Chapter 5
“Cloistering from the common”?1 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and the Power of the Commonplace
« Cloistering from the common » ? Le sonnet 130 de Shakespeare et la force du lieu commun
p. 95-109
Résumés
This chapter offers a reading of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 whose aim is to rethink its use of the poetic commonplace and the way we envisage it by placing it in the perspective of the history of the early modern English lyric. While the poetry of Petrarch and his imitators was largely part of an elite culture shared throughout Europe, the democratising power of the press allowed it to circulate much more widely than just in a few learned circles. I will take issue with the “parody theory” (Gordon Braden), according to which what singles out Shakespeare from other authors is his parodic use of conventions. Adopting a historicised approach, I contend that sonnet 130 is still partly misunderstood because the device of the blazon has been oversimplified and its historicity unwittingly denied. Sonnet 130 is a crucial text of the Shakespearean canon because it has been used to support a critical apparatus that has legitimised an aristocracy of taste based on the rejection of “conventions” (Christopher Warley). However, it is precisely by using a common Petrarchan language that Shakespeare was able to build a vision of the beloved that eschewed both elevation and debasement and that could be related to the common experience of a fallen world.
Ce chapitre propose une lecture du sonnet 130 de Shakespeare qui s’applique à repenser le lieu commun en l’historicisant, et en évoquant d’une part son usage, d’autre part la manière dont il a été traité par la tradition critique. La poésie de Pétrarque et de ses imitateurs, inscrite dans une culture partagée par les élites européennes, a toutefois circulé bien au-delà de quelques cercles lettrés, notamment grâce au pouvoir de démocratisation de la presse. Je soulignerai les limites de la « théorie de la parodie » (Gordon Braden), selon laquelle ce qui distingue Shakespeare d’autres auteurs est son usage parodique des conventions. Le sonnet 130 n’est peut-être encore aujourd’hui que partiellement compris, notamment parce que le procédé du blason a été envisagé de manière insuffisamment complexe et trop peu historicisée. Son statut de texte crucial du canon shakespearien provient d’approches critiques qui l’ont utilisé pour légitimer une aristocratie du goût fondée sur le rejet des « conventions » (Christopher Warley). Et pourtant, c’est bien par le recours à un langage pétrarquiste commun que Shakespeare a pu construire une vision de l’objet aimé qui échappe à la fois à l’éloge et à l’abaissement, pour se référer à une expérience partagée d’un monde d’après la Chute.
Note de l’auteur
This research project has been supported by the University of Strasbourg’s IDEX programme.
Texte intégral
1In Shakespeare Verbatim, her study of the reception of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Margreta De Grazia makes what could seem an incidental point about the evolution of the significance of inverted commas, writing:
What formerly marked the universal and true (and therefore public) had come to designate the unique and exclusive (and therefore private). The sign once distinguishing the commonplace sets the bounds for private enclosure.2
In the course of the sixteenth century, inverted commas were indeed used to isolate sententiae or moral sayings in all kinds of writings, and famously in the first quarto (1603) of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.3 They could be extracted from the texts and repurposed in other texts, or simply learnt by heart as snippets of discourse that could teach a valuable lesson – in other words, inverted commas materialised on the page the culture of commonplacing, a culture that several important studies have sought to recover since the 1990s.4 De Grazia’s remark exemplifies the process through which such a culture has ebbed away from us, and conceptualises it as a movement of progressive enclosure. While typography used to emphasise a form of common wisdom, it is now used to privatise it, or attribute it. Once an incentive to share, it now manifests ownership.
2This movement from a common store of wisdom to individual intellectual property finds equivalents in poetry, or in the way it is alluded to. Sixteenth-century collections of poetry were often presented as anthologies, in the etymological sense of the term: flowers picked from a common treasury and selected both for their quality and their moral aptness.5 This even sometimes applied to single-author collections: in A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573), George Gascoigne disguised his own poems as components of a multi-authorial anthology classified into categories such as “weeds”, “herbs”… The continued association of lyric poetry with horticultural imagery is recorded in late sixteenth-century sonnets,6 including in sonnets by Shakespeare (it is particularly obvious in – but not specific to – the “procreation sonnets”, i.e. poems 1 to 17). Two centuries later, William Wordsworth would express his wish to retreat “[w]ithin the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”,7 in a phrasing eerily reminiscent of the metaphorical conceptualisation of intellectual property as land ownership, the individual’s right born out of the transformation of nature through labour in John Locke’s and James Thomson’s works.8 Wordsworth’s phrasing associates land ownership with individual retreat, one possible formulation of the isolation of the individual poetic genius. My purpose is not, of course, to reduce Wordsworth to just that, or to picture the sixteenth century as a sort of golden age of commonality. However, I believe that De Grazia’s remark provides us with a useful reminder of the cultural distance that separates us from Shakespeare’s age, a distance which the very phrase “early modern” sometimes tends to cancel out.
3Unquestionably, the Renaissance was a key moment in Western history, and critical paradigms such as Jacob Burckhardt’s notion of the development of the individual or more recent works insisting on the origins of copyright9 are crucial to our understanding of the period, at the very least as points of reference. But it still remains that De Grazia’s words point towards how what we now call intellectual property shapes the way we understand literature, and our difficulty to envisage the common. My analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 will be a case study aimed at illustrating the fact that commonality in literature is something that we have trouble understanding precisely because authors are part of an ideological apparatus that stresses individuality, Shakespeare being the individual par excellence. I argue that there is also ground for a less individualistic reading of the poem, one that does not sever Shakespeare from his context. While such work has been done in the last decades by insisting on the collaborative writing of plays, on the work that got done in the playhouse, or on the role of printers and editors, I would like to argue for another type of commonality: the common grounding of poetic work in shared cultural trends. While such an approach might seem rather obvious, I believe it has not been applied carefully enough in the case of Shakespeare’s sonnet 130. Arguably, the consideration of a Western author from a Western perspective in a post-Romantic age like our own is inextricably embedded in an epistemological and ideological framework that stresses individuality and probably cannot leave it aside. But the model we follow does not have to be that of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual: it can be one in which the author’s singularity springs from the cross-fertilisation of multiple literary, cultural and social strains.10
Receiving sonnet 130
4To put the interpretation of sonnet 130 into perspective, some indications about Shakespeare’s Sonnets and their reception are needed. Written in the 1590s and the 1600s, the poems that form up the 1609 quarto were not very well received at first, at least as a collection. Their revaluation started with the Romantic age and Edmund Malone’s paradigmatic 1780 edition. Malone crucially made the 1609 quarto, rather than John Benson’s 1640 more miscellany-like edition, the canonical early modern edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He also introduced the overall frame, with the sonnets addressed to a Young Man (1-126) being followed by the Dark Lady sonnets (127-152). This invention has been contested for more than thirty years now under the aegis of De Grazia. Sonnet 130 was not a favourite until relatively recently. According to Jane Kingsley-Smith, it was, within Shakespeare’s collection, and together with sonnet 129, one of the “defining Sonnets” of the twentieth century.11 The increase in popularity of sonnet 130, which conveys a particularly convincingly heterosexual picture of Shakespeare, might have had to do with a homophobia that has been said to rise with the conceptualisation of heterosexuality as a category in the mid-twentieth century.12 As Christopher Warley has argued, it was also related with the way the binary between convention and originality emerged in literary analysis at the same time as the notion of “conventional sonnet sequence” was established.13 There was also a modernist revaluation of the complexity of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, most notably by Laura Riding and Robert Graves, valuing features that had so puzzled and dismayed readers a century before.14 This valuation of complexity, combined with the after-effects of the Victorian cult of Shakespeare,15 became a tool of social distinction which confirmed and reinforced Malone’s picturing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as “the ripe attainment of an individual mind”.16 With such a background, it is also easy to fit sonnet 130 within a narrative of triumphant genius as the expression of unfettered literary talent that transcends his time – one that, incidentally, is also particularly classroom-friendly.17
The parody theory
5I will be concerned in particular with a critical narrative that insists on Shakespeare’s separation from one specific element of his context, i.e. Petrarchism, and the notion that Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 is a satire18 or a parody19 of the Petrarchan blazon. Such an approach has been criticised by Gordon Braden:
[…] that is the voice of a modern sensibility that has, for its own reasons, never been under the spell of Petrarchan sonneteering. […] Major bodies of Renaissance poetry are unintelligible without at least some responsiveness to such a spell, and a compelling account of Shakespeare’s place in this tradition cannot merely make him (like us) superior to it. Something more complicated is called for.20
6Braden’s call for a less patronising approach of Petrarchism is a welcome incentive to studies whose authors have perhaps understandably, and arguably unwittingly, promoted a vision of Shakespeare as an autonomous individual that could only be defined not just against his background, but literally in contradistinction to it. Though it would not make sense to reject any notion that sonnet 130 might be a parodic one, I contend that such a vision has led to an oversimplification of what the poem has to offer, and I try to resist some of the implications of such an interpretation.
7Natalie Roulon has recently offered an excellent synthesis of and response to the criticism written on the sonnet, arguing that it should not be seen as a blazon or an anti-blazon, but as a metablazon criticising the Petrarchan language of praise,21 rephrasing earlier arguments that see the poem as parodic of Petrarchism, and reacting to a critical tradition, revived by feminist works, that has insisted on the misogyny of the poem. I now would like to argue that those two competing strands of criticism have sought to stabilise the meaning of the poem in a way that does not sufficiently account for its complexity.
My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,
Currall is farre more red, then her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her brests are dun:
If haires be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:
I haue seene Roses damaskt, red and white,
But no such Roses see I in her cheekes,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Then in the breath that from my Mistres reekes.
I loue to heare her speake, yet well I know,
That Musicke hath a farre more pleasing sound:
I graunt I neuer saw a goddesse goe,
My Mistres when shee walkes treads on the ground.
And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
As any she beli’d with false compare.
8As the speaker lists the criteria of beauty (introduced under the guise of stock similes or metaphors) only to express the mistress’ difference from them, the sonnet has sometimes appeared as a violent attack against the beloved. The interpretations of two aspects of the sonnet in particular have determined the adoption or the rejection of such an interpretation. The first one is the use of the word “reekes” at the end of line 8: the speaker seems to be saying that the beloved has bad breath, admittedly not a very convincing way of praising her. It has been pointed out that the verb “reek” did not necessarily have the negative connotations that it has now.22 The Oxford English Dictionary definition which includes this line of the sonnet as one of its examples reads as follows: “4.a. Of smoke or vapour: to be emitted or exhaled; to rise, emanate. Also figurative”. But the Oxford English Dictionary also gives the two following definitions: “4.b. intransitive. Of a smell: to rise, emanate. Chiefly (now only) used of a powerful, unpleasant smell. Cf. Sense 7.a.” (earliest example: 1542); “7.a. intransitive. To give off an unpleasant or unwholesome odour or fume; (now chiefly) to give off a powerful and unpleasant smell; to stink. Frequently with of, with” (earliest example: 1609).23 Definition 4.b. does not exclude a derogatory use of the word. Definition 7.a. locates the first occurrence of the much more negative sense of the word in 1609, the very year Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published. Even if sonnet 130 was composed between 1590 and 1595, it does not seem unlikely that “reek” could be used in that sense at that precise point in history. A quick look at the occurrences of the verb in Shakespeare’s works confirms the two possibilities: while in Venus and Adonis, Venus’s face “doth reek and smoke” (l. 555),24 meaning that she is perspiring and steam rises from her, Coriolanus addresses the Plebeians in the following way: “You common cry of curs, whose breath I hate / As reek o’th’rotten fens” (III.iii.121). In Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy written roughly at the same time as sonnet 130, Juliet speaks of “dead men’s ratting bones, / With reeky shanks and yellow shapless skulls” (IV.i.83). In Shakespeare’s works, the word conveys, at the very least, a mundane sense of physical exertion, and at worst, the notion of a very unpleasant smell. The use of the verb “reek”, therefore, does not really allow one to choose between blazon and anti-blazon.
9The final couplet might appear to provide a sounder basis for interpretation:
And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
As any she beli’d with false compare.
In characteristically English fashion, the logical twist of the sonnet is situated in line 13 rather than in line 9. The use of “yet” contradicts the perhaps prevalent impression of reading an anti-blazon at this point. The word “rare” expresses the fact that the mistress is truly unique. The last line is a difficult one due to its uncommon use of the word “she”. The most usual explanation is the following: “she” means “woman” or “mistress”; the speaker thinks his love as rare as any woman “beli’d with false compare”, in other words as any woman that has been praised through the use of unrealistic similes or metaphors. In this interpretation, which largely holds sway today, the sonnet voices after all a praise of the mistress, but criticises the very poetics of praise that has been used for other women, that is to say, Petrarchism. It is both praise and a parody of the blazon. However, that interpretation raises a number of issues.
Questioning the parody theory
10While it is generally argued that the Petrarchan language of idealisation is replaced by the “reality” of the mistress, the very concept of “reality” is particularly hard to define. What is more, all we know is that her hair is black. That “her brests are dun” compared to snow and that she “treads on the ground” do not help at all in picturing her, as the same could be said of any woman. A comparison with two examples, one anterior, the other posterior to Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, can give a better idea, if not of what the poem does, at least of what the poem does not do:
Combien de fois mes vers ont-ils doré
Ces cheveux noirs dignes d’une Meduse?
Combien de fois ce teint noir qui m’amuse,
Ay-je de lis et roses coloré?
Combien ce front de rides labouré
Ay-je applani? et quel a fait ma Muse
Ce gros sourcil, où folle elle s’abuse,
Ayant sur lui l’arc d’Amour figuré?
Quel ay-je fait son œil se renfonçant?
Quel ay-je fait son grand nez rougissant?
Quelle sa bouche, et ses noires dents telles quelles?
Quel ay-je fait le reste de ce corps?
Qui, me sentant endurer mille morts,
Vivoit heureux de mes peines immortelles.25
There’s nothing grieves me, but that Age should haste,
That in my dayes I may not see thee old,
That where those two cleare sparkling Eyes are plac’d,
Only two Loope-holes, then I might behold.
That lovely, arched, yvory, pollish’d Brow,
Defac’d with Wrinkles, that I might but see;
Thy daintie Hayre, so curl’d, and crisped now,
Like grizzled Mosse upon some aged Tree;
Thy Cheeke, now flush with Roses, sunke, and leane,
Thy Lips, with age, as any Wafer thinne,
Thy Pearly Teeth, out of thy Head so cleane,
That when thou feed’st, thy Nose shall touch thy Chinne:
These Lines that now thou scorn’st, which should delight thee,
Then would I make thee read, but to despight thee.26
11Jodelle’s Contr’Amours, published in 1574, has been suggested by William J. Kennedy as a source of inspiration for Shakespeare.27 The poet might have found in sonnet VII an example of a contreblason, or anti-blazon, which contrasts the Petrarchan tropes of the blazon with the features of the beloved. The poem exemplifies the notion of a discrepancy between the idealised vision of the beloved and a far less flattering one. A similar technique can be found in Michael Drayton’s sonnet, in which the idealised description of the beloved’s beauty in the present is contrasted with the vision of the beloved in the future through a set of grotesque metaphors. In each case, the poem works as a literary equivalent of a visual anamorphosis not totally unlike Hans Holbein’s in The Ambassadors: one perception, seen as false or as transitory, is replaced by a new, more truthful one, through a change of perspective. Shakespeare’s approach to the blazon is different: the idealised perception he seems to denounce is not replaced by anything as precise as in Jodelle’s or Drayton’s poems. It is rather obvious that if the poem is a parody of the blazon, it also leads the reader to believe the poem is an anti-blazon, at least for twelve lines. In other words, Shakespeare gestures both towards the blazon and the anti-blazon, which at the very least complicates its parodic intent.
12A far less debated, but, I would contend, at least equally important point, is the issue of the reliability of the speaker. What allows scholars to determine that the poem praises the beloved (and therefore is mainly a blazon satirising the language of praise) is the assumption that the speaker masters what he is saying and what he is doing. The problem is that scholars, even in particularly dense and sophisticated analyses,28 have tended to reduce Petrarchism to a language aimed at producing a one-sided idealisation of the beloved. It admittedly makes sense to consider some of the poetry labeled as Petrarchan or Petrarchist in that way, but to reduce a long string of translations, imitations and rewrites, and more than two centuries of poetry, to one-sided idealisation seems problematic.29 What is more, such a definition would make of Petrarch’s Canzoniere an anti-Petrarchist, or partly anti-Petrarchist, literary work. While idealisation is to be found in Petrarch’s collection, the idealising language of the speaker is questioned right from the first poem: his praise of Laura emerges from his youthful error (“giovenile errore”). Sixteenth-century Italian editions of Petrarch, in particular, underlined the loose structure of the collection, which is based on the speaker’s attempted conversion of his love for an earthly woman towards the love of God. This means that the questioning of an idealising stance is part and parcel of Petrarch’s poetics. Numerous instances of a similar or comparable pattern, based on the notion of an attempt at moral and spiritual conversion, can be found in early modern England (not necessarily always derived from Petrarch himself), so much so that they have been instrumental in the theorisation of early modern authorship.30 In John Lyly’s particularly successful Euphues: or the Anatomy of Wit (1578), for instance, the main character, Euphues, shifts from a concern with love (using language as a tool of seduction) to one with moral philosophy, to finally adopt theology as the only worthy subject of personal involvement. Thomas Watson’s 1582 Hekatompathia, a poetic collection often seen as a major source of the sonnet sequences of the 1590s, unlike Lyly’s work, is not merely compatible with the Petrarchan pattern: it replicates it. The collection falls into two sections, the first one made up of love poems, the second one entitled “My love is past”, expressing the notion of a conversion of the speaker away from earthly love. Finally, Philip Sidney’s thematic allusions to and structural use of this Petrarchan pattern in Astrophel and Stella (1591) provided an additional model through which the pattern might have come to the knowledge of contemporary authors, even if they did not know Petrarch first-hand (see in particular the fifth sonnet, “It is most true, what wee call Cupids dart” [first edition] / “It is most true, that eyes are formed to serue” [second and subsequent editions]). The implication of this pattern is that the speakers of Petrarchan poems might be ruled by their desires and that they might be the victims of their own perceptions.
13Let us consider again the last couplet of sonnet 130:
And yet by heauen I thinke my loue as rare,
As any she beli’d with false compare.
The speaker states “I thinke”, implying that he may be wrong. Here, as in other sonnets, he might be lacking in judgement, betrayed by his own perceptions, incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff, focusing on a beloved that is not worthy of his attention (possibly for the mere fact of being a mortal, fallen human being – or for the more precise moral defects exposed in the rest of the “Dark Lady” section). In that interpretation, the speaker of the poem would share features with the speaker in Petrarch’s Canzoniere. But perhaps more significantly, the speaker’s attempt to evade the hyperbolic stance of the rhetoric of praise undermines his own words: the semantics of the adjective “rare” is in itself contradictory with the use of the comparative “as … as”.
14The assumption that the sonnet evidences the speaker’s mastery upon his subject-matter also has implications that run counter to what the poem’s form “affords”.31 The seminal work of Nancy Vickers32 has led subsequent literary scholars to emphasise the way poetic lovers fragment the body of their beloveds better to control them. Such a drive cannot be denied. However, another aspect of Shakespeare’s blazoning that commentators have not always borne in mind is the fact that blazons usually stage the failure, rather than the success, of such an attempt.33 They therefore display the speaker’s powerlessness (which of course does not contradict the fundamental misogyny of many of these poems). As such, the blazon is part of a set of Petrarchan tropes that insist on the limits of language rather than on its success.
Sonnet 130 and the common
15In sonnet 130, the body of the beloved is mostly perceived as what it is not. It is conspicuously what the language of idealisation is not, as if it could not exist without that language. While the blazon is generally made up of a series of impressions that cannot quite form up a unified picture, the parts of the beloved in sonnet 130 can only be visualised in a process similar to that of an effect of remanence, or persistence: a photographic negative, as it were, of the language of idealisation. This entails a particular relationship to stock metaphors and similes which is not simply one of rejection, and which, I would like to argue, allows the readers to partake in a shared experience. It can usefully be contextualised by taking into account early modern modes of reading:
What is “commonplace” in our culture is trite and platitudinous. We value original thought and observation and are most interested in those figures who exhibit it. Our sense of self is tied into notions of “possessing” ideas some at least of which are not “common”, a term which is derogatory as well as descriptive. Such assumptions and judgments, themselves undermined by critics in recent years, were not those of the Renaissance. Those who read sought to partake of a common wisdom, to come to an understanding of God’s world and works by which fallen men had obscured them. [...] where we regard different interpretations as natural and positive, to the early modern world they were cause for regret. [...] The commonplace, that on which most could agree, rendered the understanding closer to that of man before the fall. […] Perhaps the central faultline in the early modern age was that between belief in a common hermeneutic and a growing emphasis on individual judgement.34
16Through the dissection of Petrarch’s poetry into repurposed fragments that were themselves used and re-used, the Petrarchan tropes had become by the late sixteenth century a widely shared language in England, a repertory of poetic commonplaces. Although it is true that Petrarchism was partly re-encoded as an elitist, courtly language in the late Elizabethan period, it had been circulating in England at least since the end of the 1550s in printed anthologies,35 and arguably as early as Geoffrey Chaucer in manuscript form. This means that its tropes could be used in widely varying ways. By the end of the sixteenth century at the latest, they could be appropriated by middle-class poets such as Drayton or, why not, Shakespeare, for purposes of social mobility in an era in which Italianate culture was central to the culture of the court, but also commodified by print. They could be the object of satires such as John Marston’s, Everard Guilpin’s or John Davies’s, some of which could well include undertones of xenophobia (directly aimed at the Italian fashion) or social contempt (against would-be social climbers emulating the language of their betters). The Petrarchan language could also conveniently be adopted for the characterisation of lovers, ridiculous courtiers or overreachers in plays. The fact that they accommodated a hyperbolic poetics made them useful to show the power and inescapability of love, a theme easily associated with a major representative of Italian literature such as Ariosto, but it also favoured an inclusion within a perspective close to Petrarch’s. As such, the Petrarchan language partook in a culture of the commonplace and of the poetic fragment that far exceeded the humanist reading techniques which only a very limited portion of the population could access. As Neil Rhodes explains:
The concept of the commonplace which is relevant to Shakespeare is the rhetorical one that emphasizes its role in discourse and composition, speech and style. We need to give weight to both halves of the term: this is material which is “common” in the sense that it represents a commonly accepted fund of wisdom, the distillation of shared experience, and it is also material that can be found in or assigned to its proper places or headings. […] as the commonplace method became more widespread, the meaning of the term was transferred to loci or places where suitable matter could be found to the headings or sayings themselves. The cultural dominance of rhetoric in the sixteenth century, and the ideal of copia in discourse, also meant that it could be rather loosely extended to cover a whole range of formulary phrases of the kind assembled by Erasmus in his various educational textbooks.36
We might even wish to push things one step further: the line between the re-use of commonplaces and the practice of imitatio was a fine one,37 and the two could merge in a more general culture of extracting and repurposing fragments of different sorts: not just moral sayings, but also proverbs, apophtegms, remarks, striking phrasings, literary topoi, and, of course, extracts from pre-existing texts. Shakespeare was no exception, as Kenneth Muir explained as early as 1959.38 It is only to be regreted that such writing practices have been frequently used as justifications to disparage certain works (one thinks, for example, of Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, which was long seen as made up of bits and pieces).39
17As far as sonnet 130 is concerned, the end of Kevin Sharpe’s above quote is of particular interest here. While the common language of Petrarchism had in effect created a form of European community of letters, the self-questioning it included, or could include, was given new relevance in a cultural environment of religious struggle and, in England’s case, of rising Calvinism. Sidney’s work was trying to reconcile an inherited ideal of moral didacticism with a determined will to value poetry. It is perhaps Astrophel and Stella, a work distinctly indebted to Petrarch and Petrarchism, that best epitomises such a contradiction in a poetic form, between, in Sidney’s own telling words, “erected wit” and “infected will”.40 In the mid-1590s, when Shakespeare was probably writing sonnet 130,41 Astrophel and Stella was one of the central texts of a new body of works that were constructing a new English canon, and the sonnet sequence that ignited the so-called “sonnet craze”. This fact has led Felicia J. Steele to an interesting suggestion about the end of sonnet 130.42 The strikingly (then and now) unusual grammatical construction of the last line (“As any she beli’d with false compare”), with the use of the pronoun “she”, is reminiscent of the very first sonnet of Astrophel and Stella:
Louing in trueth, and fayne in loue to show,
That the deere Shee, might take some pleasure of my paine
It is tempting to see Shakespeare’s poem as alluding to the start of Sidney’s sequence. If it does so, it makes the contradiction all the more blatant between “she”, the praised lady, and the fact that she is, so to speak, equally rare as other exceptional ladies. The implication is that Shakespeare indirectly affirms that his beloved, and perhaps his poetry, can compare to Sidney’s. But he also proclaims the condition shared by all lovers, which has wider implications, and brings to the fore an essential element of the Elizabethan sonnets, including Shakespeare’s: the emphasis on the speaker’s judgement and its problematic dimension.43 By leaving the beloved largely undefined, Shakespeare not only invites readers to fill the empty signifiers with their own experience and knowledge: he encourages them to think about the processes through which love is born in them and might shape their judgement, for better and for worse.44
Conclusion
18Neil Rhodes has recently written a history of the emergence of a vernacular literary culture in sixteenth-century England based on the notion of the “Common”.45 To him, that century saw a conflict between two versions of it: on the one hand, the international elite culture of humanism, based first on the classical languages, and later on English; on the other, the institution of a common Protestant culture shared by all the strata of society. For Rhodes, the two came together through translation and the subsequent establishment of a literary style in the vernacular that both print and playhouses allowed to circulate. He also believes that Sidney rescued the imagination from Protestant denigration. Shakespeare, writing sonnet 130 in a form encoded as aristocratic at that point in history, but using tropes that had been largely disseminated in the course of the century, might have sought to express his own singularity. But he also accommodated a European poetics and common experience, allowing all potential readers to question the role of imagination in love, knowledge and moral judgement – thereby responding to the pressures of social forces as well as coeval cultural trends.
19Instead of making of sonnet 130 a tool to proclaim Shakespeare’s triumphant individuality in a way that only opposes him to his context, it is possible to use it to promote a vision of Shakespeare not as a transcendent individual, but as a nodal point, the intersection of a network of relationships with other people, including authors, other works, and other cultures – an individual who still has agency but cannot fully stand on his own. If we can do that, including in our teaching, we might be able to effect, in Richard Mulcaster’s terms, but in a renewed understanding, the “bringing up of one, not to live alone, but amongst others”.46
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Notes de bas de page
1In his Positions Wherin Those Primitive Circumstances Be Examined, Which Are Necessarie for the Training Up of Children, Either for Skill in Their Booke, or Health in Their Bodie, Richard Mulcaster uses the phrase “cloistering from the common” (Mulcaster 1581, 187). Two pages before, he also writes: “[…] private is sworne enemy to publike in all eventes, as it doth appeare when private gaine undoeth the common, though publike still pretend fiendship to all that is private in distributive effects, as it is plainely seene when the publike care doth helpe ech private, and by cherishing the singular maintaineth the general, whereas the private letteth the publike drowne, so it may flete above” (ibid., 185; also quoted in Rhodes 2018, 22).
2De Grazia 1991, 217.
3Lesser & Stallybrass 2008.
4A very useful bibliography of commonplace books can be found in Burke 2013. Major studies of commonplacing include Lechner 1962; Crane 1993; Moss 1996; Rhodes 2004; and Vine 2019 (esp. chap. 1, “Commonplace Failure”).
5Compilers and / or authors used such phrasings as The Arbour of Amitie (1568), A Sweet Nosgay (1573), A Small Handful of Fragrant Flowers (1575), The Arbour of Amorous Deuices (1597), Bel-vedére or the Garden of the Muses (1600), etc.
6Stamatakis 2020, 106-110.
7W. Wordsworth, “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room”, l. 11, in Wordsworth 1807, 109.
8Rose 1993, 113-114.
9E.g. Loewenstein 1988.
10I will not list here all the editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets I have consulted, which include a range of commented editions published in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The recent editions that have been most useful are those by Stephen Booth ([1977] 1980), Helen Vendler (1997), Colin Burrow (2002), and Cathy Shrank and Raphael Lyne (2018). The text of sonnet 130 I use here is taken from the 1609 quarto.
11Kingsley-Smith 2019, 192.
12Matz 2010.
13Warley 2005, 19-44.
14Kingsley-Smith 2019, 218.
15LaPorte 2020.
16De Grazia 1991, 25.
17Later in the century, the sonnet came to be associated with readings of the Sonnets in terms of race. Though I approach sonnet 130 from a different angle, my reading of it is highly compatible with critical race studies that analyse the poem within the frame of the “Dark Lady” section.
18E.g. Butler 1899, 164.
19E.g. Wilson 1967.
20Braden 2000, 165.
21Roulon 2014.
22Booth [1977] 1980, 454.
23Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, online: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7954255446.
24Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Coriolanus and Romeo and Juliet are quoted from Crystal & Crystal 2002, 366.
25É. Jodelle, Contr’Amours, VII, in Jodelle [1574] 2003.
26M. Drayton, Idea, VIII, in Drayton 1619.
27Kennedy 2007, 25.
28See Fineman 1986.
29One of the problems here is that little criticism written in English has historically made a distinction between “Petrarchan” (i.e. pertaining to Petrarch) and “Petrarchist” (i.e. more or less closely adapted, imitated, translated from Petrarch). To complicate things further, the term “Petrarchism” is not used consistently depending on the critical tradition in which it is used. Scholarly works on Italian literature, for instance, consider that a Petrarchist poem has to engage directly with Petrarch’s works, while the use of the label for English literature is often accepted for much more indirect imitation. Finally, one might wonder whether the oversimplification of the Petrarchist “tradition” seen in works like Fineman’s does not have to do with an “anti-Catholic prejudice” found in early modern literary works of which scholars have remained “largely unconscious”, leading them to “[perform] the illiberal act of perpetuating it” (Shell 1999, 56). Such a prejudice might have contributed to give birth to the notion that Protestant English authors, and especially Shakespeare, subverted an Italian (and therefore Catholic) poetics to give rise to an emancipatory tradition embodied in English literature and Anglicanism. Such a narrative ironically leaves aside the fact that Petrarch was most often seen as a proto-Protestant poet in early modern England (Boswell & Braden 2012, 4).
30Helgerson 1976.
31Levine 2015, 6.
32Vickers 1982.
33Goeury & Hunkeler 2018, 26.
34Sharpe 2000, 190-191.
35Nebeker 2009; O’Callaghan 2020.
36Rhodes 2004, 152-153.
37See particularly “eclectic” imitation (Greene 1982, 39).
38Muir 1959.
39See Dubrow 1986, 425.
40Sidney [1595] 2004, 10.
41Wells & Edmondson 2020, 58.
42Steele 2004.
43See also Roche 1989.
44Though there is no room here for further elaboration, I would like to underline that the above understanding of sonnet 130 is relevant both when the sonnet is read on its own and when its meaning is considered in relation to its neighbouring poems in the 1609 quarto, which picture a fallen humanity and the upsetting of Platonic values.
45Rhodes 2018.
46Mulcaster 1581, 185, quoted in Rhodes 2018, 21.
Auteur
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Rémi Vuillemin
Université de Strasbourg
Rémi Vuillemin is senior lecturer in early modern English literature at the University of Strasbourg. He has authored a monograph on Michael Drayton’s sonnets (Le recueil pétrarquiste à l’ère du maniérisme, Paris, H. Champion, 2014) as well as articles and book chapters on early modern poetry, poetic theory, and the reception and historiography of the sonnet – including recent pieces in Études Épistémè, Littérales, Studies in Philology and Notes & Queries. Among other recent works, he has co-edited two essay collections: The Early Modern English Sonnet: Ever in Motion (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020, with Laetitia Sansonetti and Enrica Zanin) and Language Commonality and Literary Communities in Early Modern England: Translation, Transmission, Transfer (Turnhout, Brepols, 2022, with Laetitia Sansonetti). He is currently working on a monograph entitled Framing the Early Modern English Sonnet Sequence and co-editing a collective volume on the ordering of early modern lyric collections.

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