This is a pre-print version of the article. Thefinal version (with minor differences from thisversion) was published in Oxford Literary Review, vol. 37.1, pp. 119-139. <http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/olr.2015.0153>

The Event of Style in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

MARIO AQUILINA

Abstract

This essay brings to bear Jacques Derrida’s thinking of the

‘event’ and the ‘signature’, specifically in his reading of

Francis Ponge’s poetry, on the work of style in selected

sonnets by Shakespeare. It argues that rather than functioning

exclusively as a trace of identification and ownership, the

event of style depends on the countersignature of the readers

to come in ways that disrupt the teleocratic thinking at the

heart of attribution studies in the authorship question. Style

has a key role in the authorship controversy. It serves as

internal evidence that allows critics to make claims about the

ownership of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. However, style in the

sonnets, while signing for the author, also defaces and

dispossesses him in ways that are partly rooted in the

epideictic tradition from which the sonnets stem and partly

intrinsic to the logic or structure of style as an event.

Keywords:

Derrida, Shakespeare, Ponge, style, sonnets, event, signature.

‘Gainst death and all obvious enmity

Shall you pace forth; your praise shall

still find room,

Ev’n in the eyes of all posterity

That wear this world out to the ending

doom.

(Shakespeare, Sonnet 55)

For one of the enigmas of l’œuvre is that

its event does not totally depend on an

action carried out by my sovereign

initiative.

(Derrida, Without Alibi)

In 1986, Malcolm Evans remarked that the ‘conservatism of

Shakespeare criticism’ meant that ‘the “terrifying modernity”

of theory’ had not yet engaged fully with Shakespeare’s work.1

Reconsidered almost thirty years later, Evans’s statement

remains relevant mainly for what it tells us about a

particular point in time in the history of the relationship

between Shakespeare criticism and theory. Indeed, what Evans

identified as ‘the promise of current literary theory’ to

provide us with a ‘transformed, contemporary Shakespeare’

(Evans, 137) did materialise both around the time of Evans’s

claim with, among others, work by Stephen Greenblatt, Joel

Fineman, Marjorie Garber, Jonathan Dollimore and Terry

Eagleton, as well as in the following three decades with

theoretically informed readings such as those by Richard

Wilson, Nicholas Royle, Catherine Belsey and others.2 The lack

of theoretical engagement with Shakespeare’s plays and poems

noted by Evans in 1986 has given way to what is now a well-

established branch of Shakespeare criticism that makes, for

instance, new attempts at bringing Shakespeare into dialogue

with Jacques Derrida seem to be not as unorthodox as they may

have seemed in the early 1980s.

This essay, therefore, can only be written and read in

the light—or ‘shadow’ (Wilson, 1)—of the existing genealogy of

Shakespeare in theory. However, it also seeks to discuss a

surprisingly minor concern of previous theoretical readings of

Shakespeare: what may be called the event of style in

Shakespeare’s sonnets. Royle’s highly inventive reading of

‘the remains of psychoanalysis’ in Shakespeare’s texts

broaches this issue, but in his essay the focus is more on how

‘the writings identified with “Shakespeare” can be seen to

stage a deconstructive drama of idiom, proper name and

signature in general’ than on style, more specifically (Royle,

97). Royle does indicate a direction in which an engagement

with’ the question of style’ could lead: ‘the notion, and

deposition, of a signature’; but he does not pursue in detail

the specific question of style. I would like to do precisely

this, not simply because the gap that I have just outlined may

allow me to do so but because, I argue, style is decisive in

the context of the authorship question that Royle, among many

others, addresses in his essay and that is still a central

controversy in Shakespeare criticism, in which style analysis

remains a frequently employed tool in making claims about the

authorship of the texts. The decision to focus on the sonnets

is also not simply determined by the relative room to

manoeuvre given by the more extensive and sustained focus on

the plays in theoretical readings of Shakespeare. More

crucially, I believe, the sonnets, read after Derrida,

conceive style in ways which always already deconstruct the

assumptions on the basis of which attribution studies uses

style to address, for instance, the authorship question in

Shakespeare. Attribution studies turns its gaze obsessively

towards style as a mark of authorship but fails to see the way

Shakespeare’s sonnets deconstruct such endeavours. The use of

style to establish authorship seems to depend, for its own

existence, on at least a partial blindness to its object of

study, such as the sonnets, which problematise its raison

d’être.

This is not to say, of course, that attribution studies

in Shakespeare criticism are irrelevant, unimportant or that

they should be dismissed. It is clear, however, that

Shakespeare’s sonnets engage directly with the topic of

authorship and the way style contributes to its determination,

and, in doing so, they raise issues that the equation of style

with ownership or property at the heart of attribution studies

often seems to ignore. The sonnets do not simply dismiss the

notion of style as identifying authorship, but they suspend

it, return to it ‘under erasure’, through the way style

functions as an event which, rather than teleocratically

expressing, identifying or representing something or someone

that exists before it, happens, over and over again, every time

differently and in incalculable ways.3

The resonance of Derrida’s thinking about authorship in

this argument is clear. In particular, we may refer to ‘a

problematic characteristic of Derrida’s work’ that Royle

highlights in a footnote to his essay on signature effects in

Shakespeare:

while his texts engage the literary through their

relentless demonstrations of the impossibility of

signing, […] they nevertheless frequently draw attention

to their authorship, making this authorship [...] an

explicit fact or theme, even if a primary effect of the

text in question is to deconstruct the assumptions on

which the identity and authority of such authorship rely’

(Royle, 123n41).

This paradoxical situation may be seen, for instance, when

Derrida writes of how Francis Ponge’s ‘signing’ in his poetry

‘is not inconsistent with that death or omission of the author

of which, as is certainly the case, too much of a case has

been made’.4 To read Shakespeare, ‘after Derrida’, is not

simply to speak about loss and dispossession of authorship, as

crude commentaries on Derrida often claim he does.5 It is also

to think of the impossibility of not signing, even when one,

like Hegel for instance, would prefer not to.6

Several sonnets by Shakespeare inscribe a similarly

paradoxical conception of authorship through style. In the

sonnets, style signs for the poet; it works in his name. On

the other hand, through a conventional rhetorical move that

the sonnets make in their function as epideictic poems, style—

indeed the whole of the poet’s ‘art’ (Sonnet 78)—is also made

to sign for the fair youth, who is presented as sole subject

as well as origin of the poet’s work.7 What makes style an

event in the sonnets, however, is what, for instance, Peggy

Kamuf describes as ‘[t]he opening of the work to the event of

the future’.8 It is the way the signing coexists with the

simultaneous depropriation and defacement of both the subject

and the object of praise as well as the way it reveals an

inherent debt to countersigning and the avenir that cannot be

programmed a priori and that leaves the sonnets structurally

always open to future reading.

*

Style is a topic with strong roots in Shakespeare studies: it

has been a central concern at least since the beginning of the

authorship debate, in the middle of the nineteenth century,

when Delia Bacon claimed that Shakespeare’s work was really

written by a coterie of men including Francis Bacon, Walter

Raleigh and Edmund Spenser.9 As Katherine Duncan Jones

explains, in the authorship debate, style appears repeatedly

as ‘internal evidence’ in the texts which may be used to

answer questions ranging from the chronology of Shakespeare’s

works to whether or not these works were written by

Shakespeare, the Stratford–upon-Avon actor, a group of

writers, or any other writer from a list of over eighty

candidates who have been proposed.10 In an early intervention,

Judge Nathaniel Holmes argues that on the basis of both style

and knowledge of the law which, Holmes believes, Shakespeare

could not possibly have acquired given his modest upbringing,

Bacon must have been the real author of Shakespeare’s works.11

For Holmes, however, even if Shakespeare, the actor, was

probably not the real author of the plays and poems that go by

his name, the style of the works means that the œuvre could

have been written by only one writer, whose style is

incomparable: ‘the style and manner of the genuine Shakespeare

are so distinctly marked and so peculiar as at once to

distinguish them from the productions of any other writer of

that or any other age’ (Holmes, 177).

In The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question, Scott

McCrea strengthens the case for Shakespeare as sole author by

arguing that his ‘writing style is unlike anyone else’s’.12

McCrea argues that there is consistency of ‘image and idea’

(McCrea, 141) in the plays and the poems and he lists several

aspects of what he considers to be Shakespeare’s distinctive

style: the heavy use of monosyllabic words with a

simultaneously vast vocabulary; the fondness for puns and

wordplay; the unusual compound adjectives; the many neologisms

with Anglo-Saxon roots; the use of nouns as verbs; and the

frequent extended similes (143). McCrea acknowledges that

Shakespeare’s style ‘develops’ throughout his writing career,

but he recuperates the differences into a discourse of

continuity and presents them as useful evidence in

establishing the dates of the plays, which, for him, belong to

the same man (192).

Despite their diametrically opposed conclusions, Holmes

and McCrea, like others too many to list here, think of style

as a decisive factor in establishing authorship. However,

despite the confident subtitle of McCrea’s book, the use of

style as internal evidence to be excavated in determining

ownership of the œuvre shows no signs of ending and has

possibly become even more appealing for stylisticians due to

developments in computational stylistics that allow for fast

and extensive analyses of word use in Shakespeare’s work and

beyond.13 In the question of Shakespeare’s authorship, but

also, more generally, in attribution studies, style is treated

as a signature to be deciphered, a mark of what Derrida calls

‘le propre’ (appropriate representation and one’s property) (SP,

64). Like a signature, style is deemed to identify its

proprietor and to allow authorial fingerprints in the text to

be forensically traced back to the author. Providing what

Derrida describes as ‘the link between the text and the proper

name of the person who retains the copyright’ (SP, 24), style

does not only play a central role in the authorship debate but

is also at the heart of the mechanisms by which Shakespeare’s

writing is established as exemplary of the ‘literary’. Within

the context of the emphasis on originality and ownership

characterising the birth of ‘literature’ as a modern concept,14

style serves both in the glorification of authorship, which is

fundamental for canonisation, and in copyright law, a

cornerstone for literature as an institution. Indeed, as

Marjorie Garber points out, ‘[i]t is significant that the

Shakespeare authorship controversy presents itself at […] the

moment when the “author-function” becomes, in the late

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an item of

property, part of a “system of ownership” in which strict

copyright rules define the relation between text and author in

a new way’ (Garber, 4). To think of style as an identificatory

signature is to think of authenticity, authority and presence:

style as a reminder of authorship, a flourish of individuality

and recognisability against the threat of misrecognition and

misappropriation.

However, the ‘strange structure of a signature’ itself

urges us to rethink the function of style in attribution

studies (SP, 22). As Derrida writes: ‘The drama that activates

and constructs every signature is this insistent, unwearying,

potentially infinite repetition of something that remains,

every time, irreplaceable’ (SP, 20). A signature needs to be

uniquely the signatory’s if it is to have identificatory

value, but to function as a signature, it needs to be

iterable. The signature ‘becomes effective—performed and

performing—not at the moment it apparently takes place, but

only later, when we will have managed to receive the message’

(EO, 50). It is the ‘ear of the other that signs’—that which

countersigns’ (EO, 51). Beyond absolute propriety and singular

property, the signature is always necessarily detachable from

the signatory and performed only by the countersignatures that

respond to it.

This openness to—indeed, dependence on—iterability is

inherent in style. Style in the authorship question works as

that which may identify what is truly unique about the

language of Shakespeare or of anyone else who may have written

the work, but this uniqueness can be recognised only by being

countersigned, repeatedly, elsewhere. Not only does this style

have to be identified by reading, but it has to be seen to

work across a wide range of texts and contexts within

Shakespeare’s œuvre. For there to be something we call

‘Shakespeare’s style’—a phrase that seems inadequate

considering the range of ‘styles’ in his work—the same style

has to be found, repeatedly, in different contexts. Style,

therefore, is structurally dependent on the other. It is

indebted to the other in a way that pulls it away, by

necessity, from the absolute possession of the signatory: for

it to function as one, it has to be dispersed by repetition.

The case of Shakespeare’s handwritten signatures serves

as a useful analogy to this dynamics. Today, we know of six

signatures whose authenticity is almost universally

acknowledged;15 they are found in legal documents and are dated

from the last four years of Shakespeare’s life, between 1613

and 1616. Three of the signatures appear in his will, which

was revised and signed less than a month before he died.

Always already an iterable countersignature, Shakespeare’s

signature appears three times in this document, once at the

end of each of the three pages of the will, and it

authenticates the ‘I’ of the document as Shakespeare’s, even

if the document is most probably handwritten by his lawyer,

Francis Collins.16 Through a structure of authority granted by

law, the will ventriloquizes Shakespeare’s voice in Collins’s

handwriting and in the standard testamentary style of the

time. Immediately under the date, in Latin, framing the will,

it begins with, ‘In the name of god Amen I William

Shackspeare, of Stratford vpon Avon’ and ends with one of the

three signatures that have the function of authenticating

Shakespeare’s proper name beyond the actual moment of

inscription of the signature and, indeed, beyond the looming

end of Shakespeare’s life itself.17 Iterable, and countersigned

by five witnesses,18 Shakespeare’s signature is detached from

the living Shakespeare; it outlives and outlasts him, and it

is necessary if the will is to fulfil William’s will beyond

his death. Curiously, the signature’s living on beyond

Shakespeare the man also manifests itself in a swerve away

from the intended purpose of the will when it starts being

used as hard evidence in interminable debates about

authorship, particularly by anti-Stradfordians who interpret

them as ‘illiterate scrawls’ and hence evidence that this man

could not have written the œuvre that goes by his name.19 In

the words of Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘Shakespeare’s signature is

[…] continually countersigning itself. [.…] [I]t discusses the

contretemps that lurks in all proper names, which are forever

diverted from the contexts that supposedly ground them and

their referents in space and time’.20 This strange logic of the

signature is also the logic of style in the way it seeks to

affirm possession, property or ownership, while being

structurally dependent on the iterable dispersal of this

uniqueness and its openness to the countersignature of the

other.

*

In Signéponge/Signsponge, Derrida traces the work of the event of

the signature in Ponge, whose prose poems on everyday things

like soaps, oranges, potatoes and cigarettes in The Voice of

Things, for instance, are radically different from

Shakespeare’s measured sonnets about love, lust and time but

which enact a curiously comparable event of style. As Derrida

asks: ‘Who demonstrates better [than Shakespeare] that texts

[…] loaded with history offer themselves so well in contexts

very different from their place and time of origin’?21 What

attracts Derrida to Ponge’s work is the attempt to make poetry

a uniquely proper signature, a task that Ponge undertakes

through three ‘modalities of signature’ (SP, 52). The first of

these refers to the act of someone ‘engaged in authenticating

(if possible) the fact that it is indeed he who writes’ or

produces the work by representing his proper name in a

signature (SP, 56). Ponge goes to the extent of not only

signing at the end of his poems or on the title-page of his

books but also of signing within the poems through the

different permutations of his name. Turning it into an object,

Ponge inscribes his name in his poetry, for instance, through

the ‘eponge’ (sponge-cloth), which he writes about in

‘L’Orange’.22 Shakespeare’s first name is also inscribed

repeatedly in his plays and poems. To quote James Joyce’s

Stephen Daedalus, Shakespeare ‘has hidden his own name, a fair

name, William, in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a

painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner of his

canvas.’ He has also ‘revealed it in the sonnets where,’

Daedalus says, ‘there is Will in overplus’.23 Indeed, as

Stephen Booth puts it, sonnet 135, from which Stephen lifts

the phrase, ‘Will in overplus’, and Sonnet 136 demonstrate

‘the grotesque lengths the speaker goes to for a maximum

number and concentration of puns on will’ (Booth, 466). In just

twenty-eight verses of iambic pentameter, the two sonnets

include twenty mentions of ‘will’—in the 1609 Quarto, ten of

these are italicised and capitalised for emphasis. The couplet

in Sonnet 136 includes one of the clearest inscriptions of

Shakespeare’s first name in his writing: ‘Make but my name thy

love, and love that still, / And then thou lovest me for my

name is Will.’

Shakespeare’s more or less overt punning on his own name

in the sonnets monumentalises the name and stakes a claim for

his authorial ownership of the sonnets. However, as Derrida

shows in relation to Ponge, by signing the text and inserting

the signature into the body of the text, ‘you also lose the

identity, the title of ownership over the text: you let it

become a moment or a part of the text, as a thing or a common

noun’ (SP 56). From a proper name (appropriate and one’s own)

identifying the singularity of the writer and only him, the

signature inscribed in the text starts to function as an

iterable common noun. Ponge’s name becomes a sponge. As Booth

shows in his typically meticulous reading of the sonnet,

Shakespeare’s name, ‘Will’, becomes also the common nouns

meaning ‘wish’ and ‘lust’, the auxiliary verb for the future,

as well as a slang word for both the male and female sex

organs. If ‘will’ names the poet, it also performs his

defacement and dispossession. Signing in one’s proper name or

with a style and idiom that is absolutely one’s own coincides

with language always already moving towards the other, the

general or the improper.

The second modality of the signature in Ponge’s work is

style, which Derrida defines as ‘the inimitable idiom of a

writer, sculptor, painter, or orator’. Style is ineluctable

and the signatory may ‘leave [it] by accident or intention in

his product’ so that when the proper name of the author is not

used directly in or around a text, style still names the

author (SP, 56). The way in which style names its origin is a

specific concern of the poet in Sonnet 76, which may be read

as an apologia for Shakespeare’s poetic ‘methods’ and style in

response to the beloved’s dissatisfaction with a perceived

lack of stylistic variety or ‘invention’ in the poet’s verse:

Why write I still all one, ever the same,

And keep invention in a noted weed,

That every word doth almost tell my name,

Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?

Within the context of the sonnet’s rhetorical structure, the

idea that the poet’s words identify their source appears as

one of the two arguments or points of criticism that the fair

youth throws at the poet and that the poet first repeats and

then rebuts in his defence. The first quatrain echoes the

youth’s claim that the poet’s ‘verse’ lacks ‘new pride’, a

term which as Booth notes has connotations of ‘adornment,

ornament, fine or extravagant dress’ (Booth, 264).

Ornamentation and dress have been used as metaphors for style

at least since Aristotle, who speaks, for instance, of how

choosing a style ‘is like having to ask ourselves what dress

will suit an old man’ and that in such circumstances the

choice should ‘certainly not [be] the crimson cloak that suits

a young man’.24 The second quatrain presents the second

accusation: the poet’s style is almost too well-known, and

because of this it has become predictable. Invention—a

rhetorical term for topic or subject matter—is kept in a

‘noted weed’ or clothing. This style, we read, ‘almost tell[s]

my [the poet’s] name’. Through their repetition and by

remaining, like a signature, ‘all one, ever the same’, the

words in his poems allow us to trace their birth to the poet

as their source and origin, in line with the conceit of poetry

being like a child to the poet as mother (Booth, 265).

Conceived as the external dress of thought, style identifies

the poet, an insight that, however, is soon problematised in

the same sonnet. The volta at the beginning of the third

quatrain presents us with an ambivalent denial: ‘O know sweet

love I always write of you, / And you and love are still my

argument’. Using rhetorical terminology once again, the poem

constructs a dichotomy between ‘argument’, or subject matter,

and style, or ‘dressing old words new’. The sonnets have a

style that identifies the poet, but this stems from their

being always about ‘you’ and ‘love’. The poet’s ‘love’ is

‘still telling what is told’: there is only one subject in the

sonnets, the poet claims, and this is what makes them

recognisably his. Their stylistic signature, therefore,

originates in the other, or at least in relation to the other,

that is, in the poet’s relation to the youth. Whose property,

then, is style? Who does style sign for? To which law does it

conform? The poet seems to say to the fair youth, ‘my style is

you’. You are the law that my style abides by. Indeed, we read

in Sonnet 84, if the poet is going to be truthful to the fair

youth, all he needs to do in his poetry is plagiarise the

youth by ‘copy[ing] what in you [that is, the youth] is writ’.

This line also echoes Sonnet 79, in which the poet mounts a

strategic attack on the rival poet by arguing that the

‘grace’, ‘beauty’ and invention in any writing about the youth

has its origin in the youth himself and, thus, the rival does

not deserve praise for it.

The strategy of dismissing the importance of the poet’s

style in favour of recognisability being determined by subject

matter reiterates the dichotomy between ‘style’ and ‘love’

that appears in Sonnet 32, in which we find one of the three

uses of the word ‘style’ in the sonnets within the context of

a stated rejection of style as a mask of individuation.

Projecting his sonnets into an avenir in which the fair youth

may countersign, once more, the poet’s ‘poor rude lines’, the

poet asks the youth to ‘reserve them for my love, not for

their rhyme’. As Booth argues, the choice of ‘re-survey’ to

refer to the reconsideration of the poems in a hypothetical

future has connotations of ownership as ‘the commonest use of

‘survey’ was and is to describe an examination to establish

boundaries, legal rights, and value for real estate; such a

survey is customarily made of property’ (Booth, 185). In re-

surveying these lines, then, the reader will be reassessing

them in relation to their source, owner or proprietor, but he

or she is also asked to preserve them for their love rather

than ‘rhyme’. Since ‘rhyme’ is a metonymy for poetry, the

speaker dismisses the poems themselves in favour of a more

substantial essence: love for the other or by the other (Booth,

272). An analogous dichotomy occurs again in the couplet, in

which, however, the opposition constructed is not between the

poet’s ‘love’ and his own writing, but between his ‘love’ and

the ‘style’ of other ‘poets’. Style is here spurned in at least

two ways. The poet does not only reiterate the dichotomy

between style and love, or substance, in which the first term

is conceived as supplementary and inessential, but also by

thinking of style, primarily, in relation to the work of other

poets.

The poet’s request for style to be forgotten

disingenuously poses impossible demands on the reader. While

the poet uses the rhetorical strategy of self-deprecation by

downplaying his own abilities as a writer—his style, he tells

us, is ‘outstripped’ by other poets of ‘better equipage’—he

does this primarily as an apologia or defence for his own

writing or verse. For while his invocation is for the friend

to preserve his verse for his love rather than for his style,

as Helen Vendler puts it, ‘the baleful separation of style (rhyme)

from content (love) in the modesty topos cannot be sustained in

any serious way by Shakespeare’.25 Shakespeare, after all,

cannot help but make this point in style in this sonnet, and

style haunts the afterlife of the poet, including in the

authorship debate that revolves so much around the issue of

style. While love is not equivalent to the verses in which it

is inscribed, it only arrives to any future readers, including

the fair youth, through the verse and its style. Anticipating

Derrida’s desire in ‘Border Lines’ to ‘take charge of the

Translators’ Note himself’, if the speaker would like to

predetermine the way his own poems will be read in the future,

as he suggests he wants to do when he tells the fair youth to

‘reserve’ his lines ‘for [his] love, not for their rhyme’, he

has to resort to that style which he seems to be rejecting.26

And, in doing so, he opens the poem to the countersignature of

the other, which he cannot control. To live on, the poem must

cross borders, as in translation, from the one to the other or

into ‘the language of the other’ (Parages, 105).

The ineluctability of style in the face of the speaker’s

declared desire to erase it is also seen in Sonnet 76. Love is

unchanging, so the best the poet can do is ‘dressing old words

new’. While the subject does not change, the style does.

Vendler’s reading of this sonnet is worth referring to at this

point: ‘The young man’, she tells us, ‘is a reader who reads

only for theme; and the poet freely admits the monotony of his

theme’, which is the youth and love. ‘But Shakespeare’,

Vendler claims, ‘is a writer whose eye is on style’ (Vendler,

345). Rather than rejecting style, as he seems to do in Sonnet

32, in Sonnet 76 the poet offers an apologia for his poetry

based, precisely on style. More specifically, his claim that

like the ‘sun is daily new and old’ his love is ‘still telling

what is told’ introduces the suggestion that his love is

precisely encapsulated in the way style works in his poems.

In Sonnet 78, which includes the second use of the term

in the sonnets, the poet once again imbricates style in a

dichotomy, this time by arguing that while in ‘other’s works’

the fair youth’s influence ‘dost but mend the style’, in his,

the youth is ‘all [his] art’. The opposition here is between

mere ‘style’ and all of the poet’s art. In the work of others,

the effect of the youth is added value but superficial and

supplementary. It gives ‘grace a double majesty’ and ‘add[s]

feather to the learned’s wing’. In his work, on the other

hand, the youth is all there is. What the poet ‘compile[s]’,

he claims, ‘is thine and born of thee’. While in the second

quatrain of Sonnet 76, the poet’s words are said to ‘show

their birth’ in the poet, here all of the poet’s art is deemed

to be ‘born of’ the fair youth. As also suggested by the

antanaclasis of ‘art’ in ‘thou art all my art’, which, as

Booth suggests, makes ‘the beloved’s being and the speaker’s

art’ seem ‘one and the same thing’, that which the poet may

possess—his unique idiom or style, which makes his poems

immediately identifiable as his and only his—thus originates

in the other (Booth, 272).

There is yet another way in which the style of the

sonnets deconstructs discourse of property. By gesturing

beyond the poet himself or the object that he would seek to

capture in his poetry of praise, the sonnets’ style presents

itself not simply as ‘inimitable idiom’ but, in some ways, as

always already an imitation and reiteration of long

established stylistic conventions. As Fineman shows in a well-

known reading of the sonnets, ‘the poetics and the poetry of

praise together define the literariness through which

Shakespeare thinks his sonnets’ (Fineman, 1). Shakespeare’s

sonnets belong to the tradition of epideictic poetry, which is

constituted by a series of conventions on which Shakespeare

builds his sonnets, even as he rewrites the tradition. Among

them is the fact that ‘praise is conventionally understood to

be a referential discourse that amplifies its referent by

means of ornamental trope’ (Fineman, 4). The conceptualisation

of style in Sonnet 84, in which we find the third and final

use of the term ‘style’ in the sonnets, however, reveals a

curious twist in Shakespeare’s thinking of the relation

between the object of praise, the youth and the language of

the poet, his style. Rather than poetry amplifying its object,

what we read about is how the object of praise, the youth,

amplifies any poet who engages anyone who would write about

him by ‘[m]aking his style admired everywhere’. Style is not

used in conjunction with a possessive ‘my’ or an ‘I’ that

signs through it and owns it, but in terms of something that

any poet who manages to ‘but copy what in you [the fair youth]

is writ’ will acquire from the object of praise. In line with

what Fineman describes as the mimetic aspirations of

epideictic poetry, the task of the poet praising the object of

praise is to represent, as faithfully as possible, ‘that you

alone, are you’, that is, as Fineman puts it, to perform the

exemplary combination of metaphor and mimesis by paying the

‘ultimate compliment’ through writing ‘the ultimate

similitude’ (Fineman, 182). The poet who can ‘tell / That you

are you, so dignifies his story’. Style must follow ‘what

nature made so clear’; it must be truthful, derivative and

secondary to its source and origin, the youth. While the youth

is ‘fond on praise’, the poet must beware excesses and the

best he can do is to not ‘add’ to the youth’s ‘beauteous

blessings’, but simply capture in words what nature gives. In

the sonnets, repeatedly, style is thematised as having its

origin in the other who or that, at the same time, it

addresses and tries to represent. Like a signature, it may

identify the poet, but it does so only through an inherent

openness to the youth, who is both the subject and object,

source and effect, of style. Indeed, the poet repeatedly

asserts, if anything identifies him, it is his recurrent

subject matter, love and the youth; style, at best, is

derivative of that, subsequent to it. However, this conception

of style is in itself an indication of another fold in the

question of style. Since it is a staple of the tradition of

epideictic poetry to think itself in terms of a relation to a

‘thou’, the style of the sonnets, in echoing tradition, is

also marked by its relation to convention, beyond both the ‘I’

and the ‘thou’ of the text. Style, in this relation,

dispossesses the author and downplays his importance by

gesturing towards a structure of belonging to something that

pre-exists and stretches beyond the poet’s own writing.

The third modality of the signature that Derrida traces

in Ponge’s poetry is the ‘general signature, or signature of

the signature’, which refers to these situations when the work

‘signs itself’ as an act of writing, folding itself on itself

thereby creating an abyssal situation, that is, a form of

mise-en-abyme (SP, 54). Ponge’s ‘Fable’ does this in a

vertiginous way: ‘With the word with begins then this text / Of

which the first line states the truth’.27 The two verses

describe the poem, ‘Fable’, on one level, from the outside,

but in so doing they are actually performing what they

describe. The poem performs simultaneously both ‘hetero-

reference’ and ‘self-reference’ by performing what it says it

says (it really begins with the word ‘with’) while at the same

time representing what it does (it shows how the poem starts

with the word ‘with’). The poem, in representing itself,

refers to itself, while it seems that the poem is precisely

made of its representing itself. The metadiscursivity of

Ponge’s poetry opens the poetry to an event of style,

something that happens rather than something that simply

identifies, expresses or represents an anterior source or

origin.

As Fineman writes, metadiscursivity and self-

consciousness are also traditional within the ‘panegyric

procedure’ (Fineman, 4). Praise directed at the object often

‘rebounds back upon itself, drawing attention to itself and to

its own rhetorical procedure’ (5), and, in so doing, it ‘works

by showing, by pointing to its pointing’ (6). In Sonnet 26,

the poet self-reflexively describes the poem he is sending to

‘the lord of [his] love’ as a ‘written embassage’, a

definition which condenses the means of address in

Shakespeare’s sonnets, which repeatedly demonstrate an

awareness of themselves as written text. This

metadiscursivity, however, does not simply close the poem onto

itself, like a hedgehog intent on persevering and preserving

itself from harm, and it is complemented by a simultaneous

dialogic opening to the other, the fair youth, but also to any

future reader.

The question, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’—

the first verse of the well-known Sonnet 18—enacts such

simultaneity in being both an expression of the poet’s

internal debate on how best to describe the youth as well as a

question addressed to the youth, who is both the subject and

the addressee of the poem. The adequacy of the summer’s day

metaphor to describe the fair youth is a poetic evaluation

that the poet has to make, but the dialogic form of the verse—

its direct address to ‘thee’—invites a response from the

addressee. To use J. L. Austin’s distinction, which this

sonnet deconstructs, the verse, ‘Shall I compare thee to a

summer’s day?’ is both constative and performative.28 The

question expresses the contemplation in which the poet

immerses himself while writing the sonnet, and in this sense

functions as a constative utterance. However, this verse is

also performative in that with it the poet performs the act of

initiating his comparison of the fair youth to a summer’s day.

The verse, therefore, states and creates while providing a

dialogic opening to the other. In asking whether he should

compare the youth to a summer’s day, the poet self-reflexively

recounts the process of writing while, at the same time,

enacting the process of writing. It is precisely in moments

like these, when the distinction between the performative and

the constative becomes nebulous, that ‘the event’ or the ‘what

happens’ arises.29 The sonnet’s words, here, do not simply

describe or represent: they also happen; they are, and they

bring something into being by opening themselves up to the

other, and to what Derrida calls, in French, ‘l’avenir’, which

refers both to ‘the future’ and that which is ‘to come’. In

the sonnets, the description of the youth is inextricable from

the address to the reader as well as from the openness to,

expectation of, and sometimes, even anxiety about, the

reader’s response.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76 also enacts this third modality

of the signature. To rebut the accusation that his style is

unchanging, the poet writes: ‘O know, sweet love, I always

write of you / And you and love are still my argument’. A form

of self-reflexive commentary about Shakespeare’s sonnets,

these verses precipitate us into an abyssal structure.

Reiterating the idea that love is unchanging, they work as a

constative utterance by stating that the ‘argument’ of the

sonnets is always the same because the fair youth and love are

the unchanging topic of the poet’s verse. However, they are

also performative in that the poet does not only state that he

writes about the youth, but he does what he says he does.

These two lines, which are addressed to their reader but also

are about their reader, are part of that ‘always’, which, in

turn, is also a word within this specific sonnet. These few

words spread over two verses include within themselves what

Shakespeare presents as the sole topic of all his sonnets, the

youth and love.

The effect of this abyssal structure—vertiginously

folding the whole into the part—is that it creates an infinite

redoubling that annuls immediately any claims for the notion

of style as singular property or what Timothy Clark describes

as ‘a pure signature [that] would be a pure event of unique

and unrepeatable (self) designation’.30 Style as property

depends on the belief in the possibility of reference working

uninterrupted so that the language of the poems may be traced

back to the author as origin or, in terms of the epideictic

tradition, to the object of praise. However, the internal

mirroring of this sonnet destabilises discourses of property.

As Maurice Blanchot writes in relation to Franz Kafka’s work,

‘the more a work comments upon itself, the more it calls for

commentary’.31 Mise-en-abyme and metadiscursivity within the

sonnet, paradoxically, bring reading and critique into the

sonnet so that the poem does not close itself into itself as a

product of the poet or as a creation of the other but remains

always open to future reading.

Fineman writes about the way epideictic rhetoric, unlike

forensic and deliberative rhetoric, has been recognised, as

early as in Aristotle, as a form of rhetoric that posits the

‘audience’ as an ‘observer’ rather than as ‘judge’. Praise

opens up a circular structure in that it ultimately highlights

itself as more than deictic language, but epideictic, or

extraordinary language. In this way, the subject doing the

praising points at the ‘I’ while pointing at the ‘thou’

(Fineman, 5). However, the sonnets, in their eventness, do not

simply turn self-reflexively onto the subject, but open a

space to be filled, every time, by the other. This opening of

circularity into an always open space for the reader’s

countersignature turns style from something that expresses or

that one possesses into something that happens, every time,

differently. The ‘event’ happens in the sonnet, over and over

again, with reading.

A further reversal occurs at this point, for in the

afterlife of the poems as event, the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ are,

at one and the same time, both the source and the effect of

the sonnets’ style and their art. Using the well-known trope

of poetic immortality that a poet can offer to his patron, in

Sonnet 81, the poet promises to monumentalise the youth with

his verse, while effacing himself in the process. The readers-

to-come, or the ‘tongues to be’, will ‘rehearse’ the friend’s

‘being’; they will bring life back to the dead, and they will

do so through the poet’s ‘gentle verse’. The verse erects a

monument that will outlive both poet and youth. The choice of

the words, ‘entombed’ and ‘epitaph’ (etymologically, ‘upon a

tomb’), is significant in this respect (Booth, 275). What

Shakespeare’s verse will do is monumentalise the youth, but,

in so doing also entomb him. Rather than ‘a monument without a

tomb’—that is, how Ben Jonson describes Shakespeare’s work

after the Bard’s death—the sonnets offer a monument with a

tomb.32 As Fineman observes, despite their being poems of

praise, many of the sonnets are ‘colored by an elegiac mood

that would be more appropriate for a funeral remembrance of

things past than a celebration of things current’ (Fineman,

50). Indeed, in monumentalising the youth, in turning him into

a stony object, the verse also kills the youth. It ensures an

afterlife in poetry for him, but in so doing effaces him, his

absolute singularity, and turns him into an effect, a

consequence of the sonnets’ eventness.

The youth, whoever he was in real life, is now the fair

youth, the you, the addressee of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and

any remnants or traces of his existence depend on readers over

and over again countersigning Shakespeare’s sonnets. As the

poet writes in Sonnet 55, ‘you live in this’, that is, the

fair youth lives in the verse, and what ‘shall still find room

/ Even in the eyes of all posterity’ is not the flesh and

blood youth but his ‘praise’, that is, the youth inscribed in

the poems as a standard of beauty and as the subject of the

poet’s unconditional love.

*

Style in the sonnets discussed is an event rather than simply

rooted, teleocratically, in its source and origin. This does

not mean that there are no strategies of appropriation. The

poet signs repeatedly both for himself and for the fair youth.

However, the signing is subject to countersigning for its very

existence; it is inscribed by moments of dispossession and

defacement. The force of the literary—at work in the event of

style in the sonnets—is not the effect of a monumentalisation

of the name into the work through style. It is more the effect

of an internal re-mark that opens that which is unique and

irreplaceable to an infinity of further countersignatures.

What passes the test of time by resisting erosion, then, is

not the monument or the inscription of one’s style on it but

the work’s living on through its inherent openness to future

singular readings, like those by ‘the eyes not yet created’

that Shakespeare writes about in Sonnet 81. This makes the

sonnets, with their ‘yes’ to the arrivant, the ‘come’ to the

future, share the greatness that Derrida sees in Romeo and Juliet

and other plays (‘Strange Institution’, 62-4). As Wilson

claims, ‘when Derrida writes that the “greatness” of Romeo and

Juliet has to do with the structure of the text’, its being

rooted in a historical context while having open ‘external’

borders, ‘it becomes clear that for him the plays are not only

about the double-face’ of the openness to the future, but are

actually constituted of that Janus-like doubleness in their

singularity and universality’ (Wilson, 23). This doubleness,

indeed, is what gives the sonnets their eventness and what

allows them to ‘live on’. At the same time, however, the force

of the poetic is not simply about that which survives. For the

poetic also arises in that which is inevitably lost. As Kamuf

writes, a literary text, if still read when the historical

context ‘has subsided into archival compost’, has a relation

to the future by ‘which it remains always to some extent

incomprehensible by any given present’.33 A significant way in

which this unreadability is retained is through the meta-

discursive and self-reflexive style of the sonnets, which

orients the poems not simply towards an outside world that

they represent or mirror but also towards themselves in ways

that problematise the idea that style is a property whose true

and absolutely singular owner must be established at all costs

as in the attribution studies that Shakespeare’s ghost always

already deconstructs.

1Notes

Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing (Hemel Hempstead, Harvester, 1986),

198.

2 Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh, Edinburgh

University Press, 2008); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion,

Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Hemel

Hempstead, Harvester, 1984); Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford,

Basil Blackwell, 1986); Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention

of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, University of California Press,

1986); Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny

Causality (New York and London, Routledge, 1997 [1987]); Stephen

Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture’, Literary

Theory/Renaissance Texts edited by Patricia Parker and David Quint

(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 210–24; Nicholas

Royle, ‘The remains of psychoanalysis (ii): Shakespeare’, in After

Derrida (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1995), 85–123;

Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London:

Routledge, 2007). For recent readings of Shakespeare, specifically

from a Derridean perspective, see essays in the special issue,

Shakespeare and Derrida, edited by Nicholas Royle, Oxford Literary Review 34.

1 (2012).

3 Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend. (Prof. Izutsu)’,

in Derrida and Différance, edited by David Wood and Robert Bernasconi,

translated by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin (Warwick, Parousia

Press, 1985), 1–5 (3). For Derrida’s thinking of the event, see

Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf

(Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002) [give the page reference

here][I see the whole book as relevant to the event, including the

prefatory material. Should I be more specific]

4 Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, translated by Richard Rand

(New York, Columbia University Press, 1984), 2; hereafter SP.

5 Arguments such as Gilbert Larochelle’s claim that Derrida is an

‘anti-humanist’ thinker promoting a ‘Post-modern utopia […] of

anonymity’ that ‘surrenders the act of writing to common authorship’

and that in remarking ‘that there is nothing outside the text’ he

takes ‘history out of the work’ (‘From Kant to Foucault: What Remains

of the Author in Postmodernism’, in Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual

Property in a Postmodern World, edited by Lisa Buranen and Alive Myers Roy

[Albany, SUNY Press, 1999], 128, 129) appear somewhat reductive when

reading texts in which Derrida reads literature closely, as he does,

for instance, in Signéponge/Signsponge and in Sovereignties in Question: The

Poetics of Paul Celan (edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen [New York,

Fordham University Press, 2005]). What arises from Derrida’s readings

is not a simple dismissal of authorship but an awareness of the

paradoxical structures of the signature and the date through which an

author simultaneously and inevitably marks the text and is

dispossessed by this very act.

6 Derrida writes that Hegel ‘presents himself as a philosopher or a

thinker, someone who constantly tells you that his empirical

signature—the signature of the individual named Hegel—is secondary

[and] pales in the face of the truth’. Not only can his signature

‘disappear without a loss’ but its erasure is ‘even necessary’ for

this will ‘prove the truth and the autonomy of the system’. However,

Derrida writes, Hegel ‘signs just as clearly’ as someone who wants to

sign, and he finds it difficult to dispense with his name (The Ear of

the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, edited by Christie McDonald,

translated by Peggy Kamuf [Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press,

1988], 57; hereafter EO).

7 For the relation between the sonnets and the epideictic tradition,

see Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye. All quotations from the sonnets

are taken from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Stephen Booth (New Haven

and London, Yale University Press, 2000).

8 Peggy Kamuf, ‘Introduction: Event of Resistance’, in Jacques

Derrida, Without Alibi, edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf (Stanford,

Stanford University Press, 2002), 3.

9 Delia Bacon, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (London,

Groombridge and Sons, 1857). There is no space and no need here to

attempt even a cursory overview of the most important names and

arguments in the authorship debate that ensued. For an overview of

the major Anti-Stratfordian theories, see Warren Hope, The Shape of

Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories 2nd edition (Jefferson, North

Carolina, McFarland, 2009). For a recent collection of Stratfordian

positions, see Shakespeare Beyond Doubt: Evidence, Argument, Controversy edited

by Paul Edmondon and Stanley Wells (Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 2013). For critical and theoretical approaches to the debate,

see Shakespeare and His Authors: Critical Perspectives on the Authorship Question,

edited by William Leahy (London and New York, Continuum, 2010).

10 See, for example, ‘Introduction’, Shakespeare’s Sonnets edited by

Katherine Duncan-Jones (London, The Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 17–21.

11 Nathaniel Holmes, The Authorship of Shakespeare (New York, Hurd and

Houghton, 1867).

12 Scott McCrea, The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question

(Westport, Praeger Publishers, 2005), 143.

13 See, for example, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship, edited by Hugh

Craig and Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,

2009).

14 ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full speed ahead, Seven missiles, Seven

missives’, translated by Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in

Derrida, Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and

Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007),

387–409.

15 See Giles E. Dawson, ‘Shakespeare’s Handwriting’, Shakespeare Survey

Volume 42: Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, edited by Stanley Wells

(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 119–28.

16 ‘Will of William Shakespeare 25 March 1616, Proved 22 June 1616’,

The National Archives,

http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C198022, consulted

26 January 2015.

17 Curiously, the first date written on the document (January)—like

other phrases in the will—is stricken through, in part, and replaced

by a second date (March): ‘Vicesimo Quinto die Januarii (struck

through) Martii’. The ‘original’ date, 25 January, is therefore,

under erasure and flanked by a second date, 25 March, with the

document then coming into force upon being proven as authentic on 22

June of the same year.

18 See Kate Emery Pogue, Shakespeare’s Friends (Westport, Praeger

Publishers, 2006), 42.

19 See, for example, Charlton Ogburn, ‘A Mystery Solved: The True

Identity of Shakespeare’, American Bar Association Journal 59.3 (1959), 237–

41.

20 Jonathan Gill Harris, Shakespeare and Literary Theory (Oxford and New

York, Oxford University Press, 2010) 54.

21 Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview

with Jacques Derrida’, Acts of Literature, edited by Derek Attridge (New

York and London, Routledge, 1992), 63.

22 Francis Ponge, The Voice of Things, edited and translated by Beth Archer

(New York, McGraw-Hill, 1971), 36.

23 James Joyce, Ulysses, The Garbler Edition (New York, Vintage Books,

1986), 170.

24 Aristotle, Rhetoric, translated by W. Rhys Roberts (New York, Modern

Library, 1954) III.1405a.14.

25 Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge and London, The

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997) 174.

26 Derrida, Parages, edited by John P. Leavy, translated by Tom Conley

et. al. (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2011), 105–6.

27 Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, in Psyche:

Inventions of the Other Volume 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth

Rottenberg (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007), 8.

28 J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Cambridge, Harvard University

Press, 1962).

29 The phrase ‘what happens’, in its various forms, is a recurrent

motif in Derrida’s Without Alibi. Derrida writes about ‘what happens,

what comes to pass, that at which one arrives or that which happens

to us, arrives to us, the event, the place of the taking-place and

which cares as little about the performative, the performative power,

as it does about the constative’ (‘The University without Condition’,

219).

30 Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and

Practice of Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 166.

31 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, translated by Susan Hanson

(Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 391.

32 Ben Jonson, ‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William

Shakespeare and what he hath left us’, in The Works of Ben Jonson Volume 3

(London, Chatto & Windus, 1903), 287; emphasis added.

33 Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature, or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago

and London, University of Chicago Press, 1997), 164.