(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
POETIC MONUMENTS 
56
...is there any pre-modern text better suited to serve
as a test case for deconstruction?
...seem to have been cunningly constructed, Shakespeare’s
prophetic soul dreaming on things to come, with the idea of deconstruction
in mind.
57
...cryptic glorification... 'onlie begetter'. The
absent presence...
......positivist yearnings of an older historical
scholarship to pin down the personal experience of their author are thus
bound up with the dream of reconstructing an authoritative text of the
Sonnets.
...uncooperative aloofness of their unusually free-standing textuality.
To the vexed question of whether some of the sonnets
celebrate homosexual love, for example, Frye advances a uniquely modern
answer: it doesn’t matter. When read in terms of the convention of Elizabethan
sonneteering, within which mistresses are invariably female and fair, Shakespeare’s
sonnets, offer no less than two masterly variations, two unprecedented
moves in the then ongoing game, by introducing two presiding mistress-muses,
a ‘lovely boy’ and ‘a woman coloured ill’. The Sonnets have less
to say, that is, about ‘experience’, particularly Shakespeare’s own, than
about poetry and its conventional, archetypical, and ever-recyclable subject
matter.
59
55 ... clearly, the authority Shakespeare envisions
and claims has something to do with rhetoric, the linguistic dimension
of the will to power, though just as clearly, the sonnet is not rhetorical
in any such simple sense...
...mode described by Paul de Man and Roland Barthes
as ‘performative’. Barthes defines a ‘performative’ utterance, adopting
the term from J. L. Austin... first person... present tense... like the
I declare of kings or the I sing of very ancient poets’.
SPEAKING PICTURES
61
...he [the poet] giveth a perfect picture of it [the
general precept] ...A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to
the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosophers bestoweth
but a wordish description: which doth neither strike, nor possess the
sight of the soul so much as that other doth.
...Sidney and the Shakespeare of 55, poetry
does not so much ‘speak’ as ‘perform’ its object.
63
All the major Elizabethan sonneteers—Sidney, Spenser,
and especially Shakespeare—recognize within their sequences the manifold
difficulties involved in representing an object conventionally or actually
‘fair’ in so unlikely, estranged, and unverisimilar a medium as the ‘black
ink’ of writing, while nevertheless claiming to pursue that mimetic ambition.
Yet it is only Shakespeare, as we shall see, who at once apprehends the
full difficulty of that project and attempts a fully modern and writerly
solution to it, which is to say, a dissolution of it.
THE PUN MADE FLESH
64
Several of the Sonnets similar to 55
in form, theme, and diction explicitly compare themselves, as monuments
to the beloved, triumphantly or unhappily to ‘tombs of brass’ (107.14)
and ‘a tomb | Which hides your life’ (17.3-4)
65
The implicit depiction of the sonnet as a coffin or
tomb, with the beloved as the body it contains, is an example of the figure
Puttenham loosely terms ‘icon, or resemblance by purtrait, and ymagerie.’
...the foursquare block of print presented by the
sonnet on the page would assimilate it to the form of a box.
...grammatic concision of an epitaph such as might
actually appear inscribed on the base of a monument...
66
‘et tu Brute’ ... ‘Then fall Caesar’.
The lapse into Latin and relapse into English dramatize the time-transcending
claim made earlier by the play’s cocarver of Caesar’s fate, Cassius, that
their bloody scene will be re-enacted ‘in states unknown and accents yet
unborn’ (III.i.113), a claim not unlike that of 55, and one similarly
dependent on the performative potential of the poetic medium to reproduce
a ‘living record’. ‘When you entombed in men’s eyes shall lie’, Shakespeare
writes in 81, ‘Your monument shall be my gentle verse, | Which eyes
not yet created shall o’erread, | And tongues to be your being shall rehearse’.
...the transition from its third quatrain... ‘pace
forth’ and ‘find room’—to its closing couplet...last judgement of Christian
resurrection...release of the beloved from imprisonment in the tomb of
history into the liberty of textual ‘freeplay’? ...final couplet...an unsealing
of the tomb...
67
... 55 simultaneously voices a certain consciousness
of its own mimetic embarrassment and defeat... an ironic denial of its
claim to a transcendent and perdurable ‘supermimesis’. The sonnets that
follow... granting Time his full tyrannical due...
The great ‘ruins poems’ that dominate the decade of
the 60s in Shakespeare’s sequence may be read as a dark postscript to the
bright promise of 55.
THE FLESH MADE PUN
...an interrogation of the adequacy of any rhetorical
or poetic programme to reproduce its object that lies at the core of Shakespeare’s
sequence, the poems from 76 to 106, ... issues in the partial
‘answers’ of the rival poet and the dark lady herself.
69
... ‘As every alien pen hath got my use, | And under
thee their poesy disperse’ (78.3-4).
... ‘How far a modern quill’...’doth come too short’
(83.7)
... ‘Why is my verse so barren of new pride, | So
far from variation or quick change?’ (76.1-2).
‘Finding thy worth a limit past my praise, | And therefore
[am] enforced to seek anew | Some fresher stamp of the time-bett’ring days’
(82.5-8).
...some new and unprecedented rhetorical resource
beyond the present state of the art must continually be found.
Shakespeare ...bequeathes to other poets ‘What strained
touches rhetoric can lend’ (82.10)...
...no longer claims to have, or to have any use for
(‘Was it the proud full sail of his great verse?’ 86.1).
Instead...a new and self-conscious minimalism...which
now cuts between plain speech and tongue-tied silence, and claims to hit
the mark precisely because of its acknowledged inadequacy:
70
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed,
...this Neoplatonic...
...does not so much transcend the problem of rhetorical
defect as defer it: ‘Where art thou, muse, that thou forget’st so long
| To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?’ (100.1-2)
... “Then others for the breath of words respect,
| Me for dumb thoughts, speaking in effect’ (85.13-14)
...in this phase of the sequence...exchange one
rhetorical programme for another, a rhetoric of presence, fullness, immediacy,
and enactment—now ascribed to and personified by the hypothetical rival
poet—for a rhetoric of difference, deferral, and indirection.
...a new set of dominant figures... ‘figures of default’
... a new set of thematic oppositions and contrasts: between himself and
his rivals, poetry and its object, past and present poetry.
71
... a fault in the medium of representation can still
be made fortunate. ...earlier project... enactment... of ‘great creating
nature’... ‘procreation sequence’ with a ‘second nature’ that...replaces
the first, fallen one has now been inverted.
...a pun. ‘Speaking in effect’... ‘speaking effectively’
or ‘speaking by default, or defectively,’ i.e. ‘not speaking at all.’
...domonumentalization of fixed or ‘natural’ meaning...
‘puns’ and ‘quibbles’ ... ‘figure of disorder’.
74
Only by maintaining the priority of the sonnet’s,
indeed the sequence’s, autobiographical and mimetic over its writerly and
metamimetic enterprise could Booth relegate this train of thought to a
‘secondary’ status.
THE DARK LADY IDENTIFIED
It is precisely the abandonment, I am arguing, of
the supermimetic project of reproducing the beloved object for all time
that makes possible Shakespeare’s metamimetic foregrounding of the flaws
and tricks of his written medium.
Since signs must signify something, signification...can
never be made to cease... this latest project, which occupies the last
fifty or so sonnets...mimetic of a difference. For this is the fully
metamimetic project of representing nothing other than linguistic difference
itself.
... epitomized in then pun...irony, litotes, and
ellipsis...mean more than they say.
75
After such self-consciousness, there can be no
return to a naïve realism that presupposes the mimetic adequacy of
language. But even that problem can be met by making the lady’s character
as shady as her complexion, indeed as dark and defective as the characters
that describe it.
...a writerly dark lady, visual and moral negative
to the countless colourless fairs of sonnet convention...
...ironical figuration or negative comparison (‘My
mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’)...
...if this new object cannot be presented any more
directly than the old object, a still newer and more congenial object can
be represented through her: the duplicity and discrepancy, infidelity and
betrayal of poetic representation itself: In the old age black was not
counted fair, | Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name.
76
... ‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
| And in our faults by lies we flattered be.’
...no longer possible to tell...which is the signifier
and which the signified...
77
We, in our turn as readers, go directly against their
acknowledgment of imperfection and betray the authenticity of this acknowledgment
by attempting to re-monumentalize his writing through the systematic reification
of it we name interpretation.
78
...perhaps it is just such a foreknowledge on Shakespeare’s part of the vain efforts at interpretive re-monumentalization his text will occasion that enables his equally vain claim of poetic monumentality in the first place.