Shakespeares Sonnets (review)

Jyotsna G. Singh
Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 4, Winter 2008, pp. 491-493
(Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/shq.0.0050
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Athens (or National and Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) (13 Mar 2014 03:20 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/shq/summary/v059/59.4.singh.html
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interpretation that essentially defends the reluctant Adonis, the editors repeatedly
explain his behavior by suggesting that he is not a young man but a child
(58, 59), pre-pubertal (60), and an instance of little-boy vulnerability (60).
Virtually hairless cheeks do not establish a young man as an asexual child (as
many adolescents desperately trying to grow a beard would aggressively insist);
in any event, this analysis would have been strengthened by more attention to the
complexities of age-related categories in this period.
But such qualications in no way deny that this edition is a major achievement
that happily complicates our pedagogical and scholarly choices. Deciding which
edition to assign or recommend to graduate students and advanced undergraduates
will not be easy. Financial considerations may play a part; Arden is to be applauded
for oering this paperback for $14.99. Vhich poems are included and the
interpretive stances behind those choices may also help to determine which edition
we suggest; in particular, Duncan-Joness commitment to the idea of a Delian
structure is reected in the fact that A Lovers Complaint is paired with the
Sonnets in her edition, while Roes belief that the connections between those
poems has been overstated is reected in an edition that prints the Complaint
with the narrative poems. As scholars, we will want to consult each of these
editions regularly ourselves, turning to them for their respective strengths.
Burrows magisterial Complete Sonnets and Poems oers the most acute analyses
of literary and thematic issuesalthough the other contenders are strong in
this central respect as wellwith a valuable if sometimes overstated defense of
the poems signicance. Among the many virtues of Roes major edition is his
learned commentary on intellectual contexts and an independent challenge to the
often-unchallenged links between the Sonnets and A Lovers Complaint. Ve are
especially indebted to Duncan-Jones and Voudhuysen for their comprehensive
and original work on texts, attributions, and afterlife; a wide-ranging and thought-
provoking critical introduction; invaluable glosses; and much else that contributes
to our understanding of these poems.
Shakespeares Sonnets. By Dvxvx. C.ii.cn.x. Oxford: Blackwell
Iublishing, 2007. Illus. Ip. xii + 162. $64.95 cloth, $26.95
paper.
Reviewed by Jvorsx. G. Sixcn
One of Dympna Callaghans aims in Shakespeares Sonnets is to move beyond
an undue degree of interpretive mystication especially by those who have been
looking to decode a hidden meaning about Shakespeares life (xi). Engaging with
the Sonnets rather than with their author, Callaghan embarks on a well-guided
and illuminating journey through the shifting emotional, psychic, and linguistic
terrain of these poems. Vhile the book does not purport to uncover any secrets
of the Sonnets, it nonetheless charts a many-layered palimpsest of meanings,
evoking enigmas of emotional complexity, even while it works to elucidate and
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clarify the most signicant interpretive ideas that have circulated around these
complex poems since their rst publication (xi).
Te books organization of six chapters covers some familiar themes, such as
identity, beauty, time, love, and numbers. But in her readings, Callaghan frames
the Sonnets within historically and politically nuanced questions that make us look
afresh, for instance, at the aesthetic ideal of androgyny, both in the culture and in
Shakespeares poems; the complicated sexuality often reminiscent of Ovidian
rather than familiar Ietrarchan conventions; and the shifting and gendered
representations of time as they aect the lovely boy and the dark lady.
In chapter 2, Callaghan reconsiders the problem of identity in the sonnets
(18), recounting and moving beyond the familiar critical detective work (15)
regarding the historical identities of the young man and dark lady, as well as
the sexual identity of Shakespeare. Instead, she productively demonstrates how
the Sonnets deviate from literary conventions, specically Ietrarchanism, yet
are always conceived in relation to them (18). Oering new readings of Sonnet
145, with its pun on hate away (Iathaway) (2223), and Sonnets 135 and 136,
with their puns on Vill (2425), Callaghan perceptively reads the biographical
echoes to reveal their complex relation to Ietrarchan and Ovidian traditions,
while reminding us that as readers of the sonnets, we simply have to learn to live
with a considerable degree of ambiguity and uncertainty (34). Iere, Callaghan
also recalls that sonnets pursue the elusive identity of the beloved whereby the
disjunction between the actual identity, even where such an identity is explicitly
assigned, and the lyrical construction of the beloved reveals the poets (and not
necessarily the authors) fantasy about the object of his adoration (19).
Chapters 3 and 4on beauty and love, respectivelyexplore Shakespeares
treatment of these interlocking themes yet again, by perceptively charting the
gendered inections of the poets varying and shifting reections on the young
man and the dark lady. First, Callaghan analyzes the emotional imperatives of the
opening seventeen Sonnets that urge the young man to marry in order to breed
(83) his own idealized likeness. She examines how the Sonnets intersect with
biographical and cultural sources urging matrimony and procreation for young men
in general and Southampton in particular. But ultimately more than unraveling
the identity of the addressee, these opening poems, Callaghan demonstrates, are
remarkable for their emotional insistence in wanting the young mans child, his
copy in the world with an urgency of desire that is almost unfathomable (42).
Vhat is at issue then is the endless desire of the poet-speaker, an interesting twist
on the unavailability of the love object in the Ietrarchan tradition (42).
Not only does the Sonnets meditation on beauty idealize the young man,
and not the dark lady, but the irony is that associations between femininity and
beauty are hallmarks of the poets praise of the lovely boyassociations replete
with echoes from classical myth and literature. Callaghan further captures these
complexities of the poets desire, observing how the dark lady Sonnets explore the
problematic sexual magnetism of the woman, while both evoking and unsettling
Ietrarchan lyrical hyperbole. In charting this exploration, Callaghan also oers
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subtle analyses of the way in which evocations of the dark lady partake of cultural
racial discourses on blackness.
Like beauty, the Sonnets treatment of love, as Callaghan argues in chapter 4,
reveals mixed interactions with Ietrarchanism. On the one hand, Shakespeare
extrapolates the conventional Ietrarchan idea of the woman as enemy. . . .
Iowever, Laura, unlike the dark lady, was also the object of Ietrarchs idolatrous
worship (59). In Shakespeare, then, Ietrarchanism is divided along gender lines:
Te man becomes the object of Shakespeares idolatrous admiration . . . while the
woman becomes his dangerous adversary (59).
Chapter 5, perhaps the most innovative, connects the Sonnets thematic
preoccupation with numbers, including references to the new language of
commerce and mercantilism, to the metrical, numerical aspects of poetry. Iere,
Callaghan notes another important shift: From the Ietrarchan formula of
love, interminable desire, dissatisfaction, and deferral, Shakespeare shifts to the
experience of love via the economic conguration of scarcity and dearth, where
use, exchange, and accumulation . . . were forces that recongured poetry as
well (88).
Chapter 6 oers a novel take on the treatment of time in the Sonnets. Typically,
one is drawn to the Sonnets rehearsal of familiar Ovidian themes, namely, the
progress of mutability, loss, grief, and death (89). Callaghan complicates this
reading by adding another dimension, womans time: Vhat . . . makes the poet
so concerned about time in relation to the young man and so unconcerned about
it in relation to the woman: (89). Vhile the poet-speaker wishes to protect the
young mans ideal beauty from the vicissitudes of time and death, the womans
time, her reproductive body, is associated with inconstancy, disease and death and
with the absence of temporal progression (99).
Overall, Callaghans contribution in Shakespeares Sonnets lies in charting
the Sonnets manipulations of Ietrarchan and Ovidian forms, especially in
Shakespeares sharply gendered evocations of desire. Often, critics in their
formalist zeal tend to ignore or even marginalize the distinctions between the
poet-speakers desire for the idealized young man and his ambivalent attraction
to a woman who both fascinates and repels him (21). If the poet of the Sonnets
reveals to us the disorienting experiences of desire, we cannot overlook the
ramications of his fraught sexuality as it manifests itself dierently in relation
to a man and to a woman. Tis book provokes constant reection on this
distinction.
Finally, while not stated explicitly, Shakespeares Sonnets oers a very useful
pedagogical guide for Shakespeare scholars and students, giving us an overview
of the poems while opening up multiple ways of reading them. Aiding readers
further, it oers an introductory frame to each chapter, followed by a concluding
appendix, which briey summarizes each poem separately. In sum, this book
makes us appreciate and look afresh at the Sonnets, not by unlocking new
secrets but by reminding us again of the enigmas of desire, love, sexuality, and
death.