Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays (review)

In David Schalkwyk's rich and provocative new book, Shakespeare's sonnets become the work of a playwright and not a poet. Our traditional account of the sonnets' composition shows the dramatist rehearsing the role of gentleman-poet during the years of plague that shut down the theaters. And this historical narrative conforms to prominent critical views of the sonnets as Petrarchan lyrics participating in—and, in Joel Fineman's view, fundamentally altering—a long history of descriptive praise poetry. One of the many strengths of Schalkwyk's book is its complete overturning of this familiar story. According to this study, Shakespeare's sonnets are engaged not in description but in performance; they are not expressions of solitary speech but forms of social interaction; they are not exclusively or even primarily poems but compressed versions of plays. The grounds for these claims are philosophical: Schalkwyk believes that there is no fundamental difference between the language of the poems and that of the plays. For him, the sonnets as well as the plays can best be understood within the framework of performative language and speech acts. In place of Fineman's reliance on Lacan and Derrida, Schalkwyk proposes Austin and Wittgenstein as the crucial figures in teaching us to read and respond to these poems.

Schalkwyk's purpose, however, is not ultimately theoretical or philosophical so much as biographical: he wants to "make sense of these sonnets' remarkable engagement with a world that is now irrecoverable by surrounding them with a different kind of fiction: Shakespeare's own—his plays" (28). The idea, then, is to illuminate if not resolve the enigmatic and sketchy nature of the sonnets by looking at fuller, "embodied" moments in the plays that seem to reproduce the social situations of the poems. In this respect the sonnets function as Shakespeare's version of Leonardo's pen-and-ink drawings—they at once capture the design and detail of their master's art and also serve as preliminary studies for the fully realized work. And this comparison makes clear what is only implicit in Schalkwyk's book but deserves to be stated more boldly: not only do the plays shed light on the social world of the sonnets, but the exquisite subtlety of the sonnets forces us to rethink many aspects of the plays.

Schalkwyk has identified five thematic rubrics—performatives, embodiment, interiority, names, and transformations—through which he explores the relationship between certain sonnets and plays. The early chapters treat the more literal, less abstract relations between the language of the poems and the plays. In his first chapter, on performatives, Schalkwyk traces the use of speech acts in the sonnets, As You Like It, and Antony and Cleopatra, and reveals the ways in which Shakespeare seems to believe in the power of words to create new social bonds and worlds. Just as Rosalind and Cleopatra deploy performatives to alter their relations to their beloveds, so Schalkwyk insists that the language of the sonnets is meant to transform the relationship between the speaker—purposefully tagged the "player-poet"—and his addressee.

This parallel in language use gives way in chapter 2 to a discussion of what happens when sonnets are actually incorporated into the plays themselves, as we find in Love's Labor's Lost, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet. Schalkwyk's purpose here is to emphasize the role of the "addressee," who is no longer absent, and usually no longer silent, once the sonnet is actually performed. Schalkwyk does not believe in the silence of the poems' addressee, and one of the results of his critical project is to draw out this voice. The author seems to believe, in fact, that Shakespeare's sonnets were themselves meant to be performed—he refers repeatedly to the poems' "original" performances and regards their present silence as "infuriating" (58). This claim is never substantiated...