Forswearing Fever: Medicine, Materialism, and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147

This article considers how changes in early modern medical discourse and materialist philosophy influenced conceptions of subjectivity in Renaissance literature. The discussion is framed using Shakespeare’s sonnet 147, “My love is as a fever,” which exposes the discrepancy between the self and the body—that is, between poetic representation and the underlying material world made up of particles. The choice of fever is highly significant in this light, for this complex ailment was associated with Lucretian notions about the permeability of the body and the materiality of the soul. Parsed against these contexts, sonnet 147 emerges as a narrative in which the speaker begins by confronting his carnality and ends by asserting the role of language in counteracting that carnality, when he swears that the dark lady is “ fair.” Bolstering this reading with the work of other authors such as Montaigne and Donne, the article suggests that Shakespeare’s poem participates in a wider cultural negotiation in which a deepening interest in the materiality of the body spurs the need to reaffirm the fiction of selfhood in newly self-conscious ways.