Contents Introduction 2

CHAPTER II. SHAKESPEARE’S LITERARY CAREER AS A SONNETEER
2.1 Latinity and Desire in Shakespeare sonnets
This chapter dedicate to Shakspeare’s literary career as a sonneteer and analysis,theme of his sonnets.We know his sonnets are deducated to “the young man” and “the dark lady”.The muses are used to break down the sonnets into three sequances,as follows
1.The Fair Youth Sonnets
Sonnets 1-126 of his sonnets are adressed to the fair youth with whom the poet has a deep and loving friendship
2.The Dark Lady Sonnets
Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to the dark lady .The speaker introduces the woman by explaining that her beauty is unconventional.
3. The Greek Sonnets
Final two sonnets are very different and draw upon the Roman myth of Cypid,to whom the poet has already compared his muses.
Scholars and critics have made many attempts to discover all the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets, as they may shed light on his life, but generally to no avail. It is important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were written at a time when such sequences were fashionable, and thus the sonnets may be more an exercise in literary convention than in autobiography.
The maze of repetitions, puns, and cross-references in Shakespeare’s sonnets constitutes one of their principal seductions, a powerful version of the erotic pull whose structure they unfold in their analysis of friendship, love, desire, jealousy, hope, frustration, and self-deception. Shakespeare exploits the fact that English vocabulary draws so heavily on Latin⁹.As distinct from much work on Shakespeare’s Latinity. We model a way of reading the sonnets in which Shakespeare’s training in Latin emerges as part of the poems’ basic texture, as their way of hearing words and of approaching meaning through that hearing.
When Shakespeare tells the beloved young man that “thou art all my art, and doost aduance / As high as learning, my rude ignorance” (78. 13–14), “thou art” wittily doubles “my art.” The first “art” is native in origin, the second Roman (Lat. ars, “art” or “skill”); juxtaposed, they bring together being and poetry, in order to reinforce the poem’s argument that the beloved gives Shakespeare’s verse its entire substance and being, rather than its mere “stile” (78. 12). Typical here is how Shakespeare activates the pun through the line’s internal symmetries, so that the two “arts,” one the poet’s and the other the beloved’s, pivot around “all” and thus, in that balancing, absorb a little of one another’s meaning. Technically, the pun involves the figure of antanaclasis, “which in repeating a word shifts from one of its meanings to another.”
The auxiliary meanings that emerge through etymological hearing are produced by the poem rather than being prior to it: Shakespeare’s line, that is, exerts a pressure on both words in order to make each one’s etymological structure audible as philosophical.
Sonnet 38 explicitly takes up the relation of Shakespeare’s English poetry to the poetry and language of the classical past, by transforming the young man into a tenth muse to supplement the Greek nine, and by audibly pitching English and Latin against one another:
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Then those old nine which rimers invocate,
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to out-live long date.
(ll. 9–12)


Scrupulously mirroring the mere rhymers’ invocation (Lat. in-vocare, “to call”) of their muses, the poet instead “calls on” his new and English muse. Similarly, deriving from the Latin aeternus, the “eternal” numbers of immortal poetry receive a vernacular equivalent in “out-liue long date,” a modest and even creaky formulation that nonetheless precisely captures the distinction, alive in Latin, between a perpetual endurance in time and an eternal elevation above time.
Sonnet 44 opens by turning the distance between the poet and the young man into injury:
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then dispight of space I would be brought,
From limits farre remote, where thou doost stay,
No matter then although my foote did stand
Vpon the farthest earth remoou’d from thee,
For nimble thought can jumpe both sea and land,
As soone as thinke the place where he would be.
But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought
To leape large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend, times leasure with my mone.
Receiving naughts by elements so sloe,
But heauie teares, badges of eithers woe.¹⁰
The argument of the poem unfolds in a series of feints around the corporeal and incorporeal, spirit and matter. Because flesh is substance (that is, matter) and not thought, distance opposes itself to eros, exactly by becoming like matter, that is, an obstacle to “stop” the poet’s “way.” This is, curiously, to say that distance materially blocks, not just the poet’s access to the beloved, but also the intervening distance (or “way”) between them. Immaterial and material, distance does injury by working against itself even as it works against the poet/lover.
Shakespeare locates something of this paradox in the word itself:distance,rooted in the latin dis-and stare (to stand or to stay ),is spesifically a standing or staying apart.
The poem registers that parting in lines 4-6 in the difference between the foot’s standing and friend’s staying; accordingly the erotically charged distance between poet and friend is figured as a standing apart from a standing. Extending the pun deeper into the poem’s syntax, Shakespeare makes distance the state of difference, also, between two moods of the same verb: in “did stand” (l. 5), the foot’s removal from the beloved is marked as a di[d]stance and as a distance from “doost stay” (l. 4).The poem is about overcoming these real and textual distances, about the desire, in despite of distance, to reach the beloved. The poem’s linguistic playfulness contributes to this program, because the turning of and returning to the word’s origins effectively unmakes the word; by so doing, Shakespeare reimagines the structure of distance itself,in order then to identify a way around it.As part of the analysis, the poem pitches distance against dispight:”for then dispight of space I would be brought “(1.3) The punning juxtaposition of the words makes distance’s spite audible. But the proximity of the words is resonant also in a more important way, since “spight” has been identified in sonnet 36 as the very principle that separates the lovers from one another.
In our two loves there is but one respect
Though in our lives a seperable spight,
Which though it alter not loves sole effect,
Yet doth it steale sweet houres from loves delight.¹¹
The seperable spight here is some force, probably social, capable of seperating of the poet and beloved or keeping them at a distance from one another. In sonnet 44 where the poet longs to be immaterial in order that “then dispight of space I would be brought, From limits farre remote,where thou doost stay”,part of the force of the formulation is that, in analogy with distance as a standing apart,”dispight“ momentarily splits the separating “spight” from itself. “Dispight,” that is, gently reverses the work of“distance” by making the distance that spitefully separates loving poet and beloved
friend stand apart from itself, exactly as a “dispight of space.” The adverbial phrase thus provides, as a kind of pulse inside the syntactic meaning, a curiously apposite defi nition of “distance.” ¹²
Distance itself is a “dispight of space,” a contempt for space in the sense of being the agent, as it were, of moving across itself by already including the space it semantically refers to. Just as the poem has materialized distance against itself (as it sown material obstacle), so too, through the play of “distance” and “dispight,” it finds in distance the dematerialization of space as the word’s instantaneous absorption of the space it designates. This is, in language, already the equivalent of the poet’s wish to collapse distance by thinking his flesh across space as “thought” (44. 1).The poem’s verbal materialization and dematerialization of distance grounds its argument about the nature of the erotic body, and it does so through a second and coordinated set of puns about standing. The play of material and immaterial through which Shakespeare understands “distance” is replicated in his treatment of “substance,” a concept introduced in the first line: “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought” (44. 1). Distance, the poem says, would be “no matter” (l. 5) if flesh were thought, that is, if flesh were precisely no matter.
If flesh is a “substance” (l. 1), the foot that stands on “earth” in lines 5–6 reminds the reader that that substance is, etymologically, a standing under (Lat. sub- “under” stare, “to stand”). The root meaning is supported and complicated in the third quatrain by the poet’s lament that “so much of earth and water wrought, / I must attend, times leasure with my mone” (ll. 11–12). As the earth that stands under his own foot, the poet is materially the dull substance he desires not to be. His foot stands on earth, and is earth, and earth is that which stands under: the poet’s flesh and substance.That said, the curious circling back of standing and matter enabled by the play of Latin and English necessarily suggests another possibility: if earth is that which stands under the foot (as, therefore, its “substance”), flesh would seem not itself to be substance,but rather that under which substance stands. The suggestion is already present in line 1, in fact, in the two available ways of reading the genitive phrase “of my flesh”: on the one hand, flesh is, as matter, simply the equivalent of “dull substance”; on the other, flesh is exactly that possessed of substance, substance being that which “stands under” flesh as a sustaining principle that is not (as the poet laments) thought. Just as with the poem’s materialization of immaterial “distance,” substance points equally toward the corporeal and beyond it. For all its despair about heavy fleshliness, the poem implies two ways of reading substance, posing a problem and in identical terms suggesting its solution.
Read against sonnet 44’s “attend,” “tender” becomes both a conceptual and a material structure for love. The “Embassie of love” is said to be “tender” not just because it is an embassy of love, but also, more simply, because it is an embassy, a representation of the self sent out by the lover and stretched across the distance separating him from the beloved. In this, the poet’s embassy recalls the structure of erotic intention from an earlier poem grounded in the conceit that at night the poet’s love for the absent friend keeps him awake: “For then my thoughts (from far where I abide) / Intend a jelous pilgrimage to thee” (27. 5–6). The difficulty for the weary poet here is that intending (Lat. in- tendere) the pilgrimage is, as a stretching toward something, already to go on the journey.
Like this intending toward the object of contemplation or desire, sonnet 45’s tenderness constitutes a connection, answering the peculiarly materialized distance of sonnet 44 by itself materializing the relation that is to overcome such distance.
But if thought and desire are tender, and attending flesh correspondingly dull, Shakespeare’s treatment of substance will not allow that opposition between material and immaterial to remain absolute. Indeed, the sequence as a whole has opened with an image of a material tenderness whose purpose is to extend beauty across time:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heire might beare his memory.¹³
Against the hope of a tender heir, the poem pertinently opposes a second logic by which, unhappily, the young man finds himself “contracted to thine owne bright eyes” (1. 5), which is to say betrothed to them and shrunken into them. From the Latin con- trahere (“draw together”), “contracted” precisely undoes the elastic materiality of tenderness:
whereas the heir promises to extend the young man’s beauty into the future, his unhappy self-marriage only draws him inward to an isolated present.
Like the philological method of exploiting the distant Latin roots of English words, tenderness materially evokes distance: the distance between loving poet and beloved friend, between a literary past and literary present, between the exemplary Latin and Greek world and Shakespeare’s English praise. If the friend’s beauty overpowers the past, this argues too that the poetry in his praise has for that reason become classic. This is what Shakespeare imagines in a poem about the future reception of his own verse:
Who will beleeue my verse in time to come
If it were fild with your most high deserts?
Though yet heauen knowes it is but as a tombe
Which hides your life, and shewes not halfe your parts:
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say this Poet lies,
Such heauenly touches nere toucht earthly faces.
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorn d, like old men of lesse truth then tongue,
And your true rights be termd a Poets rage,
And stretched miter of an Antique song.
But were some childe of yours alive that time,
You should live twise in it, and in my rime.¹⁴
The poem seems doubly self-deprecating: first, it insists that the poet is unable to “write the beauty of your eyes” (l. 5) and instead “hides your life” (l. 4); second, even if the poetry were able sufficiently to praise, it would not do justice to the young man’s beauty because it would not be believed. In this double self-criticism, however, Shakespeare paradoxically imagines his poetry exactly as a classic, being read in the future as his present now reads its “Antique” songs, such that the imagined reader and critic of the sonnets analogizes the classical philologist who glosses and emends the poetry of Rome and Greece. The sonnets, Shakespeare announces, will be subject to the critical work appropriate for a classic. Although the poem’s principal argument in favor of the young man’s having a son is that even a poetry “fild with your most high deserts” would not be believed, the poet simultaneously imagines poetry as a medium able powerfully to join present, past, and future. Read through the materiality of tenderness that we have been tracing, furthermore, the “stretched” meter of the “Antique song” that is Shakespeare’s poem as imagined from the future captures this doubled account of poetic efficacy.
Helen Vendler acutely notes in her commentary the turn from substance to constancy and the implication therein that what may be at stake in the poems is ethics rather than metaphysics.¹⁵ This ethics of con-stancy (and of “con-tent”) finds its mechanics. For if the young man is a “tender chorle” (1. 12) and the poet his slave, whose only role is to “tend, / upon the houres, and times of your desire”(57. 1–2), the shared sound (tender/tend), even as it differentiates between erotic roles, also promises a kind of reciprocity, the tenderness of the intending lover answered by the tenderness of the beloved: a “mutuall render onely me for thee” (125. 12).Indeed, the sonnets propose a word for this reciprocal structure in a poem about the work of time:
Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,
So do our minuites hasten to their end,
Each changing place with that with goes before,
In sequent toile all forwards do contend.¹⁶
Read according to its modular parts as well as its more easily heard English meaning, “con-tend” expresses the stretching of the waves towards the shore in terms of a shared purpose, an intending together to the shore. On its own, this is, of course, too optimistic a reading of the word, since “contend” bespeaks principally a rivalry, the waves struggling against one another to reach their goal. This failure of reciprocity that the sonnets document is analogized in one poem as the failed economy between the poet and the object of his praise, and, most pertinently for the present argument, as a radical undoing of tenderness.