ANTONY EASTHOPE 53

Same text, different readings: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94

Resting on the foundation of Wimsatt and Beardsley’s 1946 essay on ’The in- tentional fallacy‘, the dominant form of literary criticism remains confident that the identity of a literary text is fixed once and for all by the author‘s intention as it is realised in ’the words on the page’. Some recent criticism - post- structuralism and deconstruction - has drawn on Saussure’s linguistic distinction between the signifier and the signified to challenge the prevailing account of these words on the page. It has been claimed that a text is open to a plurality of readings, even that it lacks any identity at all except as one is constructed for it by the reader, Here I shall try out the conventional view that meaning is fixed in language by the author in order to show it won’t work and so we must accept a text as always open to different readings in the present. But I shall go on equally to argue against the counter-assumption that a play, novel or poem means only what you want it to. In doing so I shall take as example Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, ‘They that have powre to hurt, and will doe none’. This has become one of the most frequently discussed in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence because of its apparent ambivalence and ambiguity. ’ My account will take up a particular debate but on!y to suggest that the poem exemplifies in an extreme form a typical - and I think insuperable - difficulty for conventional literary criticism.

In the first place this text is only there for us as a potential audience because it becomes available through certain social institutions and corresponding modes of interpretation. However it may have circulated around 1600 in a coterie of friends and patrons, today it lives almost exclusively within academic institutions, in higher education and some GCE examinations. Even within such academic institutions the text is now construed for entirely different purposes according to different disciplines. It may be used by a historian as evidence for contemporary attitudes towards the aristocracy or by a linguist working on the syntax of English in the early seventeenth century. Literary criticism assumes that Sonnet 94 is to be interpreted principally as fiction and so with special attention to its expressive and formal features. These are the grounds on which it is presented here:

They that haue powre to hurt, and will doe none, That doe not do the thing, they most do showe, Who mouing others, are themselues as stone, Vnmooued, could, and to temptation slow: They rightly do inherrit heauens graces,

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And husband natures ritches from expence, They are the Lords and owners of their faces, Others, but stewards of their excellence: The sommers flowre is to the sommer sweet, Though to it selfe, it onely liue and die, But if that flowre with base infection meete, The basest weed out-braues his dignity:

For sweetest things turne sowrest by their deedes, Lillies that fester, smell far worse than weeds.

Critical debate over this sonnet is well summed up by W. G. Ingram and Theodore Redpath: 'Some commentators take it as an ideal portrait, others as a highly critical one' (p. 214). Among those who read it as simple praise are J. W. Lever (it honours 'the main qualities . . . in a model prince', p. 217), Leslie Hotson (the character is 'that of the ideal king', p. 143) and Paul Ramsey. It has been read as ironic condemnation of the egotistical self-sufficiency of the Fair Friend (and perhaps the class he represents) by L. C. Knights in 1934 and William Empson in 1935 ('a piece of grave irony', p. 89), and by others since then. Ingram and Redpath state a common view now when they say it is 'am- bivalent . . . expressing both' attitudes (p. 214). It would help a great deal to decide whether the poem is ironic or unironic if we knew how to take 'rightly' in 1.5. Stephen Booth says the word can mean: (1) truly, indeed; (2) in proper manner; (3) rightfully, justly (p. 306). Ambivalence would be resolved if we could be sure of the simple affirmative, the first sense (Paul Ramsey is, and finds a 'surge of conviction in the "rightly" of line ?', p. 162). But if 'rightly' means 'in proper manner' then it is clearly open to the classic form of irony in which an apparent meaning masks the real meaning. In this case 'rightly' means 'in an improper manner' or even, through sarcastic reversal, 'wrongly'. (After claiming the poem is ambivalent, Ingram and Redpath go on in their paraphrase of it to make it clearly unironic, rendering 'rightly' as 'do indeed inherit', p. 214.)

The meaning of a text is not to be decided from single words alone but from the context in which they occur. However, both straight and ironic readings can find support in Sonnet 94 - as Edward Hubler says of the poem, 'Primarily it is the articulation of parts which puzzles' (p. 103). A straight reading can point to the opening line, with its sense of power under control, and to the developing idea that 'They' move others but are not moved themselves, that they inherit heaven's graces, conserve nature's riches, are masters of their face and feelings. To this virtuous ideal the sestet is meant only as a warning of possible corruption. An ironic reading stresses that the second line hints at a desire to hurt and to do which is barely restrained, that being 'as stone' while exciting others suggests cold-heartedness, that being 'slow' to temptation does not keep you immune from it, that owning your face like a lord implies over- regard for your own beauty. The sestet therefore predicts likely corruption when

Same text, difterent readings: Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 55

repressed wishes break out, If, for the conventional paradigm, the immediate context of Sonnet 94 leaves its meaning undecidable, the strategy then is to widen the context of reading by referring to other sonnets in the sequence, other works by Shakespeare, other Elizabethan texts. J. W. Lever, for example, relates Sonnet 94 to the Marriage group of sonnets and to Elizabethan conceptions of kingship to confirm his argument that a reading of the text for irony 'would surely miss its mark' (p. 219); William Empson evidences his ironic reading from the history plays and Measure for Measure (pp. 102-15). But which sense of context is relevant? How do we decide?

Whichever way he or she argues over the sonnet the conventional literary critic claims it's what the author meant. The principle was laid down by Empson (though not with reference to Sonnet 94, since his view is that i t is definitely ironic). The seventh type of ambiguity occurs 'when the two meanings of the word . . . are the two opposite meanings defined by the context, so that the total effect is to show a fundamental division in the writer's mind'.' Whether advocating a straight reading, an ironic reading, or both at once, the commentators seek to guarantee their reading as fixed in the authorial intention. J . W. Lever says that any 'undertone of ambiguity' in the poem's epithets ('cold', 'slow') comes from 'personal bitterness, due to the predicament of the I'oet himself' (p . 219); Philip Martin argues of the various meanings found in the text that 'all are valid - and intentional' (pp. 32-3); for Stephen Booth the poem's ambivalence is 'a stylistic mirror of the speaker's indecision' (p . 305).

I t is assumed that intention is fixed by the words on the page because, as Wimsatt and Beardsley say, the poem is 'in language, the peculiar possession of the public'.' This is less reassuring than i t sounds. Empson points out that simply four terms in the sonnet (flower, lily, 'owner' and addressee) may be either alike or opposed, and this alone 'yields 4096 possible movements of thought' (p. S9), a view John Crowe Ransom answers by saying, surely correctly, that the poem cannot be thus 'infinitely qualified' but must have 'a fair sense' (pp. 330-1). Possible meanings and connotations even for the 107 words of 'Sonnet 94' arc. virtually infinite and have to be limited by being strung together according to a coherent sense of their context. Conventional criticism recognises this alright, but it goes on to suppose that the author's intention can fix context somewhere out there in language in advance of a reading in the present. It thus fails to see that context cannot be defined apart from the present purposes for which the text is being read. Whcther 'rightly' is read as unironic or ironic turns on whether the poem is read now as a form of courtly discourse, praise for a model prince, or anti-courtly discourse, sardonic condemnation of the Fair Friend and his class. And this turns again on why we are reading the text now. Knights and Empson produced an ironic and politicised reading of the sonnet partly because they saw i t from a position in some association with the 1930s left.

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Theirs, like all readings, was a reading in the present, as a linguistic account of 'the words on the page' will demonstrate.

A written text is not a matter of notations only, that is, of black marks on white paper. According to Saussure's Course in General Linguistics all words, spoken and written, must be analysed through the distinction between signifier and signified. The signifier is the shaped sound and the signified the concept or meaning. Their relation is not natural or inherent but is the effect only of social convention in the form of the communal system of a language. For example, in speech the same signifier or sound image can be lined up with the meanings (1) mother (2) sea within the system of the French language (mer, m6re) but almost exactly the same sound taken up within the convention of English would lead to the signifieds (1) a female horse (2) head of a municipal corporation and possibly even (3) the surname of a famous Hollywood producer (writing differentiates mare, mayor and Meyer). Once the commonsense idea of words is broken down into signifiers and signifieds we can no longer suppose that intentions are directly and simply conveyed from author to reader. No intention can be attached to a signifier in 1600 and come out exactly the same in 1986. Of course to read a text as language at all is to take it up in terms of human intention. But intention has to be understood as collective or social both for the sender and receiver of a message. At a railway station, when I see BOLTON I do not wonder what intention the individual sign-painter had in mind since I can produce adequate sense from the signifier according to the semantic system of English. I can even do this with a signifier when there has been no prior intention to communicate meaning at all, when for instance I read an accidentally broken sign as an instruction: BOLT ON.

Fixed identity/no identity

The previous argument does not mean that the category of intention disappears forever. But it does mean that no intention - and particularly no individual intention - can govern the signifieds produced by the reader from the text within a framework or context of reading. In this respect the reader is active in producing meanings in the present. This is the case with all texts, but, it is arguable, it applies in a special way to literary texts - texts responsive to a literary reading - because they appear more able than others to engage with contexts of reading unforeseen by their author^.^ Sonnet 94 is part of a sequence addressed to the Fair Friend and meant to be read by a small group, and this, if we think of the poem as a message, is the audience it was directed at. Yet for nearly four centuries the text has answered the demands of quite different readers in different contexts of reading, including many who have happily read Sonnet 94 as a love lyric to a woman. The transhistorical potential of a literary

Same text, different readings: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 57

text is evidence that a context of reading can produce meanings from it beyond any supposedly originating but actually undecideable authorial intention.

If the passive submission of reader to author gives way to an active relation between text and reader, the work becomes open to a plurality of readings. For Sonnet 94 one can sketch in outline some of the contexts of reading which are socially available now.

1. A Marxist reading is already anticipated by some critics. Empson suggests that ’They’ connotes the Elizabethan bourgeoisie who, newly arrived, are replacing the traditional feudal aristocracy. The poem’s addressee is a ’vulgar careerist’ (p. 92), attracting some of the Elizabethans’s ’feelings about the Machiavellian‘ (p. 90). A vocabulary of social power - ’inherrit’, ’ritches’, ’Lords’, ‘stewards’, ’base’, ’dignity’ - invokes and condemns the puritan self-righteousness (’They rightly do inherrit heauens graces’) and entrepreneurial self-reliance (’Lords and owners of their faces’) of this new class, the British gentry. But such a historical reading in terms of the ideological formations of the Elizabethan/ Jacobean period can only take place on the basis of a sense of context which recognises also its own present existence. To read the text for its ideology then is inevitably to intervene within ideology now. Just as Knights and Empson in their accounts asserted a radical position in the 1930s, so now those critics who read the text without irony as portrait of a model prince re-affirm their own present conservatism.

2 . A poem may be read as phantasy, and so within a framework of the psychoanalytic understanding of subjectivity. Commentators who refer casually to the Fair Friends narcissism might have pursued this concept at least as far as the psychoanalytic account of the connection between narcissism and sub- limation. Through the process of sublimation sexual drive may be re-directed narcissistically onto the self. The Fair Friend loves the beauty of his own face and appears confident he can remain stone even while provoking others sex- ually.’ But the poem shows the reader the precarious basis of the Friends self- possession, for the more strongly sexual drive is sublimated, the more strongly it may retrieve its sexual direction, the lily becoming worse than the weed. This context of reading emphasises the viewpoint offered by the text to the reader. Seeing through the Friends self-deceptions to his real nature the reader is afforded a position both of phantasy identification with the Friend and of mastery of his mastery since we know the truth he doesn’t. Its pleasurable effect, then, might be compared to that in Fitzgerald’s novel, when we are allowed identification with Gatsby by the secure clear-sightedness of Nick Carraway.

3. A feminist reading would seek out the text’s version of gender relations. It might note that the poem is addressed to someone not clearly discriminated in a pre-determined role within gender stereotypes since it has been read as spoken to a woman and to a man. Such a reading might then perhaps refer

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the text to the ease with which Elizabethan dramatic heroines change gender roles. At another level a feminist reading could draw on psychoanalysis to explore how questions of masculinity and femininity are brought into play by the connotations of the text. One conclusion possible is that the Friend's narcissism, a quality the patriarchal tradition defines as feminine, is held in tension with the traditionally masculine desire to know and master. Is this why male lilies that turn narcissistically feminine are seen as worse than female weeds?

Readings and contexts of reading obviously overlap, as do a psychoanalytic and feminist reading here. Once the fixity of the author's intention is surrendered, it has to be admitted that a plurality of socially determined contexts for reading is opened up, including others that can't be predicted in the (hopefully intermin- able) future of human history. In this respect the lonely hour of the final reading never comes.

The power of the literary text to give rise to significantly different readings has been taken by some to warrant a view that the literary text has no identity at all except as one is produced by the context of reading. In a widely influential essay published in 1973 Raymond Williams contrasted a view of the 'work of art as object' with a view 'of art as practice'. He argued that literary texts 'are not objects but notations', notations that 'have to be interpreted in an active way, according to particular conventions'. As a consequence, he urges, 'we have to break from the notion of isolating the object and then discovering its components. On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions'. This position is surely correct in insisting that texts cannot be understood in separation from practices, the forms of social organisation in which they are produced and reproduced, and I have tried to show this above by indicating the institutions of interpretation we must work within before we can even reach a discussion of different contexts of literary reading for a Shakespeare sonnet. But Williams means more than this. The text is said to consist of 'notations', and concern with these, the basis on which the components of the object might be isolated, is placed in direct opposition ('On the contrary') to analysing institutions of interpretation: 'we should look not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice'. Perhaps this is a fine print reading but the position has been developed elsewhere, for example by Tony Bennett in Formalism and Marxism: 'The text is not the issuing source of meaning. It is a site on which the production of meaning - of variable readings - takes place'.'Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory, a book which has sold over sixty thousand copies since it was published in 1983, does not deny that texts have identities but he does deny that there is any such thing as literature. There can be no systematic study of the literary and no method for that study because there is no object such as literature: 'The unity of the object is as illusory as

Same text, different readings: Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 59

the unity of the method. "Literature", as Roland Barthes once remarked, "is what gets taught".'*

Eagleton's is a more general statement but clearly Bennett's account coincides with that of Williams: the text is empty - notations, a site - the absence of iden- tity not a presence; hence literary study is at most the practice of producing readings, not analysing texts. Somewhat surprisingly this position adopted in some left criticism in Britain has close affinities with that advocated in America by deconstruction. In Deconstruction and Criticism, a book including work by Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom argues that 'there are no texts, but only interpretations', and further than 'I only know a text, any text, because I know a reading of it, someone else's reading, my own reading, a composite reading'. Bloom's view contrasts with Bennett's. Absence of identity in a text is used by Bloom to licence a libertarian and strongly individualist play with different personal readings while Bennett argues that readings are never freely individual since they are always produced culturally and socially.

Nevertheless, Williams and Bennett share with Bloom the assumption that texts have no real identity and so there can only be readings. It rather looks as though these attempts to break with conventional literary criticism have perpetuated the form of argument at work there, either the text in itself or readings in themselves. Since the conventional view is that the text has a fully present identity because it is saturated with authorial intention, some radical criticism, in challenging the privilege of authorial intention, has gone on to deny all identity to the text as well. In concluding here I want to reject this either/or structure of analysis - either fixed identity (presence) or no identity (absence) - and argue instead that the identity of the literary text is more complex than the either/or supposes, that it is in fact a relative identity dispersed across three registers or levels of language and not fully present/(or absent) in any.

The view that the text is only notations or a site dematerialises the text and ignores the fact that it has a fixed identity at the level of the signifier. Whether as writing or print a text occurs always as these signifiers (and not others) in this linear order, and so a text is able to persist when it is not being read, Of course at this level the text has no signifieds attached to it, but it has a 'silent identity' which makes possible certain meanings and not others when it is read, meanings determined within the semantic system of the language. In Sonnet 94, for example, line 5 would open on to a different possible range of signifieds if it appeared as 'they nightly do inherrit heauens graces'. This level of language is the traditional home of conventional literary criticism, which has usefully worked over many literary texts in these terms. But, as was argued above, the identity of a text is not fixed by the system of meanings in a language because the text must also be construed according to a context if it is to produce coherent meaning. An order of meaning must be picked out from the prolifera-

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tion of possible meanings attaching to the words, both singly and together, and this can only be done by means of a framework or context of reading in the present. Conventional criticism has tried to disavow this level by trying to collapse the active and variable production of meanings from the text back into the level of dictionary meaning. But if this cannot be done and we as readers help to make meaning, it does not follow that we can make any meaning we want. The literary text has a relative identity. To acknowledge this is to stress both that there can be different readings of a text and at the same time that they are all readings of that text.

Notes

See (in alphabetical order): S. Booth (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New Haven, 1977); W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1968); L. Hotson, M r W. H. (London, 1964); E. Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Westport, Conn., 1976); W. G. Ingram and T. Redpath (eds.), Shakespeare‘s Sonnets (London, 1967); L. C. Knights, Explorations (Harmondsworth, 1964); J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1978); P. Martin, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge University Press, 1972); P. Ramsey, The Fickle Glass (New York, 1979); J. Crowe Ransom, ‘Mr Empson’s muddles‘, Southern Review 4 (1938-9), pp. 322-39. Seven Types of Ambiguity (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 192.

The Verbal Icon (London, 1970), p. 5. See A. Easthope, ’Literature, history, and the materiality of the text’, Literature and History 9 (spring 1983), pp. 28-37. See Glossary entries for ‘do’ and ‘thing‘ in Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (New York, 1960). ’Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory’, New Left Review 82 (November/December 1973), pp. 3-17, esp. pp. 15-16. Formalism and Marxism (London, 1979), p. 174. Literary Theory (Oxford, 1983), p. 197. H. Bloom et al. (eds.), Deconstruction and Criticism (London, 1979), p. 7, p. 8.

Manchester Polytechnic