The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet by A. D. Cousins & Peter Howarth

Author:A. D. Cousins & Peter Howarth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

The speaker’s oxymoronic image of the young man as his ‘master-mistress’ (2) implies however that the youth does not seamlessly integrate male with female. It implies that in him the genders coexist rather than merge, and that the speaker’s response to the young man is divided. So the sestet of the sonnet affirms, for the speaker concedes that, even if the young man is in some respects more genuinely female than are actual women, he is nevertheless biologically male: ‘Nature’, the speaker says in the little mock-fable of lines 9–12, ‘by addition me of thee defeated, / By adding one thing to my purpose nothing’. The young man is thus a divergent rather than a transcendent object of desire; and, in the final couplet of the sonnet, we see that the speaker’s analysis of his desire for the young man is itself ambiguous. He says: ‘But since she [Nature] pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure’. The words in which he claims to have no sexual interest in the young man contain two genitally focused puns: ‘pricked’ and ‘treasure’, alluding respectively to male and female genitalia. ‘[N]othing’, in line 12, is also a pun on genitalia – and can refer to male or female genitals. The speaker’s denial of sexual desire for the youth is, as a result, intimately and insistently and uncertainly erotic.

Shakespeare is thus not fashioning a new kind of individual consciousness in the Sonnets, but one that is innovative because, amidst an experiencing of desire un-Petrarchan in its scope and its worldliness, it reveals itself as nevertheless Petrarchan. He is not repudiating a now-exhausted ‘poetry of praise’ as remade by Petrarch in his own image.30 Shakespeare is making the refracted Petrarchan idiom idiosyncratically his own. Just as that could be seen in Sonnet 20, so too it can be seen in Sonnet 53. And that poem, like its predecessor in the 1609 Quarto, indicates the difficulty with which Shakespeare’s speaker imposes idealizing fictions on the young man. As if in a bewildered, epiphanic moment – and thereby in accord with a technique from the Rime – he muses: What is your substance, whereof are you made,

That millions of strange shadows on you tend,

Since every one hath, every one, one shade,

And you, but one, can every shadow lend?

Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit

Is poorly imitated after you;

On Helen’s cheek all art of beauty set,

And you in Grecian tires are painted new;

Speak of the spring and foison of the year:

The one doth shadow of your beauty show,

The other as your bounty doth appear,

And you in every blessed shape we know.

In all external grace you have some part,

But you like none, none you, for constant heart.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.