Shakespeare in an Age of Incongruity

Sonnet 24 contains what might well be the single most extravagant conceit in all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Using painting as a vehicle for rendering the vulnerable position of an adoring lover in relation to his beloved, the poem asks us to attend not only to critical distinctions between internal and external, subjective and objective, interpretation and representation, but also, through its somewhat convoluted elaborations, to consider the means by which poetic meaning is constructed in itself:

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath stelledThy beauty's form in table of my heart,My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,And pérspective it is best painter's art.For through the painter must you see his skill,To find where your true Image pictured lies,Which in my bosom's shop is hanging still,That hath his windows glazéd with thine eyes:Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done,Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for meAre windows to my breast, wherethrough the sunDelights to peep, to gaze therein on thee    Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art;    They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Here, we find the instigating agent to be the speaker's "eye," which serves as a richly conspicuous homophone for both "I" and "aye," alternately the vocalization of affirmation, consent, and, perhaps less commonly in English, pain or discomfort (as in "Ay, Dios mío"). This compound eye-I-aye—all senses understood at once—has "played" or acted as an internal painter, "steel[ing]" or creating a representation of the beloved upon the flat "table" or board of the lover's heart. The simultaneous painting-heart is itself "framed" by the body that surrounds and contains it, and is displayed in the storefront of the speaker's "bosom." But because this painting-heart remains at once an internal organ (the seat of emotion) and an internal representation (the distillation of ideation and perception), it can only be accessed by the beloved by peering through the lover's eyes. As a result, the beloved's eyes are in fact reflected in the "windows" of the storefront (which are also, one imagines, the lover's eyes). This is already a tremendously intricate figure at octave's end, but in the final quatrain it takes an even more indulgent—even climactic—"turn" (an event very self-consciously signified by the phrase "good turns," which is itself highly suggestive of sexual reciprocity). The poem moves toward what, at first, seems to be mere recapitulation—a reflection, as it were, of what has preceded it—but which, on further consideration, "appears" (pun intended) to comment on the very circuitry of meaning. What we have is a circularity of reference, an ouroboros that manages to keep the reader as far from the actual image of the beloved—an entity invoked but never depicted—as the lover himself is kept from knowledge of the "heart" of the beloved. We know already that the lover's eyes have formed the beloved's shape, but we are meant to register a further complication (lines 10–11), wherein the beloved's gaze is returning that of the lover and thus reflecting the speaker back to himself, along with the image he has constructed of the beloved. In brief, we have a mirror reflecting into a mirror: the lover sees only a reflection of the image of his own creation on an endlessly self-replicating and self-referential cycle.

The apparent congestion of this conceit goes a long way in figuring the obsessive subjectivity of the smitten lover, for whom ideation almost involuntarily revolves around the object of his or her preoccupation. But it also serves to underscore its own virtuosic development, placing readers in the position of the admiring lover, at least insofar as we are invited to appreciate the enchanting wit and felicity of a perfectly wrought conceit. Indeed, sonnet 24 nearly insists that we peer through the speaker's "eyes" to attend to the conceit's incremental logic and the...