The Perfect Ceremony of Love's Rite: Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (review)

Robert L. Montgomery presents a formal close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) as evocations and parodies of the Petrarchan commonplaces established in sonnet sequences by Sir Philip Sidney (1591), Samuel Daniel (1592), and Edmund Spenser (1595). Shakespeare structures his sequence, Montgomery asserts, as neither Sidney's narrative of failed seduction nor Spenser's narrative of successful courtship, but as an unresolved dramatic unfolding of self-contradictory praise, chastisement, and authorial anxiety that coils back on itself. Shakespeare's highly self-conscious fictive speaker, Montgomery shows, repeatedly and self-consciously recreates his poetic as he discovers that his love objects betray both him and the Petrarchan standards of hyperbolical praise out of which he tries to fashion them. In fact, the Sonnets never achieve "the perfect ceremony of love's rite" (23.6), that peerless verbal gesture of devotion that the fearful speaker, like "an unperfect actor on the stage," studies and strives in vain to articulate. That the beloved alternately inspires verse of immortal praise and drives his poet to speechless-ness has elsewhere proved a suggestive argument for biographical inferences, but Montgomery insists it is merely another Petrarchan convention that Shakespeare appropriates from Sidney. Fully grasping Shakespeare's manipulation of Petrarchan topoi best teaches a reader to admire what is truly original in the Sonnets, the fictive poet's fractured, contradictory, and overlapping self-portraits as an artist reinventing his poetic.

In 1961 Montgomery established himself as a Sidney scholar with the publication of Symmetry and Sense: The Poetry of Sir Philip Sidney, which grew out of the Harvard thesis he wrote for Douglas Bush, Hyder Rollins, and Herschel Baker. Now professor emeritus from the University of California, Irvine, he applies the same close reading strategies to Shakespeare by studiously contextualizing his arguments in the ongoing critical discussions of the Sonnets, often arguing subtle disputes in detailed footnotes. By sticking close to his primary text Montgomery confines his work to a monograph of modest size, and he demonstrates his debts to much longer annotated commentaries by Stephen Booth (1977), John Kerrigan (1986), Helen Vendler (1997), and Katherine Duncan-Jones (1998). Kerrigan and Duncan-Jones persuade Montgomery to regard the female-voiced, rhyme royal lament A Lover's Complaint as belonging to the Sonnets. Though barely convinced of any link between them, he finds both works unresolved, anguished portraits of inconsolable, incurable passion. Colin Burrow's edition of Shakespeare's Complete Sonnets and Poems (2002), unfortunately, appears only as a title among Montgomery's "Works Consulted," though it helpfully applies stylometric criticism to group the Sonnets into four historical phases of composition, furthers the discussion of English Petrarchan models, and makes persuasive arguments for including A Lover's Complaint.

Resolute in limiting himself to his close reading strategy, Montgomery dismisses not only biographical speculations but also recent critical emphases on the homoerotic implications of the Sonnets as well on numerological implications of their ordering, though he admits that sonnet 60, which sees "our minutes hasten to their end," at least coincidentally bears the same number as the sixty minutes in an hour. Teasingly, he integrates comparisons between Shakespeare's and Sidney's Sonnets repeatedly without developing a detailed comparison, and he glances at parodic elements, such as the pirate-merchant metaphor of 86 ("Was it the proud full sail of his great verse"), a sonnet about a rival poet, without exploring parodies of specific works.

Shakespeare's last word on the convoluted, circular progress of the Sonnets, according to Montgomery, is 129 ("Th'expense of spirit in waste of shame"), a poignant, impersonal lecture on the cruel energy of lust. Love's tyranny is just one more Petrarchan commonplace, but while the sexual desires of Sidney's Astrophil are politely or comically frustrated by his lady's rejection, Shakespeare's speaker insists...