Abstract

This chapter examines Shakespeare and Donne's use of the die pun, referring both to mortal death and orgasmic death, in order to argue that the works of both authors utilize the die pun as an escape from the confines and damages of linear time through the pure potentiality of embodied time. Throughout Songs and Sonnets, Donne uses imagery of perpetual, pre-orgasmic sex as a way to imagine escaping the destructive passages of time. Shakespeare uses the same pun to create productive, autoerotic self-replication in the first fifteen sonnets to the Young Man. For Shakespeare and Donne, language, specifically the die pun, is a vehicle for the manipulation of both meaning and time. Puns, as these two poets deploy them, deny both a unifying central meaning and diametrically opposed binary meanings; instead, they create a multiplicity of meanings manifested in embodied time.

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