Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric

The celebration of cerebral experience is hardly novel in the sixteenth century lyric at large. Psalm translations and devotional verse extol the usefulness of personal contemplation, and English lyrics in the “moral-philosophical tradition” frequently thematize the value of thought. ¹ Wyatt’s verse epistle, “My mothers madyes,” counsels the reader to:

  seke no more owte of thy self to fynde the thing that thou haist sought so long before for thou shalt fele it sitting in thy mynde. ²

With even more assurance, if less delicacy, the popular “In Prayse of a Contented Mind,” by Edward de Vere (Oxford) or Sir Edward Dyer, imparts the same lesson:

My mynde to me a kingdome is, such perfect joye therin I finde, That it excelles all other blisse that world affordes or growes by kind. ³

Particularly as the Reformation permeated England, the efficacy of the individual mind was widely assumed. When Hamlet remarks, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” a forerunner of Satan’s affirmation, “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” he voices neither a daring nor an original idea. ⁴

But to represent the power or joy of thinking in a love poem is a different matter. The lion’s share of love lyrics from the English Renaissance, like their continental prototypes and counterparts, represent thought of the beloved as tormenting or dangerous, despite any momentary pleasure it might afford; indeed “love” would not be love without the experience of “darke thoughts,” as Daniel laments in Delia 9. ⁵ Here I summarize some of that dark thinking as a foundation for reading Shakespeare’s sonnets 29, 30, and 122, poems in which thought of the beloved is represented as vital and good in and of itself. These poems offer a surprising and useful alternative to the melancholic mode of reading, writing, and loving dominant in the Elizabethan erotic lyric. I argue in fact that the three sonnets are examples of “anticipatory elegy”: they answer to love’s most terrible apprehensions by fostering in advance the creative, narcissistic spirit of traditional mourning elegy.

I

In many Renaissance love lyrics, thinking on the beloved contrasts the memory or fantasy of him or her with the all-abundant source of that memory or fantasy, his or her presence, making painfully evident the poet-lover’s current impoverishment. In Astrophil’s tenth song, an extended apostrophe to thought, Astrophil enjoys fantasies about Stella for several stanzas, but concludes:

O my thought, my thoughts surcease,   Thy delights my woes increase,   My life melts with too much thinking;   Thinke no more but die in me,   Till thou shalt revived be   At her lips my Nectar drinking. ⁶

(PS, 43–48)

In Amoretti 89, Spenser’s poet-lover, who has in fact already secured his beloved’s commitment and now must only endure a temporary absence, claims: “Ne joy of ought that under heaven doth hove / can comfort me but her owne joyous sight.” ⁷ An unusual example is Amoretti 52 in which the poet-lover intentionally avoids feeling joy while alone, in the absence of his beloved, to ensure that her presence will be all the more satisfying when he is literally with her: “So I her absence will my penaunce make, / that of her presens I my meed may take” (ES, 13–14). The topos of waking from a dream of the beloved to the bleak reality of day is in this category, from Astrophil and Stella 38, Delia 45, and Fidessa 14 and 15, to Milton’s “Methought I saw,” as are those representations of bittersweet desire rooted in Petrarch, in which unadulterated joy is impossible because the poet-lover’s pleasurable thoughts cannot be distilled from his despairing ones. ⁸ Examples abound, in Wyatt, in Tottel at large, in the other miscellanies, and in all the sequences: Delia 14 is a good example — “So much I please to perish in my wo” (D, 12), as...