SOURCE: Fineman, Joel. “Shakespeare's ‘Perjur'd Eye.’” Representations, no. 7 (summer 1984): 59-86.

[In the following essay, Fineman studies the language, imagery, and rhetorical structure of Shakespeare's sonnets.]

In the first portion of his sonnet sequence—in the subsequence of sonnets addressed to a young man—Shakespeare writes a matching pair of sonnets that develop the way in which his eye and heart initially are enemies but then are subsequently friends. The first sonnet of the pair begins: “Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war, / How to divide the conquest of thy sight” (46).¹ In contrast, the second sonnet, relying on a “verdict” that “is determined” at the conclusion of sonnet 46, begins: “Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took, / And each doth good turns now unto the other” (47).

Taken together and in sequence, the two sonnets compose an argument in utramque partem, with their poet placing himself on both sides of a rhetorical question that is a commonplace in the tradition of the Renaissance sonnet.² Despite the conventional opposition, however, the two sonnets confidently argue to what is the same, and equally conventional, conclusion: namely, that their poet's eye and heart do “good turns now unto the other” (47). Thus, in the first sonnet, after meditating on the war between his eye and heart, the poet syllogistically and Neo-Platonically derives the moral that: “As thus: mine eye's due is thy outward part, / And my heart's right thy inward love of heart.” In turn, in the second sonnet, from thinking on the amity between his eye and heart, the poet reassuringly discovers that “thy picture in my sight / Awakes my heart to heart's and eye's delight.” Taken together and in sequence, therefore, the two sonnets respond to the rhetorical question that they raise by juxtaposing a concordia discors and a coincidentia oppositorum each against the other. Both sonnets speak to the fact that their poet's eye and heart, however much they differ from or with each other, are equally “delighted.” In both sonnets, eye and heart will peacefully “divide the conquest of thy sight,” as though, from the ideal perspective shared by the two sonnets, eye and heart are complementary and coordinated aspects of each other.

In a straightforward way, the rhetorical wit of these two sonnets consists of thus hendiadystically arriving, from different starting points, at a common destination, for in this way the two sonnets manage to resolve, or to beg the question raised by, a traditional débat. Yet, however witty, the poems take seriously the equivalence of the conclusions that they share. In both cases the relationship of eye and heart, whether initially antipathetic or sympathetic, leads immediately, via complementary antithesis, to a recuperative and benign assessment of yet other differences adduced. In war or peace the sonnets' several binaries combine to generate a clarity of eye and purity of heart whose own discrete proprieties and properties in turn reciprocally establish, or are established by, the integrity and integration of the other categorical oppositions to which the poems refer. In the first sonnet, for example, sonnet 46, the difference between “outward” and “inward” is secured and reconciled because the vision of the eye and the “thinking” of the heart can be harmoniously apportioned between the clear-cut opposition of “The clear eye's moiety and the dear heart's part.” In the second sonnet, 47, the absence of the beloved is converted or transmuted into presence because: “So either by thy picture or my love, / Thyself away are present still with me.” This systematic complementarity—whereby opposites either are the same or, as opposites, still somehow go compatibly together—speaks to a general, indeed, a generic, homogeneity subtending both sonnets, something that informs them more deeply than the thematic heterogeneity that the two sonnets only provisionally or momentarily evoke. In the first sonnet it is the difference between eye and heart that establishes the concord between them, whereas in the second sonnet the concord derives from their similarity. But this difference, which is the difference between difference and similarity, turns out not to make much difference. In both sonnets the eye is “clear” and the heart is “dear” by virtue of a governing structure of likeness and contrast, of identity and difference, of similarity and contrariety, that both sonnets equally and isomorphically employ.

What these two young man sonnets, 46 and 47, share, therefore, as Lévi-Strauss might say, is the sameness of their differences: what joins them together is a structural identity, or a structure of identity that is yet more fundamental and more powerful than their apparent opposition. At the level of theme and of poetic psychology, this yields the Petrarchan commonplace in accord with which the poet's eye and heart come instantly to complement each other, moving from war to peace, from antipathy to sympathy, in a progress that constitutes a kind of shorthand summary of the amatory assumptions of ideal admiration, e.g., the way Cupid shoots his arrows through the lover's eye into the lover's heart.³ This is a specifically visual desire, for in both sonnets it is as something of the eye that the young man's “fair appearance lies” within the poet's heart. In both sonnets “thy picture in my sight” indifferently “Awakes my heart to heart's and eye's delight.”

Such homogenizing visual imagery, applied to the poet's love, to his beloved, and to his poetry, pervades the sequence of sonnets addressed to the young man, and this imagery is regularly employed, as in sonnets 46 and 47, to characterize a material likeness or sameness that conjoins or renders consubstantial two distinctive yet univocally collated terms: not only the poet's eye and heart, but, also, the poet and his young man (e.g., “'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise, / Painting my age with beauty of thy days” [62]), the young man and, in the opening sonnets which urge the young man to procreate, his young man (e.g., “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, / Now is the time that face should form another” [3]), as well as the poet's poetry and that of which the poetry speaks (e.g., “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” [18]). In general, the poet identifies his first-person “I” with the ideal eye of the young man—“Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done” (24)—and then proceeds to identify these both with the “wondrous scope” (105) of his visionary verse: “So till the judgement that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes” (55).

In all these cases the visual imagery that Shakespeare employs is, of course, nothing but conventional. Indeed, the sonnets addressed to the young man regularly allude to the conventionality of their visual imagery, often characterizing such imagery, as well as that of which it is an image, as something old-fashioned, even antiquated, as in the literary retrospection of sonnet 59:

O that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundreth courses of the sun.
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!

There are a good many reasons why the young man's poet might “look” in this “backward” way to specifically visual imagery, to imagery of vision, in order, as sonnet 59 goes on to say, to “see what the old world could say / To this composed wonder of your frame.” With regard to the poet's ideal desire, which aims to conjoin poetic subject with poetic object—“thou mine, I thine” (108)—the young man's poet can rely upon a familiar Petrarchist motif, derived from Stoic optics, of eroticized eidōla or likenesses, intromissive and extromissive, whose very physics establishes a special (from specere, “to look at”) coincidence of lover and beloved, as, for example, when Astrophil, at the beginning of Sidney's sonnet sequence, looks into his heart to write, and finds there pre-engraved or “stell'd” upon it the stylized image or imago of the Stella whom he loves. In turn, this physics of the eidōlon presupposes an equally familiar and specifically idealist metaphysics of genus and species whereby individual particulars are but subspecies of a universal form or type, declensions of a paradigmatic archetype whose immanent universality is regularly and perennially conceived in terms of light, as in Platonic eidos, from idein, “to see,” or as the end of the Paradiso, where Dante sees “La forma universal” in his vision of “luce etterna” and “semplice lume” (in this divine light, we can add, Dante also sees the painted “likeness,” the “effige,” of himself).⁴ Moreover, again in ways that are nothing but conventional, the poetry of idealization, especially as it develops in the self-consciously literary tradition of the Renaissance sonnet, characteristically assimilates such visual imagery, which is its imagery of the ideal, to itself, so as thereby to idealize itself as effective simulacrum, physical and metaphysical, of that which it admires. As an activity of “stelling,”—e.g., “Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd / Thy beauty's form in table of my heart” (24)—such poetry is Ideas Mirrour, as Drayton called his sonnet sequence, and it is so precisely because, being something visual and visionary, it can claim to be not only the reflection of, but also the objectification of, its idea of its ideal.⁵

Speaking very generally, it is fair to say that this is the regular force of visual imagery in the tradition of the literature or poetry of praise—a tradition that goes back to the praise of love in the Symposium or Phaedrus, but one that is especially vital in the particular literary genre of the sonnet, where it goes without saying that the poet is a lover who desires only that which he admires. With regard to poetic procedure or, rather, with regard to what is the common and long-standing understanding of poetic procedure, this is a tradition of specifically visionary poetic likeness, either mimetic likeness, whereby poetry is the simulating representation of that which it presents—“ut pictura poesis,” speaking picture—or figural likeness, as when Aristotle, defines metaphor (whether based on analogy or commutative proportion) as the capacity “to see the same” (theōrein homoion), metaphor being for Aristotle, as for the tradition of rhetorical theory that derives from him, an activity of speculative likening that, quite literally, “theorizes sameness.”⁶ Correspondingly, with regard to poetic subjectivity, this is a literary tradition in which the poet is a panegyric vates or seer who, at least ideally, is the same as that which he sees (e.g. Dante's reflexively reflective “effige”), just as, with regard to poetic semiosis, poetic language, as eikōn, speculum, imago, eidōlon, etc., is Cratylitically the same as that of which it speaks, for example, the way Dante identifies his own “beatitude” with “those words that praise my Lady,” his “lodano” with “la donna,” or the way Petrarch puns on “Laura,” “laud,” and “laurel,”⁷ These are general themes and motifs by reference to which the poetry of praise characteristically become a praise of poetry itself.⁸

It is possible to get some sense of how very familiar, over-familiar, this received literary tradition is to Shakespeare if we register the formulaic way the young man's poet in sonnet 105 identifies, one with the others, his “love,” his “beloved,” and his “songs and praises”:

Let not my love be called idolatry,
Nor my beloved as an idol show,
Since all alike my songs and praises be.

What joins these three together is the ideality they share, an ideality that establishes a three-term correspondence between the speaking, the spoken, and the speech of praise. “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true’ is all my argument,” says the poet in sonnet 105, and these “Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords” (“Three themes” that sonnet 105 repeats three times) amount to a phenomenological summary, an eidetic reduction, of a Petrarchist metaphysical, erotic, and poetic Ideal: “Fair” identifies the visibility, the Sichtigkeit, of an ideal sight (idein, “to see”); “kind” identifies the homogeneous categoriality, the formal elementality, of an ideal essence (Platonic eidos); “true” identifies the coincidence of ideal knowledge and knowing (oida, which is also from idein). It is by reference to such precisely conceived and conceited ideality, an ideality that in effect recapitulates the history of ideas up through the Renaissance, that sonnet 105 manages to identify “my love,” “my beloved,” and “my songs and praises,” each one of these being “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true,’” and therefore, by commutation, each one of these being the same and truthful mirror-image of the other two. In the same idealizing way, this is how sonnets 46 and 47 manage to eliminate the difference between their eye and heart, and thereby manage, despite the difference with which they begin, to say the same thing. More generally, we can say that this is how Shakespeare's poetry of visionary praise, because it is a “wondrous scope” and because it is addressed to a “wondrous scope,” is always, as sonnet 105 puts it, monotheistically, monogamously, monosyllabically, and monotonously “To one, of one, still such, and ever so.” This is an ideological poetry, as sonnet 105 seems almost to complain, whose virtue consists in the way its copiousness always copies the same ideal sameness—“Since all alike my songs and praises be”—a universal and uni-versing poetic and erotic practice whose very ideality is what renders it incapable of manifesting difference, for, as the poet puts it in sonnet 105:

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence,
Therefore my verse, to constancy confin'd,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.

However, as the palpable claustrophobia of sonnet 105 suggests, it would be possible to look more closely at the sonnets addressed to the young man so as to see the way they characteristically resist and conflictedly inflect their most ideal expressions of visionary unity, the way they chafe against the “constancy” to which they are “confin'd,” the way that they implicitly “express” the “difference” that they explicitly “leave out.” If, as Murray Krieger has suggested, we are supposed to hear the “one” in sonnet 105's “wondrous scope,” then so too do we also hear the “two” in its “T(w)o one, of one, still such, and ever so.”⁹ So too, the entire sonnet is colored by the ambiguous logic of its opening “Since”—“Since all alike my songs and praises be”—since this concessive particle explains both why the young man is an idol as well as why he is not. Such complications, though they are implicit, have their effect. As complications, they add a reservation or a wrinkle to the poet's otherwise straightforward rhetoric of compliment. In such oblique, yet obvious, ways the young man sonnets will regularly situate themselves and their admiration at one affective and temporal remove from the ideality that they repeatedly and repetitiously invoke, with the peculiar result that in these sonnets an apparently traditionary poetics of ideal light comes regularly to seem what sonnet 123 calls “The dressings of a former sight.”

This peculiar retrospection is a consistent aspect of the young man sonnets' imagery of the visual and the visible, imagery that is characteristically presented in the young man sonnets as though it were so tarnished with age that its very reiteration is what interferes with the poet's scopic or specular identification of his poetic “I” with the ideal “eye” of the young man: “For as you were when first your eye I ey'd” (104). In general, the young man's poet, as a visionary poet, seems capable of expressing only a love at second sight; his identification of his ego with his ego-ideal seems worn out by repetition, as though it were the very practice by the poet of an old-fashioned poetry of visionary praise that effectively differentiates the poet as a panegyricizing subject from what he takes to be his ideal and his praiseworthy object. We can take as an example the mixed-up deictic and epideictic compact of the couplet to sonnet 62 which has already been cited—“'Tis thee (myself) that for myself I praise, / Painting my age with beauty of thy days”—where the confused identification of the poet's “I” and “thou” effectively identifies the first person of the poet with the youth and age of visionary praise. The same thing goes, however, to take another example, for the “stelling” of sonnet 24. At the beginning of the sonnet the poet remembers how, in the past, “Mine eye hath play'd the painter and hath stell'd / Thy beauty's form in table of my heart.” At the end of the sonnet, however, speaking in and for the present, the poet observes: “Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art. / They draw but what they see, know not the heart” (24).

In this context, we can recall the fact that Shakespeare writes his sonnet sequence, for the most part, after the Elizabethan sonnet sequence vogue has passed, in what we might call the literary aftermath of the poetry of praise, when such Petrarchist panegyric has come to seem, to some extent, passé. This is the historical literary context within which the sonnets addressed to the young man—which are conceived long after what even Sidney, at the inaugural moment of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence, called “Poor Petrarch's long-deceased woes”—make a personal issue out of their self-remarked literary belatedness, regularly associating what they themselves characterize as their old-fashioned literary matter and manner with their poet's sense of his senescence.¹⁰ In sonnet 76, for example, the poet asks:

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?

As the poet first poses them, these are rhetorical questions, questions about rhetoric, but these questions then will press themselves upon the poet's person; they define for him his sense of superannuated self:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?

A good many young man sonnets are concerned with just this kind of literary question, and, as in sonnet 76, in these sonnets it appears as though it is the very asking of the question that turns out to empty out the poet's praising self. It is as though, because he is committed to an ancient poetry of praise, the poet feels himself obliged to pay the debts incurred by a bankrupt literary tradition—as though the poet, as a person, is himself entropically exhausted by the tired tropes with which, according to an old poetic custom, he ornaments himself:

So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

(76)

This is significant because it introduces a new kind of self-consciousness into the already highly self-conscious tradition of the Renaissance sonnet. In familiar ways, the poet in sonnet 76 identifies himself with his own literariness. At the same time, however, it is in an unfamiliar way that the poet's subjectivity here seems worn out by the heavy burden of the literary history that his literariness both examples and extends. For what is novel in a sonnet such as 76 is not so much the way the poet takes the ever-renewed sameness of the sun, its perennially revivified vivacity, as a dead metaphor for the animating energeia and enargia of an ideal metaphoricity. Rather, what is striking, and what is genuinely novel, is the way the visionary poet takes this faded brightness personally, the way he identifies his own poetic person, his own poetic identity, with the after-light of this dead metaphoric sun. Identifying himself with an aged eternality—which is itself the image of an ideal and an unchanging identity—the young man's poet is like a bleached Dante: he is a visionary poet, but he is so, as it were, after the visionary fact, a seer who now sees in a too-frequently reiterated “luce etterna” a vivid image, an effige or an eidōlon, of the death of both his light and life, as in sonnet 73: “In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.” This is the peculiarly inflected imagery of light with which the young man's poet assimilates to his own poetic psychology the self-consuming logic of “Spending again what is already spent,” for it is with this imagery of after-light that the poet makes his own poetic introspection into something retrospective:

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

(73)

In terms of what we can think of as the conventional visual imagery of the poetry of praise, it is as though in Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man Ideas Mirrour had now become the “glass” of sonnet 62, a “glass,” however, that rather horrifyingly “shows me myself indeed, / Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,” with the subjective consequence of this for the poet being that, as sonnet 62 goes on to say, “Mine own self-love quite contrary I read.”

There is much more that might be said about this imagery of tired light, or tired imagery of light, for it can be argued that such imagery not only determines the young man's poet's sense of space and time, but also his erotic sensibility as well (consider, for example, “A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” [5]). As it is, however, it seems clear that we cannot overlook—as sentimental readings often do—the novel coloring that Shakespeare's young man sonnets give to their visual imagery, to their imagery of the visual, for this is responsible, to a considerable degree, for the pathos of poetic persona that these sonnets regularly exhibit. By the same token, however, it would be a mistake to overemphasize this darkness that informs these sonnets' literary, visionary light. If the young man sonnets are suspicious of their visual imagery, this is not a suspicion that they put directly into words. Quite the contrary, whatever reservations attach to the young man sonnets' imagery of vision, these reservations, like those that shade the poet's various characterizations of the ideality of the young man, are implicit rather than explicit, something we read between what the young man sonnets call their “eternal lines to time” (18).

It is important to insist upon this indirection, upon the fact that the young man sonnets do not explicitly speak against their light, because this accounts for the residual idealism with which the young man sonnets always turn, heliotropically, to “that sun, thine eye” (49). At least ideally, the young man sonnets would like to be like the courtly “marigold” of sonnet 25, whose “fair leaves spread … at the sun's eye.” Like such flowers of fancy, the young man sonnets would like to look exactly like the ideal that they look at, just as the poet would like his “I” to be “as you were when first your eye I ey'd” (104). Hence the nostalgia of the poet's introspection: the poet sees his difference from an eternal visionary sameness, his difference from a visionary poetics that would always be the same because, as Aristotle says of metaphor, it always “see(s) the same.” But this insight serves only to make the poet's ideal bygone vision seem all the more ideal, an image of poetic presence that is always in the past, even when this ancient past is the present in the future tense, as in the prospective retrospection of sonnet 104, where the poet tells “thou age unbred: / Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.” This loyally retrospective visuality, a poetry of re-turn rather than of turn, accounts for the complex texture of the young man sonnets' imagery of vision, a complexity that derives from the fact that the young man sonnets never entirely reject the ideality from which they are estranged. If the young man sonnets characteristically distance themselves from their visual imagery even as they employ it, this distanciation possesses poetic force precisely to the extent that such imagery of light continues to retain, specifically in retrospect, at a distance, its originary and traditionary ideal connotations.

I stress the vestigial power of such visual ideality in the young man sonnets, its “present-absent” (45) presence, because this both measures and prepares for the difference between the sonnets addressed to the young man and those addressed to the dark lady. As is well known, in the subsequence of sonnets addressed to the dark lady such ideal imagery of light is explicitly—Shakespeare's word here is important—“forsworn” (152). What gives this “forswearing” its power, however, and what distinguishes it, tonally as well as thematically, from the implicit visual reservations informing the sonnets addressed to the young man, is the way the dark lady's poet puts these heretofore unspoken visionary suspicions directly into words. In the young man sonnets, the young man, whatever his faults, is an “image” whose idealization effectively can represent an ideal that is lost, as in sonnet 31: “Their images I lov'd I view in thee, / And thou (all they) hast all the all of me,” or the young man is a “shadow” who to the poet's “imaginary sight … makes black night beauteous, and her old face new” (27). In contrast, in the dark lady sonnets, though as something that is more complicated and more unsettling than a simple opposition, the dark lady has the “power,” as in sonnet 149, “To make me give the lie to my true sight, / And swear that brightness doth not grace the day.”

We broach here what is often called the anti-Petrarchanism of the sonnets to the dark lady, and it is certainly the case that the dark lady sonnets regularly characterize their literary peculiarity and novelty in terms of the way they differ from the specular ideality of a previous Petrarchist poetics. When the poet looks at the young man, he sees “That sun, thine eye” (49). In contrast, when he looks at the dark lady, what he sees is the way she is unlike the ideal brightness of the young man: “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun” (130). On the face of it, this amounts to a straightforward difference, for, on the one hand, there is brightness, whereas, on the other, there is darkness. What makes this difference complicated, however, is that when the poet makes an issue of it, when he gives explicit expression to it, he presents the darkness of the lady as itself the image of this difference, as an image, precisely, of the difference between the black that it is and the light that it is not.

This is why the difference between the lady's stressedly unconventional darkness and the young man's emphatically conventional brightness produces something that is both more and less than a straightforward black and white antithesis of the kind suggested by the “anti-” of anti-Petrarchanism. On the one hand, there is brightness, but, on the other, is a darkness that, in a peculiar or what Troilus calls a “bi-fold” way, is both these hands together both at once.¹¹ Such is the strangeness of a lady whom the poet alternately praises and blames for being other than what at first sight she appears. As an image of that which she is not, the lady is presented as the likeness of a difference, at once a version of, but at the same time a perversion of, that to which she is, on the one hand, both positively and negatively compared, and that to which she is, on the other, both positively and negatively opposed. For this reason, as she is presented, the lady is, strictly speaking, beyond both comparison and opposition. The lady both is and is not what she is, and because she is in this way, in herself, something double, the lady cannot be comprehended by a poetics of “To one, of one, still such, and ever so.” As the poet puts it in sonnet 130—this the consequence of the fact that his “mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun”—the lady is a “love,” just as she inspires a “love,” that is “as rare, / As any she belied with false compare.” The irrational ratio of the formula defines the peculiarity of the lady. She is a “she” who is logically, as well as grammatically, both subject and object of “belied with false compare,” comparable, therefore, only to the way comparison has failed.

From the beginning, this effective doubleness of the lady, defined in specifically literary terms, i.e., in terms of a new kind of poetics, is what the poet finds distinctive about her, as in the first sonnet he addresses to her:

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame.

(127)

What we are supposed to recognize here as officially surprising is that the lady's traditional foul is now characterized as something that is fair, just as in later sonnets this novel fair will be yet more surprisingly foul: “For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (147). In either case, however, whether fair or foul, it is always as images of that which they are not, as something double, fair and foul, as something duplicitous and heterogeneous, that the lady and her darkness acquire their erotic and their literary charge.

Thus “black” is “now” “beauty's successive heir,” now that “beauty” is “slander'd with a bastard shame.” In the context of the sequence as a whole, the force of this unconventional “succession” is that it repeats, but with a difference, the themes of reiterated and legitimately procreated likeness with reference to which the young man at the opening of his subsequence is supposed, as an imago, to “prove his beauty by succession thine” (2): “Die single, and thine image dies with thee” (3). Instead of the ideal multiplication of kind with kind, the ongoing reproduction of the visual same, by means of which the young man is supposed to “breed another thee” (6)—a breeding implicitly associated in the young man sonnets with a kind of homosexual usury: “that use is not forbidden usury” (6)—the novel beauty of the lady instead exemplifies a novelly miscegenating “successivity”—novel because successive to such Platonized “succession”—whereby black becomes the differential substitute, the unkind “heir,” of what is “fair.”¹² So too with the blackness of the lady's “raven” eyes, a darkness that replaces at the same time as it thus displaces the brightness it sequentially succeeds:

Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem.

(127)

This, in little, defines the structural and temporal relationship of the dark lady sonnets to the young man sonnets. The second subsequence is a repetition of the first, but it is a discordant and a disturbing repetition because the latter subsequence, stressing itself as a repetition, represents the former (as also the former's themes of visionary presence—“So either by thy picture or my love / Thyself away are present still with me” [47]—in such a way that its memorial repetition explicitly calls up the poignant absence of that which it recalls). To the degree that this articulates the silent reservations that darken the idealism of the young man sonnets, to this extent we register the way in which the “black” of the second subsequence is continuous with the elegaically retrospective visuality of the first. Yet there is also an emphatic difference between the two, a difference that derives precisely from the fact that the dark lady's poet explicitly expresses what the young man's poet preferred to leave implicit. For what the dark lady's poet sees in the darkness of the lady's mourning eyes is the death of ideal visionary presence; her darkness is for him an image or imago of the loss of vision. But, according to the poet, it is this very vision of the loss of vision that now thrusts him into novel speech—the discourse of “black beauty”—making him now no longer a poet of the eye, but, instead, a poet of the tongue: “Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe, / That every tongue says beauty should look so” (127).

As Ulysses says of wanton Cressida, therefore, “There's language in her eye.”¹³ But what is odd about this language is what is odd about the lady's eye, namely, that it is opposed to vision. The difference between this and the way that language is characterized in the young man sonnets is, of course, considerable, and we may say that this difference at once examples and defines the novelty of the way a poet speaks in a post-Petrarchist poetics. In the young man sonnets the poet ideally speaks a visionary speech, and therefore, when he speaks about this speech he speaks of it as something of the eye: “O, learn to read what silent love hath writ: / To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit” (23). In contrast, but again as something that is more complicated than a simple opposition, the poet in the dark lady subsequence will speak about his speech as speech, and as something that, for just this very reason, is different from a visual ideal. It is in this “forswearing” way that the dark lady, with the “pow'r” of her “insufficiency,” will “make me give the lie to my true sight, / And swear that brightness doth not grace the day” (150). The double way the lady looks is like the double way that language speaks, which is why, for example, when the poet looks at the lady's far too common “common place” (137), a place that is at once erotic and poetic, he tells us how “mine eyes seeing this, say this is not” (137).

Thematized in this way, as something radically discrepant to the truth of ideal vision, as the voice of “eyes … which have no correspondence with true sight” (148), language is regularly presented in the dark lady sonnets as something whose truth consists not only in saying, but in being, something false: “My thoughts and my discourse as madman's are, / At random from the truth vainly express'd: / For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night” (147). Correspondingly, because no longer something visual, because no longer the iconic likeness or the eidōlon of what it speaks about, verbal language now defines itself as its forswearing difference from what is “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true’”: “For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness, / Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy, / And to enlighten thee gave eyes to blindness, / Or made them swear against the thing they see” (152). And, as a further and more personal result, the poet now identifies himself with the difference that his language thus bespeaks. He is no longer a visionary poet who identifies his “I” and “eye.” Instead, because he speaks, the poet comes to inhabit the space of difference between poetic language and poetic vision, a difference generated by the speech he speaks. The poet's subjectivity, his “I,” is precipitated in or as the slippage between his eye and tongue. The poet becomes, in the phrase I take as title for this paper, the subject of a “perjur'd eye”: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjur'd eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie!” (152).

It is fair to say, therefore, that in the dark lady sonnets we encounter a poetics in which true vision is captured by false language, and that the conflict thus engendered—between sight and word, between being and meaning, between poetic presentation and poetic representation—in turn determines specific variations on, or mutations of, traditionary sonneteering claims and motifs. A poetics of verbal re-presentation, stressing the repetition of the re-, spells the end of the poetics of visual presentation, thereby constituting the Idea of poetic presence as something that is lost. To the extent that this is the case, Shakespeare's sonnet sequence marks a decisive moment in the history of lyric, for when the dark lady sonnets forswear the ideally visionary poetics of the young man sonnets, when poetic language comes in this way to be characterized as something verbal, not visual, we see what happens to poetry when it gives over a perennial poetics of ut pictura poesis for (literally, so as to speak) a poetics of ut poesis poesis, a transition that writes itself out in Shakespeare's sonnets as an unhappy progress from a poetry based on visual likeness—whose adequation to that which it admires is figured by a “wondrous scope” by means of which “One thing expressing, leaves out difference” (105)—to a poetry based on verbal difference—whose inadequate relation to that which it bespeaks is figured by an “insufficiency” that “make(s) me give the lie to my true sight” (150). In the sequence as a whole, this progress from a homogeneous poetics of vision to a heterogeneous poetics of language is fleshed out as a progress from an ideally homosexual desire, however conflicted, for what is “‘Fair,’ ‘kind,’ and ‘true’” to a frankly misogynistic, heterosexual desire for what is fair and unfair, kind and unkind, true and false—a progress, in other words, from man to woman. Here again, however, it is explicitly and literally as a figure of speech that the lady becomes the novel “hetero-” opposed as such to an ideal and a familiar Neo-Platonic “homo-,” as when: “When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies” (138). It is in this way, by making each the figure of the other, that the poet collates his corrupting Eros with his corrupting Logos. When the poet “credit[s] her false-speaking tongue,” the result is that “On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd” (138). But the consequence of this false correspondence, of this traducement of the Cratylism of the poetry of praise—e.g., of the “beatitudinizing” power of Dante's “Beatrice,” or of the self-applauding circularities of Petrarch's puns on “Laura,” “laud,” and “laurel”—is that the poet comes to express, in terms of a specific desire of language, the novel duplicity of a specifically linguistic language of desire: “Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be” (138).

Again there is more that might be said about the way the dark lady sonnets thematize their lady's and their poet's speech as speech, and draw from this the moral that such speech is radically excessive to an orthodox poetics of admiration. As with the implicit reservations that inform the young man sonnets' visionary themes, it would be possible to show how Shakespeare's explicitly paradoxical version of a traditionary poetics of praise not only affects the poet's expressions of desire—leading him from a homosexual desire for that which is admired to a heterosexual desire for that which is not admired—but, again, his sense of space and time as well. If we could follow this out in sufficient detail we would develop a more textured phenomenology of the psychology of the Shakespearean subject. This would help not only to describe the ways in which poetic person or lyric subjectivity in Shakespeare's sonnet sequence is altogether foreign to the kind of poetic person we find in first-person poetry up through the Renaissance, but also to explain why this novel Shakespearean subjectivity—not only as it appears in Shakespeare's first-person sonnets but also as it manifests itself in Shakespeare's zero-person plays—subsequently becomes (since Shakespeare, which is to say since the decisive conclusion of an epideictic poetics, which is to say since the end of a poetic tradition in which all poetry is a poetry of praise) the dominant and canonical version in our literary tradition of literary subjectivity per se.

For obvious reasons an essay is not the place to develop the details of such an account, an account that necessarily calls for all the particularity and specificity of extended practical and historical literary criticism.¹⁴ However, for the sake of an outline of such an account, one point seems especially important: namely, that this novel Shakespearean subjectivity, for all its difference from that which it succeeds, is nevertheless constrained by the traditionary lyric literariness to which it stands as epitaph. In this sense, we might say that “poor Petrarch's long deceased woes” exert a posthumous power, prescribing in advance the details of their own forswearing. This point, too, can only be developed here in a schematic and perfunctory fashion. But it is possible, by looking at the way the dark lady's poet revises the visionary logic and psychologic of the young man's poet's eye and heart, to get some sense of the way Shakespeare's paradoxical invention of a heterogeneous and heterosexual poetics of paradoxical praise amounts to an orthodox mutation of a conventionally homogeneous and homosexual poetics of orthodox idealization:

Thine eyes I love, and they as pitying me,
Knowing my heart torment me with disdain,
Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of th' east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face.
O, let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me, since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part.
          Then will I swear beauty herself is black,
          And all they foul that thy complexion lack.

As in sonnets 46 and 47, the general conceit of sonnet 123, with its frustrated lover addressing his pitiless, disdaining beloved, is a Petrarchan commonplace, going back beyond Petrarch to the rime petrose of Arnault Daniel. Equally common is the intricate development of the imagery of sympathetically erotic vision. In this sense we deal here with the same poetics Shakespeare presupposes in the young man sonnets, where, for example, he can speak familiarly of “that sun, thine eye” (49) precisely because a long-standing tradition of metaphysical and sexual allegory authorizes an iconographic equating of the two. On the other hand, but in an equally insistent way, sonnet 132 further plays upon this convention and these traditional light-sight metaphors when, as a result of comparing the beloved's eyes to the sun, it turns out not that her eyes are lamps, but that the sun to which they are compared is therefore black. This too is, in part, conventional (e.g., Stella's eyes are black), but what concerns us is the stressed contrast to what has come before. In the young man sonnets the morning is “sacred,” “new-appearing” (7), “golden” and “green” (33). Here, instead, “the morning sun of heaven” is obscuring complement to “the grey cheeks of the east,” shining in the morning like the evening star at night, because it is a brightness in an encroaching darkness of which it is itself the cause and sign. Where in the sonnets addressed to the young man the sun is a “gracious light” (7) to the morning, here, instead, the morning is a “mourning” whose inversion is a darkening “grace”; “Since mourning doth thee grace.” This pun on “mo[u]rning,” which explains why in the dark lady sonnets “brightness doth not grace the day,” is the kind of motivated homophone that Shakespeare is often either faulted or appreciated for, either the sort for which, in Johnson's phrase, he threw away the world, or the sort with which he generates the resonant ambiguities that critics like to list. The point that is emphasized by the sonnet, however, is that the pun, which must be noticed as such for it to work its poetic effect, does in little what the poem does rhetorically as a whole: repeating itself in itself so as to undo itself with its own echo, discovering and producing its own loss at the very moment of calling to our attention the way language, theme, and image displace themselves by folding over upon themselves in paradox. So too, this is precisely the mourning paradox of what is epideictically orthodox for which the poem will sadly say that it was written: “Then will I swear beauty herself is black, / And all they foul that thy complexion lack.”

In obvious ways, therefore, all this—morning and melancholia—results in something that is much more complex than a simple negation of Petrarchan themes and images, and for this reason the poem possesses a tonality unlike even the most self-consciously witty Petrarchan lovers' complaint. The system of logical oppositions and conventional antitheses into which we might be tempted to organize the sonnet's courtly courtship argument falls to pieces as soon as the sonnet brings antithesis into play. Just as the lady's eyes by turning black express a pity occasioned by her heart's disdain, so too does the poet here thematize the fact that he here expresses his heart's desire with a language of disdain. In the same way that the stain of the lady's eyes is both image of and answer to the disdain of her heart, so too does the poet here amplify the lady's beauty by fouling the conventional images of fairness. The relationship between the lady's eye and the lady's heart, or of the poet to the lady, is a matter, therefore, neither of similarity and contrast nor of pity and disdain, and, for this reason, there is no way either poet or lady might “suit thy pity like in every part.” Pity is a figure of disdain just as morning is a version of the night, each of them the homeopathic mirror of the heteropathy of the other. As a result, with likeness emerging as the instance, rather than the antithesis, of difference, with pity the complement to disdain, the sonnet forces its reader to deal with oddly asymmetrical oppositions whereby each polarized side or half of every opposition that the sonnet adduces already includes, and therefore changes by encapsulating, the larger dichotomy of which it is a part. With regard to the lady, this means that she cannot treat the poet either with pity or with disdain, or even with an oxymoronic combination of the two. For her “charm” consists precisely of the way these two apparently antithetical modalities, empathy and antipathy, each turn out to be, within their singular propriety, the contrary double not only of its other but also of itself, the two together thus composing a double doubling whose reduplicating logic forecloses the possibility of ever isolating either modality in itself. With regard to the poet, this means that he cannot speak of his lady with a simple rhetoric of similarity and contrast, for his language undercuts the logic of likeness and difference even as it advances complementary contrarieties.¹⁵

The difference between this and what happens when sonnets 46 and 47 develop their eye-heart topos is pointed enough, a difference now that makes a difference. Where the two young man sonnets see both eye and heart as each the figure and occasion of the other, sonnet 132 instead both literally and figuratively describes a desire at odds with itself because at odds with what it sees. Where the two young man sonnets bring out the syncretic identity built into their differences, the dark lady sonnet instead brings out the diacritical difference built into its identities. Where the two young man sonnets develop an ideal logic of sympathetic opposition, the dark lady sonnet gives us instead what is the paradoxical opposite, if we can call it that, to such a logic of sympathetic opposition. In terms of form, of theme, of tone, these are all significant differences. But it is important to realize that these differences derive not only their force but also their specific qualities, their content as well as their contours, from the structurally systematic way in which sonnet 132 understands its language paradoxically to redouble, with a difference, the orthodox dual unities with which it begins—i.e., from the way in which the double doubling of sonnet 132 tropes, re-turns, re-verses, the unifying tropes of an idealizing, homogeneous poetics, this way inverting the reciprocal way that eye and heart in sonnets 46 and 47 “each doth good turns now unto the other” (47). “Mourning” its “morning,” the sonnet puts into words, literally puts into words, the duplicity of its speech, and this duplicity, thus bespoken, in turn divides the original bright desire and golden poetics presupposed by the young man sonnets. By means of this remarked duplication, the sonnet undoes both erotic and rhetorical identification, and thereby, through its language, justifies the chiasmic inversion of the poet's eye and heart. In sonnet 132 the content of “mourning” is the loss of “morning,” and this hole built into a double language, this difference sounded in a sameness, is what functions both to blind the poet's eye and to break the poet's heart. Developed in this way, as the forswearing double of a visual ideal, as “morning” manqué, language acquires in the sonnet, and at the same time also proclaims, its novel motives and motifs, precisely those that the poet defines, logically and psychologically, as “Then will I swear beauty herself is black.”

It is language, therefore, conceived and conceited as something linguistic, as something of the tongue, as both like and unlike the vision to which it is opposed and on which it is superimposed, that in the dark lady sonnets describes and names the redoubling of unity that leads to division, the mimic likeness of a likeness that leads to difference, the representation of presentation that spells the end of presence. Writing at or as the conclusion of a tradition of poetic idealism and idealization, when poetic imitation no longer functions as Ideas Mirrour, when poetic metaphor no longer “see(s) the same,” Shakespeare in his sonnets draws the formal and thematic consequences that follow from the death of visual admiration. In the poetics of the sequence as a whole, at the level of its rhetorical figures, the dark lady sonnets explicitly break the amatory metaphorics of “Two distincts, division none” (The Phoenix and the Turtle) by substituting for such a unitary duality a tropic system of triangular, chiasmic duplicity: “A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed” (133). In the narrative the sequence tells, this figural double duplication, which brings out the difference built into binary identities, is thematically embodied in the ambiguously duplicitous dark lady—darker and older, almost by structural necessity, than the fair young man—and then projected into the double cuckoldry story itself, where the poet is betrayed by both his objects of desire when they couple or cross-couple with each other, and when the sequence as a whole moves from the unity of folie à deux to the duality of ménage à trois. In terms of the sonnets' own literary self-consciousness, there is an analogous contrast, again thematic, between the traditional poetry of erotic idealization addressed to the young man and the parodic undoing of that tradition by means of the radically para-, not anti-, Petrarchanism addressed to the dark lady, which repeats, but with a difference, the “sameness” of traditional idealizing themes. Finally, because the self-conscious tradition of the poetry of praise assumes that the language of poetic desire is itself identical to the object of poetic desire—which is why an orthodox poetry of love characteristically writes itself out as a love of poetry—Shakespeare's paradoxical version of the poetry of praise brings out even the difference built into the identity of literary and sexual admiration, which is how the dark lady sonnets describe a poetic desire whose Eros and Logos are themselves thematically out of joint.

It would be possible, of course, to find literary precedents for what seems novel in Shakespeare's sonnets. The kind of chiasmic (not oxymoronic) figurality that governs so many of Shakespeare's sonnets, the darksome light of the young man sonnets and their conflicted response to idealism, the general sense of literary belatedness that runs through the sequence as a whole—such features are already present in Dante, and they are yet more insistently and urgently emphatic in Petrarch, where the intractably heterogeneous relation of poetic signifier to poetic signified defines, to some extent, the central worry of the “scattered” songs to Laura. (In The Secretum, Petrarch's private and unpublished imaginary dialogue with Saint Augustine, Augustine accuses Petrarch of having fallen in love with Laura only on account of her name). So too, we could readily trace the way the Renaissance sonnet grows increasingly arch in its presentation of the Cratylitic correspondence of signifier to signified. This archness develops in so smooth and continuous a way as to suggest an unbroken line linking Beatrice, through Laura, through Stella (and through others) to, finally, what Shakespeare in several voluptuary sonnets calls his “Will.”¹⁶ So too, we could correlate the development of such literary self-consciousness with the increasingly intentional artificiality of the later “golden” sonnet, the way such sonnets strive, quite frankly, to present the conventionally reflexive reflections of orthodox epideixis as something merely literary, for prime example, the over-written way that Astrophil looks deep into his heart and in this way underwrites his introspective astrophilia. Even more obviously, we could find in the Renaissance vogue for the mock encomium, in the widespread enthusiasm for comically paradoxical praises of that which is low, not only the hyper-rhetorical temperament that Shakespeare's sonnets presuppose, but, also, a regularly reiterated interest in the specific themes that Shakespeare develops in the sonnets to the dark lady—e.g., the paradoxical praise of blindness, darkness, nymphomania, cuckoldry, false language, and so forth.¹⁷

The existence of such precedents is evidence of the fact that what Shakespeare “invents” in his sonnets is what he “comes upon” in a literary tradition and a literary history of which he is well aware and to which his sonnets are, again in a conventional way, intended as response. Yet it is important to recognize the genuine novelty that Shakespeare introduces into this literary tradition when he puts into words, as I have put it, his suspicions—truly, sub-spicere—of the visual and visionary poetics of idealism. For when Shakespeare thus outspokenly articulates, thematically as well as formally, the “insufficiency” that “make[s] me give the lie to my true sight” (150), when he makes his language literally as well as figuratively “mourn” the “morning,” he manages, on the one hand, to render explicit reservations that in the orthodox Renaissance sonnet are serious but always implicit, just as, on the other, he manages to take seriously what in the tradition of the paradoxical mock encomium is explicit but always merely comic. He can do so because the thematic innovation has more than thematic consequence. By “expressing” the “difference” that the idealizing and homogeneous Renaissance sonnet necessarily “leaves out,” the peculiar matter of Shakespearean paradox finds itself instantiated, exampled, by the corresponding paradox of Shakespearean poetic manner. Language thus speaks for its own gainsaying. The result is a new kind of Cratylism, a second degree of Cratylism, that, like the Liar's Paradox Shakespeare often flirts with in his sonnets—“Those lines that I before have writ do lie” (115), “When my love swears that she is made of truth” (138)—is proof of its own paradoxicality. In this gainsaying way—a speech acquired on condition that it speak against itself—Shakespeare accomplishes a limit case of the correspondence of signifier to signified. As the self-belying likeness of a difference, language becomes in Shakespeare's sonnets the true icon of an idol. Shakespeare's poetics of the word in this way acquires the “power” of its “insufficiency” (150), for every word the poet speaks effectively presents, is demonstration of, the loss of his ideal.¹⁸

With regard to Shakespearean subjectivity, two points follow from this, one practical, the other theoretical. First of all, the poet who speaks such a “forswearing” speech is no longer the speaking “eye” of the traditional sonnet. As a result, the poetic persona of Shakespeare's sonnets can no longer elaborate his subjectivity in accord with the ideal model of a self composed of the specular identification of poetic ego and poetic ego-ideal, of “I” and “you,” or of eye and eyed. Instead, identifying himself with the heterogeneous look of the lady, or with the duplicity of her speech, the poet identifies himself with difference, with that which resists or breaks identification. The result is that the poet's identity is defined, by chiasmic triangulation, as the disruption or fracture of identity: “Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken, / And my next self thou harder hast engrossed” (133). In terms of poetic erotics, we can say that this is why the poet of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence possesses a doubly divided desire—“Two loves I have of comfort and despair” (144)—and why the one is purchased dialectically, measure for measure, at the expense of the other, as “Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame” (129). Speaking more generally, we can say that such a poetic self identifies himself with an inescapable, because constitutive, “insufficiency.” Built up on or out of the loss of itself, its identity defined as its difference from itself, a hole opens up within the whole of poetic first-person self-presence. This “hole” within the “whole” (and also without, see sonnet 134: “He pays the whole, and yet am I not free”) inserts into the poet a space of personal interiority, a palpable syncope, that justifies and warrants poetic introspection. This accounts for the strong personal affect of Shakespeare's lyric persona, what is called its “depth.” By joining the rhetorical form of triangular chiasmus to the thematic heartbreak of a “perjur'd eye” (a phrase that, for this reason, we can think of as a “Shakespeareme,” i.e., the smallest minimal unit of Shakespearean self), Shakespeare's sonnets give off the subjectivity effect called for by a post-idealist literariness. This is also how Shakespeare produces subjectivity in his plays, where, to take a simple example, the cross-coupling of pairs of lovers, their “star-cross'd” fate regularly explained in terms of a thematic disjunction between vision and language, characteristically generates what are taken to be Shakespeare's deeply realized, psychologistically authentic, dramatic personae. Moreover, to the extent that the characterologies of these characters continue to retain their specifically characterological or subjective appeal, to this extent we have evidence of the abiding, though posthumous, power of the idealism and the idealization to which the logic of their unhappy psychologies attest—an ideality all the more powerful for being constituted retrospectively, as a “remembrance of things past,” as “th' expense of many a vanish'd sight,” as a “fore-bemoaned moan,” “Which I new pay as if not paid before” (30).

This leads, however, to a concluding theoretical observation. It has no doubt already been noticed that this reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, perfunctory as it is, has many affinities with various literary theories that have been labeled, somewhat simplistically, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist. My concern with the way the “languageness” of language is stressed by Shakespeare's sonnets is related to accounts of literariness that have been developed by such formalists as Roman Jakobson, Gérard Genette, Michael Riffaterre. My concern with cross-coupling chiasmus is related in very obvious ways to A. J. Greimas's “semantic square,” to Paul De Man's discussions of figural chiasmus, and also to Jacques Lacan's “Schema L,” which Lacan draws as a quaternary “Z.” So too, my discussion of the way in which an idealist homogeneity is disrupted by a supplementary heterogeneity is in many ways like, and is certainly indebted to, Jacques Derrida's various essays in deconstructive phenomenology. Most obviously and most importantly, my account of a subjectivity precipitated by the paradoxical relationship of language to vision, my understanding of a language of desire and a desire of language, is very much influenced by Lacan's psychoanalytic account of what he calls the capture of the Imaginary by what he calls the Symbolic.

It is possible to recognize, therefore, a considerable overlap between certain contemporary literary, and not only literary, theorizations and both the formal and thematic peculiarities of Shakespeare's “perjur'd eye.” This suggests either that Shakespeare was very theoretically acute or, instead, that contemporary theory is itself very Shakespearean. However, before choosing between either of these alternatives, we should recall the fact that contemporary literary theory, as it has thought itself out, has enacted a development very similar not only to the development we can discern in Shakespeare's sonnets as they move from the sonnets addressed to the young man to those addressed to the dark lady, but similar also to the larger literary development within which we can locate the historical significance of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence as a whole. Responding to Husserl's Dantesque phenomenology of Ideas, to Husserl's concern with eidetic reduction and a transcendental Ego, Sartre developed a psychology of imagination whose logic and metaphors very much resemble the paranoiac visionary thematics of a good many of Shakespeare's sonnets to the young man. The subjective optics of the Sartrian “gaze” and its melodrama of mutually persecutory master-slave relations subsequently receives in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, especially in late works such as Le Visible et l'Invisible, an ironically comic revision whose chiasmic marriage of subject and object is reminiscent of more than a few of Shakespeare's most genuinely poignant sonneteering conceits; it was Merleau-Ponty, after all, who introduced “chiasmus” into contemporary critical discourse, as a way to explain the way Cézanne paints the trees watching Cézanne.¹⁹ Lacan, Merleau-Ponty's friend, broke with Merleau-Ponty on just this point, seeing in the fully lived “flesh” and “visibility” of Merleau-Ponty's chiasmus a psychological and a phenomenological sentimentality. Instead, Lacan developed an account of the way subjectivity is born in the place where chiasmus breaks. Lacan's anamorphic “gaze,” very different from “le regard” of Sartre or of Merleau-Ponty, along with Lacan's account of the way language potentiates and inherits this rupture of the imaginary, rather perfectly repeats the formal as well as the thematic logic of Shakespeare's “perjur'd eye.”²⁰ So too, Derrida's attempt to rupture this rupture, Derrida's putatively post-subjective account of a supplemental différence, seems, from the point of view of Shakespeare's sonnets, nothing but another “increase” that “From fairest creatures we desire” (l), assuming we recognize the wrinkle, literally the “crease,” that Shakespeare introduces into the perennial poetics of copious “increase.”

This is significant because it raises the possibility that current thought works to transfer into a theoretical register a constellated set of literary themes, metaphors, motifs, that Shakespeare introduces into literature, in response to specific literary exigencies, at and as the beginning of the end of the Humanist Renaissance. If so, it is possible that current theorizations are important not because they offer a method or even a point of view with which to look back at Shakespeare, but, instead, because they participate in the very same literary history within which Shakespeare writes his sonnets, emerging now as a symptomatic and epiphenomenal consequence of the way, at the beginning of the modernist epoch, Shakespeare rethinks the literature he succeeds. Putting the question more strongly, we can ask whether, repeating Shakespeare's repetition, it is possible for contemporary theory to do so with a difference.

These are not questions I mean fully either to answer or even to address in this essay. But I would like at least to raise them, for it seems important that such a sense of repetition is itself a distinctive mark of Renaissance sensibility, especially of a good many literary minds for whom the project of their present is to give rebirth to the past. The very great Humanist Leone Ebreo—precursor to Spinoza, and in this way an important influence on Freud—in his dialogue D'amore e desiderio distinguishes—the topic is an old one—between love and desire on the the grounds that love is an emotion one feels for that which one possesses, whereas desire is the emotion one feels for that which one does not possess.²¹ Returning to the subject sometime later, in a dialogue called De l'origine d'amore, Ebreo emends his original distinction, reformulating it on the grounds that even that which one possesses, because it is possessed in transient time, carries with it, even at the moment of possession, a sense of loss.²² This possession of loss, an emotion which is half love and half desire—what we might call a desire for love, but what we cannot call a love of desire—grows increasingly strong when the later and post-Humanist Renaissance returns to rethink a good many other topics relating to the origin of love. In time, in Shakespeare's sonnets, the rebirth of the Renaissance turns into the death of remorse, for in Shakespeare's sonnets “desire is death” (147) because “now is black beauty's successive heir” (127).²³

It is because this is so central a theme in them, because they fully realize their re-, that Shakespeare's sonnets possess more than merely local interest. In Shakespeare's sonnets we hear how a literature of repetition, rather than a literature de l'origine, explains its desire to itself. With regard to the matter of poetic person, this is important because it allows us to understand how Shakespeare's response to secondariness leads him to introduce into literature a subjectivity altogether novel in the history of the lyric, or, as Shakespeare puts it, “Since mind at first in character was done” (59). For this very reason, however, the constitution of Shakespearean poetic self necessarily recalls the imperatives of a literariness larger even than the Shakespearean:

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil'd
Which laboring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!

(59)

“The second burthen of a former child” very well characterizes the subjectivity fathered in the late Renaissance by the burden of a belated literariness. There is good reason to compare the rebirth of this aborted subject that “invention bear(s) amiss” with “Death's second self, that seals up all in rest” (73). However, to the extent that it is not only Shakespeare who looks, as sonnet 59 puts it, “with a backward look,” to see “Your image in some antique book,” the revolutionary question raised by such Shakespearean retrospection will continue to retain the ongoing urgency of a perennial and, it seems fair to say, since even Shakespeare now is “nothing new,” an increasingly important literary commonplace:

That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame,
Whether we are mended, or whe'er better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
          O, sure I am the wits of former days
          To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

(59)

Notes

1. All Shakespeare references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans, et al. (Boston, 1974). Sonnet numbers are indicated within parentheses.

2. See Lisle C. John, The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences: Studies in Conventional Conceits (New York, 1938), pp. 93-95; J. H. Hanford, “The Debate of Eye and Heart,” Modern Language Notes, 26:6 (1911), 161-65.

3. Petrarch, 174; compare to 86 and 87; references are to Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and other Lyrics, ed. and trans. R. M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass., 1976). Le Roman de la Rose, ed. F. Lecoy (Paris, 1914), pp. 1684-87; see notes for background of the motif.

4. Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33, lines 91-131; references are to Dante's Paradiso, ed. and trans. John D. Sinclair (New York, 1977).

5. “Idea” is a sonneteering commonplace: J. W. Hebel, in his edition of The Works of Michael Drayton (Oxford, 1961) cites parallels in de Pontoux's L'Idée, in du Bellay, Desportes, Daniel; see vol. 5, p. 13. The Quarto prints “steeld”; Stephen Booth summarizes the range of connotations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven, 1977), pp. 172-73. The conflicting ensemble of motifs attaching to “steeld”—visual, metallic, inscriptive, all those also referring to “stolen” and to “styled”—themselves stage the tensions that sonnet 24 develops out of its general visual conceit, especially the sonnet's play on “perspective.”

6. Simonides' saying is already a cliché for Plutarch, De aud. poet. 3. In Elizabethan Critical Essays (London, 1937), vol. 1, pp. 386-87, G. G. Smith cites the many Renaissance parallels. Aristotle, Poetics 1459a 5-8; “But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars (to gar eu metapherein to to homoion theōrein estin),” Aristotle on the Art of Poetry, ed. and trans. I. Bywater (Oxford, 1909), p. 71.

7. “‘We beg you to tell us wherein this bliss of yours (tua beatitudine) now lies.’ And I answered her by saying: ‘In those words that praise my lady (In quelle parole che lodano la donna mia)’. … Therefore I resolved that from now on I would choose material for my poems that should be in praise of this most gracious one.” La Vita nuova, (XVIII), F. Chapelli, ed., Opere di Dante Alighiere (Milan, 1967); M. Musa, trans., La Vita Nuova of Dante Alighieri (Bloomington, Ind., 1965). Acting on this resolve, Dante composes the first canzone of La Vita Nuova, “Donne ch'avete inteletto d'amore,” which later, in Purg. 24, 49-63, in conversation with Buonagiunta, will be remembered as marking the beginning of “le nove rime” of the “dolce stil nuovo.” For Petrarch's puns on “Laura,” see, for example, Rime Sparse, 5, 6, 7, 194, 196, 246, 327, 356.

8. Because the sonnet begins as a poetry of erotic praise, and because praise is also a central thematic issue in the orthodox Renaissance sonnet, the genre is a particularly focused instance of the poetry of praise. This is a significant fact because from antiquity up through the Renaissance, praise or, more generally, the epideictic (praise or blame), is taken to be the master literary genre of literature as such, the single genre under which all other, more particular, literary genres are properly subsumed. This is the basis for the hierarchy of literary genres or “kinds” in Renaissance literary theory, a typology that goes back to Aristotle, who derived all poetry from primal, epideictic imitation: praise of the high and blame of the low. We can identify the idealist assumptions at stake here by recalling the fact that the only poetry Socrates allows into the republic is “praise of gods and virtuous men.”

   The epideictic bias of traditional poetics—e.g., reading the Aeneid as a praise of Aeneas—is usually understood to reflect a concern on the part of the theoreticians with the didactic function of the poetical and the rhetorical; this is to understand the poetical or rhetorical in terms of effective moral persuasion. There is a more formal reason, however, with which traditional poetic theory accounts for the generic importance of the epideictic. Epi-deictic or de-monstrative rhetoric is called such because it is a rhetoric of “show” and “showing forth.” The Greek is epideiknunai, “to show,” “display”; in the middle voice, “to show off,” “to display for oneself.” The Indo-European root is *deik, with variant *deig, “to show,” which gives Greek dikē, “justice,” and the verb deiknunai, “bring to light,” “show forth,” “represent,” “portray,” “point out,” “show,” leading to English “deictic,” “paradigmatic,” “apodeictic,” etc. So too, deiknunai is also closely related to deikeilon, “representation,” “exhibition,” “reflection,” “image,” “phantom,” “sculpted figure.”

   Aristotle brings out the significance of this semantic field, the Heideggerean resonance of which is obvious enough, when he distinguishes epideictic rhetoric from the two other kinds, forensic and deliberative, on the grounds that in the former the audience serves as “observer” (theōron), whereas in the latter two the audience serves as “judge” (kritēn), Rhetoric, 1358b2. Aristotle's point, brought out by his distinguishing between a rhetoric addressed to vision and a rhetoric addressed to judgment, is that epideictic or demonstrative oratory, as distinct from the transparent language of the law courts or the assembly, is a rhetoric both of display and self-display, a spectacular speech that we “observe” precisely because its manner calls attention to itself, a pointing “there” that points ego-centrically to “here,” an objective “showing” that amounts to a subjective “showing-off.” This explains why the epi-deictic is an extraordinary, not an ordinary, language. The point could be put in more contemporary terms by recalling the way Jakobson defines the specifically literary function as that message which stresses itself as merely message. The Renaissance sonnet characteristically amplifies this formal circularity of the language of praise, its recursive reflexivity, through various psychologistic conceits all designed to demonstrate the correlation of admiring subject with admired object. The point to realize is that when Shakespeare gives over the poetry of praise, when he distances himself from a visionary poetics, he not only gives over the themes and imagery of a perennial poetics, but also gives over the semiosis of this profoundly orthodox (and structuralist) literariness.

   For the visual imagery employed by Renaissance poetic theory, especially theory of epideixis, see O. B. Hardison Jr., The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Westport, Conn., 1962), pp. 51-67. For general background see R. Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947), chaps. 2, 3; R. W. Lee, “Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting,” Art Bulletin 22 (1940), 197-269; E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948); R.J. Clements, “Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem Books (Rome, 1960).

9. Murray Krieger, “Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5:4 (1979), 619.

10. Astrophil and Stella, No. 15.

11. Troilus and Cressida, V.2.144.

12. Dante puts homosexuals and usurers in the same circle of hell, on the grounds that they couple, for sterile profit, kind with kind. For a very plausible explanation of why Brunetto Latini is also included here, see Eugene Vance, “Désir, rhétorique et texte,” Poétique 42 (April, 1980), 137-55.

13. Troilus and Cressida, IV.5.55-57. With regard to the way Shakespeare represents Petrarchism in the plays, compare this with Longaville's sonnet in Love's Labor's Lost: “Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye, / 'Gainst whom the world cannot hold argument, / Persuade my heart to this false perjury” (IV.3.58-60), or with Romeo's “She speaks, yet she says nothing; what of that? / Her eye discourses, I will answer it,” Romeo and Juliet, II.2.12-13.

14. I develop such an account in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in Shakespeare's Sonnets (forthcoming, University of California Press); this contains a fuller account of visual metaphors in traditional poetics, especially the way such metaphors are employed in the literature of orthodox and paradoxical praise.

15. From Aristotle on, rhetoricians regularly identify comparison as the distinctive, characteristic trope of praise, this because comparison allows a speaker to amplify his referent. It is possible to double the two terms of a comparison so that the four terms thus produced stand to each other in a chiasmic relation. This is what happens to eye and heart in sonnet 132. This kind of chiasmic trope is especially characteristic of paradoxical, comic praises of that which is low, this because such paradoxical praises present themselves as mimic repetitions of orthodox praise. The technical term for this kind of reduplicating trope—tropes that break, by redoubling, the dual unities of metaphors that “see the same”—is syneciosis. Puttenham calls this the “cross-coupler,” and associates it with the erotic, unkind mixture of kinds: “Ye have another figure which me thinkes may well be called (not much swerving from his originall in sence) the Crosse-couple, because it takes me two contrary words, and tieth them as it were in a paire of couples, and so makes them agree like good fellowes, as I saw once in Fraunce a wolfe coupled with a mastiffe, and a foxe with a hounde,” in George Puttenham, The Arte of Englishe Poesie (1589), facsimile reproduction (Kent, Ohio, 1970), p. 216.

16. With their puns on “Will” the dark lady sonnets render explicit a good deal of what is left implicit in the young man sonnets. To begin with, the dark lady sonnets play on the fact that in Elizabethan slang “Will” refers to both the male and female genitals: “Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, / Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?” (135). This picks up and extends, by doubling, several doubles entendres that run through the sonnets addressed to the young man. In the young man sonnets, for example, Shakespeare develops, in various ways, not only sexual, the image of the “pricked prick”—“But since she prick'd these out for women's pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure” (20)—and uses this to characterize a desire which stands somewhere between the homosexual and the heterosexual. It is the same image, really, as “stell'd” in sonnet 24, or the time-marking “dial hand” of sonnet 104, but Shakespeare clearly enjoys the erotic connotations of the “pricked prick”—consider, for example, the fate of Adonis: “And nousling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (Venus and Adonis, lines 1115-1116), or the bawdy puns of Love's Labor's Lost, e.g., “Let the mark have a prick in't” (IV.1.132), “The preyful Princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket” (IV.2.56), or, more elaborately, the way Othello takes as well as “took … by the throat the circumcised dog / And smote him—thus” (V.2.355-356). In the dark lady sonnets, however, by virtue of the pun on “Will,” the poet becomes not only a “pricked prick,” but also, again exploiting Elizabethan slang, the “cut cunt” (compare Malvolio in Twelfth Night: “These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's” (II.5.86-88). This double doubling, whereby “Will” performs the copulation that the poet speaks about, enables Shakespeare explicitly to develop some of the thematic consequences, not only erotic, that the subject of a verbal name must suffer. As a “Will,” the poet becomes the chiasmic copula between male and female, presence and absence, inside and outside, waxing and waning, showing and hiding, whole and hole, one and none:

    Among a number one is reckon'd none:
    Then in the number let me pass untold,
    Though in thy store's account I one must be,
    For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
    That nothing me, a something sweet to thee.
              Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
              And then thou lovest me, for my name is Will

    (136).

    Quite apart from the various themes and images that are thus put into crosscoupling play, the “Will” sonnets are significant precisely because they mark the first person of the poet with a name, not a deictic, for this identifies the person of the poet through a system of representational, not presentational, reference. This is quite different from the kind of immediate reference achieved by deictic, I-you, indication, for, as has often been pointed out (e.g., Bertrand Russell on egocentric particulars, Jakobson on shifters, and E. Benveniste on pronouns and relationships of person in the verb), such egocentric reference requires the presence of the speaker to his speech. In contrast, a name retains a stable referent regardless of who speaks it. In ways which I discuss in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, it can be shown, first, that deixis is the mode of first-person speaking required by an epideictic poetics, second, that a post-epideictic poetry, such as Shakespeare experiments with in the dark lady sonnets, acquires its subjective effects from the contest it stages between self-displaying visual deictics and self-belying verbal names, as in sonnet 151, where “flesh … rising at thy name doth point out thee / As his triumphant prize,” but is also obliged “thy poor drudge to be, / To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.”

    There is more to say about these disappointing pointers, but I would like to note here that it was Oscar Wilde who first insisted in a strong way on the importance for Shakespeare's sonnets of this quarrel between verbal name and visual deictic. It was Wilde who, reading between the lines, and picking up an old conjecture (going back to Thomas Tyrwhitt in 1766), named the poet's catamite “Willie Hughes,” doing this in order to draw out the important and pervasive Shakespearean pun on double “hue,” “view,” “use,” and “you”—the same double-U whose present-absent presence distinguishes “whole” from “hole” in sonnet 134. These are the signifiers through which Shakespeare thinks the large narrative of the sonnets. By doubling the dual unity of first and second person. Shakespeare introduces, for the very first time, a third person into epideictic lyric. This formally absent third person—a “he” or “she” or “it”—who stands in between, as missing connection, the poet's first and second person, is what the poet becomes to himself when he becomes his name. Compare, for example, the progress of Othello from “all in all sufficient” (IV.1.265) to “That's he that was Othello; here I am” (V.2.283). Recognizing this, it becomes possible to understand why Wilde's Portrait of W. H. is the only genuinely literary criticism that Shakespeare's sonnets have ever yet received. Wilde's novella narrates the argument between the metaphorics of visual presentation, the “Portrait,” and the signifiers of linguistic representation, “W. H.” In the same way, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest acts out the question of what is in a Shakespearean name, thereby putting an end to a theatrical tradition that begins, at least in English drama, with The Comedy of Errors. I discuss the relation of Wilde to Shakespeare more fully in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye. I also discuss Wilde's concern with the issue of specifically literary naming in “The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Ernest,” October 15 (1980), pp. 79-90.

17. For a discussion of the classical mock encomium, see T. C. Burgess, Epideictic Literature (Chicago, 1902), pp. 157-66. For discussions of Renaissance praise paradox, see A. E. Mallock, “The Techniques and Functions of the Renaissance Paradox,” Studies in Philology 53 (1956), 191-203; E. N. Thompson, “The Seventeenth Century English Essay,” University of Iowa Humanistic Studies, 3:3 (1926), 94-105; A. S. Pease, “Things Without Honor,” Classical Philology 21 (1926), 27-42; H. K. Miler, “The Paradoxical Encomium with Special Reference to its Vogue in England: 1600-1800,” Modern Philology 53:3 (1956), 145-78; A. H. Stockton, “The Paradoxical Encomium in Elizabethan Drama” University of Texas Studies in English 28 (1949), 83-104; R. E. Bennet, “Four Paradoxes by Sir William Cornwallis, the Younger,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 13 (1931) 219-40; W. G. Rice, “The Paradossi of Ortensio Landi,” University of Michigan Essays and Studies in English and Comparative Literature 8 (1932), 59-74; “Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox,” Studies in Philology 53 (1964), 191-203; W. Kaiser, Praisers of Folly (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); B. Vickers, “King Lear and Renaissance Paradoxes,” Modern Language Notes 63:2 (1968), 305-14; R. Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Praise Paradox (Princeton, N.J., 1966).

18. At stake here is the difference between a rhetorical paradox and a merely logical paradox, for these are not the same, though in the Renaissance they are, of course, very much related. In contemporary philosophical terminology, this is something like the distinction between a real logical paradox (which would carry, if such a thing exists, some of the weight of the rhetorical paradox) and a merely semantic paradox (e.g., The Liar's Paradox).

19. See especially the discussion of entrelacs in Le Visible et l'Invisible (Paris, 1964), chap. 4.

20. I refer here not only to Lacan's explicit for mulations, but also to the development of Lacan's thought, from the early emphasis on visual themes, as in the essay on the “mirror-stage” and accompanying discussions of aggressivity, to the later emphasis on language, anamorphosis, and accompanying discussions of (male) desire, to, finally, as a third term added to the opposition of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, Lacan's emphasis on the “Real,” the limits of representation, and accompanying discussions of (female) jouissance. Lacan's sense of the Renaissance is colored, however, by a very Catholic and Counter-reformational, a very French, conception of the Baroque: “Le baroque, c'est la régulation de l'âme par la scopie corporelle,” Encore (Paris, 1975), p. 105, which is why Lacan's direct comments on Shakespeare are often disappointing.

21. Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d'amore, ed. Santino Caramella (Bari, 1929), p. 5, cited by J. C. Nelson, Renaissance Theory of Love (New York, 1958), p. 86. Ebreo's distinction remains a strong challenge to subsequent writers on the subject. Consider, for example, “Love, universally taken, is defined to be a desire, as a word of more ample signification; and though Leon Hebraeus, the most copious writer of this subject, in his third dialogue makes no difference, yet in his first he distinguisheth them again, and defines love by desire.” Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. A. Shilleto (London, 1903), Part III, sect. 1, mem. 1, subs. 2; vol. III, p. 10.

22. Ebreo, Dialoghi, p. 207, cited by Nelson, pp. 86-87.

23. That desire is death is of course a commonplace, e.g., Ronsard's “Car l'Amour et la Mort n'est qu'une mesme chose,” Sonnets Pour Hélène, II:77, Oeuvres complètes de Ronsard, ed. G. Cohen (Paris, 1950). What is important is the specifically double way in which Shakespearean revision revives this dead metaphor.