Rethinking Shakespeare's Skepticism: The Aesthetics of Doubt in the Sonnets and Plays

4. Comic Re-Creation in the Dark-Lady Sonnets and The Taming of the Shrew

163 Four Comic Re-Creation in the Dark-Lady Sonnets and The Taming of the Shrew The poet’s examination of praise, his skepticism about the male friend, his suffering and self-doubt, and finally, his acknowledgment of the canker within himself, all point to the tragic dimension of Shakespeare’s young-man sequence. Although he does not endure physical death like Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear, the poet experiences a metaphorical death, suffering through his quest for knowledge and identity, publicly confessing his vices, and achieving a victory of sorts when he affirms the primacy of the rose. But then he turns his back on the poetry that led him down his “tragic” path and on the epistemological investigation that inevitably accompanies praise. Shakespeare’s comic epilogue to this sequence is the dark-lady poems. Rather than praise his mistress and subject her to ethical inquiry, the poet bargains and pleads as if he and she were characters in a story—or she an actress in his play. Indeed, “play” is the operative word, because what the poet crafts in the dark-lady sonnets are interactive mini-dramas, scenes of comic interplay instead of epideictic introspection.1 Most scholars, however, tend to read this second sequence as something other than comic recreation. Joel Fineman, for example, is only gamesome en route to his sobering affirmation that the dark lady’s poet becomes divided forever from idealizing praise.2 Some critics take an even darker view of the mistress, comparing her to 164 Rethinking Shakespeare’s Skepticism a figure of racial difference that the poet laments and tries unsuccessfully to subjugate. According to Kim F. Hall, Shakespeare’s insistence (at least initially) on his black lady’s fairness is consistent with an imperialistic English society that wanted both to “‘enrich’ the language with new world matter [and] to control encroachments of cultural otherness and gender difference.”3 Still other interpretations have shown how cultural and social contexts further highlight problems with the dark-lady sequence, especially when compared to the young-man poems. Margreta de Grazia, for instance, argues that the “black mistress” represents “anarchy,” “miscegenation,” and “social peril,” all forces that undermine the fragile social hierarchies preserved in the first 126 poems.4 More recently, Elizabeth Harvey has suggested that “the scandal of miscegenation to which de Grazia alludes” suggests a shift away from the fair (and so more knowable) exterior of the young man toward the “dark interior” of the “female body,” marked by its “unknowability and uncontrollability.”5 Even less optimistically , Olga L. Valbuena contends that “the shame and bitterness encountered in the young man subsequence become fully realized in the dark lady sonnets” and that the mistress “has been made to blot up and absorb the blunted desires and ‘black lines’ (63.13) of the speaker’s ‘perjured’ I (152.13).”6 Robert Matz takes a similar approach, interpreting the female addressee as “a scapegoat for anxieties about duplicity or sin in the relationships between fair young men.”7 For Matz, the mistress is a cultural symbol, not an actual person.8 Indeed, few critics have shown as much interest in the dark lady’s identity as A. L. Rowse, whose assertion that the mistress is Emilia Lanyer was famously rebuffed by Samuel Schoenbaum.9 Even if this reluctance to explore biographical possibilities has led to fruitful readings of the poems, it has also, David Schalkwyk observes, curbed our desire to see the dark lady as anything more than a troublesome “whore.”10 Ilona Bell would, perhaps, agree and hasrecentlyobjectedtothepracticeoflabelingthemistressas“adulterous , promiscuous, deceitful, and thoroughly reprehensible.”11 In her analysis of the “ongoing private lyric dialogue” between poet and dark lady (“Rethinking Shakespeare’s Dark Lady,” 296), Bell draws on Schalkwyk’s work, which aims not necessarily to endorse The Dark-Lady Sonnets and The Taming of the Shrew 165 Rowse’s method but, rather, to redeem the mistress by exploring her “embodiment” in a performative (rather than descriptive) art form.12 Reading the sonnets “as the theatre in which individual subject and society engage” (Speech and Performance, 28), Schalkwyk imagines “an original context of address and reception in which the response of the beloved, though not recorded in the poem itself, would not only have been possible, but likely” (55). This claim that Shakespeare’s poet “seeks reciprocity” with his dark lady diverges from a critical tradition focused on how the poems “constitute...