[In the following essay, originally presented in 1996, Wright maintains that Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young main introduced a new mode of poetic discourse.]

Then others for the breath of words respect,
Me for my dumb thoughts, speaking in effect.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 85

O learn to read what silent love hath writ.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 23

ABSENCE, SILENCE

O absent presence Stella is not here.

—Sidney, Astrophel and Stella

He is not here.

—Tennyson, In Memoriam

Non c'é.

—Madama Butterfly

In his rich study of The Portrait in the Renaissance, John Pope-Hennessy observes that the painting of portraits, even collective ones, provided a record through which families and communities could “salvage the data of physical appearance on the threshold of the tomb.”¹ The motive reminds one of Shakespeare's arguments in the first seventeen sonnets, urging the young man to marry “And your sweet semblance to some other give” (S. 13)² as a means of enabling his beautiful image to survive his own aging and death. Perhaps because we live in an era of photography some scholars find this argument and these sonnets trivial; we have ceased to feel anxiety over preserving pictures of those we admire or are close to, which are all too likely to clutter our closets and the closets of our own survivors. Yet all the sonnets written to the young man have a related motive. Some of them openly claim the power to keep his image alive “When all the breathers of this world are dead” (S. 81); many of the others are designed to imagine his presence during periods or hours of absence. Absence here is mourned as a kind of death, and the return to the friend's presence, or even to the thought of it, is celebrated as an achievement of “wealth” and “state” (S. 30, 29). What may also seem striking is that considerations of absence are usually mingled with considerations of silence, so that the art of the sonnet seems to be an art of “silent thought” (S. 30), in which the very act of conjuring up the young friend's vivid presence in the face of his palpable absence can only be managed through eloquent words that, at least to begin with, go unvoiced, unheard, that we read as silently as the unspeaking speaker speaks them.

Of course, we may choose to sound them. But they have their origin, and they often discourse on their origin, in a “time removed” (S. 97), when the young man's absence deprives the poet-speaker of his friend's highly valued presence and makes him suspicious about where the friend is and in what company. To be sure, this absence has its consolations, especially in providing “sweet leave / To entertain the time with thoughts of love” (S. 39). If it weren't for this separation, the sonnets would never have come to exist; in a sense, there would be no subject, for these sonnets, unlike many others by other writers, are more about absence than presence, more about the absence—experienced, feared, or forecast—of their radiant center than about the enjoyment of its presence, though there is enough testimony about its presence to make its absence seem all the more poignant.

Hardly any of the first 126 sonnets seems likely to have been written in the friend's presence, though we can imagine certain lines as having been generated there (e.g., “If I could write the beauty of your eyes” [S. 17]). The poet confesses, in fact, to being “tongue-tied” before his friend (S. 80, 85, and 23, and cf. 66, 140), as if his best “speech” required the injury of “distance” (S. 44) and the “torment” of absence (S. 39), as if, unlike much portrait and landscape painting, writing could be done only when its subject is not physically present. Some poems we can imagine the speaker writing and then reading or reciting to his friend at their next meeting, or presenting for his friend's own silent (or spoken) perusal. Sonnet 38 perhaps, yet its tone is very much like that of Sonnet 39, which speaks directly of—and to—absence. Many of them seem so ruminative in tone that we can easily take them to be not really spoken to anyone but as having been produced during those “sessions of sweet silent thought” (S. 30) that seem habitual with this speaker and familiar from our own experience. Indeed, we can imagine all of these poems (including the first seventeen) as unsounded, silent meditations, capable of being voiced by the poet or by the person addressed (or by any of us) but at least equally appropriately read without sound.

Speech without speech—is that what the Sonnets are: speech that comes not after but as long silence? This deeply reflective speaker—is he really a speaker at all? Isn't it more accurate to hear the Sonnets, and much other lyric poetry that shows the same reflective depths, as, primarily, language of silent thought, unvoiced, unsounded, unperformed, the words of a consciousness (his then, ours now) silently addressing itself sometimes and sometimes an absent other? It may even be claimed that this unsounded speech, perfectly familiar to all of us because we generate it constantly every day of our lives, is the basic “voice” of the Sonnets, at least of 1-126, and a great range of other lyric poetry, and that by scrutinizing this dimension of language we can understand better not only what sort of poems the Sonnets and later English lyric and meditative poems are but how thoughtful speech of a different king—sounded and public—appears in Shakespeare's dramatic writing. Both modes use speech as their main verbal material, but they work it differently. To watch Shakespeare's mastery of both is, to say the least, instructive.

Of course, the speech of Shakespeare's plays may also be, and often is, read silently. But our usual view of it in this century is that its proper condition is as speech spoken and heard. We do not usually take that view of the language of the Sonnets.

TWO KINDS OF SPEAKING

Why do you never speak.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

My curiosity about this topic grows out of a longstanding fascination with how the verse of the plays sounded, especially with its metrical design, with how actors spoke the lines and with how audiences heard them, with whether and to what extent dramatic writing like Shakespeare's is “oral literature,” and with corresponding questions for lyric poetry: how do poets think of their work (if they do) as being spoken and heard, and how do we actually hear it when we read it from the page? These seem to me pertinent questions to ask of all poetry, and trying to answer them may help us understand a little better these puzzling sonnets of Shakespeare.

The phrase “sweet silent thought” intrigued me when I was teaching a course in poetic meter, form, and sound, and I would try to persuade students to pronounce the syllables in a way I believed was consistent with Shakespeare's probable metrical practice—not emphasizing the first adjective more prominently than the second (sweet silent thought), which would trip the meter of the line into a four-stress dactylic pattern that is rare in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter verse. Such a misreading also, to my ear, distorted the meaning of the phrase. No comma separates the two adjectives, whether we use Renaissance punctuation practice or our own, for “silent thought” is a compound substantive characterized here as “sweet.” “I sometimes enjoy moments of delicious reflection,” Shakespeare is saying, “sweet silent-thought.” (Compare these examples from Shakespeare poems that are probably contemporary: “sweet bottom grass,” “sweet coral mouth,” “sweet friendship's oath” [Venus and Adonis, 236, 542; The Rape of Lucrece, 569]). Meter and meaning both ask us to recognize the first syllable of the compound phrase as requiring more stress than “sweet”:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

Shakespeare is identifying a mode of thinking, of reflecting, unusual enough in his time to merit being the subject of special notice here and elsewhere (S. 29, 85, 119, etc.)—almost an oxymoron, since for Renaissance people a stretch of words, to be recognized as such, would usually have to be spoken. But more of this later.

But the matter of silent thought is more important than that: it has come to seem to me crucial to the lyric poetry we and our predecessors have been reading almost since Shakespeare's time and still read today, though our custom of referring to a poet's “voice” or a poem's “tone” has obscured the fact that we usually read poetry in silence.³ In pursuit of this idea, several years ago I wrote an essay that tried to explore this question as it was raised by the poetry of T. S. Eliot,⁴ whose protagonists often ruminate as they amble about the evocative landscapes of a ruined or aging world. In The Waste Land many of the lines that purport to represent the “speaker's” thoughts are presented as silent words that pass through the brain of the ruminating Tiresias but are not meant to be taken by the reader as sounded. One clear indication of this intention appears in the poem's second section, “A Game of Chess,” where dialogue of a sort takes place between the lady at the dressing table and a man, presumably her husband. Her lines appear in quotation marks, his do not, and this suggests that there must be a difference in the way we take in the two sets of words:

          “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
          “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
          I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

(The Waste Land, 111-16)

Similar distinctions between voices we are meant to understand as speaking aloud (the hyacinth girl, the typist, Rhine maidens, and others), whether we read them silently or not, and a more muted or silent voice of the protagonist can be noted throughout the poem, and I suggested in that essay that much of Eliot's most impressive poetry is written in this “sub-vocal” register (the term is Susanne Langer's), one that we hear without sound within some internal chamber, a vocal mechanism that “hears” words without speaking them, a “voice of no speech,” as Eliot called it in another poem. This is not, however, one of “The Three Voices of Poetry” he identified in an important essay, where he was more concerned with the possible audiences for different kinds of poems, and he never, to my knowledge, wrote in prose about the kind of distinction I have been pursuing here. It is worth noting, however, that when Eliot turned from lyric poetry to verse written for the stage, despite the frequent critical praise for the so-called dramatic qualities of his nondramatic verse, his use of this ruminative voice in his plays is rarely successful—mainly, I speculated, because that deep inner voice, so seductively solipsistic as it processes everyone else's speech in his poems, cannot convincingly overawe other voices when they meet as equals in the theater. The chronological pattern of Shakespeare's career, of course, was exactly opposite to Eliot's: before he wrote his sonnets he was already an experienced playwright and an actor accustomed to speaking lines from a stage. It is so much the more curious, then, that, as the only playwright among those Elizabethans who participated in the sonnet-writing vogue of the 1590s, he alone should have written sonnets in a style that stresses the solitude of the poet-speaker and the silence of his speech, probably because he had a sharper insight into the peculiar powers of speech and silent thought, and into the differences between them.⁵

ON POEMS AS MESSAGES

To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 26

Your letter comes, speaking as you,
Speaking of much, but not to come.

—W. H. Auden, “The Letter”

Sonnet 26 seems to say that the poet-speaker is sending this poem, this sonnet, to his friend, to be read by him. This implies what is true of most letters—that it has been written in the recipient's absence and will be read in the writer's absence. Letters may be intoned by writer or reader, but it was probably as true for Shakespeare as it was for W. B. Yeats when, “after long silence,” he received a letter from a later Shakespear, that such letters are usually written and read in silence. (Like Auden, he sensed that the letter might be called “Speech” or “Speaking.”) The typical assumption of the written message or lyric is that the writer will not be present when it is read but that the letter acts as his surrogate, sets up a supposed situation (“as if I were with you”) that resembles the fiction of theater (“as if these persons were here before you, moving and speaking”). Suppose, the personal lyric says, that I am there with you, speaking to you, there where you are: then this is what I say. A large number of Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man imagine this situation, for love messages, letters, or poems not only wish for the presence of an absent lover but (as the further side of a reciprocal design) request the recipient to imagine the absent writer as present. They arrive, as Auden puts it, “speaking as you.” The lover's letter is not the lover's presence, but it is something; as one gentleman observes (insincerely) to another, “Thy letters may be here, though thou art hence” (Two Gentlemen of Verona, 3.1.250). Each sonnet offers to both its intended and unintended audience—its immediate addressee and centuries of half-invited listeners-in—an occasion to hear the words spoken as the author might speak them if he were present. It offers, as it were, a play without a play.

But normally when we read the poem, we simplify the possibilities. We don't trouble to wonder whether the poet is to be supposed as speaking the poem directly to “you,” or recites it to “you” the next day, or sends it or gives it to be read silently or aloud by “you.” We just accept the words as supposed or virtual speech, as words addressed by “I” to “you,” whether “you” is present or not. We don't inquire too curiously into the dramatic situation because we have no difficulty with it. We know from our own experience what it is to address someone who is absent. We know what it means to say what the speaker of these sonnets is constantly saying to the absent friend: Be yourself, be beautiful, be young, be here, love me. We know what silent thought is, and fruitless address; knowing they can't hear us, we have all addressed (quietly or loudly) stuck windows, headaches, yapping dogs, fools or hypocrites on television, and absent lovers. And when we read one of Shakespeare's sonnets to the absent friend, we know that mode of silent speech—its fluency, its readiness “To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone” (S. 44), the “wealth” it “brings” (S. 29) on some occasions, how it breaks now and then into voice, and the ultimate pathos, poignancy, frustration, and grief of it.

This is so because what we find in lyrics or love poems is a sort of suspended speech—not the direct, actual speaking of genuine conversation, not even (except rarely) one-sided talk, but a measure of “speech” that is slowed down and prolonged and muted and indefinitely available for reference. It is inner talk turned to stone, as it were, speech that has never fully made it into sound but has been formed and preserved all the same, like those first sacred writings used by a newly literate people to transcribe and preserve the wisdom formerly kept in the songs, chants, and sayings of an oral culture.⁶

IMAGINING VOICES

Hearing you praised, I say, “'tis so,” “'tis true,”
And to the most of praise add something more;
But that is in my thought.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 85

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter.

—Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In our efforts to identify different speakers, selves, or tones, we sometimes lose sight of what we mean when we speak of voice in nondramatic poetry. We all use the term, and we know more or less what it signifies, but we seldom acknowledge that the voice we have in mind, the voice we suppose to be speaking from the page in any silent reading (which is our usual way of reading) is not really a voice; it does not speak, it makes no sound, it does not share with actual voices (or even whispers) the physical characteristics of pitch, volume, timbre, and accent. It is “unheard,” like the music that hides in the shrubbery of “Burnt Norton” and echoes the unheard “melodies” played in “soft” silence by the pipers on Keats's Grecian urn. Such melodies, Keats tells us, are “sweeter” than the ones we actually hear, because it is “to the spirit” that they “Pipe … ditties of no tone.” Keats's phrase gives a very high value to unsounded verse, even when the verse is as sensuous as Keats's own.⁷

We know the ruminant voice of The Waste Land not only through our experience of unsounded but formulated thought but also through our acquaintance with printed English poetry, which has trained us to read poems silently. We do not need to say the words aloud to capture their rhythms, or move our lips to savor the words. When we speak of them as sounded by a voice, we probably mean, among other things, that as we follow the phrases and clauses on the page, our own vocal apparatus is at some low level set to speak them, and/or that our hearing apparatus is set to hear a voice actually saying the lines—our own voice, Olivier's, Burton's, or Eliot's. Such imagined speaking may include the imagination of variations of stress between syllables, pauses, hesitations, natural pacing, effective strategies of emphasis, shrewd management of pitch, along with paralinguistic gestures, facial expressions, and body language. We are tempted to think that we hear (or see) all this in our heads, but we actually hear (and see) none of it. We are only prepared, set, to hear it if a voice materializes and speaks it. Silent reading, however muscularly persevered in, is silent reading. When engaged in it, we are ready to perform an action (in this case, to speak words) or to perceive a sense impression (in this case, to hear words) without actually doing it, though in reading poetry you may have the same experience I have of following the words silently for a time and then, occasionally, being so caught up in the eloquence of a passage that (at least if we are alone) we actually voice a phrase or a word without quite having realized that we were going to do so.

REHEARSING THE VERSE

To write is not to be absent but to become absent; to be someone and then go away, leaving traces.

—Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts

They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

—W. B. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben”

The two dimensions of speech that I have been trying to discriminate here—spoken, and unsounded—cross over so easily, our passages between them are so fluid, that we hardly notice them or pay attention to their differences. Words form in our minds before we speak, as Montaigne observed even during Shakespeare's lifetime: “the sense of hearing … is related to that of speech … so that what we speak we must speak first to ourselves, and make it ring on our own ears inwardly, before we send it to other ears.”⁸ Later, as Eliot says (in “Burnt Norton”), “Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence,” but they also have a way of following us: “My words echo / Thus, in your mind.” This is the dimension of experience that is permanently lost when we forget it a moment or a day later—or, if we keep reverting to it, when we die, unless it is preserved in someone else's memory or in art, as Proust and Virginia Woolf steadily observed. So Time, with its “millioned accidents” (S. 115), ripples these waters, altering, reckoning, and rendering the changes that occur between what we plan to say, what we say, what we remember saying (the next moment, the next day, years later), what people report us as saying. Writing, of course, fixes what the poet “says.” At least that is the case, by and large, with published lyric poetry, though even the most scrupulously edited text of an older poet (not to speak of an Auden or a Lowell) can fail to establish the authenticity of canonical versions of poems. The playtext, as students of Shakespeare know only too well, is even less reliable; if some of the quartos were, at least in part, the product of memorial reconstruction, that suggests a checkered history, indeed: from written playtext to spoken drama to partly remembered lines to printed version. But some such mixture of sources probably lies behind even the most hurriedly composed poem, as the poet writes down, in horizontal rows, the “lines” that have “popped into his head” or “just came to me out of the blue,” speaks them aloud to test their sound, adds some more in silence perhaps, revises a phrase here and there, forgets them while he goes to lunch, falls sleep, or puts them in a drawer for years, and hears them chime together silently again as he gives them a more privileged textual life on the computer screen, the disk, the page, the book.

And there they stay, ready for posterity's inspection, just as he claimed, even if, after writing them down, he lifted not a finger to help them survive. What did the claim amount to, if, in the spirit of this inquiry, we interrogate it closely? In all of Shakespeare's sonnets that promise to preserve the young man's image and to make it “eternal” or “immortal” in the “monument” of his own verse (S. 15, 17, 18, 19, 60, 63, 65, 81, 101, 107), there is no claim that the lines that offer this hope will be spoken aloud again, only the claim that the young man's image presented in them will be preserved and wondered at. Only Sonnet 81 could be taken as pressing a stronger claim:

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read,
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead,
You still shall live—such virtue hath my pen—
Where breath most breathes, ev'n in the mouths of men.

But as I read these lines, they may not suggest more than that later readers will be so astonished at the beauty of the young man as it is praised in the poet's sonnets that they will talk about it, as this poet refers to earlier poets' “descriptions of the fairest wights” in Sonnet 106. Even if we understand “rehearse” to mean “recite” and not just “recount” (see Booth on this line, p. 278), the recitation sounds very private, a mere whispered breathing of the words in which the young man, so resurrected, is sure to be buried and disinterred and buried again.⁹

INNER VOICE ON THE PUBLIC STAGE

I see a voice! Now will I to the chink,
To spy and I can hear my Thisby's face.

—Bottom, in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Why couldn't a character carry on an external monologue that was in fact an internal monologue just coming out?
And why couldn't it be off the wall or exploratory, the way the inner monologue really is?

—Sam Shepard

To sound a lyric phrase or line is to flesh it out, to bring it from what seems disembodied existence to physical embodiment—just the opposite of what the sonnet-writer wishes could happen in Sonnet 44: “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought”—to turn the bodied substance into silent, unsounded but articulated thought and nullify “Injurious distance.” Far from succeeding in this enterprise, all that the speaker of Sonnet 44 has to show for his exercise are his “moan” and “heavy tears,” the voiced longing and the material “badges of … woe.” That is, his thought has turned into just the physical and material stuff that he began by wishing he could bypass. The wish is not father to this thought. But that is what happens in poetry, which does succeed in turning absence into virtual presence, bringing the absent here, using metaphors, imagery, narrative to transport that “world elsewhere” to wherever we happen to be. If Henry V can do this for its audience in the theater, can count on their imaginations to

                                                  deck our kings,
Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,
Turning th' accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass

and to do all this “within the girdle of these walls” (Prologue, 28-31, 19), poetry silently read does it all the time. Whether or not the reading is silent, it amounts to a granting of this wish: the substance of imagery—kings, lover, moan, and tears—becomes inwardly present, at least as shadow. Neither thought nor verse nor letter can bring the lover physically here, but all of these can bring his “shadow” or “shade” within the purview of our “unseeing … sightless eyes” (S. 43).

As some critics have pointed out (notably, Heather Dubrow, in Captive Victors),¹⁰ the sonnets in many ways almost compel the reader to reenact the feelings of the poet-speaker: his confusion, his uncertainty, his ambivalence. They also make us experience an absence, a distance from the speaker, similar to that which the speaker experiences from his friend. He cannot hear or see his friend, or make him hear his own voice. If we must imagine the speaker (Shakespeare's persona, however we define it) as saying the poem (or as imagining his friend reading or hearing it), even if we grant that Shakespeare has done as he promised (“To make him seem long hence as he shows now” [S. 101]) and has kept the image of his friend alive for all these centuries, we understand (as he does) that the image is in most respects dim and blurred and that we can get no closer to him than that. Fortunately, perhaps: not naming his name blesses an ill report. Even if we speak the lines ourselves, or listen to a teacher or an actor read them (live or recorded), we shall never hear the voice of that speaker or the poet.

The theater offers us a different setting: there, as Bottom realizes, we see a voice, we hear a face. We have no text before us, no lines, no “black ink.” All the words we are to hear have been written for human actors to con, to speak, and to forget, and those actors (or their modern counterparts) are present now physically. Some of them may pretend not to hear what is being said by others—in asides or soliloquies, or when they are supposed to be drunk or asleep or dead—but we hear everything spoken aloud. But we also hear—and have heard in plays for centuries, ever since Shakespeare returned to the theater, after his time out, during the plague, for writing his narrative poems and probably most of the sonnets—a kind of speech that is different from earlier dialogue. In speeches written after this time for some of his characters at certain dramatic moments, we hear what sounds in some ways like the voice that speaks the sonnets—a ruminative, private voice that deepens our sense of the dramatic character's inner self. We can hear it in Richard II's moving meditations or in Hamlet's or Claudius's; as I have suggested elsewhere, such characters “often take us into the psychic council chambers” where they reach their decisions.

Their feelings take form on the stage or give signs of having been anxiously arrived at. The language in which they admit to divided feelings or disturbing passions is the language of “silent thought,” now for the first time conveyed from the sonnet to the theater, in dialogue as well as in soliloquy. … The quiet voice of reminiscence or experience, the muted tones, the pyrrhic dips, the spondaic gravity, the metaphoric and figurative surface, all the stylistic regalia of troubled reflection familiar from the Sonnets make their presence deeply felt in the plays that follow.¹¹

In short, an authentic inner voice becomes available after 1593 or so to many of Shakespeare's characters, who speak this private or intimate language from the stage as no one had ever done before. To convey what is going on inside a character, a playwright need no longer resort to flamboyant rhetorical gestures and postures, histrionic breast beating, or demonstrative actions; a person in emotional trouble can speak of his distress before an audience as if he were talking to himself. In the soliloquy, as Wolfgang Clemen observes, “monologue becomes dialogue”—in Arnold's phrase, “the dialogue of the mind with itself.”¹² The inner discourse that at least some persons carry on is acknowledged by being represented convincingly on the stage, and it gives us the illusion that we are seeing deeply into their souls or selves. If the ruminative, private voice is more eloquent than our own or than we suspect our neighbor's is, it still is of a kind we recognize as coming from a realm we have visited, and the ease and force of its speech may seem at least genuine, at times uncanny—in Sam Shepard's words, “an internal monologue just coming out.”

WITHIN BE FED

[T]o possess a double mental personality has long ceased to be the sort of trick that only lunatics can bring off.

—Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

But did Renaissance people read or think this way? Anne Ferry makes a compelling case for the view that they did not have the concept of an inner life in the sense of “a consciousness of leading a continuous internal existence.”¹³ If inward meant the opposite of those near homonyms outward or uttered, that which was unuttered, silent, usually appears to have been “inward states” (63-70) or “secrets” (55-59) or “hidden thoughts” (59), not a continuous wordstream; and when you looked into your heart, it was to find not what was personal and individual, your own private and particular version of reality, but the universal truth of man's fallen condition (40-43). But Shakespeare, following Sidney, moves toward the charging of an inner verbal current, with what sounds like authentic “autobiographical material” (29), a strain that we find first in the speaker of the Sonnets and later, most notably, in the character Hamlet, whose soliloquies and asides do suggest that the words he speaks issue from a personal consciousness continuously wording its thoughts, that many of these thoughts are not spoken, and that they compose a hardly interrupted inner discourse, which may appear to be independent of his outer behavior and ambiguously related to his uttered words.¹⁴

This is a reading of Hamlet worth considering, for it illuminates the difficulty other people in the play have in understanding Hamlet's behavior. It suggests that he has access to an inner mental life, which was thought to be characteristic of people who were notably devious or deviant. Gertrude and Ophelia think Hamlet mad; Polonius judges there is more to it than that: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't” (2.2.205-6), and he suggests that if Hamlet is mad, it is the madness of love. Claudius, more astute and better informed, comes closer to the truth: “There's something in his soul / O'er which his melancholy sits on brood” (3.1.164-65). Like Cassius in Caesar's view, it appears to Claudius that Hamlet thinks too much, and too much to the purpose. For those who, unlike Claudius, cannot read the clues to Hamlet's behavior, he seems mad—which he is, in a sense: after all, he converses with a ghost.

In effect, anyone whose inner discourse gives signs of being intricate and continuous is likely to arouse suspicion in others: “such men are dangerous.” The continuous inward and private consciousness that we now regard as common to the experience of almost everyone (or at least of the verbal people we are and know) could be taken by Renaissance observers as an indication of an aberrant personality, of someone who, whether mad or merely calculating, needed to be watched.¹⁵ It suggested an uncanny, even inhuman, capacity for carrying on two lives, two discourses, simultaneously, one inner and private, the other outer and public, an accomplishment that seemed to them perhaps as difficult and burdensome as a chess champion's playing simultaneous games of chess seems to us: something, that is, that only specially gifted people (a Hamlet, for example) can do. Joyce's Ulysses, of course, shows us that ordinary modern people do it, too—not only intellectuals like Stephen Dedalus, but humdrum couples like the Blooms.

This idea may have some explanatory power for Hamlet. For the sonnets, despite the speaker's occasional anxieties over madness (S. 119, 129, 140, 147, and elsewhere), the hypothesis of madness in the poet-speaker is hardly a promising one.¹⁶ More to the point, perhaps, is the possibility that Shakespeare recognized the dangerousness of the Sonnets' “inward” language: that their speaker is to be suspected of being not so much a sexual as an epistemological deviant, of thinking too precisely on every event. Whether or not that recognition had anything to do with his failure to supervise or authorize their publication we cannot know. But Shakespeare may well have perceived that inwardness of speech, that continuous “silent thought,” conducted not in fits and starts but in extended “sessions,” as a new mode of discourse, which his plays would learn to exploit, in heroic and comic protagonists, by conveying their inward speech to the stage's public spectacle—in effect giving it a public audience that could hear it speaking to itself, sometimes in tones so intimate and appealing that we are drawn to sympathize even with the most appalling villains.

From this time on, any secretive person who follows a hidden agenda may use this private speech to review strategies and anxieties. To some extent, this quiet, confiding stance derives not only from the silent speech of the Sonnets but, more directly, from the dramatic voice of the medieval Vice, who traditionally informs the audience of his malevolent plans—in Shakespeare's early plays, most notably in the person of Richard III, and later in Iago, Edmund, and the Macbeths. But now the asides and soliloquies of these and other villains acquire a reflective tone that can hardly help suggesting that their evil plotting is an activity they carry on steadily all the time. That tone, that vocal bearing—befitting less an orderly program perhaps than a personal taking of stock—is audible as well in some speeches of other characters with restless minds, like Hamlet, Prince Hal, Henry IV, Cassius and Brutus, and perhaps Jaques, Juliet, Viola, and Imogen; and in some of those, and in the language of other personages as well (e.g., Ulysses, Camillo, Prospero), that reflective voice seems to carry as well a wisdom that comes less from the mouthing of sententiae than from long experience and meditation, or, in the young, from genuine thoughtful insight. But it is evil or guilty characters especially who appear to be endowed with an almost uninterrupted conscious or nightmare life, those intrigue-ridden humans in whom mischief never sleeps and against whom average mortals like ourselves or their unsuspecting victims hardly stand a chance: Imogen against the unsleeping Iachimo; Duncan and his grooms sleeping and Macduff unwary against the insomniac and ruminative Macbeths; Hermione against Leontes, who complains, “Nor night, nor day, no rest” (The Winter's Tale 2.3.1); and Hamlet's ghostly father, “Sleeping within my orchard” (Hamlet, 1.5.59), against “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” (1.5.42), who even while the Ghost speaks to Hamlet “doth wake to-night and takes his rouse” (1.4.8). Claudius's tormented argument in 3.3.36-72 (“O, my offense is rank”) seems an excerpt from speech of the most private kind, thoughts he must be in the habit of revolving within his own innermost self, like some of the frequently “rapt” (1.3.142) Macbeth's: “I have liv'd long enough” (5.3.22-28) as well as “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” (5.5.19-28). Even Lady Macbeth, her husband's trusty accomplice and instigator, though she shares with him “these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” (3.2.18-19), cannot share his inner discourse with an invisible dagger, with accusing voices of drugged grooms, with Banquo's ghost, weird sisters, and prophetic visions, as he cannot see into her “mind diseas'd” (5.3.40) or her sleepwalking terrors. All too often it is these demonic characters whose private utterances sound most like the “silent thought” of the Sonnets, though their beleaguered victims also can sometimes adopt a reflective tone. But that only makes their position, and ours and the audience's, more treacherous. This new language, available especially to corrupt and wicked characters, allows the seventeenth-century Shakespeare to impress on us more powerfully than before the unexpected realization that such figures do not enter our world entirely as outsiders, from an unfamiliar cosmos of fallen and foreign angels, that they have motives and words and a habit of inner discourse like our own, only more fluent, more nuanced, and probably more dangerous. The gifted evil creature—Claudius, Iago, the Macbeths, and Milton's Satan—is all too fearfully like us, even in us, even is us.

To put it another way, that inner language, deeply ambivalent, becomes even more richly implicated, through its use in Shakespeare's plays, in guilt and sin—“subdued,” as it were, “To what it works in, like the dyer's hand” (S. 111)—and this is a language, voiced in drama, silent in lyric, that much of later English poetry inherits. For many of us the figures of Shakespeare's mature plays have become defined very largely by those utterances of theirs that we think of as coming from these inner depths—the self-declarations, tainted by the “black and [grained] spots” (Hamlet, 3.4.90) of an indelible guilt, of Richard II, of Henry IV and his son, of Hamlet, Claudius, and Gertrude, of both Macbeths, and of Othello and Lear at their moments of self-absorbed distraction. After the Jacobeans, English drama leaves that language behind in favor of couplets and prose, neither in this period capable of carrying the language of luminous meditation on the stage. But much of English poetry, in contrast, follows Shakespeare's dramatic verse into a speech that we usually experience as potentially sounded yet silent.

The silence of this speech probably makes it different from most earlier English verse—from Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, much of whose work was still presumably intended for recitation to a live court audience. The advance of printing would eventually make private reading more common. But Skelton invites expressive performance, much of Wyatt's verse was sung, and it seems likely that Tudor poems, like those we meet in the miscellanies, were often recited. Donne's love poems, too, seem grounded in speech; with their strong colloquial base, they appear to be meant for recitation and sometimes song, for lively entertainment, as do many poems by Herrick, Lovelace, and Suckling, and by some later writers, especially those who write frequently in other meters than iambic or pentameter, and in lively or racy stanzas.

But printing itself, by the sixteenth century, must have made it more and more impracticable for longer poems to be read or heard aloud by most readers. The very accessibility of poetic texts must soon have made silent reading (with all its concomitant options such as skipping, skimming, repeating, speeding and slowing, breaking off or looking back) more convenient, congenial, and solitary, and the physical situation of reading would presumably have led readers to find it more and more natural for the verse they encountered in their private sessions to sound like the same inner discourse they could recognize from their own silent experience.¹⁷

So in the prayerlike poems of Herbert they could hear the quiet, reflective tones of a lively but not necessarily sounded devotional verse. Milton makes the same kind of silent speech majestically audible in elegy and epic, and by the nineteenth century, after the more public narratives and essays of Dryden and Pope, a different rhythmic pattern of blank verse lines, casting Augustan symmetries and balances aside, leads through a generalized eighteenth-century reflectiveness to the self-dramatizing and usually solitary wordstreams of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats—poets whose “inward eye” is “the bliss of solitude” and whose “musèd rhyme,” touching “the sad heart” amid “alien corn,” finds its cadence in the silent bell of the word “forlorn.” That later lyric poetry is often of this kind, that its readers feel comfortable reading it silently, even perhaps that they enjoy its apparently inherent character of guilty or anxious or ambivalent rumination and reverie, seems likely enough. It seems equally likely that Shakespeare's sonnets, though they lead to the classic dramatic expression in English of personal anguish, also provide the language for English poetry's chronic mourning of absence (or at least marshal it the way that it was going), through eloquent—one wants to say fallen—words that we mainly hear in a deeply charged silence.

In effect, the language of inner thought and feeling in English might be described as having this kind of history: first appearing with force perhaps in Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, it finds its most trenchant expression in Shakespeare's Sonnets, migrates from there to his plays, survives powerfully in Milton's poetry, and then, after being approached in verse for much of the eighteenth century, is redramatized (but silently) in Wordsworth and later nineteenth-century lyric poetry, however widely this poetry varies in tone: from the controlled rhapsodies of Tennyson to the jaunty but unspoken (often, unspeakable) monologues of Browning, the musical reveries of Swinburne, the suppressed outbursts of Hopkins, and the moody meditations of Yeats. In modernist poetry it sometimes takes to disjunctive forms in order to foreground neurosis, dream, and trauma, and at last reemerges, blocked and all but silenced, barely voiced, in the stylized drama of Beckett and Pinter.

THE POEM AS BOOK

I am to wait, though waiting so be hell,
Not blame your pleasure, be it ill or well.

—Shakespeare, Sonnet 58

But surely poets for centuries—even those who appear in Shakespeare's plays—have been in the habit of reading their poems aloud to each other or to larger audiences, and lovers of the poems of Tennyson, Kipling, and Yeats, of Longfellow, Poe, and Frost, have been reciting them in public or private for generations. Even if we grant that this poetry of silence has taken the route I suggest and has come to dominate the poetic earscape for much of the last two centuries, there has surely been a strong countermovement that has run through Dryden and Pope, those public poets who constantly engage us as immediate listeners to their full-voiced verse; through prosodic dissenters like Smart, Blake, and Whitman; and gathering momentum in poets still of the silent tradition perhaps but moving toward open talk, blues, jazz, or rock—Pound, Williams, Langston Hughes, Ginsberg, and a host of others. But, except for anomalies like Vachel Lindsay or Dylan Thomas, not in our century till the late 1950s do poems convincingly requiring to be sounded come to be composed, partly inspired by popular-music “poets” like the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The poetry of open or free forms, indebted to rap, reggae, or other contemporary musical forms, committed to performance, associating poetry with ritual occasions, celebrations, and even Dionysian joy in plenitude, and usually intensely hostile to the more silent Apollonian verse of tradition, serves in our time as its chief challenger.

But that tradition remains strong. I would guess that even today most American poetry is read silently and is written by poets with the understanding that it usually will be unsounded but, they hope, silently “heard,” an eminently speakable verse that normally goes unspoken. Even if they think of their work as, ideally, read aloud by an excellent reader (themselves or another), they know that most of the time it will be read without sound from the page, that the poem, in effect, is a book.

We recognize that the language of Shakespeare's Sonnets is not entirely confessional, distressed, aggrieved. We should notice at least one other voice we “hear” in these poems, the voice in which, as in lyric poetry of all ages and many languages, the poet, like Hamlet or Iachimo, consigns or confides his thoughts, observations, and insights to writing, as a means of preserving them, delayed messages for himself or others. Sonnet 77 recommends this procedure to the friend, whose thoughts, committed to the pages of his writing tablet, can be retrieved at a later time “To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.” In the Sonnets, however, as in much earlier and later lyric verse, material of this kind is likely to have a personal edge, as it typically does in the plays. Wisdom (or foolish generalization) is not to be detached from the person who speaks it, and from his or her personal predicament or character. The sententiae that precede and modulate into John of Gaunt's impressive description of England's greatness are those of an ill and foolish old man who wants the sense or self-control to save his eloquence for Richard's ear. Similarly, the expression of general truths in Sonnets 66, 94, 129, and others can hardly be detached from the situation of their implicated speaker, whose local experience often leads to general statements about life (e.g., in S. 25, 39, 54, 57, 59, 60, 70, 84, 116, 119, 121). Later English poetry, too, includes many poems that serve as delayed and indefinitely delayable messages of general reflection to whoever is disposed to hear them—the poet, an absent lover, or anyone at all. The resource of writing offers a poet the opportunity to transfer the silent, unspoken thoughts of his brain, however inflected with personal feeling, to the equally silent register of, say, a sonnet.

Unlike plays, which offer us a sequence of voices actually heard and normally irreversible and unrecoverable, poems provide a continuous silent speech, which is easily recoverable from the writing or printing in which it is coded. In a sense, the page is always speaking, though at any moment no one may be listening; the paper has kept, in effect, the property of silence it had in the forest as a tree. Or to put it in an opposite image: “All verbal expression, whether put into writing, print, or the computer, is bound to sound forever.”¹⁸ The page, the poem, the book is always carrying on its inner discourse, like one of the driven characters in Renaissance plays, or like the electrical current that keeps running through our houses though all the lights have been turned off. In a literate culture, the library preserves the common wisdom, even when the doors are locked for the night; the book itself is an emblem of this feature of the culture. But of all books, the poem best epitomizes this relation of books to a culture, partly because of all writings poems are most recently (and most anciently) oral, even to the extent that their acoustical features (such as rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and phonological contrasts and balances) are still prominent in this silent medium; and partly because its language is often, even usually, imitative of the language we use in speaking to ourselves or in imagining our speaking with others. The poem is a quintessential book, always ready to be silently (or even vocally) read, as the book is a quintessential library. The poem may not always explicitly mourn an absence, but it waits, like a letter, in its permanently tuned silence—or like the lover of Sonnets 57 and 58—not for its own but for its reader's presence:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
.....O let me suffer, being at your beck,
Th' imprisoned absence of your liberty—
.....Be where you list, your charter is so strong,
That you yourself may privilege your time
To what you will.

From this point of view, confined to the page, denied its voice, what is poetry but silent speech that aspires to the condition of sound? But therein lie both its limitation and its strength, as an image of perpetual desire, like those figures on Keats's Grecian urn, or like Yeats's image of Keats as “a schoolboy” who

          made-being poor, ailing and ignorant,
Shut out from all the luxury of the world
.....Luxuriant song.(19)

The emphasis of many of the Sonnets on separation and absence, on silent and patient waiting, on the “ever-fixèd mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken” (S. 116), even in the face of life events that exhibit clearly all the evils of alteration and inconstancy, should not surprise us. Art always depends on negations, on frames that mark it off from what it isn't. If Renaissance portraits provide images that mime the living force they lack, drama offers a voiced enactment of actions that must not be violated by the actual. That Shakespeare understood how art thrives on such conventions, and on their deliberate ruptures, appears in the silence of the Sonnets (which may always break into sound), in the imagery, the supposes, and the intricately coded mirrorings of plays from A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Tempest (which greatly amplify the apparent range of events represented on the stage), and is nowhere made more manifest than when, almost at the end of his career, he authorizes the statue of Hermione, a likeness without life, to shatter the barrier between nature and art and from her stony sixteen-year absence step once more into life.

Notes

1. John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 9.

2. All quotations from the Sonnets are from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).

3. Later New Critical analysis made a point of stressing that “a poem is a dramatic fiction no less than a play” (Reuben Brower, The Fields of Light, quoted from Perspectives on Poetry, ed. James L. Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver [New York: Oxford University Press, 1968]) and “its speaker … no less a creation of the words on the printed page” (98). What Brower and others knew but didn't think necessary to say was that the “voice” and “tone” of a poem are also fictions. They are what we would hear if the poem on the page were to be read aloud, but in the usage of many critics this necessary qualification is not made, probably because the point is unimportant in the classroom, where the poem or the parts of it being discussed usually are read aloud. The contradiction becomes evident only on written examinations, when students are urged to write in virtual silence about such matters as voice, tone, and rhythm.

   But as Barbara Herrnstein Smith insists in Poetic Closure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), a poem is not an actual but “only a possible utterance” (16); “poetry is a representational art and … each poem is the representation of an act of speech” (17). Smith never forgets that any poet we read or hear may or may not be read aloud, and that what she claims for its form must be valid for both possibilities.

4. “Voices That Figure in Four Quartets,” in The Placing of T. S. Eliot, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 152-62.

5. In T. S. Eliot's Silent Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), John T. Mayer studies the extent to which the “voices” composing the psychological dramas of Eliot's early verse represent internal, often fragmented, elements in his speakers' psychic consciousnesses, not their spoken words. Mayer shows how these silent voices differ from the voices of comparable nineteenth-century poems in, for example, their disjunctive syntax. But, relevant as his subject is to mine, he does not discuss whether we, the audience for this poetry, are to hear its words silently or aloud.

6. For more on this subject, see my “An Almost Oral Art: Shakespeare's Language on Stage and Page,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 159-69; and “Blank Verse in the Elizabethan Theater: Language That Vanishes, Language That Keeps,” in The Elizabethan Theatre XII (1993), ed. A. L. Magnusson and C. E. McGee (Toronto: P. D. Meany, 1993), 1-18.

7. This paragraph, and the one that follows, are based on passages in my “Voices That Figure in Four Quartets,” 154, 157.

8. Michel de Montaigne, “Apology for Raymonde Sebond,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 336.

9. As Booth suggests, the parallelism between “o'er-read” and “rehearse” in lines 10-11 encourages us to understand “your being” and “my gentle verse” as equivalent. Still, line 11 “provides its own object for rehearse—your being (future tongues shall rehearse your being, i.e. recount your life, tell about you)” (279).

10. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 254-56.

11. Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 89.

12. Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare's Soliloquies, trans. Charity Scott Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987), 6. The Arnold quotation is on page 3.

13. The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 61.

14. In Ferry's view, developed in persuasive detail in The “Inward” Language, Sidney and Shakespeare “explode the boundaries of poetic convention” (28) as they “work through and beyond depiction of the lover's heart struck first by Cupid's dart, then by the lady's scorn, to an exploration of ‘how hard true sorrow hits’ [S. 120] when lovers injure one another's feelings” (28). Their sonnets' “more than usual intimacy of address, their elaboration of the lover's involvement in causing pain to himself and to his beloved, their dramatization of his imaginative entrance into another person's heart, make these poems radically different in kind from a representative sixteenth-century complaint” so that they become “intimate, private explorations of autobiographical material” (29). Sidney and Shakespeare are “the only two love poets to make central to their sonnet sequences the issue of showing in verse what is truly in the heart” (29), instead of seeking within for a reflection of the divine love or the conventional imagistic representation of human love.

15. Cf. Katharine Eisaman Maus's view that “in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England the sense of discrepancy between ‘inward disposition’ and ‘outward appearance’ seems unusually urgent and consequential for a very large number of people” (Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 13). Such a discrepancy is explored insistently and intensely in the Sonnets and with deepening subtlety in the plays that follow. Maus seems to me to argue very cogently against those critics who either “claim that a conception of personal inwardness hardly existed at all in Renaissance England” or “acknowledge that the rhetoric of inwardness is highly developed … but maintain that these terms inevitably refer to outward, public, or political factors” (2); and she notes that Ferry, in denying an inwardness in the love poetry of poets other than Sidney and Shakespeare, does so “without, apparently, sharing the philosophical agenda that motivates” these other critics of subjectivity (27n.)

16. Still, the need of the speaker to defend himself against the imputation of a vileness that may amount to a kind of behavioral madness is evident in Sonnet 121 and seems parallel to Hamlet's defensive tactics against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

    Carol Thomas Neely's study, “Documents in Madness: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare's Tragedies and Early Modern Culture,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 315-38, is helpful here: “Shakespeare … dramatizes madness primarily through a peculiar language more often than through physiological symptoms, stereotyped behaviors or iconographic conventions. … Shakespeare's language of madness is characterized by fragmentation, obsession, and repetition, and … ‘quotation.’ … The mad are ‘beside themselves’; their discourse is not their own” (323).

17. See David M. Bergeron, ed., Reading and Writing in Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), and especially Bergeron's helpful introductory essay; and Gerd Baumann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), a volume in which two essays are particularly pertinent: Walter J. Ong, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” 23-50; and Keith Thomas, “Literacy in Early Modern England,” 97-131.

18. Ong, “Writing Is a Technology That Restructures Thought,” 31.

19. W. B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus,” in The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1983), 161-62.