Afloat in Thick Deeps: Shakespeare's Sonnets on Certainty

Abstract

T HE OPENING LINES of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence state a double premise that turns out to suggest major thematic features of poems. The first clause proposes an imaginative or erotic economy, introducing what Thomas Greene has recently called the anxiety of cosmic or existential economics which haunts Sonnets (231). The second explains this economy by referring to a general social hope or purpose: to achieve a permanence or stability in beauty that opposes itself to death. This curious response to beauty reflects neither a desire to possess or share beauty (the response we might expect of a lover) nor a wish to replicate it for profit (the response we expect from a stockbreeder): it is more response of a conservationist. It might be voice-over of a Sierra Club film in which California condors soar over their eggless nest. It speaks from within a recognizably economic frame of reference about a span of time larger than that which figures in normal economic arguments. In what follows I contend that these inaugural hints point us toward sonnets' transactive analysis of human value in time and that it is this antiessentialist or anti-Platonic analysis that gives poems modernity, even contemporaneity, and establishes their status as breakthrough documents toward and beyond literary inwardness or subjectivity. The full argument, only part of which is of concern here, runs as follows. The sonnets to young man enact an affluent or generative economy of human value. In rejecting market exchange and linking poetic value to claims of transcendence, they approximate Petrarchan sonnets, though their methods are crucially different.' The sonnets to dark lady enact a poor, and consequently a naked and self-critical, economy of human value, in which reflection on love exchange and on needs from which it all too locally and directly arises promotes a deflationary perspective on idealization of all sorts. By emphasizing ways love fuels and is fueled by social economies of human value, sonnets explore both stability and instability-the long golden bull markets and catastrophic crashes-of a peculiarly deidealized, or anti-Platonic, notion of how things hang together: a worldview in which truth and lasting value are simply what a mutable community, for a variety of discussable reasons, chooses to regard as good for a long time. This description makes Shakespeare's sonnets sound very up-to-date, since it views their meditations on human value as simultaneous meditations on social mechanisms by which value is maintained or lost. Claims that sonnets approach a perspective are not unusual in recent criticism. In past six years, Anne Ferry and late Joel Fineman have independently argued that Shakespeare in effect invents or anticipates modern subjectivity, though they have somewhat different notions of what counts as modern. Ferry observes that