Of Absent Presences: Shakespeare’s Revenant Sonnets and The Tower of London

1. Introduction, Absent Presences and Revenant Words

In the introduction to her edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler asks the following question: “With respect to the Sonnets- a text now almost four hundred years old- what can a commentary offer that is new?” (17). Indeed, that was and still is the question that every Shakespeare scholar attempting to write about these sonnets must ask herself. What is there left to see? The endeavor of this study seeks to suggest that there is one last frontier not yet fully explored in these texts: the element of setting. The purpose of this study is to locate Shakespeare’s setting for the sonnets in the Tower of London, examining the absent presence of setting in the sonnets, looking at the early modern climate of anxiety surrounding the Tower, as well as source-texts that link Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the Tower. I will explore the sonnets as a haunted text with living words through an analysis of performative speech in relationship to the absent present setting. I will evoke and implement the term “revenant” in relationship to Shakespeare’s haunted, spectral text. This study will focus exclusively on the young man sonnets (1-126) and will look at the works of George North and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey as source texts for Shakespeare’s poems. I will examine the objects in the sonnets that create an absent presence of setting and examine the rhetoric that contributes to that setting. This study will provide a closer examination of rhetorical features in sonnets 63, 62, and 126 that connect the texts to North, Howard, as well as the objects that point to the Tower of London as Shakespeare’s setting.

In this essay, I am using the term “absent presence” as an allusion to a concept nuanced by post-modern French philosopher Jacques Derrida in relationship to setting, performative speech and haunting, spectral words in the sonnets. I postulate that an “absent presence” is being executed by Shakespeare to create a haunted, revenant text. The term “absent presence” was defined by Derrida to describe a concept discussed by Plato’s account of Socrates’ notion in the Phaedrus (Frentz, 259). Socrates expands on the idea that written text is always inherently problematic because the author of the text is an absent presence, a paradigm that can complicate and/or misconstrue the idea of the text as opposed to orally delivered rhetoric (Frentz, 259). If the absent author signifies a gap, and in fact, a death, the only way the author can reverse this effect is to create a bridge of revenant words, a way to make the words and the author come back to life, a haunting of the text in action and performance that it might breathe again anew. This study seeks to examine the correlation of absent presence in the sonnets in relationship to Shakespeare’s setting in The Tower of London. To be clear, I do not claim that Shakespeare himself was ever imprisoned in the Tower. Furthermore, I do not assert that Shakespeare and the speaker-poet are analogous. What I am suggesting is that the Shakespeare as absent author is important to note. The absence of the author creates a present absence in the text as Derrida has theorized. This authorial gap is what Socrates discussed. However, it is the speaker-poet that haunts us in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a persona that is decidedly not Shakespeare.

If there was ever an author capable of writing haunting, spectral words, it was William Shakespeare. The question is, how and why are haunting, spectral words a necessity in the sonnets? Shakespeare’s sequence is “the only Renaissance sonnet cycle written by a professional playwright,” (Pfister, 210). If ever there was an opportunity to explore the particulars of setting in a sonnet sequence, it is in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Furthermore, the predominance “performance and performativity” language in the sonnets suggests that Shakespeare was doing something uniquely his own (Pfister, 224). Consider the performativity found in lines nine and ten of Sonnet 62, “But when my glass shows me myself indeed, / Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,” (Vendler, 291). These lines indicate to the reader that the speaker-poet is before a mirror and the glass is actively showing him a reflection. Also consider the last lines of Sonnet 126 before the absent couplet, “Her [Nature’s] audit (though delayed) answered must be / And her quietus is to render thee,” (Vendler, 533). The young man sequence ends in action, the action of the rendering of the speaker-poet, an action directly tied to the speaker-poet’s location in the Tower of London, and his subsequent execution that I am postulating in this study. I am not suggesting that setting is absent from sonnet sequences of the past, moreover, I am suggesting that Shakespeare’s sonnets are simply more performative than the sonnet sequences of his predecessors. It is this performative speech and performativity that creates a present absence in the sonnets, that allows the words to inform the reader in ways otherwise impossible and creates an invocation, an invitation for the text to haunt us. It is precisely in this haunting that the words live, becoming a bridge spanning space, time, and ideals across centuries. The words become revenant for the speaker-poet, a second spectral life for the reader.

I am choosing to refer to Shakespeare’s text as “revenant” for reasons specific to the age of the text and to the absent presence of author and setting that we have previously discussed. Consider the term “revenant” as used by Pfister in relationship to Shakespeare’s sonnets and his comparison to a poem by Keats’ with performative speech, “Each reading of the poem [Keat’s poem] became to me a summoning of the dead poet, the appearance of a revenant, complete with ghostly voice and body,” (208). We must consider the life of words and how they are experienced when studying a text as old as Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence. The words have different lives. The words are living to the author as she or he writes them. The words are living to the early modern reader contemporaneous with the author. Over four-hundred years later, the words come back to life again and haunt us from across the reaches of time. The sonnets and take on a new life, returning from the dead. Our experience of them is defined by their rebirth across time. Absent presence is a greater factor to overcompensate because of how much time has passed. There are more gaps to fill in across time, and no author to explain what he meant in the moments of intense rhetorical ambiguity. Two definitions of “revenant” are relevant here. First, “A person who returns from the dead; a reanimated corpse; a ghost,” (OED, noun, 1 a). Second, “That has returned from, or as if from, the dead; resembling or reminiscent of a ghost,” (OED, adj. B). Both definitions and senses of the word are applicable because the speaker-poet of the sonnets returns to the reader as a ghost, and likewise, the performative speech and actions of the speaker-poet return as well. The very words as signifiers of time bridge a gap of absent presence and serves to reanimate the texts as we read and experience them once more.

Shakespeare is not the first sonneteer to make use of setting, however, he is the first to do so such that the words and setting become revenant. Fludernik discusses Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s poem, “Prisoned in Windsor” as an early topographical poem in which setting is important (114). Surrey is the same Henry Howard this study links to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Fludernik also examines the “Fourth Song” in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella as “a temporally and spatially anchored sequence of events,” in which setting encodes a “virtual story” into the poem (116-7). However, in the case of Shakespeare’s sonnets Fludernik relies far too heavily on an attempt to prescribe a narrative to the text (117). A narrative cannot live without setting, a facet elided by scholars in relationship to Shakespeare’s sonnets. I would add that without defining a setting, attributing a narrative to these poems is not just problematic, but a somewhat dangerous method of interpretation. In a sonnet sequence with a predominance of objects and performative speech, attributing a narrative becomes speculative at best without a sense of setting. Without taking setting into account, it renders the performative speech and object nearly meaningless and/or utterly incidental.

Scholars noting a predominance of performative speech in Shakespeare’s sonnets have yet to connect that speech to a cohesive setting. Manfred Pfister’s essay, “’As an unperfect actor on the stage’: Notes Towards a Definition of Performance and Performativity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” impressively identifies and locates a bevy of performative speech. Pfister notes dialogue with imagined reactions in the sonnets, indicating the type of isolation in the Tower that I am asserting in this study (216). Similarly, Pfister examines the instances of internal dialogue in the sonnets, such as in Sonnet 35 (218). The madness of these internal dialogues or monologues is compared by Pfister to Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth, and is described by Pfister thusly, “This speaker is frequently puzzled, at a loss, contradicting himself and aware of contradicting himself” (218). Pfister identifies Shakespeare’s method as an early form of Kleist’s theorem “the gradual production of ideas while speaking,” (218). This gradual production of ideas is a process that allows the words to have a second life on the page. They are words in motion towards an end, words that have the ability to haunt us and to lead us towards the end of which the author is writing us, and the end that the speaker-poet arrives at: his death.

 Words in motion and words that are doing things create an absent presence in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The words become active and revenant for the reader as if they were performed by an actor on a stage. This absent presence of setting and negates the absent present author, establishes the connection of the living words to the setting, and bridges the divide between words on a page and action occurring. According to Pfister, personal and possessive pronouns are employed by Shakespeare in his Sonnets “with an uncommon frequency, which amounts to more than 11% of the sum total of all the words in the cycle,” (211-2). Pfister explains that this is “Shakespeare, the experienced dramatist,” setting a scene in the sonnets (211).  Pfister notices the predominance of onomatopoeia as performative speech in connection to the clock in Sonnet 12 using “monosyllabic words, re-enforced by a double alliteration linking them,” as words that “actually ‘counts the clock’” to the beat of the words (222). Regarding written correspondence, Pfister notes the meta-aspects of the sonnets where writing materials are used as performative speech (214). What Pfister fails to do is to examine the absent present setting that the living words elucidate, a setting that explains why written correspondence and writing materials are necessary: the setting in the Tower of London.

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, absent presence as setting and performative speech creates a haunted, revenant text, a text of living words able to bridge several divisions through space and time. The speaker-poet alludes to the poet-predecessors locked in the Tower, and the absent presence allows connectivity between the predecessors and the speaker poet in Shakespeare’s sonnets. The speaker-poet is absent from the reader, and similarly, Shakespeare as author is also absent from the reader. According to Guthrie, “For Derrida, one’s mortality was always present in writing’s iterability. The reader was always haunted by the author, even when the author was physically alive,” (520). In fact, Derrida was even involved with censorship and prison writings within his own lifetime (Williams, 14). The revenant words act, finally, as a bridge between our post-modern understanding of the world and that of Shakespeare’s London, a time when censorship and authorship meant something very different than what we know today.

1. The Tower of London

The climate of Shakespeare’s London was influenced by his predecessors, authors that had been imprisoned in the Tower and some, that had been executed there as well. Sir Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534) written in the Tower before his execution set the stage for an early modern awareness of the Tower as a place of persecution and oppression (Deiter, 32).[i] ^{& [ii]} Tottel’s Miscellany, which would include authors who had been imprisoned in the Tower, such as Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt would contribute to the environment of anxiety surrounding the Tower in Shakespeare’s London.[iii] It is likely that Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) would have been “the major first reading of near-contemporary poets to which the young Shakespeare, Sidney, Edmund Spencer and John Donne were exposed,” (Holton and MacFaul, xxv). Shakespeare would have been well-versed in the history of writers imprisoned in the Tower of London.

To fully understand Shakespeare’s Sonnets, it is necessary to also understand the early modern climate in which Shakespeare was writing them, a time when London not only had been but was still a place of heavy censorship and where writers were subject to imprisonment at any moment. Holinshed’s Chronicles, an established source text for Shakespeare’s plays, demonstrated a knowledge of the dangers of censorship in Holinshed’s “Dedication to Sir William Cecil,” (third edition, 1586/7) (Kelen, 706).[iv]  Furthermore, the royal proclamations of Elizabeth I’s reign in 1569 and 1570 issued “against the buying, selling or owning of seditious books,” contributed to the Renaissance nervousness of censorship in England (Kelen, 717). Scholars have noted a “peak” in executions in the Tower in 1588 and 1594, years when Shakespeare was possibly writing the sonnets (Rowse, 90).[v] Tower writings prior to Shakespeare’s Renaissance England, as well as the perpetuation of censorship, imprisonment and execution during his lifetime contribute to the climate in which he wrote the sonnets, and the setting that Shakespeare chose for the sonnets as well. It is highly unlikely that a sonnet sequence about the injustices of Tower imprisonment would have ever made it past the censors for publication. This explains the need for Shakespeare to embed the setting for the sonnets as an absent presence encoded obliquely and ambiguously.

We know from Shakespeare’s plays, notably Richard II and Richard III that Shakespeare was interested in the Tower of London as a setting.[vi] However, writing about the Tower as a setting in a history play and writing about the Tower as a place of imprisonment for contemporary traitors and censorship are two very different endeavors. The latter of course being much more dangerous and perhaps one worthy of being imprisoned in the Tower for daring to write about it. It is in this climate of danger that we find Shakespeare’s Sonnets and their setting in the Tower, an undertaking in which a writer would require a healthy degree of ambiguity and absent presence in which to survive.[vii] Dieter notes representations of the “Tower as a symbol of resistance to the government” as “necessarily oblique,” to “avoid censorship punishment,” (Dieter, 32-3). It is exactly this oblique absent presence that Shakespeare achieves in the sonnets, giving his readers all the information possible to site the Tower of London as his setting without naming it to avoid the censors from preventing the document’s publication, and/or possibly to avoid imprisonment.[viii]

Shakespeare could not write about the Tower of London as the setting for his sonnets in a direct way. Instead, he carefully constructs the setting of the Tower using objects like he might on a theatre stage without Tower walls. Absent presences are pervasive in the objects particular to setting that Shakespeare was able to name. These objects are items that would have been found in the Tower of London.  As this study has established, writers imprisoned in the Tower were still writing. Thomas More is an example of this, and it has even been documented that his writing materials were confiscated as a form of punishment (Anhurt, 171). Bell notices the absence or “hiatus” between Sonnets 103 and 104, suggesting that, “a period of time has passed,” (462). This hiatus could be indicative of a confiscation of writing materials like what happened to More. The “glass” present in Sonnet 3, 62, and 77 is another object that is likely to have been provided to a person imprisoned in the Tower of London.[ix]  Sonnet 77 is an epitome of the object-Tower of London paradigm, which includes “thy glass” (l.1), “thy dial” (l.2), and “this book” (l.3) (Vendler, 347). Prisoners in the Tower were allowed to read books, and some inscriptions from these books have survived.[x] It is possible that small clocks were located in individual Tower cells, however, we know that the Salt Tower housed the famous astronomical clock and calendar created by Draper of Brystow in 1561 (Rowse, 99). Through these objects that are present, an absent Tower setting is established, and readers are tasked with filling in the blanks required for censorship, or as Clarke writes, “continually gesturing to an outside that is left for the reader to construct,” (194). We recall Pfister’s connections to performative speech and the objects in the sonnets, performative speech that allows the text to haunt us as revenant on the page (214). The combination of objects and performative speech allow the reader to see the absent presence that Shakespeare has intentionally left ambiguous, the Tower as his setting.

The absent presence of the Tower of London as Shakespeare’s setting for his sonnets is pervasive in the tone of his poems. A tone of spatial location and impending death is achieved in the the young man sonnets in Shakespeare’s choice of language within the confinement of the sonnet form. The repetitious, typically fourteen-line sonnets, most in iambic pentameter with the Shakespearean rhyme scheme is a confining space in which the author moves words. The sonnets serve as little cells, each one variant and each one a mirror of the one before like days of imprisonment within the same space: a room within the Tower of London. Within that confined sonnet space, Shakespeare writes in an  absent presence about the Tower. The word “imprison’d” is used twice (Sonnet 52 & 58); the word “prisoner” is found in Sonnet 5; “death” is found thirteen times (Sonnets 6. 18, 22, 32, 45, 55, 64, 66, 72, 81, 99 & 107); respectively “death’s” is found four times (Sonnets 6, 13, 30 & 73); “decay” is found eleven times (Sonnets 11, 13, 15, 16, 23, 64, 71, 80 & 100); “decay’d” is found in Sonnet 79; “decease” is found in Sonnets 1, 3 & 97; “deceased” is found in Sonnets 32 & 72; “grave” is found three times (Sonnets 1, 31 & 81); “tomb” is found five times (Sonnets 3, 17, 83, 86 & 101) and “tomb’d” is found in Sonnet 4.[xi] Through this language of spatial representation and death, and invocations of the grave-like absent couplet in Sonnet 126, Shakespeare is able to create an environment for his reader that mirrors the anxiety of early modern England in relationship to the Tower of London, an anxiety established and informed by his predecessors.[xii]

The most famous absent presence in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is the missing couplet of Sonnet 126. Vendler reads the absent couplet of Sonnet 126 as a death, or a “rend[er]ing of the boy,” (535). Furthermore, if we look at the young man sonnets as a dance of death, leading up to an execution in Sonnet 126, the couplet being the beheading of the speaker-poet, then we may then begin to examine other couplets as executions also. Death is a very absent presence in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, as though a shadow character that exists within the texts as much as any other character. Vendler also notices from Sonnet 126 that, “Shakespeare’s only other use of quietus is in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, where it acts as a synonym for death,” (535). If we consider the couplet in Sonnet 4, “Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee / Which used lives the executor to be,” Shakespeare’s use of “th’executor” becomes significant in a couplet as death scenario as well (Vendler, 61). “Executor” is used by Shakespeare in Henry V as synonymous with “executioner” in Act One, Scene II, line 203 (OED “executor,” noun, sense 2a).

Another way Shakespeare invokes the poet-speaker as a revenant, spectral character is through correlations between the text-body of the sonnet and the corporeal body of the speaker-poet. Vendler also notes of Sonnet 3 the “logical disjunction between the body of the sonnet and its couplet” which is “phrased as almost a death-curse,” (58). If we consider the text as a “body” of words and as a corporeal, human body, then the disconnect between the rhetoric of the body and the couplet acts as a rhetorical beheading of the sonnet form. Moreover, Derrida saw the term “death” as a signifier of performance (Morris, 110). Derrida felt that the word “death” served to displace a presumed presence, thus the absence of the word in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 126 implies that the absence has already occurred (Morris, 110). Using the word “death” so frequently in the sonnet sequence is a transient marker “into figuration and the performative,” Morris, 110). In essence, the word “death” assumes an absence to come in the sonnets, and when the word is omitted in the couplet of Sonnet 126, the reader is haunted by the realization that the poet-speaker is no longer writing because he has, in fact, already died.

Because the speaker-poet is understood to be dead at the close of Sonnet 126, the reader understands that she has been in a relationship with a ghost, the spectral revenant speaker-poet all along. The execution is an absence that the reader is expected to understand, to fill in the parenthesis of the missing couplet of Sonnet 126. Furthermore, the only character that is present with the poet-speaker is Death while he is alone in his prison cell in the Tower of London. The “gaps in the fractured narrative” require the reader to “piece out and imagine what isn’t there,” (Roe, 50). Roe acknowledges the absence of other characters writing, “There never was a young man or dark lady. We imagine or contextualize them in accordance with rhetorical practice, which helps the poem flesh itself out with imaginary dimensions,” (50). Precisely. Wright notices the absence of speech in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which indicates an absence of other individuals consistent with solitary confinement while awaiting execution in the Tower of London. Wright states,

“Speech without speech- is that what the Sonnets are: speech that comes not after but as long silence? This deeply reflective speaker- is he really a speaker at all? Isn’t it more accurate to hear the Sonnets, and much other lyric poetry that shows the same reflective depths, as primarily, language of silent thought, unvoiced, unsounded, unperformed, the words of consciousness (his then, ours now) silently addressing itself sometimes and sometimes an absent other? It may even be claimed that this unsounded speech, perfectly familiar to all of us because we generate it constantly every day of our lives, is the basic ‘voice’ of the Sonnets, at least 1-126.” (137)

Because of this absent presence, we arrive at an understanding that the interiority of the speaker-poet is the only reality that exists in the sonnets leading up to his death. Shakespeare is able to recreate the imagined experience of solitary confinement in the Tower, a fate he must have imagined for himself from time to time in his Renaissance England, or at least a fate he felt a kinship to in admiration of his poet-predecessors that were imprisoned in the Tower. Wright asserts that the sonnets “make us experience an absence,” an absence that is present and prevalent in Shakespeare’s Tower setting (146). The experience is what makes it performative, what makes it unique to Shakespeare, and imbues the speaker-poet with a revenant, second life through which to haunt the reader.

1. Intertextual Implications, Limitations and Conclusion

The concept of silent speech and an absent presence of discourse becomes an even greater absence if one considers the conversation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets as not only one that stretches across distances of imprisonment, but also across time. As we examine the possible source texts: A Brief Discourse of Rebellion and Rebels by George North and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s poetry, we must also imagine Shakespeare’s speaker-poet (and himself as author) as engaged in a discourse with his predecessors. Though scholars have linked other sonnets loosely to the Tower of London, it is the endeavor of this study to look at the North manuscript’s language as a possible source text for Sonnet 3 and 62.[xiii] This study will examine Surrey’s poem “These stormes are past” as influential on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62 as well.  This study’s intention is to demonstrate Shakespeare’s adaptation of these texts into something new and revolutionary for his own time period, the continuation of an exordium on Tower confinement began by writers before him. The texts of North and Surrey provide disparate views on treason and Tower imprisonment, North of the view that “all revolts against monarchs, even tyrannical ones, are also against God and doomed to fail,” (McCarthy and Schlueter, 7), and Surrey with the perception of a doomed man awaiting execution. We find just such disparity in the tone of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as well.

Editors McCarthy and Schlueter have impressively and convincingly traced passages from Shakespeare’s plays to North’s manuscript (1571), however, they fail to notice possible correlations to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1). Consider the following lines from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3, “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another / Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,” (Vendler, 57). Now view these lines in comparison to North, “According to the golden counsel of that grave Philosopher who wills us oft to view our own proportion in a glass, whose form and feature, if we find fair and worthy, to frame affections accordingly,” (100). Both Shakespeare and North are noticing the importance of self-reflection and interiority in relationship to heresy and crime. Beyond the disconnect between the body of Sonnet 3 and its couplet, Vendler also notices a turn from life to death in the second quatrain, an aesthetic “self-reflection” she notes as frequent in the sonnets (58). Thus, Shakespeare takes North’s statements about heresy and crime and inverts them, making Sonnet 3 reflect the interiority of a person persecuted and imprisoned in the Tower. The chiasmus of the couplet in Sonnet 3 makes a rhetorical cross, or bars across the end of the poem like a prison cell’s architecture would contain.

Similarities in the North manuscript and Sonnet 62 are also significant. Perhaps the most narcissistic of all Shakespeare’s young man sonnets, the speaker-poet of Sonnet 62 vacillates between self-loving and self-loathing. Shakespeare writes: “Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye / And all my soul, and all my every part/ And for this sin there is no remedy / It is so grounded inward in my heart,” (Vendler, 291). This same loathing for criminals is found the following passage from North, “If you penetrate without partiality their inward parts and by discretion decipher their doings from the first, you shall find them ineffective scab, the uncurable scruff, and the most filthy scum of the world,” (129). The examination of the “inward” heart and the “inward parts” are most compelling here. Shakespeare’s speaker-poet bears the burden of social scorn like North’s text places upon him, and yet he still loves himself (Methinks no face so gracious as is mine, l.5) and desires to live. The vacillations between self-loving and self-loathing express a heightened interiority that is exacerbated due to the experience of solitary confinement, the logical will to live and the burden of coming to terms with the identity of self labeled by society as a criminal.

Sonnet 62 acts as a point of centrality for Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the overlaps between North’s manuscript and Surrey’s poem, “These stormes are past.” Surrey was imprisoned in the Tower and executed in 1547.[xiv] We know that Shakespeare was greatly influenced by the poetry of Surrey and Tottel’s Miscellany.[xv] As Shakespeare takes up the poetry of Surrey written in the Tower before his execution, his adaptation of Surrey’s work becomes a modernized nervousness of Tower imprisonment and a discourse between the author and his poet predecessor. Moore has convincingly demonstrated Surrey’s paraphrase of Psalm 8 as an influential source text for Hamlet, however, he fails to notice correlations between Surrey’s poetry and Shakespeare’s Sonnets.[xvi]Consider the lines from Sonnet 62 that we examined previously in relationship to the North manuscript:

““Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye / And all my soul, and all my every part; / And for this sin there is no remedy / It is so grounded inward in my heart, / Methinks no face so gracious as is mine.” (Vendler, 291)

Now consider the following lines from Surrey’s poem:

“And pacience graft in a determined brest / and in the hart where heapes of griefes were growne / The swete revenge hath planted mirth and rest / No company so pleasant as myne owne.” (Moore 493)

The similarities in interiority, the focus on the self and the vacillations between “griefs” and “pleasant” company elicits a similar tone, one focused on imprisonment and solitary, silent speech. The absent presence is the reader or audience. Now consider Shakespeare’s line nine in Sonnet 62, “But when my glass shows me myself indeed,” (Vendler, 291). Compare this to Surrey’s line eleven, “But when my glasse presented unto me,” (Moore, 493). The return of the glass to both poems demonstrates the absence of an audience, furthermore, the need for a conversation with a glass provides the conversation with another- with the self. Of Surrey’s “These stormes are past,” which Moore indicates Surrey wrote while imprisoned in the Tower of London, Moore states the following:

“But Surrey says clearly enough in line 12 that he writes of what he sees in his mirror while alone in the Tower. Manifestly what he saw was himself, and his remaining lines continue as one long sentence. The wretch is himself who no longer desires to fight Southwell, and whose hap or fate is to have his blood spilled by the headsman.” (494)

It is exactly the same scenario that Surrey experienced that Shakespeare is imagining in his sonnets. His speaker is a poet imprisoned in the Tower of London with nothing more than his wits and his pen and paper and the few other objects in his cell. He is condemned to death and the only way to create posterity is to write within the confines of his solitude. The only way to write about imagining an imprisonment in the Tower was to do so creating absent presences, to conjure the ghost of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey who was imprisoned in the Tower and executed there as well. This dance of death ends as the poet-speaker is beheaded in the couplet of Sonnet 126. The reader is left with both an absence and a presence- the absence of the speaker-poet and the presence of his poetry written into the confines of the sonnet form.

Because of the focus on the death of the speaker-poet in the sonnets, we must ask ourselves if the Sonnets are an obituary or an elegy of sorts. Typically, obituaries and death elegies are not written by the dead. But what if the person dying knew no one else would write of them? What if they knew their last days were to be nothing more than words on a page? How desperate would the speaker-poet be to make the words live again, to become revenant? Pfister notices both spiritual and ritualistic moments in the sonnets writing, “He [the speaker-poet] envisages future readers of his texts as ‘rehearsing’ them: the beloved after the speaker’s death (71, 11),” (221). Pfister also illuminates the speech acts that take on aspects of worship such as in Sonnet 13, and the inclusion of the repetition of threes like the “Christian doctrine of the Trinity,” (222). The sonnets are deeply invested in a life after death, a resurrection for the words, a way for the truth to rise from the recesses of the setting in the performative speech, even as ritual, perhaps resembling prayer. Of Derrida and the obituary, Guthrie writes in the post-script:

“An obituary is a conclusion that is not a conclusion: it marks the end but simultaneously refuses to acknowledge it. The obituary is one of the purest manifestations of the mal d’ archive. ‘The archivist produces more archive, and  that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out onto the future.’” (534)

Indeed, Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the young man function in this way as well, closing with an opening in the absent couplet, an absent presence that is defined by all that has led up to the absence, up to the death of the speaker-poet. The last sonnet serves as the end of an elegy, of an obituary that is both permanently sealed and held open with performative speech and absent presence for all of time.

The limitations of this study should be addressed. For the sake of brevity, this study has focused exclusively on the young man sonnets, however, there are correlations between the Dark Lady sonnets and North’s mention of King Solomon that should be examined further (North, 130).[xvii] There are also a great many other authors who wrote while imprisoned in the Tower of London whose work should be compared and contrasted to the sonnets, notably Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Thomas Wyatt, however, there are others.[xviii]

Schoenfeldt describes Shakespeare’s Sonnets as “concealing as much as they reveal,” and functioning as “a mirror in which cultures reveal their own critical presuppositions about the nature of poetic creation and the comparative instabilities of gender, race and class,” (125). Schoenfeldt is correct, of course. The sonnets have functioned as a mirror for what a great many scholars have wanted to see in them. This study would ask us to see the sonnets instead as mirror for Shakespeare’s London, for his early modern English climate and for the anxieties under which he created them. When we define the absent present setting of the Tower of London, the presuppositions we might be inclined to use to fill the void fall away and we are able to see the sonnets in the light in which Shakespeare wrote them a little more clearly. The “veils of inscrutability” fall away and a more thorough perspective on Shakespeare’s experience and the experience of writers in the early modern period (and prior) may be arrived at. In essence, Shakespeare has bridged the gap for us between his world and ours by using absences to define a very present setting for his sonnets: the Tower of London. The poems come alive for the reader as the absent setting becomes a reality for us, as we, through the performative speech, experience being locked inside the Tower. The madness, isolation, and anthropomorphism become visceral to the reader. The Sonnets are a haunted text, revenant text.

Notes

1. “More resigned the chancellorship in May 1532 because he opposed Henry’s [VIII] new clerical policy and on 17 April 1534 he was committed to the Tower for refusing to take the oath attached to the Act of Succession, which endorsed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and implicitly rejected papal authority by declaring Henry to be supreme head of the Church of England. After nearly fifteen months of incarceration, during which time the 1534 Act of Treasons made it high treason to deprive the king of his dignity or title, More was tried and convicted of high treason on 1 July 1535 and, five days later, beheaded on Tower Hill,” (Deiter, pp. 30-1).

2.  Scholars have linked Shakespeare’s play, Richard III to More’s The History of King Richard III which tells us that Shakespeare was aware of More, his imprisonment and his writings (Deiter, p. 35).

3. “Within a decade of Surrey’s death, the appearance of Tottel’s Songes and sonettes, Written by the right honorable Lorde Henry Howard late Earle of Surrey, and others (1557) gave him the titular role in the creation of the early Renaissance English lyric corpus,” (Edwards, p. 284).

4. See Kelen, page 706. Also, “The state censorship of printed materials in early modern England, the self-censorship in the presentation of the Chronicles, refuse as a historiographic practice, and the reader’s implied ‘censure’ of the Chronicles for this lack are all alluded to in the preface in ways in which the texts of histories were subject to control,” (Kelen, p. 717).

5. In her edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Katherine Duncan-Jones dates the sequence as “published in 1609” and “put into its final shape after 1603,” though she admits it is impossible to know with certainty how early some sonnets were written (p. xiv). It is possible that Shakespeare was writing some of the sonnets in the late 1580’s and early 1590’s when the height of Tower executions were taking place.

6. See Richard II, 5.1, ll.1-4 (Norton Edition, p. 515); also, Richard III, 3.1, ll.136-170 (Norton, p. 405).

7. “Shakespeare did have his brushes with the law, notably when the Chamberlain’s Men performed Richard II- probably his play- for Essex’s supporters on the eve of the Essex uprising in 1601. Yet, compared with other dramatists and writers- Ben Johnson, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, George Chapman, John Marston- he was the very soul of discretion,” (Hadfield, p. 176).

8. There is scholarly debate about whether publication of the sonnets was authorized. See Duncan-Jones (p.33-4).

11. See Moore’s assessment of Surrey’s poem, “These stormes are past” regarding the mirror and the Tower of London (p. 494).

12. See Anhurt’s discussion of Seymour’s flyleaf inscription (p. 180).

9. See https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/

10. “Shakespeare’s poetic achievement, then, mirrors the development of English poetry in his time. The sonnet form so prevalent in his plays both early and late, whether in full structure (in Love’s Labor Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and All’s Well That Ends Well), mirrors the Tudor fascination with that form from the days of Wyatt and Surrey,” (Kennedy, pp. 28-9).

13. See Klause for connections between Sonnet 124 and the Gunpowder Plot and The Humble Supplication (pp. 225-37). Also, Rowse for connections between Sonnet 124 and the Tower of London (p. 90). Rowse also connects Sonnet 107 with events surrounding a possible poisoning of Queen Elizabeth I, and Dr. Lopez’s imprisonment in the Tower (p. 113). Rowse connects Sonnet 25 with Sir Walter Raleigh’s Tower imprisonment for twelve years as well (p. 113-25). These claims need further examination.

14. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey was “executed in 1547 on the pretext of having quartered royal arms, but mainly because of fears that he and his father would be able to take charge of the kingdom as Protectors during Edward’s minority (it was clear that Henry [VIII] was on his last legs,” (Holton and MacFaul, p. xvi).

15. Holton and MacFaul notice similarities in “turns or collocations of thought” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Miscellany (p. xxvi). They also describe “the arrangement of Surrey’s verse” in the Miscellany as “putting poems of youthful love first, and ending with poems that seem to have been written just before his execution,” (xvii). This arrangement of verse is similar to the arrangement of Shakespeare’s young man Sonnets, especially when Sonnet 126 is viewed as an execution sonnet.

16. Moore makes connections between Surrey’s paraphrase of Psalm 8 and Hamlet’s speech on the universe and the nature of man (Hamlet 2.2, ll. 298-308) (Moore, p. 487). Moore also demonstrates an important correlation between Surrey’s last poem and Hamlet’s “remarks just before and after the ‘quintessence of dust speech,’” (p. 487). Through Moore, we can see that Shakespeare was both deeply interested in and influenced by Surrey’s life and his writings while imprisoned in the Tower of London.

17. It is possible, given Shakespeare’s attention to Biblical allusions and Surrey’s paraphrase of Psalm 8 that the Dark Lady sonnets have some correlation to Song of Songs. This needs further examination.

18. See Deiter’s comments on William Fitzstephen, William Dunbar, and Charles d’Orleans (p. 31). Also, Deiter’s information about More (p. 37). Anhurt’s commentary about flyleaf inscriptions could also be helpful and relevant (p. 180).

Works Cited

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