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Without remainder: ruins and tombs in Shakespeare's Sonnets

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903219840

1470-1308

Tom Muir,

Medieval Literature and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Margaret Aston, ‘English Ruins and English History: The Dissolution and the Sense of the Past’ in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), p. 313. William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Arden, 2006), v.i.21. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint, ed. John Kerrigan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 126∶1, 10∶7. All further references by sonnet and line number are to this edition. F.W. Bateson, ‘The function of criticism’, Essays in Criticism, 3 (1953), p. 9. Very little work treats the possible connections between the Sonnets and Spenser. R.L. Kesler suggests that Sonnet 18 carries within itself a ‘virtual’ version of Amoretti 15, from which it seeks to distance itself and surpass: see Kesler, ‘Formalism and the Problem of History: Sonnets, Sequence and Linear Time’ in Stephen Cohen (ed.), Shakespeare and Historical Formalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 183–184. In ‘Confounded by Winter: Speeding Time in Shakespeare's Sonnets’, Dympna Callaghan contrasts the Sonnets' depiction of time as destructive with the ‘unmotivated cyclical progression of the natural order, as presented, for example, in the Garden of Adonis in Spenser's Faerie Queene’ (Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 108). More apposite to the present discussion is Andrew Hadfield's argument that Shakespeare enjoys a satirical relationship to the poems of Spenser: comparing Sonnet 130 with Amoretti 64, for example, he speculates that Shakespeare's poem ‘can be read as a cheeky response to the intricately wrought religious language of the great Protestant poet, as well as a satire of the general conventions of Elizabethan love poetry’ (Hadfield, ‘Poetry, Politics and Religion’ in Patrick Cheney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007), p. 174). Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Rome: by Bellay in The Shorter Poems, ed. Robert McCabe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), ll, pp. 94–95; A. Kent Hieatt, ‘The Genesis of Shakespeare's Sonnets: Spenser's Ruines of Rome: by Bellay’, PMLA, 98 (1983), p. 805. Hieatt continues: ‘Ruinate’ does not appear in the corpus [i.e. the corpus of contemporary sonnet sequences] except in Amoretti 56, ‘Finding a tree alone all comfortlesse/Beats on it strongly it to ruinate’. In Shakespeare's other works the only other occurrences are Lucrece 944, ‘To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours’; in Henry VI part 3 5.1.83 (first quarto, 1595), ‘I will not ruinate my father's house’; in Titus Andronicus 5.3.203-04 (last lines of play, second quarto, 1600; not in first quarto, 1594), ‘Then afterwards, to order well the state/That like events may ne'er it ruinate’; Comedy of Errors 3.2.4 (folio of 1623), ‘Shall love in building grow so ruinate?’ In addition, Hieatt notes a second effect transmitted from Ruines 7 to the Sonnets. This is the use of ‘“war” and “time” in a combination signifying war against time’ (p. 803). In Spenser, we find this as ‘though your frames do for a time make warre/Gainst time’ (Ruines 93–94); the trope makes its way into Sonnets 15 and 16 as: And all in war with time for love of you, As he takes from you I engraft you new (15: 13–14). and: But wherefore do not you a mightier way Make war upon this bloody tyrant Time … (16: 1–2). See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), p. 407. Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts Vol 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Vol. 1, p. 278. See, for example, Ruines of Rome 65–70: The corpes of Rome in ashes is entombed, And her great spirite reioyned to the spirite Of this great masse, is in the same enwombed; But her braue writings, which her famouse merite In spight of time, out of the dust doth reare, Doo make her Idole through the world appeare. In this poem, the terms of admiration – ‘braue writings’ and ‘famouse merite’ – are immediately undercut by the possibility that such admiration may seduce both writer and reader into idolatry. The poem anxiously evokes the Homily against Idolatry – which seeks to establish the equivalence of images and idols – at its most fervid: The seeking out of Images is the beginning of Whoredom … and the bringing up of them, is the destruction of Life: For they were not from the beginning, neither shall they continue for ever. … the honouring of abominable images is the Cause, the beginning, and end, of all evil, and … the Worshippers of them be either mad, or most wicked. … Nevertheless, they that love such evil things, they that trust in them, they that make them, they that favour them, and they that honour them, are all worthy of death, and so forth (Certain sermons or homilies appointed to be read in churches in the time of Queen Elizabeth of famous memory and now reprinted for the use of private families, in two parts (London: 1687), pp. 182–3). On Spenser, Rome, and idolatry, see Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘“The Afflatus of Ruin”: Meditations on Rome by Du Bellay, Spenser and Stevens’ in Annabel Patterson (ed.), Roman Images: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1982 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984), pp. 23–50. Eamon Duffy, ‘Bare Ruined Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare's England’ in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (eds), Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), p. 53. He continues: The word ‘late’ there has in fact been taken by some commentators to rule out the application of the image to the monasteries at all, for in the 1590s the dissolution of the monasteries was two generations back, and so could hardly be described as ‘late’. On the contrary, however, I believe the tell-tale word ‘late’ once again aligns Shakespeare with a dangerously positive reading of the religious past. … open assertions of the last stages of monasticism were ‘rare’ (pp. 53–54). Margaret Aston, similarly, has taken this to be a reference to the ruined choirs of the monastic houses, arguing that it ‘bears witness to an awareness of the departed monastic period’ (Aston, ‘English Ruins’, p. 314). The most elaborate reading of the whole line – ‘bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’ – is still William Empson's, tracing the comparison to ‘choirs’ from the previous line, ‘those boughs which shake against the cold’ (73: 3): … the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of winter … (William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), p. 21). Just as fascinating, though, is Bateson's rejoinder to this: quite feverishly, he writes that the suggested allusion to monastic choirs is not only historically improbable, it is also poetically disastrous. In 1593 an allusion to the suppressed monasteries would have been topical and controversial. The contemporary equivalent would perhaps be an anti-English simile from the Boer War (e.g., ‘like grand old Kruger’). And this sort of allusion isn't wanted in Sonnet LXXXIII. It would immediately vulgarise the pathetic portrait Shakespeare is painting of himself. In so far as such a meaning suggests itself to the reader it must surely be suppressed or attenuated rather than encouraged (F.W. Bateson and William Empson, ‘Bare Ruined Choirs’ in Essays in Criticism 3 (1953), p. 361). This final sentence seems extraordinary, not least in its use of the word ‘suppressed’, which we might also call, in the context of a discussion of the dissolution of the monasteries, ‘topical and controversial’. And in the stridency of this call for the attenuation or suppression of meaning – the ruination of a meaning, perhaps? – there seems to be the hint of a higher stake. After all, for whom would this allusion to monastic choirs be ‘poetically disastrous’ in 1593, or thenabouts? For whom is it poetically disastrous in 1953 – the time of Bateson's enquiry – or now? The assumption here seems to be that the population of England switched, en masse and wholeheartedly, from Catholicism to Protestantism at a particular point in the mid-sixteenth century; and behind this – hence the stridency – we can perhaps also hear what Arthur Marotti calls “the Protestant–Whig narrative into which Shakespeare and other early modern writers have been inserted” (Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism’ in Dutton et al. (eds), Theatre and Religion, p. 218). Edmund Spenser, The Ruines of Time in The Shorter Poems, ed. McCabe, pp. 414–420. William Camden, Britain, or A chorographicall description of the most flourishing kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the ilands adioyning, out of the depth of antiquitie beautified vvith mappes of the severall shires of England: vvritten first in Latine by William Camden Clarenceux K. of A. Translated newly into English by Philémon Holland Doctour in Physick: finally, revised, amended, and enlarged with sundry additions by the said author (London, 1610), p. 461. Camden is critical of the dissolution throughout the Britannia: early on, he delivers a salvo to those who would want to extirpate even the memory of the religious past: There are certaine, as I heare who take it impatiently that I have mentioned some of the most famous Monasteries and their founders. I am sory to heare it, and with their good favour will say thus much, They may take it as impatiently, and peradventure would haue vs forget that our ancestoures were, and we are of the Christian profession when as there are not extant any other more conspicuous, and certaine Monuments, of their piety and zealous devotion toward God. Neither were there any other seed-gardens from whence Christian Religion, and good learning were propagated over this isle, howbeit in corrupt ages some weeds grew out over-ranckly (p. 6). Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: California UP, 1986), p. 141. Jane Roessner, ‘Double exposure: Shakespeare's Sonnets 100–114’ English Literary History, 46(3) (1979), p. 360. Homily against Idolatry, p. 182. Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), p. 152. He suggests that the poem is ‘a secret prayer to the Holy Trinity, whispered as lip-service to the “Homily against Idolatry”’. Just as the paintings might still be seen beneath the whitewash, the prayer can be heard beneath the ‘lip-service’. Patrick Collinson, ‘William Shakespeare's Religious Inheritance’ in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), p. 250. ‘The fact’, says Collinson, ‘that the great doom painting was whitewashed over rather than destroyed suggests the kind of crypto-Catholic conduct of which Puritans often complained’. ‘The reversibility of whitewashing’, notes Duffy, ‘was an established fact: at Chichester a painting of the Passion of Christ in the Cathedral was whitewashed over in the early 1580s, but “some well wishers of that waie” rubbed at the whitewash so that “it is almost as bright as ever it was”’ (Stripping of the Altars, p. 583). Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion, 2001), pp. 76, 78. Ibid., p. 76. Sarah Dillon, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London: Continuum, 2007), p. 4. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 33. Quoted in C. E. Wright, ‘The Dispersal of the Libraries in the Sixteenth Century’ in Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (eds), The English Library Before 1700 (London: Athlone, 1958), pp. 153–154. ‘It is interesting to see’, Aston remarks, ‘how words went down as images went up’: The scriptures written on roodlofts and about the churches in London, with the arms of England, was washed out against the feast of Easter [1554] in most part of all the parish churches of the diocese of London, wrote Wriothesley. Archdeacon Harpsfield saw to it that the scripture was ‘put out’ of the church window at Headcorn in Kent, from its place over the rood at St James, Dover, and from the rood loft at Harrietsham. In 1555 the churchwardens of St Mary's, Devizes, paid ‘for defacing the scriptures on the walls … and for defacing the ten commandments’ (Aston, England's Iconoclasts, pp. 292–293). In The Ruines of Rome, for example, we find what is at least on the surface a lament for the city's smashed grandeur combined with the desire to remember in writing its greatness: If vnder heauen anie endurance were, These monuments, which not in paper writ, But in Porphyre and Marble doo appeare, Might well haue hop'd to haue obtained it. Nath'les my Lute, whom Phœbus deignd to give Cease not to sound these old antiquities … (Ruines of Rome 439–444). Similarly, Samuel Daniel contrasts the demolition of ‘walls which ambition reared’ with ‘Th'eternal annals of a happy pen’ (Samuel Daniel, Sonnet 37 in Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1950), ll. 2,8. These and similar tropes reactivate what Anne Janowitz refers to as the classical ‘immortality-of-poetry’ topos: she traces it back to Ovid, citing Frank Justus Miller's translations of the Metamorphoses: Still in my better part I shall be borne immortal far beyond the lofty stars and I shall have an undying name. Wherever Rome's power extends over the conquered world, I shall have mention on men's lips and, if the prophecies of the bards have any truth, through all the ages shall I live in fame. See Janowitz, England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 183–184. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996), pp. 11–12. Of the silence of the death drive, Freud writes: It was not easy … to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution, but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying itself. See Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey in Penguin Freud Library, Vol. 12: Civilisation, Society and Religion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 310. An instinct of destruction placed in the service of Eros sounds like an uncannily accurate characterization of the Sonnets. But we should note that it is only a portion of the instinct which is being directed outwards: in other words, the outward destruction could be thought of as a feint, a kind of bluff. It should call attention to whatever it is in the Sonnets that seeks something other than remembrance, commemoration, immortalization. Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), p. 268. ‘Substrate’ is a term from printing, meaning the material onto which text or images might be printed, pressed, imprinted – the material on which an impression is made. For Derrida, however, the term comes to signify any mnemonic system, and the possibility of memory generally. Recalling in Archive Fever his earlier discussion of the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’, he makes it clear that a description of memory systems – such as Freud's – that mobilizes metaphors of partitioning and prosthesis necessarily begins to collapse distinctions between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, between ‘human’ and ‘technical’ memory. The term ‘substrate’, then, ceases to signify the merely external – if functions as a supplement, signifying any form of memory, becoming the condition of thinking about memory itself. See, in particular, Archive Fever, pp. 14–20. Roger Martin, The State of Melford Church and Our Ladie's Chappell at the East End, as I did know it in David Dymond and Clive Paine, The Spoil of Melford Church: the Reformation in a Suffolk Parish, 2nd ed. (Ipswich: Salient Press, 1992), p. 8. Jacques Derrida, ‘No apocalypse, not now: full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives’ trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis in Diacritics, 14(2) (1984), pp. 27–28. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony published with Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, both trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000), pp. 28. He continues: No exposition, no discursive form is intrinsically or essentially literary before and outside of the function it is assigned by a right, that is, a specific intentionality inscribed directly on the social body. The same exposition may be taken to be literary here, in one situation according to given conventions, and non-literary there. This is the sign that literarity is not an intrinsic property of this or that discursive event. Even where it seems to reside [demeurer], literature remains an unstable function, and it depends on a precarious judicial status. Its passion consists in this – that it receives its determination from something other than itself. Even when it harbours the unconditional right to say anything, including the most savage antinomies, disobedience itself, its status is never assured or guaranteed permanently [à demeure], at home, in the inside of an ‘at home’. This contradiction is its very existence, its ecstatic process. Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse’, p. 26. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (London, 1631), p. 50. See, too, Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 259: ‘In some quarters, passions were aroused to such [an iconoclastic] pitch that funeral monuments were physically attacked. In response, the state issued proclamations and using heralds and antiquaries as apologists, sought to protect monuments by presenting them as examples of order and virtue. Some tomb-breaking was part of a wider attack on religious institutions but other damage was the result of social circumstance. The effigy of an unpopular landowner might earn the attention of a mob, otherwise untutored in image theory’. Weever, Funerall Monuments, p. 51. John Stow is equally appalled at the destruction of tombs. At St Dunstan in the East, he observes that buried there are ‘many other worshipfull persons besides, whose monuments are altogither defaced’: see Stow, A Survey of London, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908), Vol. I, p. 135. Similarly, at St Mary Somerset, he writes, ‘it is a proper church, but the monuments are all defaced’ (Vol. II, p. 6). Given that ‘defacement’ is Stow's choice of verb for the work of iconoclasts – suggesting some remainder, at least – it is striking that at St Peter's church in Queen Hithe ward, the demolition seems total: ‘In this Church no Monuments doe remain’ (Vol. II, p. 6). Jonathan Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 105. Thomas Hearne, A Collection of Curious Discourses written by Eminent Antiquaries upon Several Heads in our English Antiquities (London, 1771), Vol. I, pp. 259–260. Jacques Derrida, ‘Biodegradables: seven diary fragments’ trans. Peggy Kamuf in Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), p. 815. Ibid., pp. 815–816. Ibid., p. 837. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations’ in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), pp. 40–41. Derrida, ‘Biodegradables’, p. 815. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1995), p. 5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), p. 13. Ibid. Ibid., p. 14.