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

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

IRAS O the good gods!
CLEOPATRA Nay, that's certain.

(5.2.214-22)⁸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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