The Event of Style in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Abstract

This essay brings to bear Jacques Derrida's thinking of the ‘event’ and the ‘signature’, specifically in his reading of Francis Ponge's poetry, on the work of style in selected sonnets by Shakespeare. It argues that rather than functioning exclusively as a trace of identification and ownership, the event of style depends on the countersignature of the readers to come in ways that disrupt the teleocratic thinking at the heart of attribution studies in the authorship question. Style has a key role in the authorship controversy. It serves as internal evidence that allows critics to make claims about the authorship of Shakespeare's oeuvre. However, style in the sonnets, while signing for the author, also defaces and dispossesses him in ways that are partly rooted in the epideictic tradition from which the sonnets stem and partly intrinsic to the logic or structure of style as an event.