Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays

Abstract

David Schalkwyk offers a sustained reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in relation to his plays. He argues that the language of the sonnets is primarily performative rather than descriptive, and bases this distinction on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. In a wide-ranging analysis of both the 1609 Quarto of Shakespeare's sonnets and the Petrarchan discourses in a selection of plays, Schalkwyk addresses such issues as embodiment and silencing, interiority and theatricality, inequalities of power, status, gender and desire, both in the published poems and on the stage and in the context of the early modern period. In a provocative discussion of the question of proper names and naming events in the sonnets and plays, the book seeks to reopen the question of the autobiographical nature of Shakespeare's sonnets.

The ‘strange and dangerous Poynado’ of Georges Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: Weaponry, propaganda, and political identity

“…However, the blazon is a form of 'dismembering textuality'. 61 The dagger as a metonymy for the martyred soldier isolates Buckingham who is now turned into a silent textual object of contempt rather than of praise. This threat is echoed in several libels published as answers to the coranto: Why was the varlett sent into the meane and the knife heere that should thy grace have slaine Great Duke we thinke thy polecie discreete to take such care those two should never meete Yet since we cannot vindicate thy foe unles we might his name or beinge know o send him hither, whilst him we pursue we doe mistake him for the wanderinge Jewe.…”