Lust, Spirit, and the Vice List in Shakespeare's Sonnet 129 and Galatians 5

Abstract

Sonnet 129 ironically reinscribes Galatians 5:16–26, reconfiguring the relationship between spirit, lust, and will articulated in Paul's epistle. Paul counsels his audience not to “fulfil the lustes of the flesh,” which he enumerates in a format known to biblical scholars as a vice-list. If the lusts of the flesh dictate behaviors, the sinner, says Paul, lacks self-control: “ye can not do the same things that ye wolde.” Paul counters those lusts with “the spirit,” which signifies a moral freedom resulting from the regenerating effects of divine grace and produces in the “new man” a set of behaviors which Paul particularizes in the counterpart of the vice-list, a virtue list. The lusts of the flesh, says Paul, bar one from kingdom of God, while the actions of the spirit lead to salvation. In Sonnet 129, rhetorical features such as the opposition between lust and spirit, an extensive “vice list,” and a disquisition on the loss of self-control brought on by passion link the sonnet to Paul's epistle. Shakespeare handles the Pauline material with brutal irony, reducing spirit from a sign of God's regenerating influence to a synonym for semen and proceeding to a radically pessimistic conclusion on the inability of the individual “shun the heaven” of sexual pleasure “that leads men to [the] hell” of lust.