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  • Immortal Beloved
  • Emily Vasiliauskas (bio)
Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Brian Boyd. Harvard University Press. 2012. £19.95. ISBN 9 7806 7406 5642

In 1640 or so, an unidentified reader of William Shakespeare’s poems took issue with a decision made by their most recent editor, John Benson. Among many other interventions, Benson had combined into a single poem, under the generic title ‘Loves crueltie’, the first three sonnets from Thomas Thorpe’s original edition of 1609. The reader in question struck out the title by hand and replaced it with the much-improved, ‘Motives to procreation as the way to outlive Time’.

Quite a burden for a small group of sonnets to bear, let alone for a marginal note, yet neither stumbles beneath the weight. Rather, this scribble captures something distinctive about Shakespeare’s sonnets, both intrinsically and at that particular moment in literary history. Just when carpe diem was all the rage, with poets reminding everyone to take pleasure in their bodies before becoming too unattractive – or too dead – to enjoy them, someone reading Shakespeare noticed a strange variation on the theme. In the sonnets, sex still offered an answer to the biological inevitabilities of senescence and mortality, but pleasure was not a part of [End Page 79] the equation. Instead, it was the reproductive aspect of sex to which Shakespeare appealed in the fight against death. Children were a path to eternal life.

The first seventeen sonnets purportedly try to induce an attractive young aristocrat to wed. (Whether this fair creature was real or imagined and who, if real, he might have been remain matters of debate.) And yet neither the charms of women nor the attractions of married life play any role in the effort. When sex is described, the tone is almost comically technical: ‘For where is she so fair whose uneared womb | Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry’.

The energy of these poems is reserved for extravagant proclamations about the pleasures and powers of reproduction, as in Sonnet 6, where the fair youth is pictured as a remarkably fertile father of ten and grandfather of 100:

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art, If ten of thine ten times refigured thee: Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart, Leaving thee living in posterity?

As these lines demonstrate, impressive enthusiasm for procreation does not necessarily translate into a convincing argument about immortality. Two affronts to common sense are evident. First, sexual reproduction requires both father and mother, so any form of survival achieved through one’s relation to one’s offspring must inevitably be shared. Second, and consequently, children are not identical to either of their parents. The sonnets represent procreation as if it were replication, which Shakespeare and his readers, even in a pre-genetic age, knew to be wrong (cf. King Lear). Whatever forms of consolation offspring provide to the morbidly minded, a personal form of survival does not seem to be on offer.

The last few of the procreation poems register the implausibility of their arguments, and the second major group, Sonnets 18–126, develops a case for the posthumous survival of the fair youth based on the immortality of Shakespeare’s own verse. Here, literary production takes the place of sexual reproduction. In fact, we find a comparison between the two right at the hinge that joins the sequences, in the last lines of Sonnet 17: ‘But were some child of yours alive that time, | You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme’.

The analogy between the generation of children and the generation of poems is at the heart of Brian Boyd’s Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a follow-up to his On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, published in 2009 and already recognised as a [End Page 80] seminal text in the young field of ‘evocriticism’. In the new book, Boyd applies insights from the evolutionary sciences to the phenomenon of poetic success.

As in the biological definition of the term, success in verse depends on both fertility and survival. A successful organism is one which, over the course of a...

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