I begin to catalogue the book. Tweak the boss’s orders & chafe because the book sends me into a hurricane of curiosity and I’m going to be able to read it. My take on the first 17 sonnets.
December 2016
Today I picked Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets off the truck I was “cataloging” – i.e., copy-cataloging, in our new, streamlined, do-nothing way: pick a record, Dewey/category, initials, no duplicate call numbers please.
Scarry says she knows who Shakespeare’s sonnets were written to & about: the name of the guy. (The name of the guy!? The name of the guy!!! I’m avid!)
I have to read the sonnets before I read the book. I’ve been meaning to read them for yonks. Now I’ll read them for the goss.
First impressions: They start all strained and ho hum, and I’m finding that I don’t like the editor’s glosses, they’re too literal and nailed down (which is what you have to do as an editor, I see that). I like the word to float over all its applicable semantic areas; you lose the sense of richness otherwise. So I only look at the glosses when I really am puzzled & have no hope of etymologizing my way out – as in misprision for fault. But anyway:
By sonnet 13 Shake’s hooked, the sonnets start to get substantial, the language gets less... twisted around almost nothing like wire in air or the loops in an Elizabethan signature (1 and 3, e.g.), and they go on and on about the guy’s beauty and grace and how he’ll live forever in these lines (sonnet 18) and how he’s the best thing ever (sonnet 33) and Shake’s not old, only as old as the guy because they’re one spirit (sonnet 22) and his heart lives in the guy’s (and the guy will live forever in these poems). This goes on for quite a while and it gets a bit tedious, but there’s a tidbit about not being able to acknowledge each other publicly (sonnet 36), which makes me wonder how Marlowe managed. (By being flamboyant, like Guy Burgess? There’s a long tail of hiring the Queen’s eyesnspies atte Cambrigge.)
And then Shake’s wittily talking himself out of jealousy because the guy’s boffing a woman Shake’s also ditto, (sonnet 42). Then Shake gets miserable because the guy’s gone away, or he’s gone away (sonnets 50, 51), and the guy’s out doing godknowswhat (sonnets 57-58), & Shake spends his nights trying to sleep & imagining the guy under the ceiling & under his eyelids (sonnet 61) and then the guy is writing a book (sonnet 77), and then other poets are writing to and about the guy (sonnets 78, 80) and Shake is all jealous again, and I keep reading because I have to know what happens next.
The love/affair’s been going on for three years (sonnet 104). (This isn’t Michael Wood’s safe-for-fambly-viewing Saint Shake. And Shake starts condemning himself & asking for forgiveness because he’s been off bonking other people (sonnet 110) – now I really know you’re the best, but the others gave me a new lease on life.
My mouth was still gaping after the word outrageous passed through it, but managed to close when the word shameless arrived. This jaunty Act of Cocktrition! But the flattery combined with the unbreakable bond, the mixture of condescension and erotic connoisseurship and helpless helplessness:
Mine appetite I will never more grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend
A god in love, to whom I am confined.
save the poem as well as Shake. He gets forgiven & taken back (sonnets 119 and 120).
Then there’s the farewell (sonnet 126), which is really interesting. The original editor put two blank lines in square brackets where lines thirteen & fourteen “should” be, on the assumption that this was also a sonnet. But I don’t think it’s a sonnet at all, and was never meant to be. The affair is over for some reason, the union is broken, and so the form is broken: the fourteen lines of the English sonnet (three quatrains abab, etc., and the last rhyming couplet) have become six rhyming couplets ending in the emptiness of the rest of the page.
The couplets which invariably form the last two lines of the English sonnet are summations, the tie-up and twist of the subject so far. This poem is all endings. The affair has ended. Every utterance is an ending. The sonnet form itself is ending. And the couplets speak of Nature being the one to render (the guy) down as it has & will have rendered everyone and everything else.
The next sonnets are the “Dark Lady” sequence, and these are immediately less interesting, initially more mere wit, like the first twelve. They satirize the tired panoply of tropes of woman as Other… Although Shake does move almost immediately to the psychology of the relationship – fear that she’ll mock his age in front of her other suitors, openly prefer them while he's there, humiliate him, make the playwright an entertainment.
And in among all of them, the entire hundred and seventy four, are the old warhorses, the safe-for-teen-anthologies pieces, which thud along now so accreted & sunk in sentiment as to scarcely register.
Those are Everest after the Anapurnas, miracles of clarity and resolution and achievement, seeable that way only in their context. The context is the others, nearly as good, electric: fresh with not being over-read, fresh with new description, new discovery, vivid joy. Though there is obsession, it seems benign: there’s no sense of threat, no domination and wheedling. There is no hierarchy here – the poems describe an equal and returned love. It is a relationship: it is ongoing, it includes praise of virtue, it describes identification and merging, it is about being involuntarily bound, voluntarily committed (“to whom I am confined”).
There’s no obvious gender hierarchy, not even one being wittily or sincerely ignored or satirized as in the Dark Lady sonnets. Complete identification with the other, like this, produces lack of hierarchy.
One of the things about contemporary gay love poems – no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors. Often, that’s how you know before being told that a poem is about a gay relationship.
Is it because the gay love poem has been often an underground tradition, a suppressed situation bringing isolation to the writer, and so thought of as unique? Something outside an otherwise all-encompassing social hierarchy?
Is it because publication of this kind of material not having been commonly allowed, leaving everything to be reinvented from scratch and described exactly? Is that it?
Is that why this kind of material hasn't accreted metaphor yet? Let alone developed the distancing, objectification, and condemnation of women that womb-bearing, child-birthing, has terrified into existence? Is that why this poetry is so often so sensual and so tender?
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