Breaking the Cycle: Shakespeare and the Deconstruction of the Sonnet Tradition

By Clifford Stetner

Introduction

When the sonnet cycles of Italy and France began to be imitated in England in the sixteenth century, they became less explicitly associated with Neoplatonism, and appear to many critics today to be a merely conventional means of addressing some particular historical personage, either a love object or patron of the poet.  But although the gènre in England made only passing explicit references to Neoplatonism, the titles of several cycles (e.g. Idea, Delia, Diane, Coelia, Astrophel and Stella) attest to a conscious participation in a discourse with allusions to Platonic metaphysics.

Through the sonnet cycle, Neoplatonism was put into the service of the Tudor myth by Elizabethans.  Beginning with Phillip Sidney, sonnets were generally addressed by English composers of the middle classes to aristocratic patrons in a discourse of class relations based on Neoplatonic ideas of hierarchy.  The essentialization of this hierarchy valorized the monarch as the earthly expression of the Neoplatonic hypostasis of the One (which is destined to manifest itself as a European emperor who is to subdue the Roman church) and helped to make the power of the monarchy and aristocracy seem compatible with Christian ideology.  The establishment of Elizabeth in this imperial role, furthermore, seemed to validate the theological claims of the English Reformation; the sonnet cycles of Sidney, Spenser, Drayton[1], and Daniel participate in this mytho-political discourse.

            As I will argue, Shakespeare’s Sonnets represent a deconstruction of the episteme encoded into the English sonnet cycle tradition, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion of 1595 may be read as the most complete development of that episteme: a structuralism of Neoplatonic correspondences  which defined the individual subject in essentialist terms. 

Although post-Machiavelian and with a distinct political agenda in view, there is no indication that Spenser’s Platonism was anything but sincere.   The English sonneteers stand on the vaguely defined borderline between a pure essentialism and an acknowledgment of poetry’s influence on the creation of cultural meaning.  Spenser’s professed rhetorical aim of “fashioning a gentleman” implies an existentialist model of the subject, but he accomplishes his fashioning through the construction of an essentialist metaphysics.

Conscious of the potential of the Elizabethan state to attain the status of world empire, the poets of the English Renaissance sought material and role models in the history of imperialism.  The poetry they produced was sold to the state through the system of aristocratic patronage.  Aware of the precedent of Virgil, English poets like Spenser offered Elizabeth historical and metaphysical principles on which to base her claims to imperial authority.  In the sonnet cycles, such principles can be derived from reading through the prism of Neoplatonic hierarchies. 

Traditional readings of Spenser’s sonnets in terms of his own courtship and marriage alone, by failing to acknowledge the political significance of the Neoplatonic pretensions of the gènre in its historical context, overlook the subtleties of meaning which account for the extraordinary resonance of the sonnet cycle in Elizabethan culture.  While Spenser died before the problems of the succession and the failure of the Essex rebellion had cast a cloud over the Tudor dynasty, Shakespeare’s work at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and thereafter represents a deconstruction and a reversal of his Spenserian political philosophy.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been called his “prophetic soul dreaming on things to come with the idea of deconstruction in mind” (Felperin 56).  This reading reflects one side of a critical divide, the other side of which is defined by the majority critical opinion of the Sonnets as “serene, cleere, and eligantly plaine”[2] personal statements addressed and referring to a small group of specific individuals[3].  Bridging the gap between this kind of purely personal interpretation of the sonnet cycle gènre and purely abstract interpretations treating of various metaphysical or psychological principles, are readings such as Arthur Marotti’s, which interpret the various interpersonal relationships represented or implied in the poems as allegorical of the relationship of the poet to his patron, or, more generally, to the entire courtly system of patronage.

            The difference between these various readings lies in the degree of self-consciousness perceived in the tone of the poetry.  A naïve reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets gradually reveals an emotional autobiography of the poet enraptured by the beauty of a young aristocrat, fawning for a time, becoming involved in a sexual relationship with an unnamed (and anomalously unidentifiable as sonnet mistresses go) lady of dark complexion, until various events, including the infidelity of both love objects and his own supplantation by a rival poet, breed in him a sense of disillusionment and finally resignation. 

This narrative exhibits the elements of a dramatic plot (as the details of Shakespeare’s personal life perhaps inevitably would), but, as Sidney Lee remarked a hundred years ago, once it is placed into the context of the contemporary circulation of sonnet cycles, the development of a sense of its conventionalities and anti-conventionalities, what Joel Fineman calls the “orthodoxy of their unorthodoxy” (3), increasingly reveals both plot and characters to be the most self-consciously self-conscious of literary constructions.

            In order to demonstrate that the sonnet cycle gènre was mobilized in the conscious construction of an ideology which was, in the modern sense, political and next, that Shakespeare’s cycle begins a deconstruction of this ideology[4], it is first necessary to make a comparativist study of the history of the sonnet cycle gènre.  While there are many variations and exceptions to the definition of a sonnet and a sonnet cycle, a (intentionally) coherent generic history can be described beginning with Dante and Petrarch and the poets of the dolce stil nuovo in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, followed by the sonnet cycle’s considerable currency in France throughout the 16^th century with poets associated with the Pléiade school, such as Ronsard, Du Belay and Desportes, and the influences of both the Italians and the French on the sonnets of Philip Sidney who served as the archetypal model for most Elizabethan sonneteers.

Dante and Petrarch

Although Dante had made the sonnet cycle famous in the previous generation, Petrarch provided the early model for Elizabethan sonneteering. While the search for “the ideal in the real, the divine in the natural, the invisible in the visible” which is evident in the sonnets of Dante and Petrarch are recognizably Catholic pursuits, it was the “undercurrent of human feeling” in Petrarch by which the English Petrarchans were most affected (Pearson 244).  But the reason for the Elizabethan appreciation of the younger poet had as much to do with politics as sentiment.

While a passion for Beatrice is Dante’s explicit motivation, he makes it clear that his exile’s passion for Florence and its involvement in the conflict between Guelphs and Ghibbelines was the defining motivation of his identity and poetry.  An involvement in politics is less prominent in the poetry of Petrarch than of Dante, but, like Dante, next to his idealized love for Laura, the only cause which inspires Petrarch’s passion in the canzoni, is politics:

Vulture and serpent, lion wolf and bear,[5]

On a high marble column work their will,

Yet, gnawing it, likewise themselves devour; [....]

An age and more divide us from the hour

When Rome was sundered from the chivalry

Which once exalted her; and in its place

Today an arrogant and upstart race

Tramples the mighty Mother scornfully. (LXIII Ode 6, 71-81)

Petrarch’s Sonnet 105, furthermore, is a condemnation of the corruption of the Papal Court in Avignon, while 107 refers to the donation of Constantine (Petrarch 64) (only later to be discovered a forgery) which was perceived as handing Europe over to the “whore of Babylon.”  While Petrarch and Dante were Catholics, such sentiments anticipate the early Reformation teaching of Wyclif a few years later.  These affinities might also help to explain why, although Dante was still considered too Catholic, a hero of the English Reformation like Sidney should have accepted Petrarch as a model as had French supporters of the Huguenots within the Pléiade.

In the conflict that dominated Italian politics between pope and emperor, Petrarch is of the same pro-Empire party as Dante.  He accords with Dante’s view of the salvation of Italy in the person of a strong emperor, and the metaphysics of love incorporated into his sonnets is consistent with a larger ideology of history and world order which becomes associated with Platonism and remains an underlying theme of the sonnet cycle throughout its European currency.

In the sixth circle of the Inferno ... the voice of the narrator is heard advising those of “sound mind to contemplate the doctrine hidden under the veil of mysterious verse.” The passage in the Divine Comedy closely coincides with the letter to Can Grande’ della Scala, where Dante... describes his own poetry as “polysemos,” or of several meanings, the literal and the allegorical or mystical. (Allen 2).

The allegorical and mystical meaning of Dante’s verse involves a providential view of history in which politics are imbued with theological significance, and the poet is virtually a prophet. Petrarch, furthermore, “son of Dante’s fellow exile, loudly defended the theological worth of poetry in an apologetic letter to his monastic brother...” (Allen 2).

            While it is easy to see this view of the role of poetry at work in the Comedia, its relevence to the sonnet cycle, elevated to such a laureate status by these two poets and their followers in the dolce stil nuovo, is not immediately evident.  The tradition from which the gènre arises is usually understood in apolitical terms:

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries... in France... a new trend which owed something to Platonic doctrine was developing with respect to the poet’s attitude vis-à-vis his lady. ... the new attitude was one of idealization of both lady and love. It was first manifest among the troubadours of Provence, and was later fully rationalized at the courts of Elea­nor of Poitou and of her daughter, Marie of Champagne...  (Burgess ix)

This new attitude has been attributed to the sublimation of the sexual and aggressive behavior of the medieval warrior aristocracy necessary for the emergence of a courtly culture.[6]  But the need for such sublimation goes back to the Trojan War and is probably an ongoing rather than an emergent process in the Middle Ages.

Romantic poetry may have come to France from Italy with certain religious sects, and returned there after repression drove the heresies from France.  The movement away from sensual love poetry (deriving also in part from Ovid) to the more idealizing love represented by Dante and Petrarch coincides with the earliest beginnings of the major influence of Platonism on the culture of the Italian Renaissance.

With Petrarch and Dante... courtly love had already moved beyond chivalric devotion and away from adulterous desire. It could inspire the lover not only with virtuous thoughts, but with the love of God. ...the earlier exaltation of love and the Neoplatonic philosophy of love could melt into each other... (Ellrodt 27)

Platonic and Neoplatonic texts did not become widely available in Italy before the work of Ficino in the following century; we can, however, detect a foundation of Platonic ideas in the sonnets of Petrarch, who used “at least Plato’s name ... in his attack on the authority of Aristotle...” (Kristeller 55)[7].

It is harder to find evidence of Platonism in Dante; however, the complexity of the personæ of Beatrice is certainly compatible with the ideas of Platonic love to be expounded later by Ficino.  It was...

Dante, who carried the ideals of the dolce stil nuovo to their most exalted level. His lady Beatrice, not only became the earthly embodiment of the angelic but was herself an angel and the guide of the poet through the realms of the supernatural... Dante finally clarified all the symbolism behind the new concepts in his Convivio, which served as a handbook on philosophic love for future poets... (Burgess 65)

            In identifying hierarchy as a foundational principle of his poetry in the Convivio, Dante set a precedent for later Italian humanists who sought to identify the persons of the trinity with hierarchical Neoplatonic principles in order to reconcile Christian and Neoplatonic metaphysics.  While Petrarch “wanted to make his Laura a representa­tion as divine as Beatrice,” however, “he expresses considerably more than the yearnings of his immortal soul” (Burgess 65), and considerably less of the explicit political and providential implications of his poetry than Dante.  Given the fate of the older poet (and his own father), Petrarch may have found it prudent to be more allegorical than explicit. The humanization of Laura might then be read as a conflation of the two levels of historical and spiritual allegory which Dante had kept distinct.[8] 

The bringing of love back to earth from heaven with all the conflicts such a descent produces  (Petrarch eventually shrunk from his own exaltation of physical beauty “in an agony of remorse...” (Pearson 245))  is analogous to the effect of the recovery of Plato’s dialogues on the understanding of Platonism in the West.  Compared with Plotinus, Plato’s emphasis is less upon ascetic contemplation than worldly politics.  The recovery of the Republic, for example, suggested the extension of Plotinus’s hierarchy of hypostases downward to worldly government, a suggestion that those predisposed to favor a unified European empire with sovereignty over the Roman Church were eager to accept.[9]

The humanist conflation of Christian, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic metaphysics became associated with the particular political agenda which identified the Platonic form of an ideal state as an orderly empire under a single ruler, the earthly reflection of the Neoplatonic One, so that the mobilization of Neoplatonic principles in the sonnet cycle convention necessarily carries particular political implications.

            These implications began to be developed as more Platonic, Hermetic, Orphic, and Cabalistic texts flowed into Florence.  Ficino and his disciple Pico de la Mirandola proceeded in the generation following Petrarch[10] to expound a philosophy of Platonic love which Petrarchist poets including Michelangelo and his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici added to their sonnets. (Burgess ix). 

The Medicis were the ideological heirs of the Ghibbelinism of Dante. Because of its early Italian history as well as its further development in France in the following century, by the time the sonnet form was adopted in England, it was understood to represent an anti-Romanist tradition of poetic discourse.

            According to Lu Pearson, the patronage of the great English Petrarchans: Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton by court ladies vying for influence was the consequence of the raising of “the Queen and English womanhood to an unprecedented height” by the literati “under the influence of the various phases of Italian love doctrine, which entered England with the Italian literature.” Queen Elizabeth herself

...had been for almost forty years a sort of divinity to her people. She had acted well her part in the ideal of chivalry, which her poets and statesmen had tried to instil into the hearts of her subjects, and had thereby done much to exalt the position of women and to make the Petrarchan reverence and exaltation of them the conven­tional attitude of Elizabethans (Pearson 232)

This “ideal of chivalry” included a well recognized Neoplatonic subtext as is evident from the titles of the various sonnet cycles, largely in imitation of French practice[11] (however, the cerebral love celebrated in the sonnet cycle was very often concluded with an ode and followed by a complaint, forms of Ovidian poetry which often have political themes[12]). 

The Neoplatonic associations of the sonnet cycle gènre, as it came down to Sidney, had specific implications for England. The quasi-divinity of Elizabeth provided for a development of the hierarchical female principle exalted in Beatrice and Laura (and the countless nonpareils of the French Pléiade).  Not only did the circumstances of her reign make possible claims of the providential destiny of her imperialist aspirations, but she unified the warring factions of England (like the red and white roses that constantly war in the cheeks of the beloved) under a Neoplatonic hierarchy in which upward mobility began to be a question of merit for which the love of the sonnet lady had become an allegory.

            This adaptation of the European imperial theme to the Tudor myth (in keeping with the process described by Frye) through the assimilation of the sonnet cycle was not altogether unambiguous.  By the time Sidney and Daniel published their sonnets, a wave of anti-Petrarchism had already followed the sonnet cycle’s initial progress across Europe[13], so that anti-Petrarchism had been an element of the English sonnet cycle from the beginning[14]. 

According to Lu Pearson, the Petrarchan idealization of love of woman and the anti-Petrarchan scorn of that idealization were the two main determining currents of Elizabethan love conventions (297).  In response to the liberating influence of Sidney, Michael Drayton’s Idea “...recalls Sidney’s impatient rejections, and reminds us how much of Donne’s anti-Petrarchanism existed among the sonnet writers themselves” (Hebel).

It might be said that the ambiguity of Petrarch’s own sonnets is the original source of anti-Petrarchism.  Giordano Bruno (who had connections with both Philip Desportes and Phillip Sidney) “reads Petrarch’s songs to Laura as a satiric encomium of fleshly desire” (Fineman 2).  Max Wolff attributes the development of anti-Petrarchism to Castiglione’s Cardinal Bembo who “declared all physical love was bad” (Pearson 247), giving rise to a series of sonnets about dark-haired women[15].

While Shakespeare’s Sonnets lie at least partly within this anti-Petrarchist tradition in his “sharp ridicule and harsh, often obscene realism against the spiritualization of love” (Pearson 274), Elizabethans like Spenser and Daniel used various strategies to efface the contradictions between Platonic and Petrarchan paradigms.  The principle source for Daniel were the unambiguously Platonic sonnets of Philip Desportes.

Desportes

Before the sonnet cycle gènre arrived in England, it was adopted and transformed by the French who in the 16^th century were subjected to profound Italian influences by virtue of the descent of the French royal household from the Medici.  In lines such as: “Car cet amour tousjours par la beauté l’attire; En suivant la beauté, belle forme il desire; Voila comme l’amour rend le monde accompli”[16] (in Burgess 64),  Philip Desportes places the Petrarchan and Dantesque concepts of love and beauty, drawn from the romantic tradition, into the more abstract metaphysical Neoplatonic system.

His thoughts concerning the Creation and the Cosmos, the nature of Love and Beauty, the Soul and the Ideas, the relationship between the Lover and the Beloved, the divine inspiration of the poet and the role of poetry, the consideration given to the Virtues and “affections” of the Soul, are all Platonic and stem directly from the dialogues... (Burgess 19).

            The fact that Desportes had served as reader to Henri IV (a post once held by Giordano Bruno (Burgess 5) who could have brought both Neoplatonic ideas and Petrarchan sonnets from Italy) indicates the mechanism by which his poetry could be put into the service of French monarchist ideology.  “Henri IV, furthermore, shortly be­fore the poet’s death in 1606, decided to entrust the education of the Dauphin to [Desportes]” (Burgess 19).

            The theme of Love as the force ultimately responsible for order in the natural world[17] implies a Neoplatonic cosmology which necessarily includes history and therefore authorizes the emergence of world empire in Europe.  This ideology is related both to Dante’s Ghibbelinism (inherited by Catherine of Navarre from her Medici ancestors) and the anti-papalism of Wyclif, Chaucer and the Reformation.  Its authorization of  French absolutism is given expression in the sonnet cycles of Desportes and the poets of Catherine’s Pléiade[18].

Sidney

From 1583-1585, after being at the French court and before being burnt in Rome in 1600 (Eriksen 194), Giordano Bruno was in London where he wrote and published his most constructive philosophical works, dedicating the Spaccio and the Heroici Furori to Sir Philip Sidney (Ellrodt 109).  As a representative of continental humanism, perhaps Bruno’s association with Sidney encouraged the poet in his incorporation of Platonism in his sonnets.

Sidney demonstrates his knowledge of Plato in Astrophel and Stella[19] and Harrison names him together with Spenser and Shakespeare as the three chief Platonist sonnet writers of the 1590’s (127).  In sonnet xxv, he equates Stella with the principle of virtue, in the context of an explicit allusion to Plato.  Although the hierarchical principle implied by this description of Stella is used as a rhetorical device in the courtship of his beloved, it presents a sophisticated reading of Platonic metaphysics, the contemplation of which is what involves the reader’s attention.  The poet thereby valorizes Platonism, and this valorized metaphysics serves as the voice of his poetic authority.

Besides his acquaintance with Giordano Bruno, who had come to his circle directly from the French court, Sidney had direct contact with Protestant factions in France when he witnessed the St. Bartholomew massacre.  His political agenda was, like that of Dante and Petrarch, if not Desportes and the Pléiade, anti-Romish and nationalistic, and besides setting the fashion for the English expression of the sonnet cycle, he became the martyr for the literary wing of the English Reformation.

As with many other sonneteers, more or less consensus exists regarding the actual identity of Sidney’s Stella, but whoever she was, pursuit of her did not occupy all of Sidney’s attention, as a great deal was left over for his self-fashioning as the quintessential Elizabethan courtier, a figure embodying both the highest nobility and the rising middle class involved in the pursuit of aristocratic favor with the ultimate goal of royal favorite status in view.  This pursuit of ascent along the great chain of being could be understood in the same sort of Neoplatonic sense that the pursuit of the sonnet lady often was, and I follow Fineman and others in reading these hierarchies as superimposed in the poetry.

This conflation of the political with the amorous in a Neoplatonic context is continued in the next great Elizabethan sonneteer, Samuel Daniel.

Daniel

Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella of 1591 included twenty-eight sonnets by Daniel, and Daniel’s own publication of Delia increased the total to fifty-five. “Many of the sonnets are translations, or adaptations, of originals by...Desportes whose Les premiers oevres had first appeared in 1573... (Daniel i).  The sonnets were dedicated: “To the Right Honourable the Ladie Mary, Countesse of Pembroke.” After a disclaimer and accusation against greedy printers, Daniel reaffirms his association with “...Astrophel, flying with the wings of his own fame, a higher pitch then the gross-sighted can discerne,” who “hath registred his owne name in the Annals of eternitie,” and claims to:

desire onely to bee graced by the countenance of your protection: whome the fortune of our time hath made the happie and iudiciall Patronesse of the Muses, (a glory hereditary to your house) to preserve them from those hidious Beastes, Obliuion, and Barbarisme. ... wherein you must survive your selfe. And if my lines ...shall purchase grace in the world, they must remaine the monuments of your honourable fauour... Samuel Danyell. (Daniel2 2)

Although Mary Pembroke has sometimes been identified with Delia, the words “To Delia” following the dedication imply, at least formalistically, a shift of addressee.  If Daniel means to continue his address of Pembroke, he at least switches personae.  When he writes in lines 13 and 14 of the first sonnet: “Reade it sweet maide, though it be doone but slightly; Who can shewe all his loue, doth loue but lightly,” he pretends to address an unnamed beloved, not his patroness.  While much of Sidney’s Stella can be accepted as a real person, however, “Delia... is more shadowy; and her identification with the Countess of Pembroke or anyone else is tenuous, if not wholly unacceptable” (Seronsy 25).

            For Roy Innes,

...the ‘sweet maide’ of line 13 ...becomes associated with a vocabulary that had been used in connection with the Virgin Mary in the middle ages. Thus, in sonnet 6 she is described as ‘Sacred on earth, design’d a saint aboue’ (line 8). And in sonnet 8 the lover’s burning heart is envisaged as sending up the incense of its sighs to heaven. But the function of the figure of the Virgin Mary is precisely, to intercede on behalf of the sinner... (61).

This overlapping of a living Delia with the mother of God suggests a complex hierarchized persona in both the Italian and French traditions.  We may further note that the name of Daniel’s patroness’ (whose function was an earthly form of divine intercession) was Mary.  This juxtaposition with the Mariolotry in his sonnets sets a precedent for Spenser’s three Elizabeths discussed below.

Later in his career Daniel wrote about Delia:

I, who (contented with an humble song,)

Made musique to myselfe that pleas’d mee best,

And onely told of DELIA, and her wrong,

And prais’d her eyes, and plain’d mine owne unrest.

For Daniel Seronsy, the tone of this nostalgia “suggests a Delia somewhere between a real person and the object of a poetical exercise” (27).  While many critics have noted the anagrams of idea, ideal, and l’idea, in Daniel’s title (in imitation of the French tradition), I found none who remark on the possible relevance of the near anagram of the poet’s own name to the identification of Delia.  The above lines quoted by Seronsy suggest that the praise of Delia arises from the poet’s “owne unrest,” that she is, like her name, another aspect of the poet’s own identity.

Like Petrarch and Dante in their passion for Florence, and Desportes in his service to the French monarch, besides Delia, Daniel’s other governing passion is politics.  Daniel was among the numerous English poets, such as Henry Constable, William Drummond, and Thomas Lodge who esteemed and imitated “the good abbé,” Desportes[20] (Burgess 19).  Similar to Desportes who had been reader to the king, Daniel served an official literary function as state censor for a short time (Innes 42), and he put himself in the poetic service of the realm.  His “lengthy Civil Wars had an indisputable influence on Drayton” who was the only rival to his claim to pre-eminence in historical poetry (Hardin 31).

Daniel shared the passionate nationalism that seems to characterize the purveyors of the sonnet cycle tradition, as well as the sense of providential imperialism that is evident both in Dante and in the Tudor myth.  He evinced the prophetic vision that the English language “could not but be destined to play a great role in the culture of the world:”

And who, in time, knows whither we may vent

The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glory shall be sent
T’inrich vnknowing Nations with our stores?
What worlds in th’yet vnformed Occident
May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours? (Musophilus in Greenfeld 70)

This linguistic ethnocentrism puts him into the long tradition of sonneteers who sought to elevate the status of their local vernacular.

Spenser

In the same way that Sidney’s Stella is an allegorical expression of a hierarchical principle of Beauty, Spenser addresses his sonnet cycle to a tri-partite Elizabeth.

MOST happy letters fram'd by skilfull trade,

with which that happy name was first defynd:

the which three times thrise happy hath me made,

with guifts of body, fortune and of mind.

The first my being to me gaue by kind,

from mothers womb deriu'd by dew descent,

the second is my souereigne Queene most kind,

that honour and large richesse to me lent.

The third my loue, my liues last ornament,

by whom my spirit out of dust was raysed:

to speake her prayse and glory excellent,

of all aliue most worthy to be praysed.

Ye three Elizabeths for euer liue…

that three such graces did vnto me giue. (Amoretti 74)

Spenser here acknowledges that the addressee of the Amoretti is not a simple person, but a complex persona with a hierarchical structure leading upward on a Platonic ladder of love.  His trinity: from mother to queen to “love” is ambiguous.  The name “Elizabeth” suggests that his wife is meant by his “liues last ornament,” but the order of epideixis suggests an ascent to “love” as spiritual principle.  He credits his “lives last ornament” for raising his “spirit out of dust” so that it might praise she who is “of all alive most worthy to be praised.”  This last is presumably the Queen whom he has praised with his FQ, but like the spelling of dew, what seems to connote descent can simultaneously connote an ascent: mother to queen to Love in a purely Neoplatonic ladder towards the One most worthy to be praised.  The hierarchy of earthly Elizabeths is then placed in a higher order of hierarchy as the three graces, their counterparts in the Platonic realm of forms.

The concept of the ladder of love derives originally from Diotima’s comparison of the search for the Idea of Beauty with the climbing of a staircase. 

He who would proceed rightly in this ... must be in love with one particular body, and engender beautiful converse therein; but next he must remark how the beauty attached to this or that body is cognate to that which is attached to any other... to regard as one and the same the beauty belonging to all; and so ... he must make himself a lover of all beautiful bodies, and slacken the stress of his feeling for one by contemning it and counting it a trifle[21]. But his next advance will be to set a higher value on the beauty of souls than on that of the body... (Symposium 210a-b)

Further expression is given to the idea of the ladder of love by Ficino and Pico and ascribed to Cardinal Bembo by Castiglione.  Ellrodt distinguishes seven stages of the ladder derived from the speech ascribed to Bembo in the Fourth Part of The Courtier:

1. The eyes of the lover snatch the image of a beautiful woman and carry it to the heart; sensual desire is stirred (Courtier, 312-13).

[....]

3. ...the lover must call back the coveting of the bodie to beautie alone and turn his whole attention to the image of the beautiful woman “...sundred from all matter.” (Courtier, 316-17).

4. ...The lover, “meddling all beautie together... shall make an universall conceite”. “And thus shall he behold no more the particular beautie of one woman, but an universall, that decketh out all bodies” ... (Courtier, 316-18).

5. ...Generalization must be followed by introversion...as in mystical contemplation, before “the soule ridde of vices, purged with the studies of true Philosophie”, ... “the beholding of her owne substance” and see “in her selfe ... the true image of the Angelike beautie” (Courtier, 318-19).

[....]

7. Yet the soul is not satisfied with beholding the heavenly beauty “onely in her particular understanding”. Whereupon love “guideth her to the universall understanding”, Pico’s prima mente. Thus the soul “seeth the main sea of the heavenly beautie, and receives it into her, and enjoyeth the soveraigne happiness” (Courtier, 319). (Ellrodt 29-30)

[22]His three Elizabeths simultaneously recall the Neoplatonic trinity of hypostases: One, Mind, Soul and the three celestial women of Dante’s Inferno. 

...In high heaven a blessed dame [Mary]

... who mourns with such effectual grief

That hindrance, which I send thee to remove,

That God's stern judgment to her will inclines.

To Lucia calling, her she thus bespake:

"Now doth thy faithful servant need thy aid

And I commend him to thee."  At her word

Sped Lucia, of all cruelty the foe,

And coming to the place, where I abode

Seated with Rachel, her of ancient days,

She thus address'd me: "Thou true praise of God!

Beatrice!  why is not thy succour lent

To him, who so much lov'd thee...? (II.93-105)

In this way, Beatrice, the human inspiration for Dante’s poetry, is defined as the earthly manifestation of a grace that has descended from Mary (who has won it from God), through Santa Lucia to her imparadised soul.  Dante’s sonnets to the living Beatrice are simultaneously directed through her to the hierarchy of divine principles she personifies.  

He thereby “... identifies his own beatitude with his praise of Beatrice...” according to Aquinas’ definition of prayer (Fineman 6).

The persona of Petrarch’s Laura is similarly complex.  Petrarch addresses her as living woman, dead soul, and embodiment of the laurel crown of poetry.

Long on green bank, fair laurel, mayst thou thrive,

And may thy planter high chivalrous thoughts,

In the sweet shade and water’s murmurs, write.  (148, 12-14)

O laurel boughs! whose lovely garland seems

The sole reward that glory’s deeds require!

O haunted life! Delusion sweet and dire  (161, 5-7)

            Whether or not Petrarch knew about Neoplatonism, his adaptation of Dante’s invention of a human love object embodying divine principles and thereby ennobling the poet/lover was ideally suited to the syncretization of Neoplatonic with Christian metaphysics in a Mariolotrist culture of the following centuries.  The sonnet cycle was

one site of this discourse in which monarchical European states became increasingly interested.

Since its origin, the sonnet cycle gènre engaged in a discourse involving the metaphysics of love which depended on the complication of the love object through a kind of  hierarchical telescoping.  This division of woman into separate functions in late medieval Italian poetry may reflect a simultaneous cultural division of female roles into mothers, wives and concubines (to which the Elizabethans would later add queen and empress), but after the providentialism of Dante and the sensuality of the Petrarchists, it became the unifying theme of the French sonnet tradition. Desportes’ sonnet se­quences to Diane, Cléonice, and Hippolyte were not, however, written in exile, but in the highest court circles of the French monarchy.[23] 

Spenser’s telescoping of the Elizabeth of his sonnets, then, is made according to generic precedent as is the title of his cycle Amoretti which is anticipated in Desportes “Amours, qui voleties et l’entour de nos flames, Comme gay papillons” and “les petits Amours, comme oiseux voletans” (Burgess 95).

The flowering of Elizabethan literature represents a response to the same recognition of radical indeterminacy described by deconstructionists like Derrida, but an early modern response that intentionally attempts to reconstruct rather than deconstruct logocentrism.  The deauthorization of the medieval Catholic ontology left a vacuum which literature rushed in to fill.  The center of this cultural singularity was the court and London.  Queen Elizabeth served as a kind of dark lady (in the sense of obscure), rarely addressed directly, but as the final bestower of authority on the author, always present.  The construction of her mythology was the construction of the mythology of the British empire[24].

Spenser engages in this process most explicitly.  As an element of the construction of a British mythology, FQ attempts an originally British verse form.  But Spenser also saw the sonnet cycle as consistent with his poetic project.  The sonnet cycle was generically concerned with ideals in an explicitly Platonic sense.  Although Platonism had been embraced by the Roman Catholic Church, it was favored by imperialist rather than papist factions (Yates) and was preserved rather than condemned in the literary expression of heroes of the English Reformation like Sidney and Spenser.  In the construction of his mythology, Spenser often assumes the authority of Platonic principles. 

The Platonism that had come down to the Elizabethans was not well distinguished from the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and followers.  While Neoplatonism in the Middle Ages represented a more contemplative tradition than Plato’s dialogues justify, the rediscovery of the Greek texts in the Renaissance brought the magical hermetic spirit of Neoplatonism back into the context of the worldly Republic.   For the Roman Catholics, Neoplatonism had provided an independent validation of its trinitarian principles; to the Elizabethans it seemed like an ancient recipe for the creation of world empire. 

Reading of the hermetic texts has become very different for us given the benefit of the Enlightenment.  What Spenser and others attempted in their literary project was an alchemy of history.  Plato was thought to have learned his wisdom from the Egyptians who got it from Moses, Orpheus, and Hermes.  it was the secret teaching of the Golden Age which could be created from the leaden present through carefully worked ideological

processes under an auspicious planetary alignment, which the reign of Elizabeth appeared to be.  Thirty years after the FQ, the draping of the court in robes of Neoplatonic mysticism became state policy.  There is a fundamental transformation, however, with the death of Elizabeth.  The more explicit the association of the monarch with Platonic ideals becomes, the more the ideology is demystified.  The monarchy becomes more authoritarian, and the people become less enchanted with it.

We must look at the alchemy of Spenser as a failed project then, whose history we can trace throughout the history of Tudor/Stuart literature.  If the Jacobean succession represents a failure of the plans of the Tudor mythographers, Spenser may have died still optimistic.  His sonnet cycle, after all, represents one of the first and only with a happy ending, and was published not with a tragic lover’s complaint, but with a comic epithalamion.

Shakespeare

The thesis I am prepared to argue regarding Shakespeare’s Sonnets is that, regardless of any personal allusions or references, they includes a political discourse in keeping with the long tradition of the sonnet cycle gènre from Dante to Spenser, furthermore that the love object addressed, whether in the person of a fair youth or a dark lady, is a complex persona which is always understood to include Elizabeth,[25] moreover, that the text successfully supports a Neoplatonic subtext (involving elements both conventional and unconventional to the gènre), and ultimately that it makes a literary statement that we would term deconstructionist.

To make this case completely (besides the book of fifty chapters explicating all the sonnets contemplated by Barbara Felperin) a reading of the Lover’s Complaint and The Phoenix and the Turtle, as well as a number of plays would be necessary.  Within the scope of this paper, I will attempt at least to show how the first nineteen sonnets taken as a group would fit into such a thesis by taking one or two as representative.

The first nineteen sonnets are generally referred to as the “procreation [hortatory?]  sonnets,” because they share the common theme of the poet’s injunction to his correspondent to consent to marry and have children.  He employs many poetic and philosophical arguments in this endeavor, and many people read these poems as Shakespeare’s sincere and intimate expressions of affection for someone, probably his patron (WH reversed, how clever) Henry Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton.  Addressing his sonnets to a male puts Shakespeare’s cycle in the tradition of Michelangelo’s and raises the question of his possible homosexuality.  I never liked these personal readings, homosexual or not, simply because I thought it a strange sentiment for someone who is supposedly in love to express.  Romantic love as it is conventionally expressed in sonnet cycles gives rise to the desire to possess the love object to the exclusion of all, not to give him or her away to another to breed children who can only take him or her further away into the duties of parenthood.

The idea perhaps makes rational sense: go and reproduce your beauty; I can desire nothing more than to see more images of you in the world, but it does not ring true as human emotion, and Shakespeare was not naïve about human emotion.  There are, fortunately, other possible sources for the procreation discourse.  Influence has been demonstrated of a dialogue of Erasmus for the form of the argument in favor of fatherhood, but the theme of procreation has two important resonances in the period of the early sonnets: the approaching succession and Neoplatonism.  If Shakespeare’s cycle is to be read in the context of the history of the gènre, as I have attempted to describe it in this paper, then the theme of procreation can be read as an ideal device through which to unify the discourse of Platonic metaphysics with the discourse of political topicality, the two overriding themes of the historic gènre.

In brief, Neoplatonism incorporates the idea of procreation into its creation myth.  Plotinus and his followers asked why the One should not be content to rest in its own unity, but needs to create the natural world through its emanation into multiplicity and number.  The answer is given that the One possessing the ideal qualities of an ideal goodness must out of pure magnanimity seek to multiply its own goodness by dividing its perfect unity into a multiplicity of emanations which becomes everything in the natural world, including us.  The drive of the One to (pro)create is the hypostasis of Love sometimes referred to as the higher of the two Venuses.  That higher love then diffuses itself throughout the multiple forms of the natural world and instills in them (including us) the desire to return to the perfect unity of the One, out of which we have emanated. 

As we begin to struggle towards this goal, however, our natural imperfections, resulting from our birth out of the lower stuff of being, perverts our purer love to the lower Venus giving rise to all our earthly and fleshly desires—a Classic/Medieval version of libido.  It was always the express aim of Neoplatonism to use esoteric philosophy to learn to seek the higher Venus and reunion with the One, and elements of this process were adapted to Christianity by the early Fathers (the higher Venus only surviving deeply submerged in the Virgin mother).  In some interpretations the third hypostasis of Mind is added, and sometimes the trinity is identified as One, Mind, Soul, the last taking the place of Love, but similarly associated with the Holy Ghost in the Christian trinity (the idea of which incidentally arose contemporarily). 

The hypostasis of Mind is adapted to Christianity as logos, the Word, ergo the Word made flesh, ergo the Son of the Trinity.  As such it provides the model for the highest pretensions of poetry as being next only to prophecy in its divine inspiration.  It is appropriate then for the Platonic poet to cast his sonnet in the role of logos in its injunction to the One most worthy to be praised to respond to the imperative of Love, to give over its niggarding and share its beauty through procreation.  In this way, a Platonic ontology is superimposed on the form of a personal address to a love object in the tradition of Drayton’s Idea’s Mirrour.  This is the project accomplished by the first nineteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets.  Read in this sense, the love object is more appropriately a young male as described by Diotima to Socrates as of a higher more perfect beauty in the ladder of love.[26]

It remains only to describe the further layer of political topicality superimposed on the same poetry.  As I have suggested, the poetic pose of obsequious injunction to marry and procreate would immediately suggest the conventional poetic address of Elizabeth.  Elizabeth was frequently the object of literary injunctions of this nature.  It is only the gender of the love object that makes the association seem unintended.  We should note however that gender confusion is clearly marked as one of the themes of the cycle, notably in the “master/mistress” sonnet 20. A careful reading, furthermore, reveals that gender is not as clearly determined in the text as it is commonly read.  We must acknowledge that it is we the readers who construct the personae from remarkably thin textual evidence.  We infer a single addressee, for instance, throughout the first nineteen sonnets owing to their common theme and tone, but such unity of identity is nowhere stated explicitly.  This suggests of course that the gender of the addressees of individual sonnets which identify no gender explicitly are textually indeterminate.

Sonnet 1 illustrates the point:

[1]     FRom faire{{s}t} creatures we de{{s}i}re increa{s}e,

[2]     That thereby beauties Ro{s}e might neuer die,

[3]     But as the riper {{s}h}ould by time decea{s}e,

[4]     His tender heire might beare his memory:

[5]     But thou contra{ct}ed to thine owne bright eyes,

[6]     Feed'{{s}t} thy lights {fl}ame with {s}elfe {s}ub{{s}t}antiall fewell,

[7]     Making a famine where aboundance lies,

[8]     Thy {s}elfe thy foe,to thy {s}weet {s}elfe too cruell:

[9]     Thou that art now the worlds fre{{s}h} ornament,

[10]   And only herauld to the gaudy {s}pring,

[11]   Within thine owne bud burie{{s}t} thy content,

[12]   And tender chorle mak{{s}t} wa{{s}t} in niggarding:

[13]       Pitty the world,or el{s}e this glutton be,

[14]       To eate the worlds due,by the graue and thee.

While no gender is stated, one is suggested by trope.  The object is placed in a simile with beauty’s rose who when deceased “his tender heir … [bears] his memory.”  But clearly, such a comparison could be made to a woman and the word rose in a poem about succession would strongly suggest the queen.  It is only after reading many sonnets[27] that we become retroactively convinced of a male persona.  My reading of the sonnets takes the indeterminacy of gender in the first sonnet as intentional and fundamentally thematic.

In addition to the purely prudent principle of deniability, as with procreation, justification can be found for reversing the gender of the object of address in Platonic metaphysics.  Although Elizabeth was not the first woman to rule as a monarch, she was the first female candidate for a European emperor, a successor to Charles V (and putatively to Constantine and Charlemagne as well as Arthur to whom she is explicitly associated) who, instead of subduing the Roman Church under the HRE, unified Church and State as a nationalist body in the British Isles.  For those with providentialist ideas of history (and this describes almost everyone at the time), her sex was read as one of many propitious signs of her destiny to inherit the imperial scepter. 

During the Renaissance, providentialism had become associated with Platonic ideas about the ideal State.  These ideas are often seen as coming to Stuart England from France along with absolutism, but Platonic ideas were present at least as long as Sidney’s sonnets, and in England, as in the rest of Europe, the most prolific sonneteers were highly political men.  I believe that the evidence suggests that Giordano Bruno, if he did not originate the idea of the Platonic sonnet as part of an anti-papist, pro-nationalist, pro-imperialist political discourse in England, intended to cast Elizabeth as a virtual Renaissance divinity, he allied himself to a native strain emerging in the Sidney circle and must have influenced its direction.[28]

This paper has attempted a condensed history of the context in which Shakespeare’s Sonnets appeared in order to establish the terms of a discourse to which the Sonnets respond in particular ways.  Making a convincing case for the intentionality of that discourse (and its response) requires another paper.  Within the scope of this paper, I would only wish to offer a preliminary reading of Sonnet 1 in order to show how an identification of the addressee with Elizabeth is consistent with the text, and further to assert that I can make similar readings of the entire cycle.

Conclusion

The fact that the more complete the context in which Shakespeare’s cycle is read, the more its meaning moves away from the personal and naïve towards the abstract and self-conscious is evidence of its adaptability to a deconstructive reading.  The sense of presence, for instance of the fair young man, is effectively deconstructed by the application of the principle of linguistic difference to a reading of the sonnets.  Such a reading places the cycle in circulation among a larger structure of circulation of sonnet cycles that is analogous to the synchronic structure of langue adapted from Saussure by Derrida.  As such, the meaning of each sonnet is located in the intertextual space of the gènre, rather than within the text of the poem alone, or even in the individual cycle.

Deconstructionist issues were raised in England, to a large extent, by the nature of the Reformation.  Extending from the shaking loose of the more or less unquestioningly logocentric understanding of the nature of language that dominated medieval culture, based on a hierarchy of authority extending down from God through the Church, to the positivist codification of logocentrism, through technologies from Caxton’s  printing press to Johnson’s dictionary, the Renaissance in England represents a period of radical political/religious/ontological indeterminacy.  It is consistent with the principles of deconstructionist theory that the flowering of the English language should occur during such a period.  The enormous vocabulary of a figure like Shakespeare is evidence of an exhaustive pursuit of the transcendental signifier.  It would not be surprising, then, to find expressions of the futility of this pursuit in his drama and poetry.