The Articulation of Feeling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Abstract

Noting the scarcity of extended investigations of feeling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, this essay approaches the topic through the concept of articulation. On this basis, it becomes possible to trace the process of how Shakespeare’s lyrics produce rather than express emotion: feeling emerges in the act of speaking about feeling, which is also the attempt of segmenting heterogeneous affective states into distinctly conceptualized feelings. Examining the articulation of emotion within and between sonnets, the essay finds the gist of the poetry not in the success but in the persistent—and, it is argued, programmatically determined—‘failure’ of these attempts. The notion that Shakespeare’s Sonnets almost methodically demonstrate the irreducible volatility of feeling contradicts Michael Schoenfeldt’s classic argument that this collection of poems espouses a Galenic ethics of emotional control. While Schoenfeldt proposes that contemporary readings testify to ‘the distance separating the modern fetishes of desire and exhibitionism from the Renaissance fetishes of inscrutability and control’, the present interpretation suggests that the poems in the 1609 Quarto should be seen as equidistant from both ‘our’ present and ‘their’ past. Locating the major point of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the act of gesturing towards an impossible and inexpressible affective space of sociality, it is claimed that the collection might be productively read as performative prefiguration of a modernity that never quite arrived.