, 205n. Lodge, Thomas 16 Loewenstein, Joseph 46, 54n. Lok, Henry 57–8, 60–5, 70, 74n. Longley, Michael 222 Lucan 44–5, 49 Luther, Martin 59 Lyne, Raphael 30n. Machado, Antonio 218 Magnusson, Lynne 52–4n., 272, 279n.

INDEX

Malone, Edmond 101 Manovich, Lev 188–9, 195, 205n. Marlowe, Christopher 44–5, 53–4n., 103 Marotti, Arthur 36, 51, 52n., 54n. Massai, Sonia 34, 36, 52n. Massey, Gerald 92n. Masterson, Thomas 163, 180n. May, Steven 29n. Mayer, Bernadette 190, 205n. McDonald, Russ 155n., 217, 226n., 280n. McGann, Jerome 185, 204n. McGough, Roger 220 McHale, Brian 219, 226n. McIver, Bruce 265n. McKnight, C. 206n. McNulty, Robert 133n. Menon, Madhavi 204n. Meres, Francis 99, 113–14n. Merrill, James 226n. Michelis, Angelica 226n. Miller, J. Hillis 115n. Miller, Jacques Alain 168–9, 172–3, 175, 181–2n. Milton, John 99, 253 Mirsky, Mark Jay 132n. Mohammad, K. Silem 195, 226n. Montaigne, Michel de 107, 115n. Morgan, Jerry L. 115n. Morrison, Conall 134n. Morrow, Glenn Raymond 182n. Mortimer, Anthony 92–3n. Mowat, Barbara A. 53n. Muldoon, Paul 222 Müller-Zettelmann, Eva 226n.

285

Mulryan, John 267n. Munro, Lucy 72n. Nace, Nicholas D. 155n., 280n. Negev, Eilat 247n. Nosworthy, J.M. 52n. Notley, Alice 192, 205n. O’Callaghan, Michelle 54n. O’Connor, Daniel 248n. Olson, Charles 198, 202, 206n. Orgel, Stephen 111, 115n. Ovid 19–20, 30n., 141 Oya, Reiko 132n. Padel, Ruth 221 Parfitt, George 133n. Parker, Patricia 180n., 182n. Paterson, Don 191, 205n., 209–10, 217–18, 223–4, 225–7n. Pequigney, Joseph 93n., 279n. Petrarch, Francesco 84–5, 90, 92–3n. Petrina, Alessandra 72n. Pierce, Robert B. 252, 265n. Plath, Sylvia 211, 218, 230–46, 249n. Plato 25, 173 Pollitt, Katha 249n. Post, Jonathan F.S. 10n., 155n., 226n., 265n., Prescott, Anne Lake 114n., 265n. Prince, F.T. 186, 204n. Proclus 175, 182n. Pryce, Jonathan 134n. Puttenham, George 40, 53n. Pynchon, Thomas 179n.

286

INDEX

Queneau, Raymond 199 Quiller-Couch, Arthur 118, 132n. Rauschenberg, Robert 219 Read, Sophie 142, 155n. Redpath, Theodore 75n., 92 Rees, Joan 125, 133n. Reid, Christopher 247–9n. Rendall, Steven 280n. Rich, Adrienne 218 Rich, Barnaby 54n. Richardson, J. 206n. Ricks, Christopher 132n. Ringler, William 29n. Roberts, Michael Symmons 223 Robertson, Robin 221 Robinson, Peter 108, 114–15n. Roe, John 272, 280n. Rollins, Hyder Edward 92n., 113–15n., 204n., 272 Ross, J. F. 134n. Rostenberg, Leona 44, 53n. Rowland, Antony 226n. Rowse, A.L. 235, 248n. Rubik, Margarete 226n. Rudd, Niall 30n., 156n. Rylands, George 118, 132n. Sagar, Keith 230, 232–3, 246–9n. Salomone, Ronald E. 265n. Salter, Mary Jo 132n., 266n. Samuels, Lisa 185, 204n. Schalkwyk, David 91n., 105n., 114n. Schiffer, James 75n., 93n., 225n. Schoenfeldt, Michael 71n., 138, 153, 154n., 156n., 225n., 252, 265n.

Schwartz, Lloyd 113n. Schwartz, Louis 113n. Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth 53n., 227n., 279n., 280n. Searle, John 105, 114–16n. Shaheen, Naseeb 71n. Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 129, 236 Antony and Cleopatra 21, 91n., 261, 265 As You Like It 91n., 114n. Coriolanus 19 Cymbeline 121–2, 275 Hamlet 31n., 98, 112, 114n., 130, 197, 261 Henry IV Part 1 128, 134n. Henry IV Part 2 22, 128–9 Henry VI Part 2 22 Julius Caesar 21 King Lear 19, 236, 243, Love’s Labour’s Lost 43, 101, 114n., 134n., 262 Macbeth 22 Measure for Measure 54n., 122 Merchant of Venice, The 121 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 54n., 128–9, 134n., 261–2 Much Ado About Nothing 21, 134n., 182n. Othello 180n., 262, 265 Richard II 72n. Romeo and Juliet 67, 120, 122, 262–5, 275 Taming of the Shrew, The 122, 128–9 Tempest, The 236 Timon of Athens 236

INDEX

Titus Andronicus 262 Troilus and Cressida 123, 236, 240, 275 Twelfth Night 126, 134n. Winter’s Tale, The 75n., 181n. Shepherd, Geoffrey 53n. Shore, Daniel 279n. Shrank, Cathy 30–1n., 272, Sidney, Philip 2, 17, 26, 39–40, 50, 53n., 60, 62, 71n., 256 Silverstone, Alicia 267n. Singh, Jyotsna G. 180n. Sipiora, Philip 72n. Smith, Henry 59 Smith, Logan Pearsall 118, 132n. Sofield, David 252, 265n. Spenser, Edmund 17, 24, 26, 31n., 251, 256 Sprague, A.C. 30n., 133n. Spurr, Barry 247n. St. John, David 225n. Stallworthy, Jon 132n., 266n. Stallybrass, Peter 31n. Stansby, William 46 Stefans, Brian Kim 225n. Stevenson, Anne 249n. Stevenson, Ruth 265n. Stevin, Simon 173 Stoppard, Tom 190, 205n. Stow, John 13, 29n. Sweeting, Michael 246n. Swensen, Cole 225n. Sylvester, Josuah 181n. Taylor, Andrew 73–4n. Terry, Philip 119, 133n. Thomas, Thomas 98, 113n.

287

Thompson, John O. 133–4n. Thorpe, Thomas 5, 15, 33–51, 53n., 74n., 187, 191–2, 195, 276 Titian 6 Tochtermann, Klaus 205n. Tomkis, Thomas 23–5 Tosca, Susana Pajares 193, 205n. Toscano, Alberto 180n. Tosi, Laura 72n. Trapp, J. B. 93n. Traub, Valerie 204n. Turner, Francis 132n. Tymme, Thomas 59 Tynianov, Yurii 207n. Vasiliauskas, Emily 154–5n. Vaughan Locke, Anne 60 Vendler, Helen 3, 10n., 74–5n., 92–3n., 105, 114n., 124, 126–7, 133–4n., 160, 179n., 209, 214, 252, 265n. Wagner, Erica 249n. Wagner, Jennifer 2, 10n. Watson, Amanda 139, 154n. Watson, Thomas 23 Wells, Stanley 132n. Werstine, Paul 53n. Wevill, Assia 232 Whalley, Peter 193, 206n. Whitchurch, Edmund 73n. Whiting, Leonard 263 Whitman, Walt 210 Whitney, Geoffrey 175, 182n. Wilde, Oscar 235, 247n. Willan, Claude 200, 206n.

288

Williams, Travis D. 155n., 280n. Williams, William Carlos 198, 206n., 221 Wilson, Thomas 78 Winnick, R.H. 225n. Winslet, Kate 267n. Witmore, Michael 200 Wolfson, Susan J. 280n. Woolf, Daniel 24

INDEX

Wordsworth, William 2 Wright, George T. 126, 133–4n. Wriothesley, Henry, 3rd Earl of Southampton 61, 100, 213, 235, 237, 239 Wroth, Mary 256, 276 Yeats, William Butler 232 Zarnowiecki, Matthew 204n.

289

290

291

292

293

294