Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (review)

The idea that the economy constitutes an objective field of human activity, that it can somehow be differentiated and segregated from subjective experience, is a specifically modern illusion. It was not shared by the people of early modern Europe, and it does not seem credible now. In the analysis of culture, this illusion produced two dialectically related theoretical errors. First, the tendency to isolate culture from economics, to pretend that culture can be understood without any reference to economic factors. And second, the temptation to reduce culture to economics, to assume that cultural phenomena are merely manifestations of underlying economic forces.

The conflict between these two errors largely defined twentieth-century cultural analysis. But the postmodern expansion in the role of the economy, its colonization of all experience, is now encouraging many critics of early modern literature to concentrate on the homologies between economic modes of thought and such intimate, interior experiences as romantic love. In the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, the concept of the economy expands so widely as to become all-encompassing.Christopher Warley's first book is an important addition to the corpus of "new economic criticism." Warley dexterously positions himself beyond the dichotomy between materialist and idealist approaches. He documents the emergence of the economic as a discrete field, focusing on its gradual disengagement from other modes of subjective experience. The sonnet has always been regarded as providing an exemplary forum for the study of subjectivity, because it forces the most intimate thoughts and emotions into the most rigid of formal structures. This book argues that several of the most famous English early modern sonnet sequences exhibit a tension between the idealized object of the speaker's desire—Spenser's feudal utopia, Sidney's Stella, Shakespeare's young man—and the protocapitalist language in which that desire is expressed.

This is innovative work. Many earlier analyses of subjectivity in the sonnet have limited themselves to the psychoanalytic terminology employed in Joel Fineman's massively influential Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (1986). As a result, the economic implications of sonnets' rhetoric have often been neglected: Warley notes that Fineman does not so much as mention Marx. He aims to rectify this anomaly by emphasizing the penetration of subjectivity by social and economic factors: "Rather than Fineman's term 'poetic subjectivity,' . . . we should instead speak of social distinction" (6).

The Petrarchan sonnet was introduced to English readers by Tottel's Miscellany which, as Warley observes, was a compilation designed to be sold. The English sonnet was thus, in its origin, "a commodified form" (54) constructed according to the demands of exchange value. He then embarks on a series of illuminating interpretations based on this premise, revealing the constitutive contradictions within the best-known early modern sonnet sequences. In each case, the speaker's aspiration to an ideal source of meaning, or logos,is undermined by the economic figures through which it is conveyed.

In Anne Lok's A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner,the attempt to interpret subjective experience by reference to the Calvinist God is repeatedly thwarted by the formal constraints inherited from Tottel's edition. Warley claims that "By adopting a form of the sonnet found in Tottel, Lok is thus participating in the relocation of authority out of social institutions and into commodity ownership" (54). Lok's poetic paraphrases of Calvin's sermons, which she describes in the dedication as putting them "'into an Englishe box'" (55), inevitably adapts their significance in accordance with the formal requirements of her chosen poetic mode, and the sonnet becomes a vehicle through which the nonaristocratic writer can aspire to modes of thought and feeling previously considered exclusively noble.

Although Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion attempt to protect aristocratic ideology from the taint of trade by projecting economic exchange onto "'tradefull Merchants'" (110), the way in which the speaker describes his lady departs from Petrarch's ideal nobility, and the objectified focus of his...