SOURCE: “Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism,” in Style, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 1-30.

[In the essay below, Hedley argues that Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair young man are narcissistic in their distinctive use of language and form.]

The love that is celebrated in the first one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets is narcissistic, as several commentators have noticed¹: “it is love by identification,” as C. L. Barber explains (662).² Writing about the Sonnets in 1960, Barber preferred to try to understand the lover's posture in these poems “without resort to psychoanalytic formulations” (667); more recently, however, Joseph Pequigney has analyzed that posture in terms of Freud's account of “the inclination toward a narcissistic object choice” in homosexual men. The parallels are so close and so pervasive, Pequigney argues, that the Sonnets “could usefully be considered a proof-text” for Freud's account of homosexual object choice. Though Pequigney has resorted to psychoanalytic formulations, his discussion of narcissism in the Sonnets is no less thematically oriented than Barber's, and indeed every critic who has discussed the sequence in terms of narcissism (cf. also Stephen Spender, Philip Martin, and Paul Zweig) has been more preoccupied with narcissism as theme or content than with its formal or stylistic manifestations.

What I hope to demonstrate is that Shakespeare's Sonnets are narcissistic not only in the sense that they thematize love by identification, but also in the sense that they involve the poet in a distinctively narcissistic use of language and poetic form. Like dreams, Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair young man are doing a certain kind of psychic “work” that has a number of symptoms or hallmarks, including the semantic instability of their language. Wordplay is pervasive in the Sonnets, and whereas it sometimes enriches their arguments in ways that are pleasurable and satisfying for us as readers, at other times it interferes with their intelligibility and creates relationships between consecutive sonnets that are bewilderingly unstable. This kind of semantic instability is closely associated, as I will argue, with the narcissistic agenda of the sequence.

Obsessive repetition, contradiction, and non sequitur are also pervasive, and they too collaborate with the narcissistic agenda of the Sonnets. Thus the order in which they were published in the 1609 Quarto seems unsatisfactory not because it is not, but because it probably is, the order in which these poems were actually written. The sequence is informed by a repetitive, oscillating rhythm of identification and estrangement between the poet and the fair young man, whose “beauty's form,” as he asserts in sonnet 24.1-2, “Mine eye hath … stelled … in table of my heart.” In order to keep that image alive, he must be continually inventing and overcoming pretexts of estrangement or of difference between himself and it. At intervals throughout the sequence this narcissistic imperative subverts the linear, diachronic processes of exposition, argumentation, and story telling on behalf of a more primal imaginative tendency that is synchronistic and tautological. That tendency, which is also served by wordplay, cannot finally be accommodated within the Symbolic Order: it is at odds with language-as-communication and with the boundaries language establishes between self and not-self, past and present, “mine” and “thine.”

“THOU ART THY MOTHER’S GLASS”

The Ovidian myth of Narcissus was a well-established reference point for the western tradition of literary love making long before Freud called attention to its saliency. In the Roman de la Rose, for example, the fountain in which the lover first catches sight of his “rose” carries the inscription “Here starf the fayre Narcissus.”³ In Petrarch's “Una candida cerva” the miraculous allegorical vision of Laura as a pure white doe is said to have lasted until “I fell into the water, and she disappeared.”⁴ Joel Fineman has recently argued that far from offering an alternative to the ostensibly heterosexual orientation of the “Petrarchan” poet-lover, Shakespeare's Sonnets bring out into the open “the homosexual truth subtending the poetics of admiration from Beatrice onwards” (17). What Fineman means, I take it, by “the homosexual truth” that “subtends” this tradition is that the Petrarchan poet-lover is ostensibly in love with a member of “the opposite sex,” but really with a psychic projection that corresponds to an idealized image of himself, what Freud called the “ideal ego.” If Fineman is right, then what is unusual in Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair young man is not the narcissistic posture of the lover, but his openness about it: narcissism is explicit in these poems both as an attribute of the beloved and as the matrix of the poet's love for him.

The first seventeen sonnets of the sequence, the so-called “procreation” sonnets, accuse the fair young man of narcissism and warn him that if he persists in “having traffic with thyself alone” he will suffer Narcissus's fate. Northrop Frye, in his influential essay on the Sonnets, made the erroneous assumption that by urging his friend to marry the poet was trying to cure him of narcissism: the purpose of sonnets 1-17, according to Frye, is “the awakening of Narcissus” (17). But as Stephen Spender more accurately points out, the poet is not recommending to the young man that he cease to be narcissistic: procreation is recommended in these sonnets as a way to give Narcissus's posture a new lease on life (Spender 120-21).⁵ A child, the poet argues, would renew the image both he and the young man are in love with and thereby defeat the natural process of aging that threatens to destroy its beauty. Sonnet 3 thus begins with the invitation to “Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest, / Now is the time that face should form another” (3.1-2).⁶

The fair young man is not, however, the only narcissist in the case. As Zweig points out, the poet's advice to him in sonnet 3 “is the advice he himself has followed in the course of his strange infatuation. If the poet loves the boy … it is because the boy's youth has become a rejuvenating mirror which enables him to roll back the years and conquer the worst enemy of Narcissus: time's encroaching ugliness” (105). In loving the young man he recovers an (idealized) image of himself, an image of which the aging process had bereft him. And thus after seventeen sonnets that urge the young man to beget a son, the poet begins to proffer his own imagination—and his poems—as a mirror in which the young man's beauty can outlive the face that wears it: “Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live young” (19.13-14). The language of his vow is here crucially ambiguous: “My love” means either “the one I love” or “my love for him” or both. What this ambiguity suggests is that the image he would preserve is a narcissistic projection, the figment of his own desire.⁷

Verbal ambiguity is pervasive in the Sonnets, and I will argue later that the pervasiveness of ambiguity and double entendre is itself an important aspect of “the poetics of narcissism.” At this point, however, it is enough to point out that the poet seems never to tire of juggling in this way with possessives, especially in phrases and compounds like “my love,” “my self,” “your will[iam]” “your eye [I],” which can be doubly inflected by their syntactic context to mean both “you whom I love/am thinking about/am forced to obey” and “my feelings/thoughts/wishes/self.” The proverbial notion that “a friend is another I,” which Stephen Booth finds explicitly referred to in at least nine of the fair-youngman sonnets (cf. Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets 192, 333), is thus hauntingly implicit in many others as well. With repetition, what passes at first for a lover's hyperbole or jeu d'esprit comes more and more to connote anxiety and, in poems that glance at the beloved's unfaithfulness or unworthiness, a pathetic defenselessness against the tendency toward narcissistic identification with him.

In his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud explained “the inclination toward a narcissistic object-choice”⁸ as the outcome of an intense erotic attachment to the mother that is repressed during the Oedipal crisis but resurfaces in adolescence to control the son's erotic life. Ovid's myth of Narcissus, as Freud had noticed, is the story of a boy whose mother loved him too much.⁹ In adulthood, identifying with his mother, such a son “takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love” (100). His love objects are “revivals of himself in childhood”; he loves them in the way that his mother loved him:

Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime,
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time. …

(3.8-12)

Reviewing Pequigney's and Fineman's psychoanalytic studies of the Sonnets in 1987, W. Thomas MacCary suggests that this paradigm has a broader range of application than Freud himself was inclined to give it. MacCary argues that sonnet 3 and others recall an early childhood experience that is continually being reenacted by all of us in our most intimate relationships, not only those of us “who persist in making ‘mirror object-choices’” (229).¹⁰ In loving another we seek to recapture the experience of being loved that is associated with “the mirror stage,” the point at which, even before the acquisition of language, the self first begins to be envisaged. At this stage of development, as it has been delineated by Jacques Lacan and elaborated by other theorists,¹¹ every child begins to conceive of itself as a distinct, separate person by “introjecting” a maternal image of itself (cf. Wilden 173-74; Muller and Richardson 29-30). Like the Oedipal crisis, a later stage of development that coincides with the acquisition of language and with entry into the Symbolic Order, the preverbal “mirror stage” involves an experience of loss as well as gain: what is lost is a primordial sense of oneness with the mother; what is gained is an “ideal ego,” our self encountered first as the apple of her eye. When we fall in love the pre-Oedipal “mirror stage” reasserts itself to some degree: both the intensity of our emotion and the imaginary status of its object are signals or symptoms of this. And thus MacCary concurs with Fineman in suggesting that to make a “mirror object choice” in adulthood is simply to render explicit the narcissistic basis of all romantic love.

In sonnet 62, about halfway through the sequence, the poet explicitly acknowledges the narcissistic basis of his own infatuation. He begins the sonnet by accusing himself of “self-love”: “Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye / And all my soul and all my every part” (62.1-2). But after elaborating this self-accusation for two full quatrains, he abruptly withdraws and revises it in view of the image he actually sees whenever he looks in the mirror:

But when my glass shows me myself indeed
Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Sin so self-loving were iniquity.
          'Tis thee (my self) that for my self I praise,(12)
          Painting my age with beauty of thy days.

(62.9-12)

“For my self” in this context means both “instead of myself” and “on my own behalf,” calling attention once again to the intrapsychic status of the mirror relation. What the couplet thus confesses is that self-love has been rekindled in the experience of loving another: the “ideal ego” is lost but then found again in the “ego ideal” that mirrors it back.¹³

Sonnet 62 calls attention also to the strange economy of this transaction—whereby, as Freud explains, “the subject seems to yield up his whole personality in favor of an object-cathexis” (“On Narcissism” 76).¹⁴ So ready is the poet of the Sonnets to do this that, as he explains to the friend in sonnet 88,

When thou shalt be disposed to set me light,
And place my merit in the eye of scorn,
Upon thy side against myself I'll fight,
And prove thee virtuous, though thou art forsworn.

(88.1-4)

To be willing to give the young man's faithlessness the color of honor at the expense of his own reputation seems extravagantly self-abnegating, foolishly altruistic: but the poet goes on to explain that “I by this will be a gainer too,”

For bending all my loving thoughts on thee,
The injuries that to my self I do,
Doing thee vantage, double vantage me.

(88.9-12)

He too will be a gainer in this transaction insofar as he preserves the ego ideal in which he has a narcissistic investment.

If, however, the lover could and did “yield up his whole personality in favor of an object-cathexis,” he would no longer have a standpoint from which to say, “I love you,” or to write poems that say so: thus his inclination to identify with the beloved must finally be resisted or repressed. In sonnet 39 it seems that we can watch the poet work this out for himself. The sonnet begins with a rhetorical question—“Oh how thy worth with manners may I sing, / When thou art all the better part of me?”—a hyperbolical compliment to the beloved, which is then repeated with a greater sense of urgency in lines 3 and 4: “What can mine own praise to mine own self bring, / And what is't but mine own when I praise thee?” Reiterated thus, the question conveys that the poet finds his own posture unsettling and problematic; as he juggles with personal pronouns he both asserts and recoils from total identification with the beloved. In the second quatrain he argues, somewhat paradoxically, that for the sake of their love they must put some geographical distance between them: “Even for this, let us divided live, / And our dear love lose name of single one. …” Just as, in the Ovidian myth, Narcissus surprised himself with the wish “that what I love were absent from me!” (lines 467-68),¹⁵ so in the last six lines of this poem absence is hailed as a bitter but necessary expedient:

O absence, what a torment wouldst thou prove,
Were it not thy sour leisure gave sweet leave
To entertain the time with thoughts of love,
Which time and thoughts so sweetly doth deceive,
          And that thou teachest how to make one twain,
          By praising him here who doth hence remain.

(39.9-14)

Identification with the object of one's love is a regressive tendency that must finally be resisted, according to Freud, if the ego is to survive as a center of volition and consciousness. In sonnet 39 it seems that the poet knows this and is willing to “name” the condition of “oneness” he desires only in the context of insisting that it not be consummated. But the argument as he frames it is not about selfhood as a metaphysical or psychic abstraction; the topic of this sonnet is his poethood, his capacity to go on writing poems. The suggestion is that distance between himself and his beloved friend must be continually reinvented or recircumstanced in order for love poems to continue to be written.

There is only one poem to be written about perfect “at-onement” in love, a memorial poem whose lovers are beyond being able to use the pronouns I and you, and who were never human in any case: “The Phoenix and Turtle.” The argument of that poem is that such a relationship confounds the linguistic and logical categories (“Number there in love was slain. … Property was thus appalled, … Reason in itself confounded”) that must nevertheless be brought into play in any attempt to expound its truth. The phoenix and the turtle were miraculously two and yet one: this miracle took them out of the world as we know it into eternity. In the Sonnets, “love by identification” is able to be sustained as a human, subjective experience only imperfectly, only insofar as distance is continually reopened, difference continually reestablished, between the one who says “I” in these poems and his beloved “alter ego.” No sooner has one pretext of estrangement been overcome, than another must present itself. This, I would suggest, is “the riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets”: it is necessary always for the poet to be “praising him here who doth hence remain.”

“'TIS THEE (MY SELF) THAT FOR MY SELF I PRAISE”

Up to this point I have focused primarily on the psychic profile of narcissism that sonnets 1 through 126 disclose to us: this is ground that has already been covered by other critics, most notably Pequigney and Zweig. Turning now to formal and stylistic manifestations of narcissism, I will be engaging more closely with the language of the Sonnets at two different levels. At what might be termed the macrostructural level, I will be taking on the controversial problem of the sequence as such: the sporadic unsatisfactoriness of the 1609 Quarto order is occasioned, I will argue, by the poet's narcissistic use of language. At a microstructural level, I will be exploring some typical instances of verbal ambiguity and wordplay in order to propose an alternative to Booth's classic account of the way the sonnets' language works.

Along with psychic ambivalence, verbal ambiguity is a typical feature of poems that touch upon the narcissistic character of the poet's love for the fair young man. In two of the instances already cited in the previous section of this essay—“My love shall in my verse ever live young” and “'Tis thee (my self) that for my self I praise”—the ambiguity comes across as an intentional play on words because in both cases its meaning is stabilized and harvested by a couplet that caps the poem's argument like the punch line of a joke. Other instances of verbal ambiguity are not, however, stabilized and contained to this extent by the formal or the rhetorical context in which they occur. Many of these more unstable and elusive ambiguities create problematic linkages between consecutive sonnets.

Because the 1609 Quarto order is sporadically disconcerting in this way, several editors of the Sonnets have tried to rearrange them: Hyder Rollins gives a comprehensive history of this activity up into the 1940s, and in 1968 an ambitious and impressive rearrangement was attempted by Brents Stirling in The Shakespeare Sonnet Order.¹⁶ More recently Pequigney has come to the defense of the 1609 Quarto and of its editor, Thomas Thorpe. Meanwhile, however, Adena Rosmarin and Margreta de Grazia have argued that the Shakespeare sonnet order has no significance as such and that to read the Sonnets as a sequence is to subject them anachronistically to post-Romantic expectations of finding beneath or behind them a love story of a familiar kind.¹⁷ My own contention would be that the Quarto order is significant but also disconcerting. It is disconcerting not because the sequence stands in need of editorial rearrangement, but because at intervals its language promotes and fosters, yet also frustrates, a reader's efforts to establish a coherent story line. As we make such efforts—and I would argue that often we are virtually compelled to make them—we become complicit in an artistic process whose workings we have already glimpsed in sonnet 39, whose goal is to postpone the death of Narcissus by continually destabilizing and then recontextualizing the narcissistic mirror relation. Let us begin to look at this process, and at the way in which the reader becomes implicated in it, by focusing on a notorious problem spot in the sequence as we have it, the apparent non sequitur that occurs as we move from sonnets 33-35 to 36, 37 and beyond.

In sonnets 33-35, for the first time in the sequence as we have it, the poet appears to lose confidence in his friend's honesty: he refers obliquely but unmistakably to behavior that has estranged them. From one sonnet to the next, we seem to be watching him struggle to cope with his own hurt and disillusionment. He wants to be able to forgive the friend, and by the end of sonnet 34 he has managed to do this (“Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheeds, / And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds” [34.13-14]); but then in sonnet 35 he finds that in this effort he has compromised his own integrity and become an “accessary” to his friend's crime against him. Sonnet 36 appears at first to be a continuation of this same conversation, beginning—reluctantly, as it seems—with the proposal that they part: “Let me confess that we two must be twain” (36.1). Oddly enough, however, the reason the poet goes on to give in sonnet 36 why “we two must be twain” is that he himself has done something dishonorable and does not want the friend to risk damaging his own spotless reputation by continuing to be seen with him.¹⁸

All five sonnets are closely linked as arguments and also by their metaphoric language. Sonnets 33 and 34 both liken the friend to a sun whose splendor has been “stained.” In the couplet of 34 he is found to be remorseful, hence worthy to be forgiven, and then sonnet 35 begins by urging him to “No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done” and produces a series of exculpatory analogies that hark back to the metaphoric language of sonnet 33: “Roses have thorns, … / Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun” (35.1-3). Up to the end of 35, references to the friend's “trespass” become increasingly explicit and urgent; then suddenly, by the end of the first quatrain of 36, the speaker appears to have forgotten that his friend did anything to disillusion him or put their relationship in jeopardy. “We must be twain,” he urges, “Although our undivided loves are one” (36.1-2):

I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame,
Nor thou with public kindness honor me
Unless thou take that honor from thy name,
          But do not so; I love thee in such sort
          As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.

(36.9-14)

Whereas in 33 and 34 he speaks as an unwilling witness to his friend's disgrace, here and again in sonnet 37 he speaks as if the friend were an unwilling witness to his.

John Dover Wilson, the editor with the greatest penchant for biographical story telling, calls this little run of sonnets “the chief puzzle of the 1609 text” (xxxiii). If Shakespeare had intended for the Sonnets to tell a story, he would surely have managed it better than this, as Edward Hubler drily observed in The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1952 (8).¹⁹ Many editors of the Sonnets have tried to help Shakespeare tell a better story by rearranging them, but rearrangement is hard to justify in the case of sonnets 33-37 because of the extensive thematic and metaphoric linkage between them. Thus Stirling, who agrees with earlier editors of the Sonnets that the Quarto order needs to be rearranged at this point, surmises that it may nevertheless preserve the original order of these poems' composition (117).

During the heyday of the New Criticism Booth proposed, in his Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, that we accept the Quarto order as it stands and surrender to the highly unusual reading experience the Sonnets have to offer us. With a series of dazzlingly persuasive exercises in close reading Booth demonstrated that within, as well as between, sonnets we are continually having, as we read, to adjust or even revise our conception of what the poet is talking about or where his argument is headed. Booth contended that this “experience of his own mind in flux” is finally very satisfying for the reader: it is an experience of meaning making in process, of “coherences rather than coherence” (Essay 171). We should allow ourselves to have this kind of experience, Booth argued, and not be panicked into “arbitrarily maintained distortions” (14) by editors and critics who have misguidedly undertaken to stabilize the poems' meanings for us.

At this point in the sequence, however, and at several other points as well, it is very hard to keep from trying to resolve contradictions within and between the arguments of consecutive sonnets. The kind of reading experience Booth takes to be normative for the sequence as a whole is indeed typical of its most often anthologized sonnets, which are poems of meditative soliloquy with high-redundancy arguments. But sonnets 33-37 and many others also are not self-enclosed soliloquies: they presuppose things that have happened, using deictic words and metaphors with unstated tenors to refer to a social world beyond the poems themselves: “That thou hast her, it is not all my grief, / And yet it may be said I loved her dearly” (42.1-2); “That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect” (70.1); “Alas 'tis true, I have gone here and there, / And made myself a motley to the view” (110.1-2); “That you were once unkind befriends me now” (120.1). And thus the first line of sonnet 35, “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done,” is hard to interpret otherwise than as an expression of commiseration or forgiveness addressed to someone whose recent behavior has been dishonorable and is on his conscience. If the very next sonnet appears to be part of the same conversation and continues to talk of stained integrity and guilty deeds but has abruptly reversed the roles of guilty party and comforter, this is indeed “hard to think about” (Booth, Essay 1). Whereas the experience of “coherences rather than coherence” is often pleasurable, at times like this it is disconcerting and perplexing, in ways that Booth's ideal reader would prefer to ignore.

Booth might well be thinking of sonnets 33-37, however, when he compares the reader's experience to “a dream where one accepts improbable transformations without hesitation and where one slips imperceptibly from one frame of reference to another” (Essay 167). The problem with this analogy is that it begs the question of how the reader can be induced to dream another man's dream. Poems have a different psychic and social status from dreams: Freud explained the difference in 1911 by suggesting that the artist is a very special kind of dreamer, one who “allows full play to his erotic and ambitious wishes” but nevertheless “finds a way of return from this world of fantasy back to reality.” Using the resources of a particular medium of representation, the artist “moulds his phantasies into a new kind of reality, and men concede them a justification as valuable reflections of actual life” (“Formulations” 224).²⁰

Perhaps instead of rejecting Booth's analogy with dreaming, we need to take hold of it differently: perhaps what we encounter in these poems from time to time is mental activity that is not fully intelligible because it has some of the lability and improbability that belongs to unconscious thinking. If so, then our own interpretive activity becomes a form of “secondary elaboration”: as we read through the sonnets in sequence, we become involved in trying to complete a process Shakespeare has left incomplete, whereby erotic wishes are subjected to what Freud sometimes called “considerations of intelligibility.”²¹ We flesh out the story the sequence seems to be gesturing towards; we try to explain away contradictions between the arguments of consecutive sonnets; or we decide, in spite of all the rhetorical and metaphoric linkages between them, that an abrupt change of subject has occurred from one sonnet to the next. We cannot finally succeed in making the Quarto order work, but we are inveigled into this kind of interpretive elaboration at intervals throughout the sequence by the way in which consecutive sonnets hang together yet pull apart.

In this particular instance, however, and in others also, the manifest incongruity of consecutive sonnets can be accounted for psychoanalytically in terms of the latent economy of “love by identification.” Sonnet 33 destabilizes the narcissistic mirror relation between the poet and his alter ego by putting the friend's integrity in question, thereby opening up the possibility of there being more to this young man than the beautiful face the poet is in love with.²² Having entertained this possibility, which is “realistic” but very painful for him, he then struggles to come to terms with it in sonnets 33 and 34—first by making light of it, then by acknowledging his friend's duplicity and accepting it. Neither approach meets his need to preserve the young man's image intact. “All men make faults,” and yet his beloved must be the one exception to this general rule. In sonnet 35, therefore, he takes upon himself the doubleness or duplicity he had at first attributed to the friend, exchanging roles with him in a still unspecified scenario of betrayal. He restores the friend's “good report” at his own expense. But this series of shifts cannot be plausibly circumstanced: in terms of Freud's account of the artist's task, we could say that at this point in the sequence he has not successfully moulded his erotic wishes into persuasive representations of actual life.

Looking more closely at the process of role reversal as it plays itself out in these sonnets, we can discern a series of interlinked permutations of Narcissus's relationship to his own reflection. To begin with, the poet faces up to an image of the friend that is stained or tarnished: he is a witness to the friend's faithlessness in sonnet 33 and in 34 takes on the role of plaintiff against him. In sonnets 34 and 35 the friend remains fixed in the negative role of false friend or sinner, but the poet moves toward identification with him through a paradigmatic series of roles: from “adverse party” to “advocate” to “accessary.” In sonnet 36 he makes the final move in this paradigmatic series, reversing the positions he and the friend had occupied in the original face-off: he replaces the friend as the one whose image is blotted with infamy. As we move through this series, the adversarial opposition is intensified, then attenuated. The sun similitude of sonnet 33 represents the friend's falsehood as a misfortune rather than a crime, but with the first line of 34 he begins to be accused of having actively offended. In sonnets 36 and 37 the same thing happens in reverse: in 36 the poet refers to “my bewailed guilt” (36.10), but then in 37 he portrays himself as having been “made lame by fortune's dearest spite” (37.3). Thus, in both the first and last sonnet of the series the blemished or blotted one is passive to his own disgrace; in between, each in turn is made guilty of having acted badly. Considered as a series of reactions to things that have happened, acts that have been committed in the world beyond the poems, this little run of sonnets is perplexing and incongruous; meanwhile, however, it harbors a series of permutations of Narcissus's relationship to his own reflection that is complete and symmetrical.

By the end of this series, the poet is once again in a position to “take all my comfort of thy worth and truth” (37.4). This is the setup that had been destabilized by sonnet 33; with its restoration the poet's enthusiasm for his own poetic project is renewed, and sonnet 38 becomes an occasion for the sequence itself to engage in self-reflection:

How can my muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse.
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?

(38.1-8)

Itself an instance of “my verse,” the poem offers itself to its addressee as the best of all possible mirrors: reading it, he will be calling forth his own reflection. The mirror relation includes the poet also: insofar as there is “aught in me worthy perusal,” his own best self is embodied in his poems for the friend to recognize. What he is claiming, however, is that his own best self is nothing more than a mirror image of his friend's excellence. The mutuality and circularity of the narcissistic mirror relation are formally emphasized by the second quatrain, where “me” is made to rhyme with “thee” (38.7-8). The sonnet immediately following is 39, where the poet suggests that “I” and “thee” part company not because one of them has betrayed the other or because either of them is unworthy to be loved, but so that the poet may be able to go on writing poems like these.

Insofar as there is a love story behind this part of the sequence it is not, I would argue, one that Shakespeare “meant” to tell us in the usual sense. It consists of intrapsychic events and unfolds according to an oscillating rhythm of alienation and at-onement.²³ Like dreams, the sonnets are doing a certain kind of psychic “work,” whose objective is to defer the death of Narcissus. They keep a narcissistic love relation alive by continually destabilizing it, continually reopening and recontextualizing distance or disparity between the lover and his mirror image, his “other I.”

“TAKE ALL MY LOVES, MY LOVE”

In sonnets 40-42, the conventional language of love affords still another way of arranging for “our dear love” to “lose name of single one.” This happens quite literally in sonnets 40-42, as the word love is used at first to mean “our love for each other,” but then begins also (it is hard to be sure precisely when) to have another referent: a woman both men are involved with.²⁴ Again the mirror relation is destabilized, and again, as in 33-37, it is unclear at first what the friend has done or what is at issue between them.²⁵ In sonnet 40 the poet hints that something is the matter by juggling obsessively and possessively with the word love:

Take all my loves, my love, yea take them all:
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

(40.1-4)

As we come to these lines from sonnet 39, it seems that “all my loves” refers to the poetic tributes he had undertaken to produce in his friend's absence: “By praising him here who doth hence remain” (39.14). If so, then the problem is that the friend is flattered by these tributes but does not give of himself in return. But Douglas Bush, in his Penguin edition of the Sonnets, glosses these lines with an interpretive hypothesis that takes its departure not from sonnet 39, but from 41 and 42: “read in the context of later sonnets, the allusion seems to be to the poet's mistress whom the friend has taken” (60; italics mine).²⁶ And sure enough, once we have moved on to sonnet 41, where the poet accuses his friend quite unmistakably of “straying” into his mistress's arms, it is easy to read an allusion to the lady back into the hectic quibbling of sonnet 40. The language of sonnet 40 is thus ambiguous: if we try to resolve the ambiguity and stabilize the meaning of “all my loves” with reference to the immediately preceding sonnet this will work, but a more suggestive resolution is suggested by later sonnets—more suggestive in the sense of giving us a better pun, but also in the sense of providing a more lurid scenario of betrayal.

From our vantage point as readers of the sequence it is easier to cope with the ambiguities of sonnet 40 than with the way in which the poet exchanges roles with his friend from one sonnet to the next in sonnets 33 through 37. We can account for the ambiguity of sonnet 40 by supposing that he cannot bring himself at first to refer unequivocally to the liaison he knows his friend has formed with his mistress. As we do this we are engaging in secondary elaboration, in an effort to enhance the intelligibility of sonnet 40 itself and of the sequence as such.

Oddly enough, however, after sonnet 42 the mistress disappears without a trace on the heels of an assertion that “my friend and I are one,” which seems, on the face of it, to be desperately ironic:

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake lay me on this cross.
          But here's the joy, my friend and I are one;
          Sweet flatt'ry, then she loves but me alone.

(42.9-14)

The conventional language of love becomes a very slippery medium here indeed. In lines 9-10, the same word's capacity to mean either “the one I love” or “the emotion I feel” assists the poet to reason that if he has lost the friend to a woman who is his love (in the first sense), their relation belongs to him and augments his store of love (in the second sense). In the couplet, he seems to be making a last, desperate attempt to redescribe loss as gain. But then, as if the verbal assertion “my friend and I are one” had been a magical charm that could restore the status quo ante, the mistress disappears: in 43, and for several more sonnets thereafter, the poet and his friend are apart, and the poet is doing just what absence's “sour leisure” was going to teach him in sonnet 39: “To entertain the time with thoughts of love” (39.11). Some of these thoughts are anxious ones: in 48, for example, he worries that his friend might be stolen from him; but apparently what keeps them apart over this stretch of the sequence is merely distance (as in 44, which begins, “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, / Injurious distance should not stop my way”) and not the kind of injury that is cited by sonnets 41 and 42.

Hubler's observation that if Shakespeare had meant to tell a story he would surely have done it better is again very much to the point. When we get to sonnet 48, the Quarto order seems merely wrong or without significance: so many intervening sonnets have rung changes on the theme or predicament of absence that the sequence has begun to read like an anthology without an underlying story line. But in 40-42, as in 33-37, the poet's anxieties appear to be triggered by particular events, by “that which thou hast done.” It appears that the sonnets do mean to tell a story, or that they presuppose one, but the rudiments of a significant incident have no sooner emerged than they abruptly and completely disappear.

In this entire stretch of the sequence what we have, instead of a love story in the usual sense, is an oscillating rhythm of at-onement (“my friend and I are one”) and estrangement (“we two must be twain”). “My friend and I are one” is a claim the poet has no sooner made than he undermines or denies it again. Sometimes his own discourse produces a more or less adequate rationalization of this process and sometimes not. If his argument is slightly implausible, it calls attention to itself as a rationalization: thus in sonnet 42 the claim that “my friend and I are one” is urged in a context in which, it seems, he cannot really mean it. Sometimes rationalization²⁷ is what editors and readers will do when the arguments of consecutive sonnets invoke and yet do not easily accommodate an underlying storyline or sequence of events.

“… ALL MY BEST IS DRESSING OLD WORDS NEW”

Wordplay or “punning” in the Sonnets is not only an occasional obstacle to the intelligibility of their arguments; it is Shakespeare's most inveterate stylistic habit, his signature trope. Sonnets are more hospitable to this trope than plays could possibly be, and therefore wordplay is both more prevalent and more openly associated with narcissism in the Sonnets than it is in Shakespeare's plays. In order for the relationship between narcissism and wordplay to emerge, it will be necessary to add to the psychic profile of narcissism that was quickly epitomized in the first section of this essay; to explain the sonnet form itself as a medium of representation whose limitations also create special opportunities for narcissistic fantasy work; and to discuss in psychoanalytic terms the trope known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries as “syllepsis.”

After he had fallen in love with his own reflection, Narcissus thought at first that he had an ongoing relationship with another person, but he soon realized that he did not: their gestures toward each other were simultaneous and identical. What the Ovidian fable tells us in this way is that love by identification has a psychological bias that is powerfully synchronistic and tautological; that quality is its attraction and its limitation also. This is reemphasized by the fate of Echo, the nymph who loves Narcissus but is incapable of initiating dialogue and must always use his words to express her desires. The closest Echo can come to saying something of her own is by repeating (and thereby recontextualizing) Narcissus's words whenever he happens to say something she can use to speak of her love for him. When Narcissus rejects her, Echo pines away until she is just a voice. She is literally consumed by love, and the fable depicts this process as one of ever-closer identification with the beloved.

As Narcissus himself nears death, Echo undertakes, in a final act of loving selflessness, to repeat whatever he says to his reflected image so that it will seem to love and suffer with him in words as well as gestures that precisely match his own. When language is thus assimilated to the mirror relation, the limitations of that relation become apparent: the difference between echo and dialogue is a measure of Narcissus's fatal unwillingness to forego the pleasures of what Lacan calls “the Imaginary” on behalf of authentic intersubjectivity.²⁸ Ovid tells us that “even when he had been received into the infernal abodes, he kept on gazing on his image in the Stygian pool” (3:504-05): in death he becomes an emblem of self-willed exile from the Symbolic Order, the order of language-as-communication and also of history, becoming, and change.

The sonnet sequence is a genre that will afford the narcissist a relatively high degree of satisfaction both of his inclination to be talking to himself²⁹ and of his appetite for the recuperation of diachrony into synchrony. The sonnet form itself is synchronistic in the sense that its argument is converted by its metric structure and its rhyme scheme into a synchronic array of phrases and clauses that will hang together in the mind as a simultaneous unity. Along with his contemporaries Spenser and Daniel, Shakespeare clearly understood the sonnet form in this way. All of them learned from Petrarch and from the French poets of the Pléiade that sonnets in sequence are hospitable to the stance or project of being “all in war with Time for love of you” (15.13): time's passage need not be experienced as a dimension of the poems themselves, but can be allowed to take care of itself in the spaces between them. A sonnet sequence need not tell very much of a story: it will readily accommodate repetition and redundancy. So will its individual units; indeed the line of least resistance to the form of the sonnet is the kind of argument that progresses, as do many of Shakespeare's sonnets, by means of the reiterative reformulation of one idea.³⁰

In sonnet 76 the poet of the Sonnets acknowledges, however, that his sequence is far more static and repetitious than most. “Why is my verse so barren of new pride?” (76.1) he asks, as if to forestall the criticisms of unsympathetic readers (including the friend himself, perhaps) by anticipating them. “Why write I still all one, ever the same, / And keep invention in a noted weed …” (76.5-6)? We could refer his self-accusation to the typically high redundancy of any one sonnet's argument (“still all one, ever the same”), to his propensity for mounting the same argument in sonnet after sonnet—sonnets 1-17 are a notorious case in point—or to his limited repertory of figurative and rhetorical strategies, a limitation to which he alludes in lines 3-4 by asking, “Why with the time do I not glance aside / To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?” Indeed he does seem never to tire of saying the same few things in the same way. Answering his own questions in the last six lines of the sonnet, he asserts that his feelings are such, their object such, that he can do no other: “O know, sweet love, I always write of you, / And you and love are still my argument” (76.9-10).³¹

He goes on to characterize his own use of language in a way that, interestingly enough, recalls the figure of Echo: “So all my best is dressing old words new, / Spending again what is already spent” (76.11-12). Often, as we have already noticed in working with sonnets 33 through 37 and 40 to 42, this is indeed how he gets from one topic or situation to another, both within and between sonnets: by generating new contexts for old words. “Dressing old words new” could also serve as a metaphorical definition of his most inveterate stylistic habit, the verbal device known to us as “punning” but to Shakespeare's contemporaries as “syllepsis.”

The sixteenth-century rhetorician George Puttenham called syllepsis “the figure of double supply” (168): it occurs when a single word is doubly contextualized, usually by participation in more than one syntactic construction, and thereby has more than one of its possible meanings brought into play. Antanaclasis, a closely related figure, occurs when the same word is repeated in consecutive, coordinated clauses or phrases with a different meaning the second time (Todorov and Ducrot 278). Both figures exploit the haphazard polysemy of words and thereby confront us with an element of arbitrariness and sheer contingency in the relation of signifier to signified within the verbal sign. They are akin to rhyme, and they can be used, along with rhyme and meter, to promote what Roman Jakobson calls the “poetic function” of language, whereby the sequential unfolding of the discourse is overtaken by relationships of similarity that fold the verbal medium back on itself to render it “self-focused” (Jakobson 69-70, 85-86).

The noun-verb “pun” did not appear in English until after the language had begun to be stabilized and institutionalized by dictionaries in the eighteenth century, and its appearance coincides with a shift in attitude toward syllepsis and kindred figures. In the sixteenth century these figures had not been reserved for joking or merely playful uses, but ever since the Age of Reason they have been regarded as unserious, even disreputable (Joseph 168; Easthope 112-17).³² Freud takes this attitude for granted in Jokes and the Unconscious, where he explains that one of the ways in which puns give their author pleasure is by promoting the free play of the signifier, which is ordinarily repressed in the interest of transparent communication, of “saying one thing at a time” (119-20). Puns are enjoyable but also mysterious and a little unnerving, as Jonathan Culler suggests, because they “present the disquieting spectacle of a functioning of language where boundaries—between sounds, between sound and letter, between meanings—count for less than one might imagine, and where supposedly discrete meanings threaten to sink into fluid subterranean signifieds too undefinable to call concepts” (3).

Shakespeare's sonnets very often present such a spectacle. As Booth explains in his edition of The Sonnets, Shakespeare habitually and pervasively “uses more of the ideational potential in words than the logic [of a sonnet's argument] needs or can admit. He often uses words that have a common pertinence to a context other than the one in which he uses them; sometimes the words relate to one another through senses entirely foreign to the ones that relate to the assertions in which they appear” (Shakespeare's Sonnets 371). Shakespeare's use of this kind of wordplay goes far beyond any other poet of the Renaissance, and it is much more pervasive in the Sonnets than rhetorical terms like syllepsis and antanaclasis can properly suggest.

Where the Sonnets are at their most synchronistic and reiterative, this kind of wordplay assists them to double and redouble their simple arguments, blurring the semantic boundaries between consecutive statements to produce the haunting reverberation that has become Shakespeare's hallmark as a sonneteer.³³ This way of using language is especially effective in sonnets 1-17, where a series of different metaphors is used to make the same argument over and over again:

From fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory;
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies.

(1.1-7)

Here in sonnet 1, for example, the word “contracted” in line 5 means “betrothed” in the context of the legal language of lines 3 and 4 but may also mean “diminished,” insofar as the rhetorical structure of the first quatrain sets up an opposition between the friend's posture and the “increase” we desire “from fairest creatures.” Meanwhile the predominant meaning of “increase” in line 1 is not “growth” but “the begetting of offspring”: it invokes the biblical injunction to increase and multiply, which the young man is accused of flouting. The relationship between “increase” and “contracted” is thus an instance of what Booth is talking about when he speaks of words being related by way of senses different from the ones that are relevant to the assertions in which they appear. In this instance the syllepsis does, however, make a meaningful contribution to the argument of the sonnet: it creates a nonce relationship between two different senses of “contracted” (“you are perversely self-betrothed, and thereby diminished”) and, by extension, a relationship of mutual support between the two systems (legal and biblical-natural), whose norms and conventions the narcissistic young man is accused of frustrating.

Moving on to sonnet 2, whose argument is essentially the same, we find the young man being warned that “When forty winters shall beseige thy brow … / Thy youth's proud livery … will be a tottered weed of small worth held” (2.1-4). “Tottered weed” means “tattered garment” in the immediate context of the livery metaphor; but against the background of sonnet 1, where the young man's beauty and its fragility are metaphorically associated with the flowers of springtime, it acquires a second meaning: “withered plant.” In sonnets 1-17 this kind of sylleptic linkage often obtains between neighboring sonnets, helping to synchronize many different metaphoric codes into a richly interactive network.

As we have seen, however, as soon as the Sonnets begin to address themselves to the vicissitudes of an ongoing relationship, the poet's propensity for “dressing old words new” begins to interfere with the intelligibility of consecutive sonnets' arguments: a word or phrase is “doubly supplied” to consecutive arguments or situations that take hold of it differently, and the sylleptic overlap renders each of these contexts semantically unstable and/or incomplete. We have looked at two examples where the first line of a sonnet seems to mean one thing as a continuation of the previous sonnet's argument and then something quite different as a new situation crystallizes around it.³⁴ Interestingly enough, both of these instances of “double supply” occur at moments in the lover's discourse when the boundaries between subject and object also threaten to dissolve or “count for less than one might imagine,” moments when he expresses both desire and fear at the prospect of an identification with the beloved so total that he would no longer be “himself.”

Shakespeare's sylleptic wordplay is itself the work of desire:³⁵ by continually folding the language of the sonnets over on itself, it traduces the linear, diachronic processes of exposition, argumentation, and story telling on behalf of the narcissistic stasis of the mirror relation. Often, as in sonnets 1 through 17, this word play enhances the sonnet's capacity to work with language in a way that is more pleasurable for us as readers than ordinary speech and argumentative prose, which are in the business, mostly, of “saying one thing at a time.” But at other times Shakespeare's propensity for “dressing old words new” is confusing: it keeps a coherent scenario or story line from forming and makes the arguments of consecutive sonnets hard to follow, even as they seem to bear witness to an interpersonal crisis. This is what happens whenever the poet's need to be inventing pretexts of alienation from his beloved alter ego is at cross-purposes with the narcissistic pleasure he meanwhile obtains from “spending again what is already spent.”

Another instance of this difficulty that has greatly troubled editors and commentators is the antanaclasis that links the end of sonnet 93 with the begining of 94 but thereby renders the argument of 94, which is difficult anyway, even harder to establish. In this part of the sequence, especially in sonnets 91 through 96,³⁶ there is thematic overlap and sometimes also syntactic run-on from one sonnet to the next. The possibility they all entertain, though it takes several different forms in quick succession, is that the friend's constancy in love does not match the poet's: perhaps he has already forsaken the poet unbenownst to him, perhaps he is simply incapable of constancy in love. Sonnets 91 and 92 are closely and unproblematically linked together by syntactic run-on, and so are 92 and 93: in the last line of 92, for example, the poet worries that “Thou mayst be false and yet I know it not,” and then sonnet 93 begins, “So shall I live, supposing thou art true. …” “It seems at first,” says Stirling, “that 94 proceeds as surely from 93 as 93 proceeds from 92” (Stirling 102), especially since the couplet rhyme of 93 is picked up in the first quatrain of 94 with a repetition of the thematically important word show:

          How like Eve's apple doth thy beauty grow,
          If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!
They that have pow'r to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces. …

The problem is that whereas in 93 “show” is a noun that refers to the friend's appearance of harmless sweetness, in 94 it is a verb that refers to “their” manifest “power to hurt.”

Stirling plays out the response of a hypothetical reader of the sequence to this shift in the meaning of a repeated word. “A reader stops. He reexamines the end of 93 to see whether it says what he thinks it said. It does, and so does 94.1-2. He begins to muse on ambiguity, on paradox, on ‘controlled dichotomy’” (Stirling 103). Stirling's reader begins, that is, to rationalize the shift from one meaning of “show” to another: their “power to hurt” becomes, “interestingly enough, a power to injure by sweetness and true love …” (Stirling 102). After playing out this rationalization Stirling rejects it because the rest of sonnet 94 does not construe “their” “power to hurt” in this way. “What we have here,” he concludes, “is not ambiguity but quite unnecessary confusion that keeps a pleasurable ambiguity from arising. Either the Q text is faulty or Shakespeare mismanaged his lines” (Stirling 103). Stirling's solution to the problem is to separate the two sonnets in his revised version of the Shakespeare sonnet order.

Here again, however, the sonnets in question belong to a paradigmatic series that takes off from, and returns to, a strong assertion of “at-onement.” The argument of 91, which begins “Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,” is that for the poet his friend's love is all that matters: “having thee, of all men's pride I boast.” No sooner has he made this assertion of total narcissistic investment in the friend, than he begins to worry that he may not really “have him,” after all: “thou mayst take / All this away, and me most wretched make.” From this point on, one way of framing this suspicion gives way to another in quick succession, each presenting a slightly different challenge to the poet's constancy: the friend may forsake him (91.13-14), but in that case he will simply perish (92.1-12); worse yet, however, the friend may only be pretending to love him (“Thy looks with me, thy heart in other place” [93.4]); or the friend may be one of those who do not betray their lover because they themselves never feel anything much (“Who moving others are themselves as stone” [94.3]); or he may be one of those who are so beloved of everyone that even though they have sinned, other people cannot help but love and praise them anyway (“Naming thy name blesses an ill report” [95.8]). The series of “what if's” has run its course by the end of sonnet 96, where the poet begs the friend not to use his charisma to corrupt other people's judgments by “making faults graces”: “But do not so; I love thee in such sort, / As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report” (96.13-14). This was also the couplet of sonnet 36, and here, as there, the poet's overt gesture of psychic identification with the friend signals a shift from a negative to a positive image of him and a reassertion of psychic “at-onement.” Here, as there, however, that assertion is predicated on a geographical separation between them: “How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year,” sighs the poet with apparent non sequitur in the first two lines of sonnet 97.

Here again, semantic instability is produced by the poet's propensity for “dressing old words new,” coupled with his need to be continually broaching and overcoming pretexts of difference between himself and his beloved alter ego. In this example it is even more obvious than in the stretch of sonnets from 33 through 42 that his poems have been generated by a process of psychic improvisation, rather than as a series of reactions to external events. It is a process that calls upon the poet to discredit himself just as often as he calls the friend's integrity into question, so that he can continue to oscillate between having and lack, sameness and difference, distance and closeness.

“YET THIS THY PRAISE CANNOT BE SO THY PRAISE TO TIE UP ENVY. …”

In sonnet 69, the sequence forestalls the assertion that “my friend and I are one” in still another way by focusing on disparaging things that other people are saying about the friend or the poet or both. Sonnets 66 through 72 share a common preoccupation with gossip and with all the different ways that other people's language might alienate the lovers by co-opting one of them: absorbing his image, or devaluing it in the eyes of the other.³⁷ The World, quasi-personified, becomes involved in a series of shifting alliances that produce alternative configurations of two against one as the World, the poet, and the friend are each in turn disparaged. What is at stake throughout this series, as in the others we have already looked at, is the poet's wish to identify with his friend and thereby to preserve the ego ideal in which he has a narcissistic investment. In this series, however, the danger that threatens their relationship is associated with the Symbolic Order more obviously and insistently than before: the World is a many-tongued monster whose power to disseminate rumors is antithetical and threatening to the poet's way of using language.³⁸

The arguments of these sonnets are sometimes explicitly linked: the opening lines of sonnet 67 presuppose the couplet of 66, and sonnet 68 is linked by its opening lines to the couplet of 67, whose argument it repeats and extends. At other points in the series, however, all that consecutive sonnets seem to have in common is the mood and topic of world-weariness: thus, for example, in sonnet 71 the poet abruptly ceases to worry about his friend's reputation and begins instead to worry about his own standing in the eyes of the World. Here, as in the other series we have looked at, narrative and discursive continuities are only fitfully present; again, however, embedded in this series of sonnets is a full set of permutations of an oppositional mirror game. The game has three players this time, instead of two.

The series begins with sonnet 66, in which the poet repudiates the World in a lengthy catalogue of generalized indictments, personifying its multiform corruption with a series of one-line topsy-turvies: “As, to behold desert a beggar born, / And needy nothing trimmed in jollity … / And captive good attending captain ill” (66.2-3, 12). Overwhelmed, as it seems, by all of these figments of the World's deformity, the poet lacks the energy to go on living: he “would be gone” from the world, “Save that to die, I leave my love alone” (66.13-14). Does he fear that his friend will not be able to withstand the World's corruption once he is gone, or is it simply that he cannot bear to be parted from him? It seems, in any case, that his death wish triggers an intense and painful awareness of his friend's young life. In sonnets 67 and 68 he struggles to remain closely identified with the friend, arguing that the world is no fit place for him either:

Ah, wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society.

(67.1-4)

The world is depicted here and in sonnet 68 as a place where sin and falsehood lie in wait to feast vampirically upon the friend's beauty.

In sonnet 69, the World claims the friend for its own in a way that is even more disquieting for the poet: the World calls the friend's virtue into question. This is the crisis point of the series; as such it will bear closer examination. In sonnet 70, however, the poet moves to rescue his friend and reestablish their alliance against the World by refusing to believe the slander that is being circulated about him. Then in 71 and 72 the World repudiates the poet, and it is a question of whether the friend will go along and identify with the World against him, as in 72 the poet disconsolately and self-abnegatingly urges him to do.

The threat the poet has most to fear is broached in sonnet 69, where the World's co-optation of the beloved is associated with a disparaging use of language that is insidiously disseminative and thereby undermines the narcissistic economy of the mirror relation. The World is imaged as a many-tongued multitude that confounds its own praise of the friend by circulating rumors that there is more to be discerned than meets the eye:

Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend;
All tongues, the voice of souls, give thee that due,
Utt'ring bare truth, even so as foes commend.
Thy outward thus with outward praise is crowned,
But those same tongues that give thee so thine own
In other accents do this praise confound
By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.
They look into the beauty of thy mind,
And that in guess they measure by thy deeds;
Then, churls, their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds:
          But why thy odor matcheth not thy show,
          The soil is this, that thou dost common grow.

This sonnet is rhetorically uneasy and full of ambiguity, both situational and linguistic. It seems that the World both praises and blames the friend: “those same tongues that give thee so thine own / In other accents do this praise confound. …” Meanwhile the friend is on overfamiliar terms with a World that contemns him—“The soil is this, that thou dost common grow”—and the poet, although he despises the World, repeats these rumors to the friend as if there might be some truth to them.

In this context, several of the poem's key words and phrases become capable of meaning several different things at once. “Outward praise” is a case in point: as Booth points out, the phrase could mean “praise of your outward appearance” (“Thy outward thus with outward praise”), or it could mean “praise that is public” (with a homonymic pun on “outward” and “uttered”), or “praise that appears to be genuine but is not” (Shakespeare's Sonnets 253-54), and indeed all of these possible senses of “outward” blend together in this context in such a way that the praisers and the object of their praise seem to merge as well. In the case of the word soil, it seems that Shakespeare has made a noun out of a verb meaning “resolve, explain”; but because this usage is unconventional and hence slightly unstable, other meanings of soil come into play also: especially “to dirty” or “sully” and—in view of the flower metaphor—“earth” or “ground” (cf. Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets 254-55). Thus the same word seems to mean “solution” or “reason” and “dirty rumor”; instead of clarifying the friend's situation, as solutions usually do, this one makes it even murkier and muddier.

As in the other examples already discussed, linguistic instability is the symptom or hallmark in sonnet 69 of an interpersonal situation that is not just complicated, but disconcertingly labile and ambiguous. In sonnet 70 all these ambiguities are resolved as the poet, by unequivocally refusing to believe the gossip about his friend, restores the boundaries between self, friend, and World that had become blurred and indistinct in sonnet 69. At this point, however, the series is not yet complete: as in the series 33 through 38 and 91 through 96, it has run its full course only when the poet has worked his way round to a position as close as possible to that of the impoverished ego in Freud's account of object cathexis. Thus sonnets 71 and 72 are preoccupied with his own unworthiness to be loved: the world may be “vile,” but he is even more worthless. In the couplet of 72, his total lack of self-esteem extends to his poems as well: “For I am shamed,” he tells his friend, “by that which I bring forth, / And so should you, to love things nothing worth” (72.13-14). Once he has touched bottom in this way his focus changes in immediately following sonnets: in 73-74 love's enemy is Time and the aging process, rather than the World. Sonnets 75-77 engage in metapoetic reflection, much as we found the poet doing in sonnets 39 and 40.

Sonnet 75 generalizes about what it is like to be in love with the young man in terms that acknowledge the oscillating rhythm of this and other stretches of the sequence and are strikingly compatible with the Freudian notion of reciprocity between ego and object libido:

And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found:
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure;
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look. …

(75.3-10)

After two more sonnets of metapoetic reflection, still another pretext for “starving and pining,” estrangement and further sonnets, is brought into play in sonnet 78: “every alien pen,” “others' works,” “the full proud sail of his great verse,” in short, a rival poet.

“… WHEN FIRST YOUR EYE I EYED”

Again and again we have discovered in Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair young man an oscillating rhythm of identification and estrangement, fullness and emptiness, that is continually being recircumstanced. In relation to this psychological process, any particular sonnet is a work of secondary elaboration that compromises, not always successfully, with its inexorable dynamics. Meanwhile the language of the sonnets is itself compromised by the poet's narcissism, which is to say that his poems bear the imprint of an uneasy compromise with the Symbolic Order, on behalf of the Imaginary, for the sake of “love by identification.” The sonnet in which the poet comes perhaps closest to saying this in his own way is 105, another of his sonnets of metapoetic reflection, which argues gnomically that because “my love”—by which he means both “he whom I love” and “my love for him”—is “still constant in a wondrous excellence,”

Therefore my verse to constancy confined,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.

As we have seen, the poet could not really afford to “leave out difference”: to do so would be to forego the opportunity of giving his love in both senses a discursive embodiment. And he has not succumbed to tautology; but he has used rhyme, repetition, and wordplay to create a tissue of language that is antidiscursive to a quite unusual degree.

Shakespeare's Sonnets are thus closer than the sonnets of any other poet, and closer, certainly, than his plays and his narrative poems can afford to be, to the permeable boundary between the intersubjective realm of language-as-communication and an intrasubjective realm of “fluid subterranean signifieds,” where selfhood is also unstable and fluid. This quality is what gives them their distinctive power to pleasure but also to haunt us, as they have not ceased to do.

Notes

1. Oddly enough, however, Louise Vinge, in her comprehensive history of The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early Nineteenth Century, claims that there are “no allusions to the myth in Shakespeare's sonnets” (377).

2. The essay I am citing is a distilled version of Barber's introduction to the Laurel edition of the Sonnets, published by Dell in the same year.

3. Cf. Zweig 99; the inscription, which Zweig quotes also, is from Chaucer's translation of the Roman.

4. This is the last line of Rime sparse 190, as translated by Robert M. Durling in Petrarch's Lyric Poems (336).

5. Frye's and Spender's essays were published in the same volume (Hubler): that Frye's reading of the “procreation” sonnets prevailed until very recently among critics and in college classrooms is a symptom of the heterosexist inflection of Sonnets criticism and scholarship during the 1960s and '70s. The tide began to turn with the publication of Pequigney's and Fineman's studies in 1985 and 1986, respectively.

6. All quotations from the Sonnets are based on Stephen Booth's 1977 edition.

7. Cf. Bruce Smith: “Is ‘my love’ in this line a name for the friend, or does it refer to the poet's feelings?” Smith points out that “‘Love’ and ‘my love’ emerge after sonnet 13 as the poet's favorite epithets for the young man” (249).

8. Freud's first published reference to narcissism was in a footnote added to the 1910 edition of Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. A more extended and more interesting discussion of “the inclination toward a narcissistic object-choice” appears in Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910), where Freud explicitly cites the Greek legend of Narcissus (98-101). Cf. also “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) (73-102) and “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality” (1922) (esp. 230-32). Pequigney cites all of these Freudian texts extensively in chapter 5.

9. Leonardo Da Vinci 99; cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses (3.344-46).

10. This is a position to which Freud himself tended more and more: in a footnote added to Leonardo Da Vinci in 1919 he argues that “everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object-choice” and is repressing this tendency in adulthood (99).

11. MacCary also cites Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut as influential post-Freudian theorists of narcissism. A theorist whose work is even more relevant to the concerns of this essay is Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel because of the attention she gives to art and language.

12. I have restored the Quarto's typography in this line, as furnished by Booth in his facing-page edition (Sonnets 57). Booth's changes mask the word play on “my self.” Pequigney also highlights this sonnet as one in which the poet confesses to “narcissism in the Freudian sense” (84). I take the couplet to be a gesture of homage to the friend rather than, as Pequigney does, a confession that the poet desires to “use [him] exploitatively … by sexual possession” (85). The poem's confessional rhetoric comes across to me as mock serious, a means, as it were, of hiding the poet's narcissism out in the open.

13. As Pequigney points out, sonnet 22 is very similar in its argument to sonnet 62 (87). The arguments of 31, 53, 59, 106, and 108 are also closely related: in all of them, the poet casts the friend as his “ego ideal” by arguing that the friend's image subsumes for him every past or present, remembered or conceivable object of love.

14. In the essay “On Narcissism” this formulation occurs in the context of a generalization about “the state of being in love.”

15. In their entirety, lines 466-68 read, in translation: “What I desire, I have; the very abundance of my riches beggars me [inopem me copia fecit]. Oh, that I might be parted from my own body! and, strange prayer for a lover, I would that what I love were absent from me!” (All quotations from Ovid's myth of Narcissus are from the Loeb Classical Library's facing-page edition of the Metamorphoses.)

16. Stirling's grounds for rearrangement are always linguistic and stylistic rather than biographical, and although his proposed rearrangement did not catch on, his book is an excellent treatment of all the different kinds of difficulty the Quarto order makes for the reader, especially of the ways in which consecutive sonnets often pull apart and hang together, both at once.

17. De Grazia's is the ultimately skeptical challenge to all claims that the Sonnets constitute a sequence: “strictly speaking,” she contends, “there could be as many different relations as there are sonnets” (432). While I am very much in accord with de Grazia's emphasis on the “legion ambiguities” of the Shakespearean text and her suggestion that they “unsettle the gender determinations disciplining desire” (440), I still think there are good reasons for continuing to suppose that sonnets 1-126 were all written to or about the same young man. The poet's constancy to one person is the central topic of many of these sonnets, and several of them refer to earlier poems that have been written to their immediate addressee. Pequigney adduces other good reasons also (cf. especially his discussion of generic conventions [213-20]); he suggests that the resistance of earlier commentators to the authenticity of the Quarto order “has to do in large measure with their moralistic resistance to any amorous transaction between the friends” (Pequigney 40).

18. Cf. Booth, who comments that “the first phrase of sonnet 36, Let me confess, is in the spirit of 35” but “neither what is confessed nor the substance of the rest of the poem grows from any suggestion in 33-35” (Essay 8).

19. In a recent essay Robert Crosman, who argues that “there is a discernible story in Shakespeare's sonnets,” usefully plays out the pros and cons of trying to find one there. Cf. also Heather Dubrow (1990) for a different explanation of the frustration of “narrativity” in the Sonnets. (An expanded version of her argument is forthcoming in Friendly Fire [1995].)

20. In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” in 1908, Freud had argued that an audience is induced to accept the truth of the artist's vision by an “aesthetic bribe”: by an appeal, that is, to the “pleasure principle.” But in the passage I have quoted above from “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911), he suggests that the artist's special triumph is to be able to compromise with the “reality principle” while he succeeds, nevertheless, in obtaining some measure of gratification for his (and his viewer's or reader's) erotic and ambitious wishes. Steven Levine, whose article includes a useful conspectus of Freud's discussions of art in relation to fantasy and dream, argues that although Freud vacillated between these two poles of emphasis, the trend of his thinking was toward “stressing the sociality of the work of art” (50): “the artist after all makes something real, and it is only in the interpersonal arena of artist and audience that this achievement is possible” (46).

21. Ruchsicht auf Verstandlichkeit: not to be confused with Ruchsicht auf Darstellbarkeit, “considerations of representability,” which according to Freud belong to a more basic level of the dream work (see Laplanche and Pontalis 412 and cf. 389-90).

22. I have made “Sonnet 33” the subject of this sentence in order to remain agnostic about what might have “really happened” to occasion suspicions of this kind. My larger argument is that pretexts for estrangement are necessary to the survival of the relationship from the poet-lover's standpoint. Whether these are furnished by the behavior of the beloved, invented by the lover, or foisted upon them both by the mischievous gossip of third parties may well be undecidable in any particular case, a problem the sequence overtly thematizes in sonnets 66 through 72 (to be discussed below).

23. The rudiments of narrative are, of course, present in this oscillation between fullness and emptiness, loss and recovery. As Terry Eagleton points out in discussing the implications of Freud's “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” for narrative theory, “Fort-da is perhaps the shortest story we can imagine: an object is lost, and then recovered” (185).

24. The way in which the sequence here produces a novel referent for the word love resembles one of the modes of dream displacement Freud highlights in The Interpretation of Dreams, which “results in a colourless and abstract expression in the dream-thought being exchanged for a pictorial and concrete one” (4:339).

25. Perhaps the most ingenious treatment of this anomaly is S. C. Campbell's proposal that the love triangle is really an esoteric homosexual allegory: the mistress stands for the young man's feminine, erotic aspect, so that when he is accused of having stolen her he is really being charged with self-love (39-40). Campbell's reading strikes me as unconvincing, but it testifies to the difficulty the sequence makes for most readers at this juncture.

26. Bush's gloss is useful because it exposes the process of interpretive conjecture that is often elided in editorial commentary on the Sonnets. In the New Penguin Edition John Kerrigan just explains that in 40.1 the poet is forgiving the young man for being seduced by his mistress (7).

27. I am presupposing Freud's use of “rationalization” as a partial synonym or subcategory of secondary revision; and yet, as the dictionaries of both Robert Jean Campbell and Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis acknowledge, the notion of “rationalization,” as it is invoked in psychoanalytic theory, is consistent with, and shades into, the ordinary, nonspecialist meaning of the word (cf. Robert Jean Campbell 220, 615; Laplanche/Pontalis 376).

28. This account of Lacan's notion of the Imaginary and its relationship to the Symbolic Order is indebted to Anthony Wilden, who explains that “in spite of the fact that the Imaginary is present in all human relations, Lacan avers that intersubjectivity cannot be conceived within its limits. … [I]ntersubjectivity is viewed by Lacan as primarily a symbolic relationship,” mediated by language (175-77).

29. Cf. MacCary: “I would maintain that any edifying reading of the Sonnets must account for their universal appeal by stressing that, as T. S. Eliot puts it in ‘The Three Voices of Poetry,’ lyric is by definition ‘the poet talking to himself’” (229). Cf. also Bruce Smith, who takes a Foucauldian approach to their “privacy” in his chapter on the Sonnets.

30. I have discussed the “synchronicity” of the sonnet at greater length elsewhere (Hedley, ch. 5).

31. Kerrigan points out that “tautologies of selfhood” are “both commonplace in Shakespeare and central,” appearing frequently in the plays as well as the narrative poems and sonnets (26-27). In an interesting brief discussion of the relationship between tautology and metaphor in the sonnets, he argues that “repetition, that essential protracted tautology, became, for Shakespeare, perfect eloquence” (29).

32. Antony Easthope argues that when, for example, Alexander Pope exploits a single word's capacity to signify doubly, he endeavors to arrest and contain “any play of meaning and slide of the signifier” by mastering it syntactically and giving it a definite rhetorical and thematic purpose (Easthope 114-15).

33. In an important exchange with John Crowe Ransom in 1940, Arthur Mizener coined the phrase “soft focus” to describe the figurative style of Shakespeare's sonnets in contrast to the sharp or “perfect” focus of the metaphysical conceit (Mizener 733).

34. Cf. also sonnets 116-17: Booth comments that sonnet 117 “is something like a pun on sonnet 116,” insofar as it picks up some of its metaphors and its language but “uses them to entirely different effect” (Shakespeare's Sonnets 392).

35. Pequigney, and more recently Smith (229 ff.), have argued for a dimension of genital innuendo and of references to physical lovemaking in the language of these sonnets that was largely ignored by earlier commentators, although not by Stephen Booth in his edition. I have neglected this dimension of Shakespeare's wordplay for two reasons: first, because it is not “there” for me as often as it is for Pequigney (a difference which can be ascribed to the way in which puns rely on their audience to activate second meanings); and second, because the narcissistic pleasure in language recrudescent in these poems belongs to a phase of psychic development that precedes the genital organization of bodily pleasure and is associated more immediately with language: pleasure in nonsense, in chiming and rhyming, in double entendre for its own sake. That some of the wordplay in the Sonnets is also subversive of cultural taboos—against, for example, referring to anal intercourse in a love poem—is not, however, precluded by my analysis.

36. In order to keep my discussion of this stretch of the sequence relatively brief I have neglected the way in which sonnet 91 is related to the interlinked sonnets that precede it: they too are worried about the possibility of losing the young man's love. But whereas the emphasis for several sonnets up through 90 is on the poet's bankruptcy (“Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now, / Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross” [90.1-2]), in 91 it is on the riches he possesses (“having thee”); the generalizing force of 91's reiterated summary of all the things other men “glory in” contributes, moreover, to the impression of a fresh beginning here.

37. The sonnets on both sides of this group are Tempus edax rerum sonnets, which express the fear that death will part the lovers. In view of their preoccupation not with Time but with “the World,” sonnets 66-72 do thus form a distinct group or cluster, which shares with the sonnets on both sides of it a mood of weariness and disenchantment that tinges this part of the sequence from as far back, at least, as sonnet 57.

38. Sonnet 70 alludes unmistakably to the Blattant Beast, archenemy of courtesy and of poetry in The Faerie Queene, book 6: “Yet this thy praise cannot be so thy praise, / To tie up envy, evermore enlarged” (70.11-12). The many-tongued beast of Spenser's poem is vanquished and tied up by the Knight of Courtesy but gets free at the end of book 6, never again to be successfully bound: allegorically, the suggestion is that slander is ineradicably part of contemporary social life. The beast is depicted by Spenser in The Faerie Queene (6.12.39-41) as having preyed upon his own poem to discredit it in the eyes of its royal dedicatee.

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