November 3

The Art of Love:
Desire, Power, Performance

Sidney...

Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella (published 1591, after Sidney’s early death) is the first complete sonnet sequence written in English: (108 sonnets and songs).

Note Sidney’s manipulation of persona (Stella = Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich) and the immediacy and drama of the sequence: Astrophil

• vigorously deplores love's assaults upon his dignity &, independence
• hits back at his critics
• solicits Stella's favors in variously courtly and casuistical fashions ("the logician in love")
• reports that the (married) Stella will only love him conditionally (#69) "while virtuous course I take"
• ends the sequence in a Petrarchan oxymoronic standoff

... and Shakespeare

Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets are probably written between 1593 and 1600 and published in 1609--in an edition probably not authorized or supervised by the poet.

Note Shakespeare's subversion of the Petrarchan formula. There are two addressees:

• sonnets 1-126 seem to be addressed to a beautiful, aristocratic young man
• later sonnets seem to be addressed to a "dark lady" with whom he enjoys a frankly sexual relationship

Note the differences in tone and style depending on the addressee. Poems to the young man seem to be idealizing on the one hand, anxious on the other. Consider the frequent

• hints that the beloved is less than a good friend to the speaker
• anxiety about class differences between speaker and young man
• glimpses of an intermittently and disturbingly abject stance assumed by the speaker

Poems to the dark lady, on the other hand, are much less idealizing (cf. #130) and often frankly critical.

The Sonnet Sequence vis-a-vis the Renaissance

How does the Petrarchan sonnet sequence dovetail with the Renaissance interest (cf. our brief reading from Pico Della Mirandola) in the power of the individual to mold and fashion his/her (usually his) own identity? Try imagining

• the "I" of the first person lyric as performative.
• the sonnets staging the self in a series of short scenes or mini-spectacles in which a speaker reorganizes the world around his own subjectivity (the poet as God of the microcosmos).

A very partial list of the "performances" we encounter in these sequences:

• sonnets which enter into their own dialogue with the conventions and traditions of love poetry (Sidney #6, Shakespeare #130). (Note: by the end of the 16^th century it has become almost a convention of the love lyric to insist one is rejecting all the conventions of the love lyric)
• sonnets whose own meditations on how best to represent or address or speak persuasively to the beloved end up producing meditations on the problems of producing "authentic" love poetry (Sidney #1)
• experiments in the manipulation and dramatization of personal voice (Sidney #47, Shakespeare #129)
• in Shakespeare in particular, sonnets addressing the problem of Time as an enemy to love and to beauty--i.e., meditations on loss and transience. (The earliest sonnets in the sequence implore the young man to marry and have children so that his beauty will be reproduced for posterity; later ones--such as #55--insist upon the power of the poet to immortalize the beloved in his verse.)

A couple of other things to look out for:

Poetic Logic

The sonneteers’ often deploy this "poetic logic" in quite sophisticated ways, forcing the reader to remain alert to the linear unfolding of meaning, the movement of the poet's thought, the rules of syntax.

• This is particularly striking in Sidney’s work, where often a poem’s development of a thought or idea/ideal will suddenly be overturned by a dramatic final line reversal (cf. #71).
• But note also Shakespeare’s use of a rather problematic kind of casuistry (why?) in #138.

Lyrical Agendas

These, too, are quite complicated, especially when one bears in mind the larger Renaissance interest in the rhetorical arts of persuasion. There are often interesting tensions between the apparent drift of a sonnet and its manipulative/persuasive intentions (cf Shakespeare #71). Think about

• just what kind of relationship the poems seek to establish with their imagined reader (or readers)
• the disclosures they make implicitly as well as explicitly
• what designs do they have upon their audience?

And, of course, Lyric Representations

Consider the issue of what, in the end, gets represented within the sonnets.

• Do we really see, for example, the Beloved who is supposedly immortalized in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets?
• Or do we, by contrast, see the poet engaged in a particularly painful attempt to represent him--even meditating on the very difficulties of that act of representation?

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