This particular substitution is in itself neither novel nor surprising. Its interest, from my perspective, is that it makes Sonnet 5 into a tiny treatise on poetic sublimation. What I mean by this is that Shakespeare’s image of the perfume bottle takes the commonplace but mysterious process whereby the father’s sexual substance produces a baby, and puts in its place the even more mysterious process whereby the young man’s sexual substance—his semen—is distilled into poetry. Sonnet 5 seems to offer a curiously material demonstration, even before the fact, of the Freudian thesis that sexual desire can be sublimated into art.
Both Shakespearean and Freudian sublimation find their origin in older traditions of medical and alchemical literature, especially the latter. Two of alchemy’s principal refining processes were distillation, or the evaporation and recondensation of liquids, and sublimation, or the evaporation and recondensation of solids. Both aimed at separating and elevating a purer and more spiritualized substance from a grosser and more corporeal one. Nicolas Flamel, a medieval French alchemist whose works were translated into English in 1624, writes:
Note therefore, that this separation, division, and sublimation, is without doubt the key of the whole worke. After the putrefaction, then, and dissolution of these Bodies, our Bodies doe lift themselves up to the surface of the dissolving water, in the colour of whitenesse, and this whitenesse is life; … which separateth the subtile from the thicke, and the pure from the impure, lifting up by little and little the subtile part of the Body, from the dregs, untill all the pure be separated and lifted up: And in this is our Philosophicall and natural sublimation fulfilled: And in this whitenesse is the soule infused into the Body, that is, the mineral vertue, which is more subtile than fire, being indeed the true quintessence and life, which desireth to bee borne, and to put off the grosse earthly faeces, which it hath taken from the Menstruous and corrupt place of his origin.9
Alchemical sublimation thus produces two substances: a purified and spiritualized essence and, separated from this, a fecal discharge or remainder. In turning solid to gas, and gas back to solid, sublimation was seen as transforming body to spirit and spirit to body. The goal was not a separation of spirit from matter but a reconciliation of spirit with a purified matter:10 hence the sublimate was often compared to an infant emerging from the womb or to Christ’s resurrected body.11 The fecal remainder, by contrast, was associated variously with earth, with menses, with putrefaction, and with death. Flamel writes of this discharge or remainder that “it stincks, and gives a smell like the odour of graves filled with rottennesse, and with bodies as yet charged with their naturall moysture.”12 It is also, not incidentally, associated with the female body. Flamel elsewhere describes sublimation as the process of eliminating “the dark moiste dominion of the woman.”13 Sublimation is thus not only a purifying but a defeminizing process, qualities that will persist when the concept is adopted by Freud.
Returning to Sonnet 5, we can see how the tropes of alchemical sublimation serve to imagine a masculinized, poetic birth. The metaphor of glass bottle as womb was already widespread in alchemical literature before Shakespeare borrows it here. Moreover, male semen resembles the alchemical quintessence not only in its masculinity and its white color, but because Renaissance medicine already conceived of semen as a distillation and purification of the blood. I am not arguing that the images of Sonnet 5 are specifically alchemical in origin, although Shakespeare’s sonnets make occasional explicit reference to alchemy. Obviously, the direct subject matter here is perfume-making. Rather I am arguing that discourses such as alchemy, medicine, and even perfume-making shared a common figural vocabulary of sublimation.
Our brief survey of alchemy immediately reveals something crucial about Sonnet 5: the poem depicts only the perfume as distillate, while the waste matter or remainder of distillation has disappeared. Shakespeare’s imagery of distillation is thus, itself, distilled or purified. The effects of this may become clearer when set against another image of distilled perfume, this one occurring in John Donne’s eighth elegy, “The Comparison.” Donne’s poem consists of a series of contrasting descriptions pitting the speaker’s own, beautiful mistress against the putatively repulsive mistress of a male friend. It begins thus:
As the sweet sweat of roses in a still,
As that which from chafed musk cat’s pores doth trill,
As th’almighty balm of th’early east,
Such are the sweat drops of my mistress’ breast.
And on her neck her skin such lustre sets,
They are no sweat drops but pearl carcanets.
Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spermatic issue of ripe menstruous boils,
Or like that scum, which by need’s lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra’s starved men did draw
From parboiled shoes, and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blessed,
And like vile lying stones in saffroned tin,
Or warts, or weals, they hang upon her skin. (1–14)14
It is no coincidence that the first set of comparisons takes up fourteen lines, for despite the rhyming couplets this is clearly an anti-sonnet. Inversion of structure (an opening sestet followed by an octave) announces a thematic inversion of Petrarchanism, the latter’s presence signaled once again by imagery of distillation. But if Donne grotesquely parodies a sublimating rhetoric, he does so (paradoxically) not by negating it but by completing it—that is to say, by portraying not only the distillate but the remainder as well. For Donne, something like alchemical separation produces two contrasting women: one the traditionally idealized Petrarchan mistress, the other a repulsive mass of scum and sores. These are, of course, simply the two halves of the fantasized diptych known as Woman, seen here simultaneously and anamorphically rather than (as in Spenser’s Duessa, for example) sequentially.
Things aren’t so simple, however, for the strain of sublimation imprints itself even on the first, “pure” mistress. The opening comparison, “As the sweet sweat of roses,” exhibits a slightly oxymoronic stress that bursts forth in the grotesque second line. The very fact of choosing sweat for his first point of comparison—a kind of bodily distillate, to be sure, but one of necessarily compromised purity—indicates the limits of sublimation when the poetic subject is woman.
Yet the threat of contamination runs not only between the two women, but between woman and man. The grotesque qualities of the “other” mistress, after all, derive both here and elsewhere in the poem from a disturbing admixture of masculinity, visible in the “spermatic issue” and in the image of Sanserra’s men boiling their shoes. What the sublimating movement of “The Comparison” actually hopes to separate—and in the end, does separate—is not one woman from another, but woman from man. The poem ends by exhorting the friend to abandon his mistress and (in a slightly more covert vein) to take Donne himself as an erotic substitute.15 The grotesque hermaphroditism of the “other” mistress is finally resolved, then, not by purging her of the offending masculinity, but by purging the masculinity of her. In the final irony of the poem, the masculine “remainder” is transubstantiated and saved as sublimate while even the idealized, Petrarchan woman is abjected as waste matter.
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, the young man is sometimes depicted as sublimate, sometimes as sublimating agent—both product and radiant source of alchemical refinement.16 The waste remainder is associated primarily (though not exclusively) with woman, as in Donne. In fact, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady embodies every aspect of what Nicholas Flamel calls the “dark moist dominion of woman.”17 But if the young man serves as the sublimated opposite of the Dark Lady, this is