Shakespeare's Ear

Abstract

IN MY BOOK ON Shakespeare's sonnets I argued, on more or less formal, even formalist, grounds that in his sonnets Shakespeare invented what is an altogether novel but subsequently governing model of subjectivity in our history-recognizing that the word in the phrase history has a particular historical formation, just as the word history, in the same phrase, is a function of, an effect of, a particular form. This argument about the invention of Shakespearean subjectivity, whether right or wrong, is a strong one because it straightforwardly asserts that, at a specific level of generality, and within the context of a specific, notably self-conscious, tradition, there is something exigent, necessary, predetermined about the construction and reception of Shakespeare's lyric subject. Putting the point as bluntly as possible, I argued in my book that in his sonnets Shakespeare comes upon, i.e., he invents, the only ways in which or through which subjectivity, understood as a particular phenomenon, can be coherently thought and effectively produced in the literature of the West. Summarizing, very briefly, the main lines of that argument, I began by saying that Shakespeare writes at the end of a tradition-one quite central to the development of the Renaissance sonnet-that identifies the literary, and therefore language, with idealizing, visionary praise, a tradition in which there obtains, at least figuratively speaking, an ideal Cratylitic correspondence, usually figured through motifs of visual or visionary language, between that which is spoken and that which is spoken about. However, because Shakespeare, when he sits to sonnets, registers the conclusion of this tradition of the poetics and poetry of praise-a tradition that reaches back to the invention of the literary as an intelligible theoretical category-he, Shakespeare, is obliged, in order to be literary, to recharacterize language as something duplicitously and equivocally verbal rather than as something truthfully and univocally visual. It was my argument that this linguistic revision of a traditional language of vision both enables and constrains Shakespeare to develop novel subjects or verbal representation for whom the very speaking of language is what serves and works to cut them off from their ideal and visionary presence to themselves. Citing Shakespeare's sonnet 152, I called this generic Shakespearean subject the subject of a perjured and I further maintained that the reader of Shakespeare's sonnets, precisely because Shakespeare's sonnets remark themselves as something verbal, not visual, of the tongue and not the eye, will therefore find, though in a