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  • Hoarding the Treasure and Squandering the Truth:Giving and Possessing in Shakespeare's Sonnets to the Young Man
  • Alison V. Scott

I

Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes shall outlive this pow'rful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contèntsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

(55.1-4)1

The speaker of the Sonnets promises his addressee immortality, an everlasting fame for his gifts of beauty and virtue, achieved via the speaker's gift for poetry and conferred through the gift of the poem he produces. Of course, the most immediate problem with this promise is that the Sonnets never actually name the "young man" to whom the majority are addressed, and therefore, the only personality to "shine more bright in these contents" of the poems is the poet himself. So it is that the Sonnets revert to the possession of their author, and the gift which they promise their subject and addressee is, in fact, accorded to Shakespeare himself. Though the poems became public property upon publication, they remain inseparable from Shakespeare; and, though they have been given as love gifts throughout time, they belong to nobody and continue to be given and received over and over again.

The relationships depicted in the Sonnets revolve around exchanges, [End Page 315] or at least, attempted exchanges: of love, of favor, of praise. The break-down of relationships and the increase of antagonism and rivalry, which the Sonnets manifest as they progress, are often described in terms of failed, aborted, or unfair (unequal or inappropriate) exchange of gifts or love. This article will consider the nature of the poet-speaker's struggle to confer his gift upon a man of superior social status, from whom he desires reciprocation of some, perhaps many, kinds.2 In addressing the problematic notions of valuation, ownership, and obligation in the sequence, it will also suggest that the Sonnets contemplate impossibilities: the impossibility of true representation, and the impossibility of pure giving.

In one of the most recent articles to apply gift theory to Renaissance scholarship, Georgianna Ziegler remarks: "The giver of a book, who might be its 'author' or just as likely its translator, printer, or publisher, expected to be rewarded for his or her gift; in other words, the original recipient in turn became a giver, providing money, lodging, or political protection to the presenter of the book."3 As the poem or book passes [End Page 316] into the public realm, the "author" loses control over its circulation and interpretation, and, to a certain extent, his gift loses potency as it advances from coterie to common readers. In the marketplace, poetry (a text) is public property, and the intimate exchange between author and reader, poet and patron, is lost. The "gift books" which Ziegler examines gain value from being handmade, personally dedicated, and publicly unavailable. By striking contrast, the "increase" through copying metaphor, which Shakespeare applies to the procreation sonnets, defends the notion of the published text and implies that good material is wasted in the rejection of its reproduction.4 Drawing attention to the paradoxical status of the Sonnets as both public property and private monuments, Arthur F. Marotti has examined the sequence as a commodity passing between one owner and another, yet never wholly detached from the claims of the poet or the addressee. In "Shakespeare's Sonnets as Literary Property" he highlights the importance of the patron-client relationship, with all its tensions and political implications, to the questions which modern criticism has posed about the bond between the poet-speaker and the young man of the Sonnets.5 Though "the poems to the young man constantly refer to themselves as commodities," the poet reiterates the "value of his poems as objects worthy of being presented as gifts to a patron."6 Of course, in the context of the patronage relationship, gifts and commodities were difficult to separate. Depending on the balance of the two conflicting principles, the poet's gift could appear less like a gift between lovers and more like "a request for a couple of quid," as John Barrell has noted.7 [End Page 317]

Jacques Derrida has argued...

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