A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion—
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
Most recent commentary on this sonnet has worked ingeniously to undercut the apparent gesture of sexual renunciation in the poem’s final lines. I would like to focus rather on the figure of Nature, who occupies almost as much of the poem as the young man. The image of Nature fashioning human beings draws on long-standing medieval traditions of the goddess Natura’s double role as procreatrix and vicaria dei or vicar of God.30 Nature’s apparent inattentiveness at this job is also not new, harking back to Prudentius31 and Alan of Lille, although the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea may also hover in the background. As the procreative deputy of God, Nature engages in an activity that at once recalls and differs from divine creation. As Alan of Lille puts it in his Anticlaudianus, “divinum creat ex nihilo, Natura caduca / procreat ex aliquo” II, 72–73)—“the divine one creates from nothing, Nature breeds perishable things from something.”32 Alan’s phrasing is, I think, suggestive for Sonnet 20, both in its play on “nothing” and “something,” which presages line 12 of Shakespeare’s poem, and in contrasting Nature’s procreation with the sublime scene of God’s creatio ex nihilo.
The odd thing about all scenes in which a mythological Nature fashions human beings is that real nature doesn’t work that way. People originate as tiny embryos and grow into adulthood; they aren’t sculpted as fully grown creatures. Thus Shakespeare’s scene of creation, in which Nature molds adult forms, inevitably invokes God’s fashioning of Adam and Eve in the first chapter of Genesis.33 I would even argue that the play on “something” and “nothing” in line 12 is meant in part to recall God’s original creation of something (indeed, everything) out of nothing.
But, typically, the goddess Natura both invokes and negates this scene of divine creation. A nurturing mother steps in for the sublime father Jehovah, natural birth for the original scene of creation. The feminizing logic of this substitution goes so far as to hint at a rewriting of Genesis in which Adam is a kind of supplementary afterthought to Eve. Or perhaps Shakespeare even understands the biblical line “male and female created he them” in a manner similar to that of the rabbinical commentators (and Renaissance Platonists) who argued that God created a single androgyne, which he subsequently split in two.34
In any case, the strategy of this sonnet is to summon up a sublime scene of creation in order then to veil it, by which I mean to naturalize, feminize, and aestheticize it. Divine narrative gets reworked here in the same way that theological categories did in the procreation sonnets. And to similar ends, since sodomitical undertones clearly disturb Sonnet 20. By adding a penis to the half-finished woman, Nature simultaneously invokes the specter of sodomy and fends it off, at least if we accept the poem’s surface argument that this penis stands definitively in the way of sexual contact.35 But what the poem has thereby and perhaps even more importantly avoided is a divine injunction against sodomy. To put this in Lacanian terms, Sonnet 20 substitutes a real impediment for a symbolic prohibition. That is, instead of the sublime “Thou shalt not” of an angry God, what bars access to the young man is just a harmless if frustrating bit of flesh. A piece of nature fends off the daunting theological apparatus of anti-sodomy discourse, thus defining a safe space in which homoerotic desire may be harmlessly indulged. The psychoanalytic significance of the poem may be brought out by quoting the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek as he comments not on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 but on the infamous scene of discovery in Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game: “This scene of failed sexual encounter is structured as the exact inversion of the scene referred to by Freud as the primordial trauma of fetishism: the child’s gaze, sliding down the female body towards the sexual organs, is shocked to find nothing where one expects to find something (a penis)—in the case of The Crying Game, the shock is caused when the eye finds something where it expected to find nothing.”36 Or, to put this in more Shakespearean terms, when it finds something to its purpose nothing. The effect, however, is the same as in the classical Freudian scene. For just as the threat of castration leads, in Freud’s narrative of the Oedipus complex, to a suspension of sexual desire and paralysis of the phallus known as the latency period, so in Sonnet 20 the superfluous presence of the young man’s penis renders the speaker’s penis likewise superfluous, at least in regard to the young man. The speaker finds his sexual impulses blocked, and this pacifying of desire helps to constitute the young man as something more like an art object than a sexual object. Indeed, it turns him into something like the perfume bottle of Sonnet five, which is to say, the object of a sonnet.
In attempting to move from sublimation to the sublime, my argument may seem to have landed in a contradiction. For my analysis of Sonnet 5 emphasized the defeminizing aspects of Shakespearean sublimation, but my reading of Sonnet 20 insists on its feminizing of a masculine sublime. Even if there is a contradiction here, it is Shakespeare’s rather than my own. But, I would claim, it is less a contradiction than a multiplication of strategies to effect the same end. For the two poems share this double aim: to invoke the threat of sodomy so as to expel or foreclose it, and to invoke a poetics of the sublime so as to reject it in favor of a poetics of the beautiful. Sodomy and sublimity are engaged and neutralized as a linked pair. While somewhat idealized, then, the young man does not attain the inhuman and terrifying loftiness of the Petrarchan mistress. This sublime height, and depth, are avoided because they are also the realm where sodomy and its divine punishment dwell.
* * *
My argument thus far has focused on Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man—admittedly, the bulk of the sequence. But what of the equally famous sonnets to the so-called Dark Lady? At first glance, they would seem to conform roughly to the aesthetic principles I have already described. Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” systematically negates the idealizing tropes of Petrarchan poetry, thus producing a desublimated and presumably more “human” mistress—a slightly earthier counterpart to the young man.
Things are not so simple, however. As Jonathan Goldberg has pointed out, “the threatening sexuality that the dark lady represents—outside marriage and promiscuous and dangerous to the homosocial order—is closer to sodomy than almost anything suggested in the sonnets to the young man.”37 To Goldberg’s list of sodomitical attributes I would add that of sterility, conjured most forcefully in Sonnet 129’s famous opening line, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” Among the wealth of possible meanings generated by this line, several turn on the reading of “spirit” as semen and imply a sodomitical waste of the male seed. Like Sonnet 5, then, this one also makes the proper vessel improper by rendering it sterile or nonproductive, and it thereby depicts sex with the Dark Lady as sodomitical in a quite technical sense.
I would argue, moreover, that, just as sodomy is displaced from the young man onto the Dark Lady, so too is the sublime. To make this argument, however, will require reading the Dark Lady sonnets backward, from the perspective of a later writer—one who explicitly employs the category of the sublime and who, moreover, connects it directly with the concept of sodomy. He thus makes open and unmistakable the connections that in Shakespeare