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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Despite his disillusionment with the moral condition of his friend, the beloved young man of the sonnets, Shakespeare's vocabulary of praise remains unabated. The key to this paradox lies in a shift of focus from the friend's “truth” to his power to inform the poet's style, that is, from moral fidelity to metaphysical and aesthetic constancy. This shift is attended by a heightened awareness of language as a way to grasp reality through participation in it. The sonnets portray the beloved as the incarnation of an unchanging truth, and poetry as a vehicle for evoking or re-creating that truth. These developments lead Shakespeare to a sacramental or “figural” conception of his poetry of praise that replaces the Petrarchan convention with which he begins.
1 All quotations from the Sonnets are from the New Variorum Edition, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), Vol. i. Any deviations from the Variorum text are bracketed, with the usual exceptions of normalized modern typography: s, v, j, and the like.
2 Blackmur, “A Poetics for Infatuation,” in The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. E. Hubler (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), pp. 155, 157.
3 Ferry, All in War with Time (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 3–63.
4 Erich Auerbach notes the general decline of figuralism in the sixteenth century (Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953], p. 279). Recently, however, Barbara Lewalski has written at length on the subject, paying particular attention to the Protestant emphasis on the individual Christian, rather than Christ, as the antitype (Donne's Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973]). Thus Donne, for example, can praise Elizabeth Drury in typological terms as recapitulating in herself both Old Testament and New Testament events. Lewalski focuses on Donne's occasional poems in the context not only of Protestant typology but of epideictic poetry in general. She does not discuss love poetry or the sonnet. The usual view of the latter is that of Leonard Forster, The Icy Fire (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), p. 74.
5 Although the present discussion is restricted to the major cycle of poems, those to or about the young man, I believe that many of the observations made in this essay are appropriate to the Dark Lady sonnets as well. Neither the redirecting of Shakespeare's “quest” nor the development of a “figurai” poetics is repeated in the minor cycle, which forswears any effort at transcendence from the outset. But the underlying desire for a unity of being and the intuition that poetry itself may be the only means of attaining it are both detectable in the Dark Lady poems. And one of them, Sonnet 151, may indeed be groping, in a way that anticipates some of the formulations of Antony and Cleopatra, for an identification of eros and gnosis through half-serious dallyings with words.
6 In this paragraph, and throughout the essay, two assumptions are made about “sequence” in the sonnets. One is that some sort of story, i.e., a sequence of events and of corresponding modes and attitudes, is implicit. The other is that the order of the poems in the 1609 edition, which despite considerable controversy most editors have preserved, reflects that story in at least its broad outline. While I do not involve myself in the controversy, and my argument does not depend on our endorsing in every detail the exact chronology of the 1609 arrangement, I do assume that the searches and discoveries I discuss happen in time and that the peculiar affirmations of the high-numbered sonnets to the friend in some sense evolve from experience treated in the earlier poems.
7 Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (Geneva: Droz, 1960), pp. 21, 37, 39, n.; see also P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Virginia Conant (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 287–88; Forster, p. 21; and George Watson, The English Petrarchans (London: Warburg Institute, 1967), pp. 1–5.
8 This and the following quotation are from the Rime, ed. F. Neri (Milan: Ricciardi, 1951). The English paraphrases are my own, intended neither as poetic renderings nor as literal translations.
9 Noferi, L'esperienza poetica del Petrarca (Florence: Monnier, 1962); see esp. pp. 113–82.
10 Dronke, Medieval Latin and the Rise of the European Love-Lyric (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), i, 111.
11 Perhaps a better word than “archetype” would be “exemplar,” as in Petrarch's esempio or the platonized theology (exemplarism) of Bona Ventura. The exemplar or exemplary cause is the model that earthly copies imitate, the prototype to which they are said to be in exemplary relation. Bonaventura distinguishes between a formal exemplarism in which the exemplars of created things are the Platonic Forms and a figurai exemplarism wherein the three Persons of the Trinity are jointly the exemplar of all creation. See T. K. Seung, Cultural Thematics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), p. 78. An analogous distinction underlies the Petrarch-Shakespeare comparison under discussion.
12 Cf. Rosalie L. Colie's remarks on George Herbert's “Providence”: “It is in fact, as the poem ‘discovers,’ impossible for a poet to write ‘not of thee’; whether poets know it or not, all poems, Herbert finally comes to realize, are sacred poems. The quiddity of poetry, of making and creating, partakes of the original mysterious creating word, and is an imitation of the essence of logos” (Paradoxia Epidemica [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966], p. 212).
13 See Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 11–76; Jean Daniélou, S.J., From Shadows to Reality, trans. Dom Wulstan Hibberd (London: Burns and Oates, 1960), pp. 12, 31; G. W. H. Lampe and K. J. Woolcombe, Essays on Typology (London: SCM Press, 1957), pp. 39–40; Johan Chydenius, The Typological Problem in Dante (Helsinki: Societas Scientarum Fennica, 1958), p. 11; and A. C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 1–9.
14 Auerbach, Literary Language and Its Public, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon, 1965), pp. 316–17.
15 Singleton, An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 114–15.
16 Cf. Irenaeus' discussion of the soul's growth toward an understanding of God: “And in respect that they are younger, they are also childish, and … un-practiced, and unexercised in the perfect training. Although indeed the mother is able to provide solid food for her babe, the babe is yet incapable of receiving nourishment which is yet too strong for it: so God also was indeed able to bestow on man perfection from the beginning, but man was incapable of receiving it, for he was a babe” (Contra Haereses, Bk. iv, Ch. xxxviii; quoted in Daniélou, p. 34). There may also be an echo in the poem of the Scholastic notion of the via eminentiae, as in Donne's “Love's Growth.”
17 Dronke, pp. 62–63. Forster notes the presence of the freedom-in-service motif in Petrarch (p. 13).
18 Tyrwhitt's widely accepted substitution of “skill” for “still” would not materially affect my argument, though the figurai reading would remove the objection that it is not poetic ability they lacked but sufficient knowledge: the two are indistinguishable in Shakespeare's figurai poetics.
19 Murray Krieger discusses the figurai vocabulary of this sonnet and attempts to use Auerbach's notion of figura as a kind of metaphor for the relation of particular poems, such as Shakespeare's sonnets, and poetics in general (A Window to Criticism [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964], pp. 175–76). See Wesley Morris, Toward a New Historicism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 199–200. On Sonnet 106 see also Louis F. May, Jr., “The Figura in Sonnet 106,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 11 (1960), 93-94.
20 Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 24–28.
21 Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970), p. 55.
22 Daniélou stresses the “efficacious” properties of sacramental typology (p. 95). Richard Neuse offers a reading of Spenser's Epithalamion as a kind of Renaissance secular “poetic analogue to the religious sacrament,” in that it is “a dramatic performance taking place in the poet's soul” (“The Triumph over Hasty Accidents,” Modern Language Review, 61 [1966], 171). Like the sacrament it imitates, poetry of this kind consists of signs that “effect what they signify” (p. 172). A somewhat more scientific contemporary label for language of this sort is that of the philosopher J. L. Austin: “Performative utterance,” i.e., “statements which themselves accomplish the acts to which they refer” (see Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975], p. 108).
23 Augustine gives the orthodox interpretation of the key phrase: “What is always holy in itself should be regarded as holy also by men” (On the Spirit and the Letter, ed. and trans. W. J. Sparrow Simpson [London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; New York: Macmillan, 1925], p. 92). Strictly speaking, that is, when one addresses the Lord one never “hallows Thy fair name.”
24 On the “verbal epistemology” of Augustine and its ramifications in the Middle Ages and in Dante, see Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970).