Base excrement of earth, which dost confound
Sense, from distinguishing the sick from sound;
By thee the silly amorous sucks his death
By drawing in a leprous harlot’s breath. (57–60)
It is not my intention to claim that the perfume bottle of Sonnet 5 evokes all these things; the miracle is rather that it doesn’t. Shakespeare’s crystal flask does not harbor a Baudelairean “parfum corrumpu.” Perhaps this is because it exists primarily as a visual rather than an olfactory object, and so suspends or cancels the connections on which Donne dwells. Trapped within its bottle, the perfume is prevented from releasing its associative as well as its floral bouquet. Instead, the image achieves a kind of untroubled luminescence in which the crystalline enclosure of the bottle signifies, among other things, its isolation from all that was abjected to produce its contents. A manifestation of pure claritas, Shakespeare’s perfume bottle is a distant ancestor of the snowy, aseptic bowl in Wallace Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate.” The bottle’s walls of glass are visually transparent but semiotically opaque; they reduce the image to mere seeming or appearance rather than meaning.
But while the sublimating rhetoric of Sonnet 5 leaves no residue, it does offer a faint commemoration of the labor needed to expel it. The image of the perfume as a “prisoner pent” suggests a latent dynamism that threatens the visual repose of the image—indeed, threatens it from within. This one detail causes the image to vibrate with the energy of everything it tries to exclude. By “everything,” as we have seen, I mean in part “woman.” But as we shall see next, I also mean in part “sodomy.”
* * *
“Procreation sonnet” has become such a convenient term for the opening seventeen poems of the Quarto sequence, it trips so easily from the tongue, that one is prone to overlook how very odd a thing a sonnet on procreation is. In every respect it seems to violate the sexual canons of a form traditionally devoted to idealized worship on the one hand and libertine seduction on the other. The procreation sonnet at once charts a third option and splits the difference between the first two, since it counsels sex in the name of reproductive duty—that is to say, for a purpose other than that of sexual pleasure itself.
But while they enjoin childbearing, the procreation sonnets strangely evacuate the content of this duty. First, as Joseph Pequigney notes, they deprive themselves of possible arguments by inexplicably failing to allude to the young man’s noble birth: “They might easily have done so; they might have urged his responsibility to his family, to hand on a great name, to enable the passage of a title or property along bloodlines, to provide for the maintenance of an ancestral house.”19 Second, they refrain from mentioning any divine injunctions to be fruitful and multiply.20 So the “duty” of procreation, whatever it may be, stems neither from God nor from the social order. Then why reproduce? The very first lines of sonnet 1 say why:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory. (1–4)
Reproduction is, in the first instance, an aesthetic duty; its purpose and aim is the perpetuation of the beautiful. Moreover, as we learn in Sonnet 11, Nature has granted beautiful creatures a reproductive advantage with just this aim in mind:
Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.
Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die. (9–14)
In reproducing, the young man will obey natural law; to this point, Shakespeare’s argument appears quite orthodox. But by redefining the aim of that law so radically, the procreation sonnets engage, as we shall see, in a theologically subversive form of aestheticism.
This redefinition will, moreover, engage the problem of sodomy. For in the very process of endorsing a licit, reproductive sexuality, the procreation sonnets employ a range of figures that mimic, and in some cases may derive from, theological condemnations of sodomy. If at times these sonnets covertly endorse or propose sodomitical practices, they also constitute a distinctive sexual aesthetic precisely by negating, expelling, or purging sodomy.
One way in which they do so is by repeatedly advising the young man on the proper “use” of his semen. In Sonnet 4, which tries to dissuade the young man from masturbation, variations on the word “use” (“abuse,” “usurer,” “use,” “unused,” “used”) occur five times. Sonnet 6 repeats Sonnet 4’s contrast between the procreative “use” of semen and “forbidden usury” (5). As Mark Jordan shows in his book The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, medieval theologians often defined sodomy not as a forbidden form of sexual desire or as an excessive form of pleasure or even as a specifically same-sex practice but simply as a misuse of semen for anything—including male masturbation—that does not serve to fulfil its reproductive potential. Albertus Magnus even goes so far as to state that female masturbation is not necessarily sinful since it does not entail a waste of male seed.21 In Thomas Aquinas, distinctions between legitimate and sodomitical sex turn entirely on the proper or improper “use” (usus) of the seed, a vocabulary that informs Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets as well.22 Likewise, the conception of sodomy as usury derives from medieval sources. Dante puts sodomites and usurers in the same circle of hell. In urging the proper “use” of the young man’s semen, the procreation sonnets thus engage a theological discourse that opposes such use to sodomitical “abuse” or “usury.” Yet even as they employ a theologically derived vocabulary, and do so precisely to invoke the specter of sodomy, the sonnets never adopt a tone of theological condemnation. Indeed, the sonnets undermine the theological concept of “use” by twisting that term, as we have seen, in a purely aesthetic direction. For Shakespeare, as opposed to Aquinas or Albertus Magnus, the proper “use” of semen involves not the creation of life as such but the creation of beauty.
Theological distinctions between the use and sodomitical abuse of semen frequently invoked a supplementary distinction between the female womb as semen’s “proper vessel” and the anus (male or female) as an “improper vessel.” The proper vessel fulfils the semen’s procreative potential while the improper vessel wastes it. To borrow Shakespeare’s vocabulary in Sonnet 3, the latter is semen’s “tomb” rather than its “womb.” I believe that by depicting the womb as a “vial” Sonnets 5 and 6 invoke something very like this medieval figure and its context. Yet in doing so the sonnets transform it just as they did the term “use”—by aestheticizing it. For, as we have seen, the perfume bottle fails as metaphor precisely by evacuating life in favor of art. Shakespeare thus summons up the image of the proper vessel in order to pervert it. Instead of abandoning the proper for an officially improper vessel, he makes the proper vessel itself improper by substituting an aesthetic function for a reproductive one. In effect, he refashions the theologians’ vessel of birth into something like an ornate vase or a crystal vial, beautiful but barren objects that contain only poetic claritas.
From this moment of conversion or transformation, something one might call Shakespearean homosexuality