Bruce
Carroll
Poetic
Preservation, Ontological Peril: The Friend within the Shakespearean Sonnet
1> Most readers will recall the poet-speaker of
William Shakespeare’s Sonnets and his
well-known promises to immortalize his poetic subject and beloved young friend
(the ‘fair youth’), promises such as “So, till the judgment that yourself
arise, / You live in this [sonnet] and dwell in lover’s eyes”[1] and
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this [sonnet], and
this gives life to thee.”[2] But
my attention in this essay is drawn to the speaker’s lesser recognized negative
portrayal of his craft, a critique of the poetic form that clearly marks it as a
threat to its subject. In one instance, poetry is a theft: “Why should false
painting imitate his cheek / And steal dead seeming from his living hue?,”[3] and
in another, a theft with mortal consequences: “[verse] is but as a tomb / Which
hides your life and shows not half your parts.”[4] The
disconcerting possibility of death is reemphasized: “I impair not beauty being
mute, / When others [other poets] would give life and bring a tomb.”[5] Similarly, the speaker calls creative verse “barren,”[6] “barren rhyme,”[7] and the “barren tender of
a poet’s debt.”[8] For what it is worth, I do
not overlook the Sonnets’
conventional elevations of the poetic subject at the disparagement of the
poet’s skill, such as: “And him [the friend] as for a map doth Nature store, /
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.”[9] But
it is neither conventional to indict verse for stealing from or causing the
death of its subject, nor is it a trope when the speaker’s first explicit
mention of poetry, as “rhyme,” likens it to the up to then most negative
descriptor in the sequence, “barren.”[10]
2> The speaker’s aggrandizements and criticisms of
his craft at once suggest that the qualities of poetry empowering it to
safeguard his young friend against the ravages of time also bring him harm. How
this may be possible is the object of the present investigation.
3> If unconventionally the Sonnets forward what resembles a theory of the relationship between
the poem and its subject, which operates on a blurring of the boundaries, the ontological
boundaries, between the two. Put another way, poetic preservation requires a
transition from person-as-poetic-subject to inanimate poetic form. This seemed
sensible enough to Horace, whose ode “more lasting than bronze” ensured that
“part of [him] would evade the death god.”[11] But
the Sonnets meditate at length on the consequences of poetic preservation, and
a comparative analysis of the poem and the other art forms mentioned in the Sonnets reveals the pyrrhic solution
found in the extra-ordinary ability of verse to protect its subject matter from
the progress of time. Removing the friend to the ontologically foreign poetic
image means driving him from his native ontological state, a state of life and
flux that must include both age and death. It is this transition that threatens
his definitive temporal nature and thus sacrifices his personhood, the who and what the speaker wishes to safeguard in the first place.[12]
4> Exploring variable means of artistic preservation, the
Sonnets’ speaker settles on verse
over the “gilded monuments of princes”[13] or
any other visual, material media made up of brass, rock, steel,[14] marble, stone, or masonry.[15] The
rejection of these sturdy materials contrasts poetry against everything from
stately monoliths and memorials to that mainstay of monumental representation,
the statue. Statuary may be crafted of the most durable material and cut to
accurately resemble its subject, to reflect her character in a recognizable
gesture or gait, and even to occupy the same amount of space as she by
reproducing her height and girth. In his The
Dream of the Moving Statue, a meditation on the animation, the life, of
statuary, Kenneth Gross has said that “the statue presents a body or a pose
arrested in time, arresting time itself; it marks an absence or a loss through
the presence of the thing that is yet irremediably, materially present.”[16]
5> The statue’s marmoreal qualities should satisfy
the speaker’s need to overcome the force of time that will destroy the youth.
Yet it is the very materiality of steel, stone, and masonry, that eventually
succumb to the wrackful siege of batt’ring days,[17] to
broils, decay, and all the happenstances of sluttish time.[18] The
speaker identifies the essential dependence of visual arts upon the material of
their fashioning. Each piece is its
material make up. Because the spatial nature of any material closely binds it
to the progress of time, all matter over time decays, so that material
monuments cannot adequately protect the friend from the deterioration to which
they themselves are subject. The alternative is the immaterial “monument” of “gentle
verse,” “Which eyes not yet created shall o’er read, / And tongues-to-be your
being shall rehearse.”[19] The
speaker repeats the proposition in the above-mentioned passages: “So till the
judgment that your self arise, / You live in this [sonnet], and dwell in
lovers’ eyes,”[20] and: “So long as men can
breathe or eyes can see, / so long lives this [poem], and this gives life to
thee.”[21] Before taking up the role of “gentle verse,” I want to examine the significance
of the eye to poetic preservation. As a window into the mind, it becomes a
channel for external phenomena that may then be converted into images, for safe
keeping, within the imagination. And so it not only assists in the process of
poetic preservation but also plays a part in the ontological compromise of its
subject.
6> Mental activities in general were figured by the
Elizabethan and Jacobean sense of sight. Recall Philip Sidney’s sonnet 5: “It
is most true, that eyes are formed to serve / The inward light,”[22] which likely draws on Luke 11:34, where the eye works with an inward moral and
decision making faculty: “The light of the body is the eye: therefore when
thine eye is single, then is thy whole body light: but if thine eye be evil,
then thy body is dark.”[23] In
his Five Plays Confuted, Stephen Gosson
treats sight as the pathway to the theater-goer’s moral sense: “[V]ice is
learned with beholding, sense is tickled, desire pricked.”[24] The
lush religious visual stimuli that pervaded western Europe is believed to have
originated in Francis’s conviction in the salvific effects of what one sees and
takes into her imagination. Accounting for the abundance of metaphoric
ecclesiastical architecture and, especially, religious statuary throughout the
Catholic subcontinent, Franciscan iconophilia gave way to a Protestant distrust
of the visual and reemphasis on the audial.[25] According to Gosson: “There commeth much euil in at the eares, but at the eies.
. . . Nothing entereth more effectualie into the memorie, than that which
commeth by seeing: things heard do lightlie passe awaie, but the tokens of that
which wee haue seene, saith Petrarch, sticke fast in vs whether we wil or no.”[26] In
the view of one commentator, sight in the contemporary outlook was “the most
corruptible and most corrupting” of the senses.[27] Corruptible
likely because of its tendency to be deceived, sight may only be corrupting because of its connection to
something beyond or interior to itself, something like Sidney’s “inward light”
that shines through the eye to illuminate mental, psychological faculties.
7> The connection of the eye to the mind needed to
convert what is seen into imaginative images makes it not only a matter of
moral implications but also of significant creative powers. Note that unlike
visual works, letters and words cannot visually imitate what they represent.
This is arguably the limitation of any poem, that it cannot present itself
immediately to its audience in the way a visual image is present upon first
sight, its audience confronted, in some cases accosted, with it precisely
because of its visual nature. (Whether we desire participation with a visual
piece or not, we cannot not see what
is before us and, just as Gosson pointed out, once seen, we cannot unsee it.) To the contrary, the poem
requires an audience’s careful, attentive interaction through reading to
conjure the image somehow latent within its verbal or rhetorical constructions.
The image of the poetic subject, then, lacks the literal immediacy of the
visual image, but the reader’s imaginative conjuring of the poetic image gives
its subject a personal presence.[28] This
results in our numerous mental images derived from our reading: images of the
physical features of literary characters, the setting of a fiction, and the
impressions of abstract poetry. And though most of us have read many of the
same texts, it is unthinkable that any two of our images are alike. The picture
formed by reading is an image created within and belonging to each reader. It
permits an imaginative and even emotional intimacy that will not allow the
literary subject to become, as Horace said of ancient heroes who had no bard to
sing of them, unweepable (inlacrimabiles).[29] Through
Homer Agamemnon remains weepable to us, and our emotional investment retains in
the world a measure of his personhood. We are, after all, unquestionably aware
of him still, a fact that no material monument could guarantee as certainly as
the poem. The poem better overcomes the progress of time by removing the image
of its subject to the unconventional space of the imagination.[30] The
poet, therefore, relies on an audience of “lovers”, on “lovers’ eyes,”[31] and
his subject’s longevity (not to mention his poem’s) on the “eyes not yet
created.”[32]
8> Choosing the “gentle” sonnet in favor of sturdy,
material means of preservation, the speaker’s two-fold formulation that his
friend may “live in this [sonnet], and dwell in lovers’ eyes”[33] operates on the principle that a poem is not limited to its material, the
printed page, that unlike the material monument, and much like the space of the
mind, the poem does not exist in any conventional understanding of space. In
one sense, this is evident from the fact that it can be printed and re-printed
(or re-written) numerous times without any compromise of the poetic work
itself. For is not sonnet 55 in one copy of Colin Burrow’s edition of the Sonnets just like the sonnet 55 of the
next copy?[34] Contrarily, the material
monument is like the visual work of art, which is typically singular and
singularly valuable. If more than one copy of it is made, each is numbered and
becomes less valuable with each reproduction. For this reason, a painting,
sculpture, or marble monument is far more precious than any piece of paper with
a poem on it. The higher value of these works relies on their tangibility, the
fact that they will, in time, decay. The literary equivalent would be the
collector’s item, a folio edition or an inscribed or autographed page of
poetry, but these derive their worth from their singular uniqueness. The
inscribed page is only valuable because of its inscription, but the poem
itself, provided that it is printed elsewhere, is not extraordinary in value.
9> The same difference between visual and written
works is also an indicator of the poem’s unique agility. While the material of
its presentation is perfectly fungible, the poem itself is unaffected even by
mass reproduction. It can move freely from one page to another and exist
entirely apart from the page; if memorized, sonnet 55 ‘exists’ in my memory,
another mental space, and no longer relies on the printed page or e-file where
I first encountered it. I can recite it or write it down for someone else with
no alteration to what it actually is.[35] I
cannot describe to others a painting or a photograph in a comparable way,
cannot replicate either as completely, because a description does not equal the
actual article and because a replication is only that and not the work itself.
Though not marble, consider that monument the Mona Lisa, probably the most reproduced image in the world. While
no reproduction or photo can present to us the actual Mona Lisa, my recitation or transcription of sonnet 55 presents the
poem in its whole form. Obviously,
the Mona Lisa can only be in one
geographic locale (at present, the Louvre), but the poem is no less complete
when off the page than on it. No visual medium has this versatility.[36]
10> There is material here enough for an addition
to the paragone that undergirded so
much of the art and poetic theory shared by both Italian and English
Renaissances. According to the dispute between the two chief visual arts,
painting bettered sculpture because it relied less on the manual working of a
material substance, such as stone. Painting was less labored and much cleaner,
and therefore, of a higher class of craft. Poetry was always included among the
liberal arts, the arts of those who could afford the education needed to
practice them, and it bested both painting and sculpture because it relied that
much less on labored means and material content for its execution and over all
make up. The very same principles make it a superior preservative. Ontologically
the poem is an abstract aritifact much like a law or theory.[37] Surely they exist, but because they are not found in any single, identifiable
location, they are in no way bound by the space that partners with time to
bring about physical change and decay.
11> But here within the agility needed to properly
safeguard its poetic subject we find the poem’s threat to the speaker’s young
friend who is himself of a physical and singular nature. More like the visual
work of art that is limited to only one geographic place, the friend cannot
withstand the abstract sonnet form’s capacity for multiplication through its
many means of presentation. And worsening this injury is the fact that unlike
the statue that eventually decays, the poem never releases what it preserves
but only retains it within its poetic, imaginative images, images that do not
just fix but fix multiply in various copies, editions, recitations.
12> Such a compromise to the young friend’s
personhood is only increased by the snapshot quality of the sonnet, which as a
representation arrests the subject in time at the moment his poetic image is
made. The speaker uses the figure of distillation to illustrate this preservative
quality. Once “never resting Time” has lead youthful summer on to “hideous
winter” and has confounded him there,”[38] sonnet 5 reads:
Then were not summer’s
distillation left
A liquid pris’ner pent in
walls of glass,
Beauty’s
effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor no remem’brance
what it was.[39]
13> Initially, the sonnet suggests that if the
young friend, figured by summer, were not somehow captured, just as a
distillation captures what it preserves, not only would his beauty be separated
from its effects but there would be neither his youth nor even the memory of
it. These are curious implications (which I will return to below), but the
figure of distillation recalls the
speaker’s reliance on stillness in
other preservation sonnets, such as “His beauty shall in these black lines be
seen, / And they shall live, and he in them still
green”[40] and
“in black ink my love may still shine
bright”[41] and
“When all the breathers of this world are dead, / You still shall live—such virtue hath my pen.”[42] Still may both suggest the quality of
unmoving, such as “Dost thou lie still?”[43], and
mark the progress of time up to the present moment, as in “But I did find him
still mine enemy.”[44] In
the latter use, for example, “my love may still shine bright” accounts for the
progress of time only up to the present, and like its adjectival counterpart,
it implies that within the “black ink” of the poem the young friend will “lie
still” despite time’s advance. In another instance, “You still shall live—such
virtue hath my pen” carries the double entendre “You shall live yet” and “You
shall live without change by remaining motionless.”
14> And yet in sonnet 5 the stillness promised by distillation
is actually a dubious protector, for though it may offer shelter from the flow
of time, the language used to describe the solution—“pris’ner,” “pent”—is just
as sinister as the problem. Taking a second glance, the stanza is laced with
suggestions of ontological disorder. “Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,”
for example, distorts the relationship between cause and effect. And just as
distorted is the need to employ an artificial means, distillation, to protect
summer from the natural advance of its own seasonal kind.
15> The artificial intrusion into the progression
of the seasons calls into question whether or not the preservative act can be
natural at all. Sonnet 54 employs the distillation figure to raise this very
issue. On roses, the sonnet reads:
Of
their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And
so of you, beauteous and lovely youth:
When
that shall vade, by verse distills your truth.[45]
16> Certainly the odor of any thing is, in a
metaphysical contemplation, a part of its secondary nature, one inessential
feature of the whole composition no more primary than hair color to the rest of
the person. But if scent is the substance preserved through the sacrifice of
the actual rose, then the direct comparison “And so of you” makes poetic praise
of the young man his substantial “truth” and him himself an incidental quality.
The reversal of order is congruent with the claim that a sign might produce its
signified or an effect beget its cause. And if distillation means imprisonment,
as we saw above, then the close association of it with verse is all the more
remarkable. Distillation’s “walls of glass”[46] are
the trap of artifice that the speaker associates with his own poetry. Likening
poetry to distillation accents the harm that it may bring about, since the
process of distillation only preserves through a kind of ontological blurring,
a chemical permeation where, in this case, the rose ceases to be itself and
becomes the solution in which it is preserved. As with distillation so with the
sonnet: the youth’s preservation sacrifices him himself.
17> The seeming contradiction carried throughout
these sonnets, that they at once propose and resist preservation, signals the
paradox of the situation. Preservation may protect and harm the young man by
removing him from his telos, yes, but that telos is itself both ordained by nature
and ultimately destructive. Covered previously, the sonnet’s impressive
capacity for reproduction brings about the increase called upon in sonnet 1’s
“From fairest creatures we desire increase.”[47] At
the same time, the poem’s tendency to capture its subject in a single moment brings
about the contradictory stillness first proposed in sonnet 5’s “distillation.” Previously
unnoted, the opening of the sequence then features a stormy collision of metaphysical
forces, the one grounding its preservative power in stasis, the other in the
increase of the poem’s potentially endless replication.
18> The speaker’s friend and poetic subject becomes
the site for the squall, its dual forces more than reminiscent of Thomas
Greene’s revolutionary take on the Renaissance self, which was on the one hand
“centripetal,” or durable and center-oriented, and on the other “centrifugal,”
or disoriented and “in quest of transformation.”[48] For
Greene, Volpone is the exemplar of the centrifugal character, his urge being to
transform his single, centered self into many selves in a manner that is only
constant in its dynamism.[49] His
example shows us “the horror of a self too often shifted, a self which risks
the loss of an inner poise. It reflects this horror even as it portrays . . .
the whirlwind virtuosos of multiplication.”[50] Though Greene’s analysis retains a metaphysical hue, his privileging of the
stable over the transformative self belies a spatial, physical understanding of
Volpone’s personhood. Volpone’s whirlwind shifting disorients an inner poise
that only risks division at its peril, and the vehicle of his constant
transforming is the object of all alchemical efforts, gold. The “cruel lesson
of the play,” in fact, “is that gold fails to confer that infinite mobility its
lovers covet, but rather reduces them to the status of fixed, sub-human
grotesques.”[51] As is the case with any
precious metal, the self of gold is
nothing but the shifting foundation of its value. That its value is built upon
the ever tenuous market only makes gold that much more unstable a substance.
The predicament of identifying oneself with it recalls the sonnet, which,
within the “whirlwind virtuosos of [the] multiplication”[52] of
its forms, can only fix its subject matter through his division between
increase and stillness.
19> As Philip Sidney had it, the power of the poet
is not to imitate nature’s forms but to grow into “another nature”[53] capable
of generating a new subject and a new reality within the poem. Such power given
a literary form accounts for the instances of Horatian pomp that occupy our
attention when we consider the poetics implicit in the Sonnets. Likely taken directly from Horace, sonnet 55’s “Not
marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of
Princes shall outlive this pow’rful rhyme”[54] provides
a frontispiece for passages like “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, /
So long lives this [sonnet], and this gives life to thee”[55] and
“So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this [sonnet] and
dwell in lover’s eyes,”[56] claims more gentle, yes, but ones still making the impossible promise of
preservation. Sidney’s empowered literary form also accounts for the Sonnets’ negative portrayal of poetry,
which responds to the notion of preservation with the nefarious language
included throughout this essay. The “other nature” of the Shakespearean sonnet
is a “false painting” that “steals”[57] by removing
its subject from the flow of time. This ontological transition from a temporal
to an a-temporal state robs the speaker’s beautiful young friend of his “living
hue,”[58] a
hue not simply “live” or “alive” but progressive, “living,” in the process of being
live or alive. When employed as a preservative the sonnet defies the barriers
that once defined and safeguarded the perceived dignity of the friend’s personhood.
20> Considered in this way, a corpus of poems
attesting to a conflicting poetic theory emerges. In the Sonnets an ontological poetics acknowledges the poet’s power to
transcend the limits of nature but to destroy what is preserved in the process.
Simply put, the Sonnets’ other nature
is the “tomb,”[59] its image becoming the
young poetic subject’s final resting place—and we imaginative readers both the
bereaved and the complicit.
_____
Notes
[1] William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, Colin Burrow, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), sonnet 55.13-14. I draw on Burrow’s edition, referred to as Sonnets, for my analyses throughout.
[1] William Shakespeare, Complete Sonnets and Poems, Colin Burrow, ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), sonnet 55.13-14. I draw on Burrow’s edition, referred to as Sonnets, for my analyses throughout.
[2] Ibid. 18.13-14.
[3] Ibid. 67.5-6.
[4] Ibid. 17.3-4.
[5] Ibid. 83.11-12.
[6] Ibid. 76.1.
[7] Ibid. 16.4.
[8] Ibid. 83.4.
[9] Ibid., 68.13-14
[10] Ibid., 16.4.
[11] Horace, “I
Have Completed a Monument,” in Odes,
translated by Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
lines 2, 7-8.
[12] Both Allen Grossman (with Mark Halliday), The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for
Readers and Writers (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992),
240-44, and Aaron Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 92-106, derive
this basic conclusion, but with a very different emphasis on the personae found
in the poem. Grossman sees that the human collective keeps the poem, any poem,
culturally alive, but that the poet as poetic speaker must die to be remembered
in poetry (240-241). Kunin addresses the Sonnets’
poetic subject and finds that the young friend himself resists the annihilation
of his character that will result from his own poetic preservation (100). Both
critics associate poetic preservation with some form of death, but I focus on
what the poem does to its subject from the only point of view we are given in
the Sonnets, the speaker’s. Considering
the speaker’s troubled concern over his poetry’s effect on his young friend, I
draw on a large number of passages within these sonnets not considered by
others to show just how central a problem the sonnet itself is to the sequence.
[13] Sonnets,
15.1-2.
[14] Ibid., sonnet 65.
[15] Ibid., sonnet 55.
[16] Kenneth Gross, The
Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006),
15.
[17] Sonnets,
sonnet 65.
[18] Ibid., sonnet 55.
[19] Ibid., 81.9-11. Compare these lines to sonnet 107:
“thou in this [sonnet] shall find thy monument, / when tyrants crests and tombs
of brass are spent” (13-14).
[20] Ibid., 55.13-14.
[21] Ibid., 18.13-14.
[22] Sidney, Astrophil
and Stella, edited by Max Putzel (Garden City, NY.: Anchor Books, 1967), 5.1-2.
[23] Tyndale’s translation, ca. 1536.
[24] Gosson, Five
Playes Confuted, in Arthur F. Kinney, Markets
of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Sallzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und
Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974), 192.
[25] Clifford Davidson, “The Anti-Visual Prejudice,” in Inconoclasm vs. Art and Drama, edited by
Clifford Davidson and Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute
Publications, 1988), 36.
[26] Gossson, A
Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plays and Theaters, in The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor
and Stuart Princes, 1543-1664, edited by W. C. Hazlitt (1869), (Reprint,
New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.),141-42.
[27] Stuart Clark, Vanities
of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 24.
[28] Though the notion of mental images became a signature
modern dispute in cognitive theory, at the time of the Sonnets the close association of image (phantasma) with the mental function of imagination (phantasia) was still current. In
Aristotle’s handling, it is impossible to think without images (phantasmata) (De Anima, 431a). For him, imagination is itself a mental activity
during which a mental image (phantasma)
is seen in the mind (ibid., 428a). Nigel Thomas (“Mental Imagery,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Summer 2013 Edition, accessed July 20, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/)
locates the beginning of the modern conception of mental imagery with Descartes’ 1641 Meditations, which denies that certain concepts, like God, appear in our minds as an image. First refuted in 1651 by Hobbes, who conceived of all thought as a “trayne of imaginations” (Leviathan I.3, quoted in Thomas, “Mental Imagery”), cognitive “picture-theory,” as it is called, remains a matter of contention. Sections 3 and 4 of Thomas’s entry are devoted to this still ongoing debate.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/)
locates the beginning of the modern conception of mental imagery with Descartes’ 1641 Meditations, which denies that certain concepts, like God, appear in our minds as an image. First refuted in 1651 by Hobbes, who conceived of all thought as a “trayne of imaginations” (Leviathan I.3, quoted in Thomas, “Mental Imagery”), cognitive “picture-theory,” as it is called, remains a matter of contention. Sections 3 and 4 of Thomas’s entry are devoted to this still ongoing debate.
[29] I draw on Allen Grossman’s translation here:
Many heroes lived before
Agamemnon
but they are all
unweepable [inlacrimabiles],
overwhelmed
by the long night of
oblivion
because they lacked a
sacred bard.
(The Sighted Singer, 7)
(The Sighted Singer, 7)
[30] Grossman notes the imaginative preservative quality
of “holding-in-mind by the poem of the picture of the person” (7).
[31] Sonnets,
55. 14.
[32] Ibid., 81. 10.
[33] Ibid., 55. 14.
[34] A work’s capacity for reproduction as a component in
understanding its ontology has a long, well argued, and not much resolved,
history of which Paisley Livingston offers a concise and helpful summary (“The
History of the Ontology of Art,” The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summer 2013 Edition, Edward N. Zalta,
ed., accessed July 20, 2013, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/art-ontology-history/
[see especially section 2.1]). Livingston suggests categories of works based on
their reproducibility: “Multiply instantiated works [such as a poem] form one
major category, then, while single or non-reproducible ones [such as a
painting] form another.”
[35] I should concede here that we all know of more than
one version of sonnet 55, and though at this point in the Sonnets editorial history the differences are mainly in
punctuation, the poem does differ from edition to edition. Nevertheless, my
claims that sonnet 55 may exist whole and complete on the page or in the mind
still apply. They rely neither on a single, standard version of the poem
reproduced in one “master edition,” nor on what I believe is the sonnet 55
intended by Shakespeare. One might memorize the version in either Burrow’s or Stephen
Booth’s edition (Shakespeare’s Sonnets
[New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977]). And though they differ in
that Booth’s has one more question mark than Burrow’s, numerous copies of each
version have been reproduced, so that each may have its own existence in
multiple spaces, both on pages and within memories.
[36] That is, no visual medium at the time of the Sonnets. Livingston’s recent treatment
of the ontology of the photo, however, is informative to our own contemporary
understanding of the sonnet form: “[I]t would be highly implausible to contend
that Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous photographic work ‘Behind the Gare
Saint-Lazare, Paris’ (1932), consists [ontologically] in the negative used to
make the prints, or in the first or any other single print of this picture.” I
see that, likewise, the existence of the poem cannot be limited to the material
of is presentation, especially if there are numerous instances of it. Here we
ask where a work exists to determine how it exists.
[37] Amie Thomasson’s Fiction
and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) makes helpful
distinctions between presumably eternal
abstract Platonic forms and abstract artifacts, or things that are made yet
still occupy no space. “[A]bstract artifacts such as laws, theories, and works
of music and literature cannot be forced into the categories of either the
[Platonically] real or the ideal without giving up some of their most important
characteristics, such as their repeatability and their created status” (148).
See especially xii, 37-38, 148-49.
[38] Sonnets, 5.
5-6.
[39] Ibid., 9-12.
[40] Ibid., 63. 13-14, my emphasis throughout.
[41] Ibid., 65. 14.
[42] Ibid., 81. 12-13.
[43] Antony and
Cleopatra, 5.2.3755. Citations of the plays are from OpenSourceShakespeare: An Experiment in Literary Technology, George
Mason University, accessed 05 April, 2014,
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/.
http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/.
[44] As You Like It,
1.2.335.
[45] Sonnets, 12-14.
[46] Ibid., 5.10.
[47] Ibid., 1.1
[48] Thomas Greene, “The Flexibility of the Self in
Renaissance Literature,” in The
Disciplines of Criticism: Essays in Literary Theory, Interpretation, and
History, edited by Peter Demetz, et al. (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1968), 326.
[49] Ibid., 337-43.
[50] Ibid., 344.
[51] Ibid., 343.
[52] Greene, 344.
[53] Philip Sidney, An
Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), edited by Geoffrey Shepherd,
3rd edition revised and expanded by R. W. Maslen (Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 85.
[54] Sonnets,
55. 1-2.
[55] Ibid. 18.13-14.
[56] Sonnets, 55.13-14.
[57] Ibid. 67. 5-6
[58] Ibid., 67.6.
[59] Ibid. 17. 3 and 83. 12.
_____
Bruce
Carroll holds a
lectureship with New York University-Shanghai. He has published previously with
The Annals of Scholarship on the Greek archaic poet's relationship with
his Muse. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg's reoccupation thesis, his current
research argues that the appearance of the Muse in early modern English poetry
points to an ontological relationship between the poet and his art form.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature & Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/,
ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume Seven (2014): Genres & Cultures
_____
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