Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:58:49.040Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Shakespeare's Preservation Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Aaron Kunin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay uses Shakespeare's sonnets to test the implications of the fantasy that poems, although not living things, preserve human life. The most valuable object in the community of the sonnets is the face of a beautiful young man. The speaker in the poems argues that the young man should entrust his most valuable quality to some technology of preservation, such as sexual reproduction or poetry. In every scenario, his beauty is preserved in a form that will not allow him to enjoy it: he inevitably has to die while his beauty lives on. Preservation thus turns out to be an unattractive plan against the fact of mortality and the possibility of holocaust. The fantasy of preservation is compatible with and even encourages a holocaust fantasy: everyone else has to die to prove that the young man's beautiful face is indestructible.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 92 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958. Print.Google Scholar
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. John Harrington. Ed. Gottfried, Rudolf. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963. Print.Google Scholar
Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Ed. Jackson, Holbrook. New York: New York Rev., 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. New York: Viking, 1962. Print.Google Scholar
Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. New York: Knopf, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean.” The Essential Davidson. Ed. Lepore, Ernie and Ludwig, Kirk. Oxford: Clarendon, 2006. 209–24. Print.Google Scholar
de Grazia, Margreta. Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubrow, Heather. “Incertainties Now Crown Themselves Assur'd': The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47.3 (1996): 291–305. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Empson, William. “Donne and the Rhetorical Tradition.” Kenyon Review 11.3 (1949): 571–87. Print.Google Scholar
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1974. Print.Google Scholar
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
François, Anne-Lise. “‘O Happy Living Things’: Frankenfoods and the Bounds of Wordsworthian Natural Piety.” Diacritics 33.2 (2003): 42–70. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gil, Daniel Juan. Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Goldberg, Jonathan. Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts. London: Methuen, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Allen, Grossman, with Halliday, Mark. The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Halpern, Richard. Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Macpherson, C. B. New York: Penguin, 1968. Print.Google Scholar
Horace. The Odes and Epodes. Trans. C. E. Bennett. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1947. Print.Google Scholar
Kalas, Rayna. Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacqueur, Thomas. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1991. Print.Google Scholar
Leishman, J. B. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Hutchinson, 1961. Print.Google Scholar
Martz, Louis. “The Amoretti: Most Goodly Temperature.” Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Selected Papers from the English Institute. Ed. Nelson, William. New York: Columbia UP, 1961. Print.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Complete Poetry and Major Prose. Ed. Hughes, Merritt Y. New York: Odyssey, 1957. Print.Google Scholar
Pittenger, Elizabeth. “Aliens in the Corpus: Shakespeare's Books in the Age of the Cyborg.” Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies. Ed. Brahm, Gabriel Jr., and Driscoll, Mark. Boulder: Westview, 1995. 204–18. Print.Google Scholar
Schalkwyk, David. Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Ed. Booth, Stephen. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968. Print.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. Spenser's Shorter Poetry. Ed. Oram, William, Bjorvind, Einar, and Bond, Ronald. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Stevens, Paul. “Subversion and Wonder in Milton's Epitaph ‘On Shakespeare.‘” English Literary Renaissance 19.3 (1989): 375–88. Print.Google Scholar
Stewart, Susan. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Toufic, Jalal. Over-sensitivity. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Tuve, Rosemond. Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1947. Print.Google Scholar
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Warley, Christopher. Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Portrait of Mr. W.H. New York: Kennerley, 1921. Print.Google Scholar