Sonnets (Vol. 51) | Jane Hedley (essay date 1994)
Jane Hedley (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakspeare's Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism," in Style, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 1-30.
[In the following excerpt, Hedley contends that self-love or narcissism is pervasive in Shakespeare's sonnets. After observing that the sonnet genre in general can be perceived as one where the poet is "talking to himself, " Hedley also remarks that Shakespeare's sonnets in particular convey narcissism through their use of puns and through the poet's clear desire to become one with his beloved.]
The love that is celebrated in the first one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets is narcissistic, as several commentators have noticed1: "it is love by identification," as C. L. Barber explains (662).2 Writing about the Sonnets in 1960, Barber preferred to try to understand the lover's posture in these poems "without resort...
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