Introduction: the sonnets

Abstract

Why are there proper names in Shakespeare's dramatic works, but none in Shakespeare's sonnets? What roles do proper names (or the absence of proper names) play in these poems, and how are such roles related to the varieties of language used in the sonnets and Shakespeare's plays? Are the sonnets primarily concerned with description, or is their language chiefly performative? And how are these questions about language, proper names and genre conceptually related to the life of the author and the historical conditions under which the texts were produced? These questions provide a framework for the analysis of Shakespeare's sonnets in this book, which takes as the central condition of the sonnets the fact that their author was also the period's foremost dramatist. The sonnets are deeply informed by the player-poet's peculiar self-consciousness about his lowly social status. Despite the added sense of personal inadequacy and social taint that such self-consciousness about his profession brings to the poet's Petrarchan moments, as player-dramatist he is, nevertheless, able to bring to the poet's task an extraordinarily developed sense of language as a performative force. By focusing on such performative dimensions I seek to take forward an approach to language that began in the philosophical writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin. It enjoyed some status within literary criticism and theory in the 1970s and 1980s, but has lately received less attention in the era of high historicism.