"She Never Told Her Love": Embodiment, Textuality, and Silence in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Abstract

of poems proclaiming its own capacity to grant immortality-to rescue its addressees from the obscurity and ravages of time by immortalizing them in the transcendental life of its own language-should at the same time have left the natures and identities of its addressees a virtual blank. Despite attempts by literary biographers and historians to determine the identities of the dark lady and the young man of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the life that these figures lead, considered purely through the poems, is a linguistic or textual one. Whatever subjectivity or objectivity they enjoy is at most grammatical, literally the product of a logical paradox: while to speak of a character entails nothing about the actual existence of that character, at the same time the act of doing so confers existence on it, if only as a merely grammatical direct object. To paraphrase Stephen Booth, the dark lady and the young man were almost certainly either actual historical people or fictions: The Sonnets provide no evidence on the matter.2 A growing and increasingly self-conscious obsession with this logical paradox lies behind the recent trend (which begins with New Criticism and culminates in poststructuralist theory of the past decade) of rejecting biographical or dramatic accounts of the Sonnets in favor of their textually self-reflexive and self-enclosed nature. This critical agenda not only emphasizes the multiple and irreducible complexities and ambiguities of the language of the Sonnets (witness Stephen Booth) but also sacrifices the Sonnets' objects of address to the overriding idea that the poems are interesting above all for the way in which they constitute the subjectivity of their creator. Shakespeare's Sonnets are taken in this context to be less about the noble young man or the morally duplicitous dark lady of their