Three Theoretical Readings of Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle

By Clifford Stetner

I.   DECONSTRUCTION

Because of Shakespeare’s status as a poet by 1601, The Phoenix and the Turtle serves as the “centerpiece” of the collection, Love’s Martyr.  It is, however, in a Derridean sense, a missing center.  The Phoenix and the Turtle stands as a semantic term in the narrative of Love's Martyr that derives its meaning from its différance from the terms around it: the poems of Jonson, Marston, Chapman, Chester, and Ignoto. When read with reference to this particular series of rhetorical statements, the poem takes on its own rhetorical character which is absent from its text when read as usual only in the context of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. 

The Phoenix and the Turtle deconstructs the hierarchical opposition between the death of the old and rebirth of the new that Love's Martyr attempts to establish.  The term that is valorized throughout Love's Martyr (usually interpreted as a celebration of the impending Jacobean succession) is the “new Phoenix,” who rises from the ashes of the old.  The language of The Phoenix and the Turtle  continually defers the presence of the new Phoenix so that Shakespeare’s contribution is finally revealed as an empty signifier that serves to deconstruct the discursive values implied by its context. 

On a first reading, the Phoenix seems to open the poem:

Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree

herald sad and trumpet be… (1-3)

The “sole Arabian tree” describes the legendary bird’s habitat, and readers generally  assume the identity of the occupant to be the title character, but at the sixth stanza the action of the narrative situates itself after the Phoenix’s death:

…Love and constancy is dead

Phoenix and the Turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence. (22-24)

This unexpected absence of the Phoenix, who, until now, had been a palpable presence, “confounds” the reason  (see below) and forces the reader to return to the first stanza in order to determine the identity of the “bird of loudest lay” who occupies the Phoenix’s seat.  Its identity remains indeterminate, however, stimulating a great deal of critical debate and amplifying the reader’s awareness that the presence of the Phoenix had been merely illusory, sustained through six stanzas by her own presumptions.  What she took to be the legendary bird of most beautiful lay, viz. the Phoenix of the title, is merely the loudest, a crass usurper.  The reader’s assumptions are seduced by the text into attributing value that the text itself ultimately destablishes.

The expression of the confounding of Reason in the center of the poem is a description of the process of the deconstruction of apparently dualistic terms through the realization that each term is contained in the other:

Reason in itself confounded

Saw division grow together

To themselves yet either neither

Simple were so well compounded

That it cried “how true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one… (41-46)

The twain referred two are the Phoenix and the Turtle who de(con)struct in a “mutual flame,” the necessary means, ostensibly, for rebirth and renewal.  The text, however, explicitly denies the rebirth that the other poems of Love's Martyr celebrate. 

Because of further reader assumptions based on context, the absence of the Phoenix discovered at the sixth stanza of Shakespeare’s poem appears merely as a deferred presence anticipating the celebrated rebirth.  It is not until the third to final stanza that the deferred object is removed altogether:

Leaving no posterity

‘Twas not their infirmity

It was married chastity, (59-61)

The unprecedented absenting of the new Phoenix renders the sacrifice meaningless and Love's Martyr  is effectively decentered. 

The Phoenix and the Turtle, the central term (in position and status) of Love's Martyr, which should be the site of the presence of the valorized object (the new Phoenix), is characterized by linguistic opacity and deferral which on examination reveals only the multiplication of empty signifiers.  The poem’s deconstruction of the assumptions of value grounding Love's Martyr subjects them to reversal or collapse. 

The absence of the Phoenix creates a hole in the text such as Lacan reads in Ophelia’s grave[i] or Margery Garber in the ghostliness of old Hamlet[ii].  The rebirth valorized in the other poems of the collection is deconstructed, and celebration is transformed into mourning[iii].  The owl, “thou shrieking harbinger” of doom, whom the narrator warns away from the funeral in the second stanza (“to this troop come thou not near”) is revealed to be the poet himself who is forced to cloak his augury in intense irony and ambiguity.  Constrained by political conditions and by the circumstances of its commission, Shakespeare’s poem represses an explicit denial of the values implied in the rest of Love's Martyr, and instead uses the opacity, ambiguity, and différance inherent in linguistic discourse to deconstruct those values.

II.   PSYCHOANALYSIS

Lacan was surprised that no critic had commented on the etymology of the

name of Ophelia, in O phallus (20).  A similar observation might be made about the phonetic association of Phoenix both with phallus and penis.  If the Phoenix of Shakespeare’s poem is revealed to be the missing center of the linguistic discourse of a collection of poems, then Lacan would surely identify it along with Ophelia as a Shakespearean expression of the (veiled) phallic object of desire[iv]. 

In the discussion of his graph of the relationship of the symbolic to the imaginary register of the unconscious, Lacan draws an analogy between the object in desire and the square root of minus one which “doesn’t correspond to anything that is subject to our intuition, anything real…and yet, it must be conserved, along with its full function” (29)  It is this kind of absent presence that characterizes the Phoenix of Shakespeare’s poem.  The Phoenix is not there (as are the eagle, the swan and the crow (and even the owl)), and yet it nevertheless determines all the action.  The text first joins in the valorization of the divine bird and then frustrates any attempt to locate it.  It is this frustration itself that creates the affective mood of the poem.      

            Reading the Phoenix as Lacan’s veiled phallus, the relationship of the Turtle to the Phoenix might be neatly represented by the formula $ua in Lacan’s graph which signifies the relationship of the barred subject ($) to the object of desire (a)[v].  The birds burn up because the merger of $ with a is ultimately impossible, and we are left with a funeral rite.  The ultimate failure of the poem to deliver the completion and transcendence implied by the theme of the collection is analogous to Lacan’s recognition that the fantasy object of desire is a “mirage”[vi].

The threnos that makes up the last fifteen lines of the poem illustrates the initiation of the play of the signifier in the real register in the form of language: viz. a poem composed by Reason.  In a process analogous to the barring of the subject (signified by castration in the symbolic register) and the investment of the object of desire in the Other during the mirror stage, Reason cries:

…How true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one

Conscious reason is unable to reconcile the paradox inherent in the construction of the idea of the Other by the subject and is forced to defer to the law of desire:

Love hath reason, reason none

If what parts can so remain[vii] (47-48)

The frustration of Reason in the imaginary register finally “sets the signifier in motion” through abstract language in the form of poetry:

            Whereupon it made this threne

            To the Phoenix and the Dove

            Co-supremes and stars of Love

            As chorus to their tragic scene. (49-52) [followed by five triplets]

The funeral of the Phoenix and the Turtle figure the same paradox of the object-relationship and its consequent mourning that Lacan reads in the funerals of Hamlet.  Simultaneously excluded from and merged with the subject Turtle, the phallic Phoenix becomes a hole in the text of Love's Martyr whose palpable absence creates an overarching sense of mourning which sets its ritual and poetic signifiers in motion[viii].

III.       Marxism

            Lacan criticized Marx for neglecting ritual as a material practice in his study of historical dialectics [ix].  For Lacan, the universal human drive toward the participation in and performance of ritual, which is a consequence of the construction of the individual subject, is also a force acting on history.  As Francis Barker argues “…history and mourning are engaged together in a pattern of displacement and substitution where historical memory is displaced on to ... the personal version” (2).  For Lacan, the funerals of Hamlet are representations of mourning, as Freud defined it as a function of the decline of the Oedipal complex, and as he himself described it in terms of the genesis of the subject. 

According to Francis Barker, the funerals of Hamlet signify a crisis in cultural historical memory which is largely congruent with the “end of history” identified with postmodern culture.  Postmodern ahistoricism has ignored the fact that every age (and culture) has had its modernisms and postmodernisms and that an “end of history” figures in all historical postmodernisms.  It is therefore significant for an historical interpretation of The Phoenix and the Turtle that the Phoenix myth has often been interpreted in terms of the rise and fall of Empire[x].  The funeral of an old Phoenix and its rebirth from its own ashes is an ancient allegory for the continual death and rebirth of history.  Shakespeare’s denial of posterity to the Elizabethan Phoenix, no less than the maimed rites of Hamlet, therefore serves as an ideal metaphor for a postmodern Elizabethan “end of history.”

            The deconstruction of the cultural values embodied in the iconography of the new Phoenix reflects a simultaneous deconstruction occurring in the larger culture.  This deconstruction is revealed in the slippage of meaning in the language of The Phoenix and the Turtle.  As the connotations of the Phoenix and Turtle slip from the highest divine principles “truth and beauty,” “love and constancy” to “dead birds” over the course of the poem, the ambiguity of individual terms allows meaning to slip from a poetic naive sense to a demystified ironic sense.  This use of demystification as an instrument of the deconstruction of presumed cultural values reflects a similar process of demystification that Marx perceived in what he referred to as the period of “primitive accumulation” (Kapital )

            As the warning to the owl has its naive and ironic readings, every term in the poem reveals similar ambiguity.  Property is given an emphasis equal to Reason in the anthem, and is often understood in terms of Platonic forms[xi] or scholastic categories[xii].

...Either was the other’s mine.

            Property was thus appalled

            That the self was not the same;

            Single nature’s double name

            Neither two nor one was called. (36-40)

During the period of the victory of the Early Modern bourgeois capitalist revolution, however, the word  property was acquiring its primary modern connotation.  The Oxford English Dictionary attributes the following meaning to the above lines:  “Either was claimed by the other as ‘Mine’.  Ownership was thus dismayed.  (But Schmidt takes ‘property’ here as =’particularity, individuality’.”  This disparity of opinion originates in the ambiguity that characterizes the deconstructive mechanism of the entire poem.  The  “end of history”  that early modern England experienced is described by Marx[xiii]  as the replacement of “motley feudal rites” by “callous ‘cash payment.’”

            Marx describes a process of the demystification of history which is brought about by primitive accumulation[xiv] and which makes the proletarian revolution possible.  The bourgeoisie, unlike the proletariat, attempts to appropriate the historical mythology of the superseded feudal state.  It is this process that generated the publication of Love's Martyr with its manipulation of Royalist symbolism.  Rather than participating in the appropriation of the Phoenix myth to legitimize a largely bourgeois Jacobean state, Shakespeare’s poem reduces it to a symbol for the deconstruction of all cultural mythology inherited from the Elizabethan age.

Whether or not The Phoenix and the Turtle engages in deconstruction on the anagogic level or Lacanian ideas of the subject on the tropological level, on its allegorical level its decentering of the values established and valorized in the poems of Love's Martyr amounts to a political statement (although its use of linguistic technique to manipulate reader expectation rather than positive utterance successfully evades the attribution of a definite political position). 

Although the end of history, as it is read by Barker as portrayed in the maimed rites of Hamlet and as it can likewise be recognized in the barrenness of Shakespeare’s Phoenix, would have been a tragic theme to a devotee of the century old Tudor myth.  For Marx, the early modern end of history, as it was brought about by the rise of the bourgeoisie during the period of primitive accumulation, was a necessary step towards the true end of history in the dictatorship of the proletariat[xv].