“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”. Autoeroticism and Decadence in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 62–75

Abstract

Scholars have noted, but scarcely, the autoerotic thematic at work in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Curiously, most attention to masturbation and other manifestations of autoeroticism have come from the Procreation Sonnets. Rarely have scholars pushed the sodomitic envelope beyond homoeroticism or Shakespeare’s affection for the Dark Lady. Critics have, of course, used the three major sonnet sequences (viz. the Procreation, Young Man, and Dark Lady sequences) to forward discussion of sexuality, but they also frequently look at individual sonnets out of their sequence context to explore their theses. This essay identifies a heretofore unseen mini‐sequence in the Sonnets, and, through a close analysis of this mini‐sequence, begins to fill the autoerotic lacuna. Following Duncan‐Jones’s defense of the stability of the sequence in the poems, the present essay contends that sonnets 62–75 constitute an economy of autoeroticism situated in the fin de siècle motif of decadence and decay.