William Shakespeare: The Sonnets- istorical and cultaural point of view

Much has been made (by those who have chosen to notice) of the fact that in Shakespeare's sonnets, the beloved is a young man. It is remarkable, from a historical point of view, and raises intriguing, though unanswerable, questions about the nature of Shakespeare's relationship to the young man who inspired thesesonnets. Given 16th-Century England's censorious attitudes towards homosexuality, it might seem surprising that Will's beloved is male. However, in terms of the conventions of the poetry of idealized, courtly love, it makes surprisingly little difference whether Will's beloved is male or female; to put the matter more strongly, in some ways it makes more sense for the beloved to be male. Will's beloved is "more lovely and more temperate (18.2)" than a summer's day; "the tenth Muse (38.9);" "'Fair,' 'kind,' and 'true' (105.9);" the sun that shines "with all triumphant splendor (33.10)." We've heard all this before. This idealization of the loved one is perhaps the most common, traditional feature of love poetry. Taken to its logical conclusion, however, idealized love has some surprising implications. To idealize the beloved is to claim for them (or, in a sense, to endow them with) certain characteristics. The Ideal is the One--perfect, self-sufficient, unified, complete. The Ideal doesn't need anything. The consistent, static, homogeneous Sun is ideal; the changeable, inconsistent Moon is not. Insofar as the Ideal is the One, it is also the True. The image coincides with reality; looks do not deceive. There is, for Will, a battle between his eye and heart--"Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war / How to divide the conquest of thy sight: (46.1-2)"--but they are not disagreeing about value: ". . . mine eye's due is thy outward part, / And my heart's right thy inward love of heart (13-14)." Inward and outward are in harmony; the beautiful is the good. This could create a problem, since the beloved eventually is going to grow old and ugly and then die and be food for worms. There is in the sonnets definitely a concern with the ravages of "Time's scythe." And Will does not say "I'll love you when you are old and ugly." The body will wither and die. But the Ideal can be saved, if one prints off more images. Will exhorts his beloved to reproduce, "breed another thee (6.7)" or better yet, let the poet do the job, "ingraft you new (15.14)" with poetry: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee (18.13-14)." Will will immortalize his beloved in language. This implies a very interesting relationship between the word and the thing, a "true" relationship like the relationship between the eye and the heart. The word conjures the image, and it is the image that is true, not the material reality of the beloved. This precedence of the image over the body is dependent on the psychological process behind idealization. Joel Fineman, in Shakespeare's Perjured Eye, says, "what the poet sees outside himself will regularly be in fact an image of himself (9)." The Ideal is, in a way, my sense of me if I were perfect, and to fall in love with an idealized figure is to fall in love with an image of myself. In a very interesting way, "I" don't see the other as an Other; the beloved is an idealizing mirror in the place of an other. Consequently, the kind of blissful, ecstatic union, where "our united loves are one (36.3)," becomes possible, at least theoretically, because they're both me. Idealized love therefore turns out to be a love for the same, and a homosexual love because, in a way, it is a self-love. In that case, the fact that Will's beloved is a man doesn't cause as much tension in the sonnets as one might expect it to. It is something he has to address, as in sonnet 20: "But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure, / Mine be thy

love, and thy love's use their treasure (13-14)." However, it doesn't disturb the poetic or metaphysical system in the least. Language, vision, truth and love--everything still interlocks. It all fits because it is all the poet. It's all the same, and it is simply the logical conclusion of the conventions of idealized, courtly love. If Shakespeare's sonnets had dealt only with the beloved, they would be invaluable to scholars interested in unraveling gender structures in Renaissance literature. However, Shakespeare doesn't stop there. The sequence contains several sonnets that contrast starkly with the sonnets to the beloved. The subject of these sonnets (or rather, the object of them) is the dark lady: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lip's red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks, And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. (130.1-8) Why should my heart think that a several plot, Which my head knows the wide world's commonplace? Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not, To put fair truth upon so foul a face? (137.9-12) Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is perjur'd, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight. . . (129.1-5) What is immediately apparent about Will's relationship to the dark lady is that she has not been idealized. Will does not admire her. He doesn't say anything about immortalizing her. He doesn't say anything about a sublime union with her. She is not ideal. What's more, she ruins, and essentially renders impossible, the idealization of the beloved: To win me soon to hell, my female evil Tempteth my better angel from my side, And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, Wooing purity with her false pride. And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend Suspect I may, yet not directly tell, But being both from me, both to each friend, I guess one angel in another's hell. (144.5-12) The dark lady isn't fair, or kind, or true. She is irreducibly Other and she destroys the system; the love of despair corrupts the love of comfort. This breakdown is manifested in other ways: In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note,

But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise, Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote. . . . (141.1-4) Will's eyes and heart are no longer in accord, and the tension between the two is not resolvable by dividing the spoils. Furthermore, this is not the only site of disjunction engendered by Will's relationship to the dark lady: O, love's best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not t'have years told. Therefore I lie with her and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be. (138.11-14) The relationship between the word and the truth is severed, as are the relationships between beauty and truth, and love and truth. In fact, it is more accurate to say that the relationships are not severed, so much as they are inverted: in terms of idealized love, the relationships are paradoxical. Will does not admire the dark lady--but he does desire her. These poems are much more erotically inflected, with a desire that Fineman says is "genuinely inexplicable in terms of a visual identification with an 'all in all sufficient' ideal (21)." It is a desire that gains much of its power from its impossibility--a desire for a union that can never be, spiced with regret, loss, and a certain amount of antipathy: Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan For that deep wound it gives my friend and me; Is't not enough to torture me alone, But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be? (133.1-4) This is a specifically heterosexual desire, in that its object is different and heterogeneous. Will says in sonnet 137 that love is blind, but he seems really to see the dark lady in a way that he didn't see the beloved. She's there; she's different--attractive, but alien and scary. Consequently, Fineman argues, this new model of erotic, heterosexual desire is necessarily misogynistic. Woman is threatening in her otherness, in the danger that otherness poses to the claims of self-sufficiency, truth, and homogeneity implied in idealized love. Fineman's theory makes some sense, especially when one examines other Renaissance literature. For example, the tragedies, particularly the really "hot" ones, the ones that are very erotically inflected, so to speak, such as Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Middleton's The Changeling, or others (and there are scores of them)--these plays tend to adopt an almost rabidly misogynistic tone. The higher the level of passion in these plays, the worse the women are treated, and the more likely it is that the women themselves will be blamed for the abuse they suffer. Fineman's theory, however, opens up a problem that Fineman doesn't address: what about women poets? Are they supposed to be misogynists or misanthropists? This is a complicated problem, considering the persuasive arguments made by certain theorists that the "I", the subject, is gendered masculine: Oedipus is male. This points to the difficulty of describing an authentically female or feminine language or psychology, given our cultural history. After all, there is a sense in which the stories we know, and the literary tools we are given constrain what is possible, thinkable, and writable. What would the dark lady say? To address the issue often raised: "Is Shakespeare a feminist?", I suppose it could be argued that

Shakespeare's dark lady sonnets constitute some kind of progress, in that the love object goes from being simply a place marker, a space that holds up a mirror, to being an actual object, acknowledged as being no longer dependent on the subject for existence--actually seen, though not necessarily understood. Furthermore, there is definitely an acknowledgment of power there, proportionate to the perceived threat. However, if one looks at the treatment of women in literature that idealizes women, and compares it to the treatment of women in, for example, the Renaissance tragedies I mentioned before, which seem to follow much the same logic as that which informs the dark lady sonnets, it is difficult to see how women could be said to benefit. In any case, it still seems to be a man's game.