SOURCE: “What May Words Do? The Performative of Praise in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3, Fall, 1998, pp. 251-68.

[In the following essay, Schalkwyk maintains that in the sonnets Shakespeare used language as a method of social action.]

In a previous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets and their relation to performance, I have suggested that it may not be especially fruitful to approach these sonnets in particular, and early modern Petrarchan poetry in general, by assuming that their linguistic aims are primarily epistemological.¹ I argue in that essay that commentators' mistaken assumptions about what the language of the sonnets is doing lead them to overlook the ways in which a sonnet's conditions of address are embodied in particular social and political contexts of performance. To pursue the fact of embodiment as the condition of a sonnet's address, I claim,

is to problematize the relationship between the signified and the referent—that is, between the embodied addressee and addressor on the one hand and the actual circumstances of the address, including a material context of uneven social relations, on the other—and to leaven the concept of subjectivity with the public reality of an audience.²

In the present essay I wish to take this argument further, this time by shifting attention from the generally theatrical notion of performance to the more philosophically technical concept of the performative as a particular use of language not confined to any genre. I shall argue that Shakespeare's sonnets use language as neither epistemology nor description but as a form of social action: in a series of performatives in which the power relations between “you” and “I” are negotiated.

The concept of the performative comes from J. L. Austin, who made explicit in philosophical terms what users of language have always known intuitively: that a form which at first glance looks like a description may in fact be doing something quite different.³ When Astrophil cries out “What may words say, or what may words not say, / Where truth itself must speak like flattery?”⁴ his invocation of the limits of words overlooks their power to transform, rather than merely to reflect, a situation. Better to have asked what words may do, for then Astrophil might have negotiated more successfully, as Shakespeare does, the dilemma between truth and flattery.

Many of Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man attempt to negotiate the unequal political and social relationship between actor-poet and aristocratic patron via performative uses of language. The actor-poet seeks, sometimes in vain, not so much to persuade careless nobility as to bring about something in the saying of it. Thus I hope to demonstrate that in the sonnets negotiations between power and weakness, authority and subordination, are bound up with performative rather than descriptive uses of language, and that such performatives are the means by which the actor-poet negotiates a politics of self-authorization. The illocutionary force of the performative constitutes a major part of that “dynamic, unending slippage between power and powerlessness and between one of their principle sources, success and failure,” which Heather Dubrow has characterized as being typically Petrarchan.⁵ Even if Shakespeare was not acquainted with Austin, his poetic practice reveals a subtle understanding of the ways in which the necessary logic of the illocutionary act, as opposed to the merely contingent force of a perlocutionary or rhetorical utterance, may transform the relationship between addressor and addressee. In Shakespeare's sonnets language is mobilized not merely to say that things are so descriptively, or to move an audience through rhetorical skill merely by saying something, but to transform a situation, to make it so of conventional necessity in saying something.⁶

My analysis of Shakespeare's illocutionary logic is divided into three sections, each of which explores an aspect of the performative in Shakespeare's sonnets: 1) the ways in which the actor-poet attempts to negate the rhetoric of his rival through what I call the quasi-performative; 2) the illocutionary logic of tautology in the poems; and 3) the use of performative language to avoid the question of truthfulness altogether through the powers of illocutionary transformation. I shall follow the method of my 1994 SQ essay by reading the poetry in conjunction with similar moments or uses in the drama, particularly Antony and Cleopatra. Through its overt staging of the performative—its performance of the performative—the play renders more explicit the nature of speech acts in the poems. Austin reminds us that such speech acts are apt to disguise their actual nature by masquerading in the guise of constative or descriptive forms.⁷ Such formal masquerading has led to their actual force being overlooked in the first place. I shall thus begin with a well-known scene from Antony and Cleopatra, before going on to discuss the sonnets concerned with the rival poet, in order to show how a concern with theatricality and performativity in the play might illuminate the antitheatrical performatives of Sonnet 23.

I

Recall the moment, in Act 5 of Antony and Cleopatra, when both the historical queen of Egypt and the boy-actor representing her appear as a duck/rabbit figure glimpsed for a moment, impossibly, in both aspects at the same time:

Cleopatra Nay, 'tis most certain, Iras. Saucy lictors
Will catch at us like strumpets, and scald rhymers
Ballad us out o'tune. The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels; Antony
Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see
Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness
I' the posture of a whore.
Iras O the good gods!
Cleopatra Nay, that's certain.

(5.2.214-22)⁸

The “impossible” perception of both aspects, queen and actor, at the same time is, in contrast to two-dimensional figures like the duck-rabbit drawing, made possible by the bifold nature of theatrical performance. Here embodied action and spoken verse provide a double perspective, by which Gorgon and Mars can be presented simultaneously.⁹ In a moment of almost vertiginous self-reflexivity, we observe a figure, representing a historical character, entertaining the horrible thought of being the spectator of the unflattering representation of herself. The horror lies both in its inevitability (“Nay, 'tis certain”) and in its reflection of the powerlessness of the represented subject before the authority of representation and performance embodied in the transformative shape of the actor. This force is particularly well conveyed by the poetic transformation of the noun boy into a verb. But the self-reflexivity that enables us to entertain at once the double aspect of Cleopatra as boy-actor and historical figure, as “queen” and “whore,” is itself the re-mark of its own powerful effect. This capacity of representation to reflect upon both itself and the conditions of its own possibility, thereby displaying its limitations and precariousness, is precisely the sign of its massive authority. The scene calls attention to what Robert Weimann terms the “bifold authority” of theatrical performance: the authority of the actor to represent, transform, and limit the authority of a class that was the patron of and the most influential and powerful audience of the Jacobean theater.¹⁰

Shakespeare's Sonnet 23 is equally concerned with the anxiety of representation through performance, although it expresses the other side of the “bifold authority” exemplified in Cleopatra's speech. It presents the perspective of an actor overwhelmed by the feeling of impotent vulnerability before an audience made powerful both by its social and political position and by its formal capacity merely as audience to take offense:

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart;
So I for fear of trust forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love's rite,
And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,
O'ercharged with burthen of mine own love's might.
O let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.
          O learn to read what silent love hath writ.
          To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit.(11)

Sharing the double aspect of Cleopatra's speech, this sonnet displays the imbrication of theatrical and political differences of situation and power. It is one of the key poems in the subsequence addressed to the young man, since it conveys more powerfully than any other the inarticulateness of the actor before an aristocratic audience and views the silence of that audience as a source of power rather than as a sign of repression.¹²

The political and cultural inequality of the relationship between addressor and addressee is reflected in the asymmetrical distribution of silence and speech across actor and audience. The stage-fright expressed in the opening line arises from the poet's acute sense of vulnerability and inadequacy, both as “unperfect actor” and on account of the socially inappropriate strength of his passion for that distant patron. Whereas the silence of stage fright signifies the actor-poet's social inadequacy, the absence of the patron's voice from the poem mutely expresses the patron's overwhelming authority. The sonnet owes its existence to the fact that, as a poet, the actor, however “unperfect,” can make that silence speak through the written word. By urging the patron to withdraw to the more private space of the page, and by enacting such a withdrawal through the poem itself, the actor-poet hopes to create a place in which the “Injurious distance” (44.2), imposed by both his inappropriate theatricality and his status in the theater as social institution, may be diminished.¹³ Eloquence is, unusually, here the reflection of impotence rather than a sign of accomplishment, and the poem itself is a paradoxically eloquent plea to be allowed to leave out difference (105.8) by moving into a private sphere with the beloved as poet rather than as tongue-tied actor. Only via the eloquent silence of writing, which matches the powerfully significant silence of the patron, will the actor-poet be able to assume a less abject position. It is in order to achieve this transformation that the speaker (who in the world of the poem does not [yet] abandon the exposure of the actor) resorts rather desperately to a series of performatives: “O let my books. … O learn to read.” Through these illocutionary acts, the beloved is urged to negate the differences in rank and love—differences historically represented by the public distance between stage and spectator—in the supposedly socially undifferentiated exchange of written texts.

Sonnet 23 is only a moment in a sequence of negotiations and renegotiations between actor-poet and aristocratic youth, and the failure of the negotiations is made clear by the number of sonnets that continue to be informed by the actor-poet's acute awareness of his status as performer. He finally embraces this condition at the end of the narrative—“my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer's hand” (111.6-7)—but not before he has used the illocutionary force of his verse to transform the conventions of praise. In other sonnets Shakespeare's actor-poet does attempt to resolve differences of social rank and patronage via conventional arguments comparing the plain truth of his own style with the false persuasive force of ornament used by other poets. But here the actor-poet's appeals to what Joel Fineman calls a Cratylitic “poetics of a unified and unifying eye”¹⁴ are a cover for a much more forceful, performative dimension. In the last analysis such appeals do not seek an epistemological correspondence among sight, word, and object but rather negotiate a series of pragmatically determined social and erotic consummations through the force of illocutionary or quasi-illocutionary speech acts.

The claim in Sonnet 23 that the poet's silent appeal via the ear can say “more than that tongue that more hath more expressed” is probably an early reference to the rivalry with the unknown poet, which is dealt with explicitly in the sonnets following 76. If so, it shows that one cannot simply avoid the “bifold authority” of performance and representation by abandoning the eloquence of the theater for the unstaged, private muteness of the book. The performative power of verse can be imitated, even superseded, and the private space that binds poet and reader invaded by others more authoritative, more favored, or more persuasive. It is thus the dynamic power of the rival poet's writing—“the proud full sail of his great verse, / Bound for the prize of all too precious you” (86.1-2)—that the actor-poet fears in the relationship between his rival and his patron. This relationship is itself the silent expression of a “silent love,” feared not for its power to mirror its addressee but rather to make its way into his heart.

Like Puttenham, Shakespeare deals with the problem of similitude in an unmetaphysical, flexibly strategic way, as different forms of social action impress themselves upon him in his drive to achieve a kind of self-authorization through verse.¹⁵ Take Sonnet 21:

So is it not with me as with that muse,
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heav'n itself for ornament doth use,
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse—
Making a couplement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flow'rs, and all things rare
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.
O let me true in love but truly write,
And then believe me, my love is as fair
As any mother's child, though not so bright
As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air.
          Let them say more that like of hearsay well;
          I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

Ostensibly an attack on mere ornament, the poem is in fact an excuse for a kind of inaction. Its persuasive force lies precisely in its argument that both “painted beauty” and painted verse must be false because of their persuasiveness. Ostensibly, too, a rejection of the “couplement of proud compare” that marks both conventional love and conventional verse, it pushes its own rehearsal of such a comparison as far as it will go without actually becoming the thing it apparently rejects. Furthermore, through its own “couplement of proud compare” between the lavishness of others and its own truth, the sonnet attempts to engineer the belief upon which it depends and towards which it moves. The point is not simply that the poem itself indulges in the very ornament that it sets out to denigrate but that such denigration is a form of deliberate action. The poem attempts to change the unequal power relations that subtend it, conditioning both the writing and its perceived truth: “O let me true in love but truly write, / And then believe me, my love is as fair / As any mother's child.” The young man is enjoined to allow the actor-poet to write in a particular style (in which its self-proclaimed lack of rhetoricity constitutes its most powerful rhetoric) as the condition of allowing himself to be persuaded both of his own exemplary human beauty and of the fairness of the poet's love.

Sonnet 21 is, however, more than an appeal to be allowed to write without the ornament of similitude (a possibility that the very writing of the poem contradicts); it is a quasi-performative, by which the actor-poet strives to create the conditions that will ensure belief as the result of an illocutionary rather than a merely perlocutionary act. I say “quasi-performative” because the appeal rests on no clear-cut conventional form such as promising, warning, crowning, or declaring war. At the same time, the poet does not wish to leave the effect of his utterance to the caprices of a merely rhetorical, notoriously unpredictable force. The appeal “O let me true in love but truly write” is less a political request to be allowed to do something than a conditional one to make belief its necessary (and not contingent) consequence: “if true in love I could manage to write truly (i.e., without ornament), then you would have to believe as a matter of logical necessity.”

Many of the sonnets to the young man, I am arguing, attempt to negotiate the unequal political and social relationship between actor-poet and aristocratic patron by means of such quasi-performatives. A poem seeks, not always successfully, to bring about something in the saying of it rather than (as in rhetoric) by the saying of it. This use of quasi-performatives may account for the sonnets that have often been viewed as unsatisfactory because the couplet, in a strikingly artificial way, runs counter to the thrust of the first twelve lines, often attenuating blame by means of acceptance or banishing suspicion with what appears to be groundless affirmation of the beloved's truth. Such turns may not be mirrors of the “speaker's vain attempts to resolve the conflicts in his own mind” but rather attempts, from a position of social and erotic vulnerability, to transform the beloved into truth through the self-proclaiming power of the quasi-performative.¹⁶

If we take Sonnet 84 as an illustration of the argument of this subsequence regarding the “true-telling” of “true plain words” (82.12), we can see how strongly such “true-telling” is nonetheless conceived as a strategy of rhetorical accountancy, of borrowing and lending “glory,” of reckoning the profit and loss of admiration and fame:¹⁷

Who is it that says most, which can say more
Than this rich praise, that you alone are you—
In whose confine immurèd is the store
Which should example where your equal grew?
Lean penury within that pen doth dwell,
That to his subject lends not some small glory,
But he that writes of you, if he can tell
That you are you, so dignifies his story.
Let him but copy what in you is writ,
Not making worse what nature made so clear,
And such a counterpart shall fame his wit,
Making his style admired everywhere.
          You to your beauteous blessings add a curse,
          Being fond on praise, which makes your praises worse.

The sonnet argues against the notion that, since the patron may “ever live young” (19.4) in the poet's “gentle verse,” the “monument” (81.9) that such poetry creates is worthy of the recompense that comes of patronage: in other words, that poetry indeed offers a world-without-end bargain. But if this is true of the actor-poet's sonnets, then it must also be true of sonnets written by others. In contrast to claims that it is only through the power of his poetry that Time shall “never cut from memory / My sweet love's beauty” (63.11-12), this sonnet tries to diminish the “store” contained within the poet's pen by suggesting that the exchange operates in the opposite direction. That the expenditure is in fact the patron's is stated most clearly in Sonnet 79, lines 7-14:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
          Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
          Since what he owes thee thou thyself dost pay.

The use of the third person and the past tense directs attention away from this present writing toward another text, already written, and so suppresses any question regarding its own present theft. The tautological formulation you alone are you is the culmination of a complex series of social actions that, despite being conceived in economic terms, rather seek to obliterate free exchange with the settled values of feudal relations. The mere “copy” that Sonnet 84 prescribes as the proper business of the poetry of praise, by a curious inversion of the usual economy governing the relationship between poet and patron, finally serves to praise and glorify the poet himself: it is the patron who expends himself by glorifying the wit and style of a poet, here, crucially, the actor-poet's poetic, social, and sexual competitor. Within the context of such materially located rivalry, the sophistry of this argument should be apparent, warning us against taking at face value the poet's appeal to his own epistemological purity or rigor. His “rich praise,” both epideictically and logically empty, is no less an exercise of social force than the good words that others write.

In the early sonnets at least, the actor-poet, overwhelmed and fearful of the public space that imposes differences of rank, blood, and social power, hopes to persuade the young man to retreat to a private world in which the speech acts of promising faithfulness, declaring love, and commanding trust will not be informed and distorted by the exigencies of material difference and unequal power. The paradox—that only when perfectly silent can the actor-poet's breast speak truly—is understandable given the uncertainties that accompany public declarations of this kind. As we have seen, however, the retreat from stage to page implored in Sonnet 23 is not good enough, since even the page is invaded by the words of others, competing for favor. The actor-poet makes the painful, Derridean discovery that language itself—in whatever form, including silence—is always already marked by the material space and spacing of the stage, by the always-present possibility of intrusion and citation.¹⁸

Austin, however, reminds us that praise, like greeting, performatively constitutes a reciprocal relationship which obtains no matter what the intentions of either party may be. In other words, one can refuse the basic consensus that underlies even our disagreements by refusing to greet someone; one can also refuse to accept praise. Accepting such praise, however, constitutes an ethical obligation that is part of the performative situation. Such an obligation is not as clearly marked as it would be in the case of a promise or a bet, but this makes it no less binding than the implicit obligations undertaken in those cases. To accept praise from someone is implicitly also to allow them to judge, criticize, or condemn. And it is from this conventionally incurred obligation that the peculiarly ethical power of Shakespeare's sonnets derives, despite the social weakness of the actor-poet. Like a promise, such an obligation lies, publicly, “in eyes of men” (16.12), not in the eyes of the one who promises.¹⁹ The readers of the sonnets have the authority to weigh up the obligations that they enact: it is not in the power of either the maker of a promise or the recipient of praise to declare a promise null and void. This asymmetry is the logical condition of promising as performative.

Shakespeare's sonnets thus hold an ethical power purely by virtue of the performative situation of praise, even when the poet declares himself most abjectly slavelike in his relation to the more powerful beloved. It is in relation to such implied obligation that the actor-poet seeks, through the institutionalized, conventional performative or quasi-performative, to create what he calls a “marriage of true minds” (116.1). And as Lars Engle argues so convincingly, such a marriage is shown by the sonnets to be part of the context-bound pragmatics of social existence and change.²⁰

The right to blame, which is implied in the illocutionary logic of praise, may be what imbues the poetry with a gathering self-confidence as the subsequence progresses. This culminates in the poet's recourse to tautology, which he had up to then reserved for the ineffable subject of praise. The denigration, via the somewhat obsequious argument that “you are you,” of rival attempts to ornament the beloved, is turned in the final stages of the subsequence into an almost magisterial assertion of self via the same tautology, now converted into the divine: “I am that I am” (121.9). If the declaration could have seemed a kind of description (the ultimate, unornamented, description of praise), the first-person form can only be a self-authorizing elevation of oneself above the vagaries of descriptive praise or blame. This is a pure performative: a self-proclaimed declaration of independence very like that declared by Antony and Cleopatra when, “[c]ontemning Rome” (3.6.1), they crown themselves in the Alexandrian marketplace.²¹ It is certainly quite different from the protestations of abject dependence and servitude that we encounter earlier in the subsequence (Sonnets 26, 29, 49, and 57).

The early poems bewail not only the beloved's untrustworthiness and social and erotic distance, but also the actor-poet's powerlessness to invoke the conventional, public authority of performatives. He can neither forge the kind of public performative space that marks the Alexandrian self-coronation nor invoke the public and conventional obligations incurred by promises of love or trust because his “own love's strength” puts him in “fear of trust” (23.7, 5). He thus resorts, on the one hand, to contradictory claims about the power of “these black lines” to make the beloved still “live” (63.13-14) and, on the other, to the argument that only he can recognize the extent to which his poetry is in fact empowered by the young man's incomparable beauty: “There lives more life in one of your fair eyes / Than both your poets can in praise devise” (83.13-14).

We should now be able to see that the performative thrust of Sonnet 84 (“Who is it that says most which can say more / Than this rich praise, that you alone are you”) is directed not toward the accurate description of a unique external object but rather toward the discovery and enactment of a rhetoric that will render an appropriate account of the social rather than the epistemological relationship between the praiser and the praised. In 84, the quasi-performative noted above in Sonnet 21 is presented generally in the third person, where its conditional logic is shown more clearly: “But he that writes of you, if he can tell / That you are you, so dignifies his story. / Let him but copy what in you is writ, / … And such a counterpart shall fame his wit, / Making his style admired everywhere.” Description, here in the form of the tautology “you are you,” masquerades as the epitome of truthfulness. It is in fact a double performative: it performs both a sophisticated form of definition and a remarkably audacious self-authorization operating under the guise of humility. It marks a decisive move away from the epistemological argument that continues to inform the other sonnets.²²

II

When Shakespeare's actor-poet claims that tautology is the highest form of praise, this is a performative utterance which does not describe the young man but rather instantiates him as the paradigm from which beauty gets its name. As such a paradigm, the young man is beyond description. He is the standard from which words such as fair, kind, and true derive their meanings. It is logically and socially inappropriate to apply those concepts to him, since they are derived from him. We can see the logic of this argument more clearly by looking at an example from Wittgenstein: to say that the standard meter is a meter long is not to describe it but rather to institute it as a rule for the concept “one meter.”²³ Since the standard meter is the standard, it is inappropriate to describe it as being one meter long. Such a proposition is either true or false. But if the standard meter is the length that settles just what a meter is, then it lies beyond truth or falsity. As the rule by which other lengths are to be judged, it cannot itself be said to be one meter long, for what standard should we use to establish this? To describe the standard as a meter would be as tautologically empty as the statement “you alone are you.” One can say that the standard meter is the measure by which we decide what a meter is, but one cannot say that it is one meter long.

Shakespeare's declaration that “you alone are you” is thus declaring: “you are the standard by which we measure what beauty is, by which beauty gets its name.” The argument against the rival poet claims that if the young man is not an object which may be described (truly or falsely) as beautiful but in fact the standard by which the concepts of fairness, truth, and beauty are established, then it makes no sense to describe him as such. All one can do is proclaim him, over and over again, as the paradigmatic instance of beauty: “I never saw that you did painting need, / And therefore to your fair no painting set” (83.1-2).

Shakespeare's sonnets show that the ornamental descriptions of other poets are not only logically vacuous or redundant; they also denigrate the paradigm as paradigm, reducing it from timeless rule to just another object among others. To praise the young man by a standard of beauty taken from some other paradigm or standard of reference is either to empty the words of all meaning (like using a tailor's tape-measure to judge the standard meter) or, by subordinating the young man to a higher standard, to diminish his status, to insult him.

This argument is remarkable for its capacity to deprecate the “ornament” of normal forms of praise on logical rather than rhetorical grounds. Such forms of praise can be dismissed for committing what Gilbert Ryle calls a “category-mistake,” which has both social and logical aspects:²⁴ rival poets make the logical mistake of assuming that the young man is merely one more object among others to be praised (it matters not that they regard him as the best). In doing so, they commit a social and political error of denigrating him. It thus becomes clear why Shakespeare's verse should be “so barren of new pride, / So far from variation or quick change” (76.1-2). It deals in definitions rather than descriptions, in the reiterated instantiation of concepts—“fair, kind, and true” (105.9)—with reference to a paradigm case that by definition is “Still constant in a wondrous excellence” (105.6), rather than in the syntactical elaborations of mere description. Such barrenness is what is best about it: it marks its true understanding of its object of praise.

Sonnet 79 exemplifies the logical economy by which the meanings of the words used in descriptions of the young man are neither bestowed on him nor used in propositions that could be true or false, but are derived from the young man himself:

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek. …

Although the young man's admirer writes as if his beloved were intrinsically constituted as a paradigm by the authoring and authorizing power of Nature (see 20), it is the writer's own aesthetic, rhetorical, and political project to authorize the power of his own verse over its subject: first, by elevating him to this position; then, by proclaiming himself to be the only one to have recognized this incomparability. We should note the sleight of hand here, since the self-authorizing performative of the first is performed under the guise of the humble descriptiveness of the second. It is the young man who must be persuaded that he is indeed the universal standard of beauty; once dazzled by his own status, he will fail to notice that it is the actor-poet's verse, not Nature, that institutionalizes him, retrospectively, as such: “And him as for a map doth nature store, / To show false art what beauty was of yore” (68.13-14). Replace “nature” with “Will,” and you have the properly secularized agent of such conceptual mapping. Thus the poet attains a self-authorizing independence in the final sonnets of the subsequence, achieved by distancing himself both from the theatrical community in which his “dyer's hand” is “subdued” and the courtly society of informers and hack poets that threatens him.

The logic of paradigmatic instantiation signalled by tautology does not make the object the meaning of the word in a Cratylitic sense but rather allows objects in the world to be appropriated in different ways as rules for the use of words. In doing so, it closes the gap between words and the world and, most important for this discussion, avoids Sidney's dilemma mentioned in the opening above. But the appropriation of objects as paradigmatic instances is a performative speech act with far-reaching social implications, since it raises the question of authorization: who has the right, or the power, to decide the standards by which words get their meanings? After witnessing the power of the self-authorizing performative in the poems that deal with court rivalry, we therefore need to explore the actor-poet's authoritative relationship to a broader community when the object of his affections is neither male nor fair but female and black. If Shakespeare's actor-poet can declare his independence of “suborned informer[s]” (125.13) and “frailer spies” (121.7) by magisterially invoking the divine tautology “I am that I am” in his own person, the later subsequence shows a persona much less assured about the power of the performative to forge a “world elsewhere” (Coriolanus, 3.3.139).

The opening poem of the subsequence, Sonnet 127, begins with a confident elaboration of the argument sketched above regarding “beauty's name” and its exemplification by some chosen standard, a confidence that the rest of the sequence almost immediately belies. The opening lines—“In the old age black was not counted fair, / Or if it were it bore not beauty's name”—are a variation on the theme that the meaning of words is open to change as and when new paradigms are authorized. In days gone by, the poem suggests, even if beauty had included blackness, blackness would certainly not have counted as a paradigm. No one would have dreamed of teaching a novice Petrarchan poet the meaning of the word beauty by pointing to a dark woman. But Will reminds us that all this has changed. Since “each hand hath put on nature's pow'r, / Fairing the foul with Art's false borrowed face / Sweet beauty hath no name” (ll. 5-7). In other words, the concept of beauty has been emptied of content, since there are no longer indubitable paradigm cases by which to exemplify it and its relation to truth. Such apparent paradigms of fairness as there are are untrustworthy, for one can no longer tell whether they have “profaned” (l. 8) or not. To exemplify the concept of beauty via a woman who appears to be fair would nowadays be like trying to settle the length of a meter with a piece of elastic.

The crux of this poem's subtle argument lies in the logical operative “therefore,” which marks the transition from octave to sestet. For, taken as the reason why he has chosen a dark mistress, the word confirms the poet's self-authorizing power to revive the name of beauty by instantiating a new paradigm, the now-exemplary “Dark Lady of the Sonnets.” In this subtly self-aggrandizing poem, the poet no longer opposes language users who persist in their own perverse usage by following their own paradigmatic samples. Rather (so he implies) he effects a sea-change in the very concept through his choice of mistress: “Yet so they mourn becoming of their woe, / That every tongue says beauty should look so” (ll. 13-14).

The agreement conveyed by “every tongue” is unusual in a sequence that is frequently at odds with the world at large and with itself. This agreement does not last long, however. Within a sonnet or two, the poet is not only at odds with common opinion but is also unwilling to oppose it in any public way: “Yet in good faith some say that thee behold / Thy face hath not the pow'r to make love groan; / To say they err I dare not be so bold, / Although I swear it to myself alone” (131.5-8). And as the subsequence progresses, the poet internalizes the difference between his unauthorized judgment of the mistress and a world that now stands “hugely politic” (124.11) against the madness of his private discourse. This difference is powerfully registered by the device, extensively analyzed in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, of the contest between his heart and eyes, indeed, all his senses, which now draw back in horrified disgust from a perversely persistent perversity: “My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are, / At random from the truth vainly expressed; / For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (147.11-14).

“At random from the truth vainly expressed”: this is, of course, one aspect of “lust in action” (129.2). But it could also be applied to one of the most intriguing moments in Antony and Cleopatra, when, in a surprising Petrarchan moment, the defeated queen subjects Antony to a lover's extravagant blazon:

Cleopatra His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck
A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted
The little O, the earth.
Dolabella Most sovereign creature—
Cleopatra His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm
Crested the world; his voice was propertied
As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,
There was no winter in 't; an autumn 'twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphinlike; they showed his back above
The element they lived in. In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropped from his pocket.

(5.2.78-91)

Dolabella cries out, “Cleopatra—” surprised and horrified at what he perceives to be the madness, the eccentricity and excessiveness of her “thoughts and … discourse.” The felicity of such discourse depends on the willingness of the audience to concur in both its truth and force. Dispassionately rejecting the falsity of Cleopatra's praise but also horrified by its exorbitant power, Dolabella responds with a pitying but firm “no” to her question: “Think you there was, or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of?” (ll. 92-93). As many critics have pointed out, the question, with its subjunctive modification, is concerned as much with the powers of poetry as with the truth of history. It returns us to, or rather, anticipates, Cleopatra's later concern with the power of fiction to represent and transform her own historically specific figure into the stuff either of myth or political propaganda. Reading Cleopatra's praise of Antony in the way that the actor-poet reads the “full proud sail” of rival poet's verse, Dolabella flatly denies the veracity of her dream. Being false to its object, a product of projection rather than truthful description, it is “At random from the truth” and because it is so, it is “vainly expressed.”²⁵

But as so often happens in this play, with its Chinese-box effect of audiences nested within wider audiences, we are free to answer Cleopatra's question otherwise, just as we were able, in the opening scene, to accept Philo's invitation to “behold and see” by judging his judgment:

                                                  Look, where they come.
Take but good note, and you shall see in him
The triple pillar of the world transformed
Into a strumpet's fool. Behold and see.

(1.1.10-13)

What we, watching Philo and Demetrius watching Antony and Cleopatra, behold is a remarkable scene which gives full rein to the performative as a way of attempting to transform, successfully or not, a situation through the power of merely saying so. The scene is too long and complex to analyze in full here. We should merely note the way in which Antony instantiates himself and Cleopatra as a paradigm of the “nobleness of life” itself: “The nobleness of life / Is to do thus; when such a mutual pair / And such a twain can do 't, in which I bind, / On pain of punishment, the world to weet / We stand up peerless” (ll. 38-42). But it is one thing to make such a declaration in the private world of a lyric poem—as Donne, for example does—quite another to stage it publicly in one's capacity as the “triple pillar of the world.” Antony's theatrical declaration betrays precisely the difficulty of such self-fashioning and self-authorizing public show: if Antony and Cleopatra can turn their sensuality into a paradigm of nobleness only by binding “the world” to accept it “On pain of punishment,” if they must resort to physical force in order to effect it, then it fails as a performative. On the other hand, as I have argued elsewhere, if our own involvement in what we have communally instituted as the “literary” stems at least in part from its capacity to show us the instantiations and relationships between the concepts of our language, it also opens the space for the constitution, however brief and unstable, of an imaginary consensus whereby paradigms may be shifted, concepts renegotiated.²⁶ If it is Cleopatra rather than Philo who publicly refuses Antony's extravagant gesture, she does so in a powerfully ambiguous phrase: “Excellent falsehood!” (l. 42). This is to part-reject, part-deny, part-admire a claim that, if it is ostensibly “at random from the truth” and “vainly expressed,” may indeed, from the imaginary perspective of the theater audience, fall beyond the limits of truth altogether. As many critics have noted, an ambivalence about truth and lying, deceit and trust, marks Antony and Cleopatra's relationship throughout the play, and it is never finally settled one way or the other, just as it is never settled whether Antony is a “strumpet's fool” or a Colossus whose “legs bestrid the ocean.”

I do not mean by this that we are each left to decide for ourselves, for that would mean that we would finally settle on a truth, one way or another. Rather, I want to suggest that, just as performatives are logically independent of truth or falsity—of correspondence with an entity that already exists in the world—but rather transform the world or bring about a situation merely in their saying, Antony and Cleopatra and the sonnets both represent and perform this transformative power of language in the imaginary space of theatrical and poetic production. If Cleopatra fears this process in her reflection upon what she will become at the hands of “quick comedians” in Rome, she fully indulges in it in her “dream” of Antony—a dream, we must recall, that is not simply or merely a fiction:

But if there be nor ever were one such,
It's past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t' imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(5.2.95-99)

Such an Antony is not a product of fancy, because, like the young man of the sonnets, he is “nature's piece 'gainst fancy.” On the other hand, he is not a mere empirical object of description. Rather, to “imagine / An Antony” is to see both how paltry are mere fictions, and how dull mere men. Cleopatra speaks here of an Antony: not merely the man called Antony but the historical figure turned into generic type or paradigm, just as the poet of the sonnets turns its young man into “beauty's name.”

III

Antony and Cleopatra is imbued with a philosophy of language and the imaginary that transcends classical oppositions between fact and fiction. Lying between truth and fancy, history and fiction—“dolphinlike” as Antony's desires—the figure that Cleopatra imagines is the object of a performative use of language that is neither true nor false but, rather, enacts or brings into being the figure of which it speaks. To read Cleopatra's utterance as the object of a truth-claim is, like Dolabella, to deny that it does or ever could exist. But to see it for what it is—a different language-game, as Wittgenstein would say, and one that could be said to constitute epideixis as such—is to find “new heaven, new earth” (1.1.17).

This is not a transcendentalizing reading of either the sonnets or Antony and Cleopatra. Such a language-game is still very much of this earth, even if it extends it beyond the limits dreamed of by positivist philosophy. We can see its mundane operation in one final moment of Act 5 when, re-enacting the self-authorizing moment in the Alexandrian marketplace when she appeared “in th' habiliments of the goddess Isis” (3.6.17), Cleopatra proclaims herself not whore or mistress but Antony's wife: “Husband, I come!” (5.2.287). Again, this is not a constative or descriptive act but a performative one. Is Cleopatra's urgent vocative—which names Antony as he is called by Egypt—not a condensed form of the marriage ceremony: a unilateral declarative that transforms in the saying her relationship with Antony and thereby changes our judgment of it? Furthermore, it is neither an “Excellent falsehood” nor a gesture of pure transcendence. It constitutes an acceptance that the title involves publicly accessible standards of behavior which are an independent measure of her condition rather than Antony's self-authorized show of pride in 1.2. “Now to that name my courage prove my title!” (5.2.288): Cleopatra's death is a kind of performative by which she lives up to that transforming “title” and, at the same time, effects a transformation of its values.

If through the performative power of her suicide Cleopatra does not transcend the mundane world but rather subjects herself to its transformative institutions, of which the concepts “husband” and “wife” are a signal part, she nonetheless transforms the ideological thrust of the patriarchal institution in which they have their life. No theoretician of speech acts would accept Cleopatra's vocative as an instance of the felicitous performance of the marriage ceremony. But the play invites us to do so: it asks us to accept the authority of a figure who is “No more but e'en a woman, and commanded / By such poor passion as the maid that milks” (4.15.78-79) and who, in the absence of consenting husband or presiding officer, claims for herself the right not only to chose but also to make her own husband.²⁷ Shakespeare's play thus effects a transformation exactly the reverse of that which Cleopatra fears at the hands of comedians, imbuing her through its own power with the capacity to transfigure herself from whore to queen, self-fashioned/self-fashioning, not abjectly made, wife.

The power of certain speech acts in Antony and Cleopatra, either to transcend questions of truth and falsity or to transform a situation, should enable us to see more clearly how poems such as Sonnet 138 enact their own kinds of transformative force. In his reading of this sonnet, Edward Snow both draws parallels with Antony and Cleopatra and also sees in it “a moment of repose” and a “subtle realignment of values.”²⁸ Against this, Nona Feinberg proposes a feminist argument that such repose is achieved through the silencing of the woman, so that in the end “the sonnet celebrates the speaker's verbal power at the cost of the loss of the Dark Lady's voice.”²⁹

In “‘She never told her love’” I suggest that the silencing or scattering of the beloved is complicated, if not contradicted, when the blazon is embodied in the theater, especially when silence makes itself heard through the irreducible presence of a mute body on the stage. It could be argued that the sonnet is the poetic form least able to accommodate another's voice in anything but the most cursory or indirect way.³⁰ But this is to ignore a possibility that the theater makes palpable, namely an original context of address and reception in which the response of the beloved, though not recorded in the poem itself, would have been not only possible but inevitable. It is, we recall, precisely to avoid the unwelcome consequences and circumstances of such an address that the actor-poet urges his patron audience to “hear with eyes” in Sonnet 23. The presence, and intrinsic power, of an audience to shape the poet's own voice and stance should not be overlooked in a discussion of whether Sonnet 138 achieves a tone of repose, smugness, or grim seriousness.

Few critics who accept the notion that Petrarchan sonnets in general necessarily exclude, silence, or disembody the beloved-as-woman comment on the silence—almost always icily aloof, to be sure—of the young man. With this in mind it might be useful to compare Sonnet 93 with the much more famous 138, since they share distinctive subject matter, even if they diverge in their final treatment of a common predicament:³¹

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceivèd husband—so love's face
May still seem love to me, though altered new:
Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place.
For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
Therefore in that I cannot know thy change.
In many's looks, the false heart's history
Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange,
But heav'n in thy creation did decree,
That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell,
Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be,
Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell.
          How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
          If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show.

We should note first that while Sonnet 138 is addressed to an audience from which the woman is implicitly excluded, Sonnet 93 has the young man himself as its direct and primary audience. One would expect this to make it more intimate, achieving the “mutual render, only me for thee” (125.12) that Sonnets 23 and 125 attempt to effect. But this is not so: 93 conveys as much alienation and uncertainty, distance and obeisance, as we find in the more overt poems of estrangement. The proximity of 93 to the much better known 94 allows us to recognize, in the beloved whose face shows neither “thy thoughts” nor “thy heart's workings,” the enigmatic and discomfiting “lords and owners of their faces” of Sonnet 94 (l. 7). Furthermore, the silence of the beloved is here and in 94—indeed, throughout the subsequence—a source of the young man's strength: the aloof, judgmental, and mute power of the spectator.

It is across this distance, then, of both social power and inscrutable enigma that the poet declares his decision to do what Sonnet 138 announces in such a different mode: to “live, supposing thou art true, / Like a deceivèd husband.” This in fact paraphrases the famous opening line of 138. Sonnet 138 lacks the conventional flattery of lines like “For there can live no hatred in thine eye” and “But heav'n in thy creation did decree, / That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell.” But such flattery is quickly undercut in 93 by the implication that this apparently gracious gift of nature may be both what “puts fair truth upon so foul a face” (137.12) by hiding the “false heart's history” and a sign of promiscuity, since the beloved is said to be unable or unwilling to “frown” on anyone. That this inscrutably beautiful beloved is given no opportunity to speak, even indirectly, is indicative of an almost total asymmetry of power which works in favor of the beloved rather than the poet. The decision by the poet to “live, supposing thou art true” is thus made entirely unilaterally in an exasperated and fearful attempt to adapt to an intolerable situation, in which all “mutual render” is excluded a priori both by the beloved's implacable silence and the double-edged argument that his heart may be in another place precisely because “there can live no hatred in [his] eye.”

Directed as a monologue to the beloved, Sonnet 93 engages less in a description than in what I have called a quasi-performative: the attempt to effect a situation simply in saying something. Appearances to the contrary, there is no perlocutionary force in the argument, for what would this achieve? By the poem's own argument, to persuade the beloved to a change of heart would be pointless, for how would the writer know that such a change has taken place? So the poet simply has to console himself in the belief that the poem itself will bring into being the state of “homogeny” that it so longs for. It enacts the adoption of a belief, a way of living. But such an enactment can be no more than a lonely tactic as long as the lie is lived and believed entirely unilaterally: “So shall I live, supposing thou art true.”

In contrast, as Edward Snow shows, Sonnet 138 at least reports, and perhaps also enacts, in a variety of nuanced ways that I need not rehearse here, a kind of mutual rather than unilateral transformation of a relationship through the acceptance of a lie. The difference between 138 and 93 lies in the fact that the beloved shares the decision to live in terms of a pair of fictions that finally constitute the relationship and its undoubted, if imperfect, consummations. In other words, the disempowering Petrarchan distance, constituted in part by the absence of an answering voice and marking not only 93 but the whole of the subsequence to the young man, is closed by the “mutual render” of the heterosexual couple's lying with and to each other. To agree to engage in this relationship through the powers of the lie is neither to harp on what is nor to accept the shadows of mere fancy but to bring forth a situation in the mode of what, following Cleopatra, we may call an “Excellent falsehood.” It is to abandon the idea of a “simple truth”—one to which 93 still clings and from which it derives its pain—in favor of the power of the performative, by which saying makes things so.

Notes

1. David Schalkwyk, “‘She never told her love’: Embodiment, Textuality, and Silence in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 381-407.

2. Schalkwyk, 382.

3. See J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1975).

4. Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella” in Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1989), Sonnet 35.

5. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1995), 10.

6. Illocutionary acts are those by which, in terms of agreed and institutionalized convention, to say something is at one and the same time to do it. To say “I promise you I shall love you forever” is not to describe anything in the world but in the saying of it to perform the act of promising, and to place oneself under an undeniable ethical obligation. Perlocutionary acts, on the other hand, are rhetorical acts: there is no direct, conventional, or internal link between the speech act and its consequences. By performing the illocutionary act of promising I shall love you forever, I may perform perlocutionary acts as divergent as winning your love in return, provoking your eternal scorn, or evoking critical admiration from an audience who read my sonnets. I may equally be able to achieve any of these perlocutionary effects through a constative utterance like “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun.” Whereas there is no gap between saying and performance in the case of illocutionary acts, perlocutionary acts are mediated by every kind of contingent, material circumstance, and their effects may range from the intentional to the purely accidental. Such effects, however, are never enacted by convention in the making of the utterance. See Austin, 7-11.

7. Austin, 4.

8. Quotations of Shakespeare's plays follow The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). For a discussion of “seeing as” in terms of the duck/rabbit figure, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 2:193^e-229^e.

9. For an application of Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect perception to Henry V, see Norman Rabkin, “Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V,” SQ 28 (1977): 279-96.

10. See Robert Weimann, “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare's Theatre,” SQ 39 (1988): 401-17. See also the tendency of the Chorus in Henry V and of Father Time in The Winter's Tale to address the spectators as “gentles all.”

11. Quotations of the sonnets follow Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1977).

12. For a discussion of the ways in which silence can be a source of empowerment, see my “‘She never told her love’” and Dubrow, 82-94.

13. I explore the relationship between privacy and theatricality in the sonnets in “‘As an unperfect actor on a stage’: Theatricality and Privacy in the Sonnets of William Shakespeare and Mary Wroth,” an unpublished paper presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, Cleveland, Ohio.

14. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California P, 1986), 15.

15. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1584), Ddiij^r. Cf. Fineman, who argues that “ornament” is a “discourse of special vividness” which nonetheless remains subservient to the ideal of similitude:

    praise is conventionally understood to be a referential discourse that amplifies its referent by means of ornamental trope. … traditional poetic and epideictic theory tend regularly to describe both mimesis and metaphor in terms of the same notion of likeness: verisimilar likeness or resemblance in the first case, the likeness of figural comparison and similitude in the second.

    (3)

16. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1987), 222.

17. Thomas M. Greene, “Pitiful thrivers: failed husbandry in the Sonnets” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 230-44.

18. This is in fact the philosophical lesson that Derrida draws in his encounter with so-called “Speech Act Theory”; see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988).

19. For a discussion of the public nature of performatives, see Austin, 9-11.

20. See Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993).

21. What affronts the “Romans” is the public, performative nature of these declaratives, which both assume and display their own self-enacted authority in “the public eye,” “the marketplace,” and “the common showplace” (3.6.11, 3, 12). Caesar's indignant account not only reflects a plethora of performatives, such as crowning, proclaiming, bestowing and dividing kingdoms; it also draws attention to such performatives' own reflexive, and for Caesar extremely vexing, self-constituting authority. Antony and Cleopatra engage in the self-proclaimed constitution of the very public institutions that make such performatives possible; the enactment is a simultaneous refusal of Roman authority, jurisdiction, and legal and political claims—“Contemning Rome, he has done all this” (l. 1)—enacting in concrete terms what is earlier little more than a gesture of impatience and insult: “Let Rome in Tiber melt and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall” (1.1.35-36).

22. We are reminded here of Antony's account of the Egyptian crocodile: “It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates” (2.7.43-46). “Will this description satisfy him?” Caesar asks mockingly and incredulously (l. 51); but logically speaking, Antony's joke is no different from the description “you are you” (84.8) that the actor-poet of the sonnets—he who “purpose[s] not to sell” (21.14)—peddles to the young man as the only truly “rich praise” he deserves and should expect.

23. Wittgenstein, 1:25^e.

24. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949), 18-23, esp. 18.

25. For a fine extended analysis of this speech in Wittgensteinian terms, see Brian Cheadle, “‘His legs bestrid the ocean’ as a ‘form of life’” in Drama and Philosophy, James Redmond, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 87-106.

26. David Schalkwyk, “Fiction as ‘Grammatical’ Investigation: A Wittgensteinian Account,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 287-98.

27. See Mary Hamer, “Cleopatra: housewife,” Textual Practice 2 (1988): 159-79. Hamer points out that one of the cultural threats posed by Cleopatra lies in her exemplification of the fact that Egyptian women “enjoyed one freedom that made them a scandal to the men of Rome: they were free to choose their own husbands” (163).

28. Edward A. Snow, “Loves of Comfort and Despair: A Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 138,” ELH 47 (1980): 462-83, esp. 462 and 479.

29. Nona Feinberg, “Erasing the Dark Lady: Sonnet 138 in the Sequence,” Assays: Critical Approaches to Medieval and Renaissance Texts 4 (1987): 97-108, esp. 108.

30. But see Dubrow's counter to this argument in Echoes of Desire, 82-94.

31. One should not lose sight of the fact that these two sonnets might have been addressed to the same person. See Heather Dubrow, “‘Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd’: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets,” SQ 47 (1996): 291-305. Although Dubrow's argument is compelling in its own way, I am following tradition by assuming that 93 has the young man and 138 the woman as their respective addressees.