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Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares SonnetsSuparna
Roychoudhury
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 54, Number
1,Winter 2014, pp. 105-124 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI:
10.1353/sel.2014.0005
For additional information about this article
Access provided by University of Athens (or National and
Kapodistrian Univ. of Athens) (13 Mar 2014 03:41 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/sel/summary/v054/54.1.roychoudhury.html
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Suparna Roychoudhury 105SEL 54, 1 (Winter 2014): 105124ISSN
0039-3657 2014 Rice University
105
Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
SUPARNA ROYCHOUDHURY
Tell me where is fancy bred,Or in the heart, or in the head?
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice1
As Bassanio chooses among three caskets in Shakespeares The
Merchant of Venice, a nearby singer ponders the location of fancy,
and determines that neither heart nor head is the an-swer. Instead,
fancy is engendered in the eyes and With gazing fed.2 Why does it
localize in the eyes here, and not the heart or head? These
questions, raised momentarily in The Merchant of Venice, are
investigated more deeply in Shakespeares sonnets, in which
conflicts among heart, eye, and mind abound. In what fol-lows, I
read such conflicts in light of the early modern discourse of the
imaginative faculty, for which fancy was another name. The
physiological status of the imaginationits position in the brain
and its corporeal natureis inconsistently presented in scientific
literature of the Renaissance, and was further complicated by the
findings of anatomist Andreas Vesaliuss dissections. In the
liter-ary sphere, however, this movable faculty enriches the
imagery of quarreling organs conventionally found in Petrarchist
poetry. Shakespeares sonnets are attuned to these trends, although
they do not establish where fancy is bred. In them, the lover seeks
repeatedly to pinpoint within himself the shifting corporeal
presence of the beloveds phantasmatic image. In this pursuit, he
both demonstrates that the search for fancy proliferates
theories
Suparna Roychoudhury is Assistant Professor of English at Mount
Holy-oke College. She is completing a book on Shakespeares
representation of the imaginative faculty.
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106 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
about how the body works and approaches the humanistic aim of
self-knowledge that was a primary goal of anatomists.
Before turning to Shakespeare, I wish to outline some points of
contact between the imagination of anatomy and the anatomy of
imagination, as it were. In late sixteenth-century physiological
accounts, fancy is often used interchangeably with fantasy or
imagination, referring to the mental faculty that abstracts data
from the senses into intelligible forms known as phantasms. Fancy
works alongside the other faculties of common sense, judgment, and
memory. Ideas about the nature and function of imagination have
evolved a good deal over time. Aristotle, in De Anima, speaks of an
image-making faculty distinguished from sense and memory.3 Later,
Arabic philosophers take fantasy and imagination as two faculties,
one to do with the collection of sense impressions, the other with
intellective synthesis.4 Still later, medieval scholars delineate
the ontological properties of the phantasm.5
Renaissance discussions offer different and sometimes
in-consistent definitions of fancy and its cognates. For example,
Helkiah Crookes Mikrokosmographia (1615), a compendium of
sixteenth-century anatomical writings, describes Imagination as
that faculty which conceyueth, apprehendeth and retaineth the same
Images or representations which the common sense receiued this
conception or apprehension we call Phansie.6 However, Thomas
Vicary, surgeon to Henry VIII, distinguishes be-tween fantasie that
taketh all the formes or ordinances that be disposed of the fiue
Wittes, and imagina[tion] that apprehends the fourme or shape of
sensible things.7 In a third variation, the physician Philip Moore
lists the three faculties as imaginacion or common sense, reason or
phantasie, and memorie.8 The confusion was apparent to the poet
John Davies of Hereford, who writes in his Neo-Platonic verse
treatise Mirum in Modum: A Glimpse of Gods Glorie and the Soules
Shape,
Imagination, Fancie, Common-sence, In nature brooketh oddes or
vnion, Some makes them one, and some makes difference, But wee will
vse them with distinction. With sence to shunne the Sence
confusion.9
It is arguable whether Davies manages to dispel the confusion,
since his poem freely mingles Aristotelian categories (the motive,
sensitive, and principal powers) with physical brain tissue
(pia
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Suparna Roychoudhury 107
mater and dura mater) and abstractions such as spirit,
contem-plation, and truth.10
Imaginations location within the brain is also unclear. Crooke
cites the view held by Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes
that the faculties are housed in certaine mansions in the braine,
with Phantasie in the forward ventricles, Reason in the middle, and
Memory in the hinder.11 He explains his logic: Almost all the
sences are placed in the forepart of the head, wherefore be-cause
the Imagination is to receiue and apprehend the species and
representations of sensible things it must be placed in the
fore-part.12 Still, there was disagreement about the number and
function of ventricles. Crooke himself ends up rejecting the
Schoole of Arabians, instead concurring with Galen that the
faculties must be dispersed throughout the brain. For Crooke, only
this would explain why diseases such as epilepsy are wholly
debilitating.13
All of this had to be reconciled with rapid advances in the
burgeoning field of human anatomy. Vesaliuss groundbreaking De
Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) presented organs such as the eye,
brain, and heart in unprecedented detail, illustrating a new
commitment to empirical scrutiny. However, these break-throughs did
not lay to rest the mysteries of cognition that had puzzled
philosophers for ages, as Vesalius himself admits: I can in some
degree follow the brains functions in dissections of living
animals, with sufficient probability and truth, but I am unable to
understand how the brain can perform its office of imagining,
meditating, thinking, and remembering.14 The need to theorize brain
function remained, therefore, and older models of psychol-ogy had
to be integrated with emerging knowledge.
The problem is apparent in commentaries of the period. The
Spanish physician Juan Huarte, for instance, tries to determine in
which of these ventricles the vnderstanding is placed, in which the
memorie, and in which the imagination. This is difficult, because
the cells are so vnited and nere neighboured, that they [cannot] be
distinguished or discerned.15 The French anato-mist Andr du
Laurens, meanwhile, states with confidence that these chambers are
not for nothing, yea and there is no man that can thinke, that they
were made for any other vse, then to be lodgings for [the] three
faculties.16 Seventeenth-century natural philosopher Kenelm Digby
sutures together a range of intellectual traditions in his
paraphrase of Descartes: [Light is] a percussion made by the
illuminant vpon the ayre that striketh also our sense; which
[Descartes] calleth the nerue that reacheth from the
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108 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
place stricken The part of the braine which is thus struken, he
supposeth to be the fantasie, where he deemeth the soule doth
reside.17 An atomic percussion activates an anatomical nerve that
alerts the relevant faculty and so invokes the soul. There is
almost the hope that the accumulated knowledge of the centuries may
yet be brought together and bound up, with nothing lost or
relegated to inconsequence.
The previous examples show two modes of approach: one focused on
how the soul executes its offices, the other on the architecture of
the body. Andrew Cunningham puts it thus: anatomy as structure was
concerned with learning about the body through the inspection of
the viscera; anatomy as key to function, in contrast, concentrated
on how bodily operations were carried out.18 Plato and Aristotle
had in effect developed functional theories, while Galen and
Avicenna were concerned with the physical fabric. The two
approaches were not necessarily at odds, as Nancy G. Siraisi notes:
the differences between the philosophers and the physicians did not
lead to any radical or unambiguous separation of the medical from
the philosophical approach.19 The organization of Crookes
Mikrokosmographia illustrates the point; each section deals with a
different region of the body and is broken into two parts. One part
presents the corporeal circuitry with diagrams and labels, while
the other, entitled Controversies, explains how it all works.
What emerges from this contextualization is that the enter-prise
of locating fancy in the body had rather broad implications. At
stake was an understanding of how the souls faculties could be
mapped onto a physiological body whose contours were coming into
increasingly sharp focus. In one sense, the early modern dis-course
of imagination was conjectural and inconclusive; this was an
anatomy of synthetic approximations. Yet, in part because of its
positional instability, imagination provides a conceptual space for
theorization in which ideas about the body and brain can be tested
and explored. For the remainder of the essay, I consider how this
knowledge might enrich our reading of Shakespeares sonnets, if not
of Elizabethan love poetry as a whole. Whereas the inconclusive
anatomy of imagination was a problem for scientific thinkers, it
presented literary practitioners with artistic possibili-ties.
According to the sequence of phantasm creation, a visual encounter
initiates a bodily response; inward images are then created that
come to influence and shape future encounters. This is also the
progress of erotic love, as mythologized in the Western canon; Eros
enters through the eye, penetrates the heart, and
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Suparna Roychoudhury 109
profoundly alters subsequent perception. Phantasmal theory thus
dovetails with aesthetic conceptions of desire.
To be sure, imagination had other valences. It was, for
ex-ample, closely tied in early modern thought to the supernatural
and the pathological. While these darker undercurrents of
pos-session and madness can certainly be traced in the Elizabethan
sonnet, I focus here on a particular subset of imaginative
dis-ordernamely, malfunctioning hearts and eyesso as to point out
the resonance between early modern cognitive theory and a
specifically Petrarchist topos. It is also worth bearing in mind
that the meaning of phantasm was in flux, its more neutral senses
image or appearance giving way to associations with illusory and
fictive representations.20 It is best not to privilege one set of
meanings over the other, especially as the poetry of this period is
instrumental to shifting definitions, precisely in the midst of
negotiating the difference between phantasms and fancies.
In this poetry, heart and eye are disrupted by the potent
in-trusions of the beloveds image. In Petrarch, this image carries
both a representational and a phantasmatic sense, and is able to
engender physiological chaos. Canzone 94 reads, When through my
eyes to my deepest heart comes the image that masters me, every
other departs, and the powers that the soul distributes leave the
members an almost immobile weight.21 This effect is frequent in
Renaissance poetry. Philip Sidney writes in Astrophil and Stella,
what we call Cupids dart, / An image is, which for ourselves we
carve; / And, fools, adore in temple of our heart.22 In the
Amoretti, Spensers lover exhorts the lady to give up her christall
clene glass and instead use his heart for a mirror, for in it the
fayre Idea of your celestiall hew remains immortally.23 Sidneys
temple and Spensers Idea allude to the Platonic ideal and the
notion of Christs picture inscribed in the believer. Yet the
vocabulary used also evokes the mechanics of imagination.
Image, fancy, and wit: such words have cognitive connotations in
a culture that conceived of desire as a phantasmatic process in the
stricter sense. Sidney often uses the word wit in lines from
Astrophil and Stella such as, My wit doth strive those pas-sions to
defend, / Which spoil it with vain annoys and My best wits still
their own disgrace invent.24 The Amoretti likewise invokes fancies,
by which Spensers lover is amazed and sus-tained.25 Mental images
are also implicitly involved with heart/eye wrangling in Michael
Draytons Idea 33. In the 1599 edition, the sonnet is addressed To
Imagination:
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110 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
Whilst yet mine eyes do surfet with delight, My wofull hart
imprisond in my brest,
Wisheth to be transformd into my sight,That it like those, in
looking might be blest,But whilst my eyes thus greedily doe
gaze,Finding their objects oversoone depart,These now the others
happines doe praise,Wishing themselues that they were now my
hart,That eyes had heart, or that the hart had eyes,As couetous the
others vse to haue;
But finding reason still the same denies,This to each other
mutually they craue, That since each other yet they cannot bee,
That eyes could thinke, or that my hart could see.26
What makes this a sonnet about imagination? Is it because the
speaker is represented in the act of imagining the beloved? Or
perhaps it implies that poetry is a supremely imaginative act.
Perhaps the activity of imagination engenders physiological
con-fusion. Or maybe the speakers phenomenological speculation
about his interior workings constitutes imagination. All of these
meanings are in play.
These examples reiterate that distinctions between terms such as
fancy and imagination were less than crispcertainly less crisp than
they would become in subsequent periods of literary history.27 As a
rule, the more purely cognitive terms imagination and fantasy are
emphasized in medico-philosophical literature; but when phantasm
creation is transported into literary contexts, the more
expressive, affective, and subtly erotic fancy arises. This rule
does not hold true for every text, however; for we find Phan-sie in
Crooke and Imagination in Drayton, and when Theseus and Hippolyta
converse about strong imagination and fancys images in A Midsummer
Nights Dream, the distinction between the terms is not immediately
apparent.28 Still, the very difference between the mechanical and
the subjective aspects of cognition is a conscious theme in
Elizabethan poetry.
Certainly this could be said about Shakespeares sonnet
se-quence. Fancy and imagination are never mentioned explicitly,
yet the sonnets recurring dialogues among heart, mind, and eye
contemplate how perception and cognition are inflected by volition
or desire. Repeatedly, the lover traces the anatomical movements of
his fancy, grasping at the phantasmatic manifestation of the
be-loved within himself. In doing this, he probes the relation
between
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Suparna Roychoudhury 111
the bodys structure and function; between inward vision and
literal sight; and between the minds unruliness and the agency of
the self. For Shakespeare, it seems more important to ask the
question of where fancy lives than to settle upon an answer. My
analysis of the following sonnets demonstrates the various ways in
which Shakespeare poses this question.
It is clear that Shakespeare knew of the inward wits, or mental
faculties. In sonnet 141, In faith, I do not love thee with mine
eyes, the lover says that neither my five wits nor my five senses
can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.29 All ten wits
and senses participate in this foolish devotion, but the specific
relation between eyes and heart is especially emphasized through
rhyming lines: In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes But tis
my heart that loves what they despise. Sonnets 46 and 47 treat this
relation more extensively; in them, phantasms emerge as a means of
resolving self-division. Here is sonnet 46:
Mine eye and heart are at a mortal warHow to divide the conquest
of thy sight.Mine eye my heart thy pictures sight would bar,My
heart, mine eye the freedom of that right.My heart doth plead that
thou in him does lie,A closet never pierced with crystal eyes;But
the defendant doth that plea deny,And says in him thy fair
appearance lies.To cide this title is empanelldA quest of thoughts,
all tenants to the heart,And by their verdict is determindThe clear
eyes moiety and the dear hearts part, As thus: mine eyes due is thy
outward part And my hearts right thy inward love of heart.
The sonnets syntax mimics the difficulty of determining
prece-dence between the two organsMine eye, my heart and My heart
mine eye. There is no I in this lyric (unless we count the pun
lurking in eye). The conceit of the mock trial is florid, complete
with defendant, jury, and verdict, yet it does not gather full
momentum until the second quatrain. Moreover, the trial or quest
seems one-sided; the hearts tenant thoughts are empanelld. Why is
this a stacked jury? And how can a heart have thoughts?
The heart was the seat of cognition for centuries. In the Bible,
it represents an array of powers including perception, reason,
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112 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
conscience, and piety.30 As William W. E. Slights has shown, the
heart in the age of Shakespeare was embedded in theological,
anatomical, and medical discourses, bound up with ideas not only of
the body, but also the soul, faith, narrative, and art.31
In the early half of the sixteenth century, Erasmus writes that
The seate of the soule or minde, is in the heart.32 And Thomas
Elyot, diplomat and physician, writes in his medical dictionary of
1538: Cor, cordis, the herte. somtyme it is taken for the mynde.33
That being said, in Renaissance anatomical literature the hearts
physiological role is no longer central in the way it had been in
classical sources. Crooke voices the gathering view among early
modern commentators that this organ was not as Aristotle called it
principall; it was the author of the pulse and a generator of vital
heat, but not the center of life and sense.34
Shakespeares decision to imbue the heart with implicit but muted
power in sonnet 46 is shrewd; from the perspective of early modern
discourse, this organ represents the shifting locus of the bodys
intellective center. Though generally a metonym for romantic
devotion, Shakespeares heart takes on many guises. It is a source
of moral corruption in sonnet 62, infecting all mine eye and all my
soul with sinful love (lines 1 and 2). Elsewhere, it stands for the
power of imagination: Those parts of thee that the worlds eye doth
view / Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend (sonnet 69,
lines 12). In sonnet 93, it denotes the inaccessibility of others:
Thy looks [are] with me, thy heart in other place (line 4). This
range of connotations underlines the hearts unfixed significance
and its many physiological roles. It is linked to passion and
feeling, yet is able to see like the eye and think like the
brain.
In sonnet 46, the jury of the hearts thoughts fails to award it
sovereignty over the whole; the eye winds up with the moiety, and
the heart is given a part. Through a resolution that verges on
trite (neatly, each organ gets one line of the couplet), the
son-net points to the artificiality of its conflict. Indeed, the
division of outward part and inward love separates two things that
were arguably discrete to begin with. Critics intuit a dialectic in
this sonnet. For Stephen Booth, it is between infatuation and true
love; for Helen Vendler, it is between loves aesthetic and
affective aspects.35 I would suggest that the two disputants
represent dif-ferent facets of consciousness, perception and
contemplation, the eye being a window to the world and the heart
being the closet of interiority. These are not alternatives; they
are distinct yet con-nected aspects of ordinary cognitive
experience.
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Suparna Roychoudhury 113
Perhaps the surest proof that there was never any real
dis-agreement in sonnet 46 is that the truce presented in its
sequel, sonnet 47, is more compelling than the original
quarrel:
Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,And each doth good
turns now unto the other.When that mine eye is famished for a
look,Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,With my loves
picture then my eye doth feast,And to the painted banquet bids my
heart.Another time mine eye is my hearts guestAnd in his thoughts
of love doth share a part.So either by thy picture or my
love,Thyself away art present still with me;For thou no farther
than my thoughts canst move,And I am still with them, and they with
thee; Or if they sleep, thy picture in my sight Awakes my heart to
hearts and eyes delight.
Instead of legalistic wrangling, the sonnet cites rituals of
hospital-ity, such as feast, banquet, and guest. Heart and eye
indulge together in the painted banquet of my loves picture, while
the eye shares in the hearts thoughts of love. How does this
sharing occur? It could be that the lover is referring to a
concrete paint-ing, but he must also be speaking of something like
a phantasm, an image that can be passed between parts of the mind
(in this period, picture could in fact mean mental image).36
Picture and thought evoke the faculties of imagination and
understand-ing, shown here in seamless and serene collaboration.
Addition-ally, the banquet is painted, hinting at a mediated
quality. This picture is a representation of sorts, colored by
feelingmore fancy, perhaps, than phantasm.
The single-mindedness with which sonnets 46 and 47 pursue the
relation between heart and eye can seem overwrought. Booth, for
example, finds in their chiastic tangles and derivative theme a
barren ingenuity, while for Joel Fineman their systematic
complementarity illustrates praise poetrys usual derivation of
similarity from difference.37 I argue that interactions between
heart and eye encode narratives about inward images. The sonnets
of-fer allegorized representations of cognitionheart sometimes
stands for brain or mind, and eye for minds eyebut they are not
purely metaphorical. As Gail Kern Paster writes, that which is
bodily or emotional figuration for us was the literal
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114 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
stuff of physiological theory for early modern scriptors of the
body.38 Only when such poems are read in light of the theory of
phantasms do they make sense from the perspective of physiologi-cal
plausibility and become more than just rhetorical flourishes.
These interpretive principles can be applied to other poems in
the sequence. In sonnet 137, for example, the heart/eye quarrel
implicitly calls attention to the materiality of phantasms:
Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyesThat they
behold and see not what they see?They know what beauty is, see
where it lies,Yet what the best is take the worst to be.If eyes
corrupt by over-partial looksBe anchored in the bay where all men
ride,Why of eyes falsehood hast thou forgd hooksWhereto the
judgement of my heart is tied?Why should my heart think that a
several plotWhich my heart knows the wide worlds common place?Or
mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,To put fair truth upon so
foul a face? In things right true my heart and eyes have erred, And
to this false plague are they now transferred.
The opening lines distinguish between beholding and seeing, the
sense of touch hidden in behold hinting at what Susan Stewart calls
hallucinatory tactilityin this case, the elusive texture of the
mental image.39 The ties between perception and estimation are
heavily material in this sonnet, with eyes chained by forgd hooks
to hearts judgement. This, along with the glancing invocation of
plague, recalls the contemporary belief that the anatomical heart
could send up harmful spirits to the eyes, causing toxic vapors to
be transmitted through the gaze.40
Mental images come to the fore of consciousness in the sen-sory
vacuum of darkness, in which the mind draws away from the body and
phantasms become akin to haunting phantoms. We see this in sonnet
27:
Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,The dear repose for limbs
with travel tired;But then begins a journey in my headTo work my
mind when bodys works expired;For then my thoughts, from far where
I abide,Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
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Suparna Roychoudhury 115
And keep my drooping eyelids open wideLooking on darkness which
the blind do see:Save that my souls imaginary sightPresents thy
shadow to my sightless view,Which like a jewel hung in ghastly
nightMakes black night beauteous and her old face new. Lo, thus by
day my limbs, by night my mind, For thee, and for myself, no quiet
find.
From limbs to head, mind, thoughts, and soul, the diction
gradu-ally leaves behind the weary body and moves into a bodiless,
nocturnal journey. Like behold in sonnet 137, intend is a
suggestive choicetend inall the more apt because it denotes both
mental fixedness and extension, and so suggests nicely imaginations
drifting grasp.41 Supernatural undertones (zeal-ous, ghastly, and
pilgrimage) and metaphysical paradoxes (Looking on darkness and the
blind do see) intimate how, in the deepest recesses of the mind,
vision becomes visionary.
The separation of eye and minds eye is not always exalted,
however. Sonnet 113 hints at the dichotomy of function and
structure that, as we noted previously, underwrites the history of
anatomy:
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,And that which governs
me to go aboutDoth part his function and is partly blind,Seems
seeing, but effectually is out;For it no form delivers to the
heartOf bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch.Of his quick
objects hath the mind no part,Nor his own vision holds what it doth
catch;For if it see the rudst or gentlest sight,The most sweet
favour or deformdst creature,The mountain or the sea, the day, or
night,The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable
of more, replete with you, My most true mind thus maketh mine eye
untrue.
The first quatrain outlines various ruptures, between I and you,
eye and mind, and of course within the eyes parted function. This
is the only time, in fact, that Shakespeare uses function in the
sonnets, a word newly coined in sixteenth-century Eng-lish.42 The
speaker is physically intact, and yet something is not
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116 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
right. He can still see and still form mental images, but the
two processes are no longer connected. This can only occur if
func-tion and form can indeed part ways. The dark lady sonnets
often play with the inversion of opposites such as fair and black,
but here such categories become meaningless. Medical treatises
proposed that in cases of extreme love melancholy the phantasmal
love object could become lodged in the mind, crowding out all else
and eventually driving the subject mad.43 Yet this sonnets final
couplet suggests that sensory dissolution can be self-induced, even
pleasurable, for the lover easily absolves the deceiving mind,
calling it most true.
In sonnet 114, the partnership between eye and mind is more
devious:
Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,Drink up the
monarchs plague, this flattery,Or whether shall I say mine eye
saith true,And that your love taught it this alchemy,To make of
monsters and things indigestSuch cherubins as your sweet self
resemble,Creating every bad a perfect bestAs fast as objects to his
beams assemble?O, tis the first, tis flattery in my seeing,And my
great mind most kingly drinks it up.Mine eye well knows what with
his gust is greeing,And to his palate doth prepare the cup. If it
be poisoned, tis the lesser sin That mine eye loves it and doth
first begin.
The aural correspondences of mine, mind, eye, and I seem to
underscore the tangled power structurewho, or what, is in control?
The mind is king, but it is being duped by the servile eye. Then
there is the first-person pronoun in line three, the persona posing
the questions of the sonnet and observing the dynamic between
monarch and flatterer. Crooke believed that the study of anatomy
enables a man to moderate and order the conditions and affections
of his minde: all things shal accord and ioyne in a mutuall
agreement, and the inferiors shall obey the superiors, the passions
obey the rule of right reason.44 Yet here we see not a well-tuned
state, but rather something closer to a political coup. The sonnet
expresses an awareness and wari-ness of the ideological stakes of
the schematization of cognition.
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Suparna Roychoudhury 117
These stakes were real, as Crooke notes: knowledge of a mans
selfe, as it is a very glorious thing, so it is also very hard and
dif-ficult. And yet by the dissection of the body, and by Anatomy,
wee shall easily attaine vnto this knowledge.45 This was the
humanis-tic goal to which, as Michael C. Schoenfeldt writes, much
of the physiological work of the period arises as an explicit
response.46 The dictum was nosce te ipsum, know thyself. Mere
introspec-tion was of little use, however, at least according to
Vesalius, who castigated his precursors for fabricating ideas about
the brain: Anyone who examines carefully the parts of the human
fabric for himselfnot merely applying himself to the writings and
drawings of others (as certainly none should)would discover that
Galen imagined many things.47 The misleading effects of writings
and drawings had to be tempered by firsthand experience;
represen-tations were useful only if they called to mind things
previously seen directly.
That said, the stunning illustrations of Vesaliuss De Humani
Corporis Fabrica, in which flayed musclemen pose in passionate
attitudes amid pastoral landscapes, are vigorously fantastical. So
too is the frontispiece of the work, a scene of teeming figures
gathered around an open cadaver (Figure 1). It seems therefore that
although observation was essential to procuring anatomical
knowledge, affective representational strategies could be used to
display its fruits.48 At the same time, there was the urge, as
Jona-than Sawday puts it, to imagine the human anatomical subject
as in some form or another participating in its own dissection.49
One illustration in Vesaliuss work reveals a tension inherent in
this. The picture is of a skeletal Hamlet staring morosely at a
skull; the inscription reads vivitur ingenio caetera mortis erunt,
Genius lives, all else is mortal (Figure 2).50 An alternative tag
line, though, might be this is, and is not, me, for the image
emblematizes the irremediable otherness of the dissected corpse
that is supposed to represent the self. Indeed, this rift could
only have been compounded by the irony that, although the pedagogic
ideal of the anatomical body was a healthy, well-developed young
man, the cadavers used for dissection tended to be of executed
criminals, paupers, or friendless foreigners.51
Sonnet 24 brings these dissonances togetherthe chasm between
subject and object that simultaneously contracts and expands in the
moment of bodily scrutiny, and the inalienable distortions of
representation:
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118 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
Figure 1. Frontispiece of Andreas Vesaliuss De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (1543). Reproduced with the permission of Wellcome Library,
London.
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Suparna Roychoudhury 119
Figure 2. Plate 164 of Andreas Vesaliuss De Humani Corporis
Fabrica (1543). Reproduced with the permission of Wellcome Library,
London.
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120 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeledThy beautys
form in table of my heart.My body is the frame wherein tis held,And
perspective it is best painters art;For through the painter must
you see his skillTo find where your true image pictured lies,Which
in my bosoms shop is hanging still,That hath his windows glazd 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.
As Rayna Kalas points out, the sonnet begins with an anatomical
frame (table of my heart) that turns into a two-dimensional,
perspectival frame.52 The lover invites the beloved to look inside
him (through the painter you must see), but the view is distorted
and obfuscated. The true image is an anamorphic perspective, which
is, moreover, hidden inside the workshop of the bosom. To see
through the painters eyes is also difficult because they are glazd
with the beloveds reflection. The fusion of images on the surface
of glass is enthralling, yet it is flawed because it is
superficial; eyes draw but what they see, know not the heart. This
sonnet is plainly about representation. For Kalas, the ocular
windows mimic the reflective transparency of poesy; for Fine-man,
they epitomize the idealizing visuality of the Elizabethan lyric.53
But the poem is also about the difficulty of trying to wit-ness, or
capture, an inward image. This problem is exacerbated by the
external stance of the anatomistthe obscuration of the specimen by
the observers shadowand, ultimately, represen-tational perspectives
are needed to mitigate it.
The knowledge that the anatomical body is necessarily imag-ined
resides uneasily in the discourses devoted to its study; yet this
is the knowledge to which Shakespeares sonnets return re-peatedly.
They confirm that empirical discoveries do not diminish, but rather
redouble our need to tell satisfying stories about our insides.
Indeed, were Bassanio simply to accept that fancy is bred in the
eye, he would not come up with the complicated expla-nation that
compels him to choose lead instead of gold. In some ways,
Shakespeares lover echoes Vesaliuss disinterest, as he is less
interested in noble symmetries and syncretized knowledge
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Suparna Roychoudhury 121
than in the discernible realities of body and mind. Yet, he is
also like Crooke in his commitment to forging figurative hypotheses
that are intuitive, if not provable. In their repeated and precise
investigations of inward imagery, the sonnets belong very much to
the period that was the dawn of modern anatomy. They also suggest,
however, that the tactics of faculty psychology remain relevant to
the Renaissance project of self-dissection. Shake-speares lover
knows, perhaps, that fancy is not to be found in either heart or
eye; rather, it constitutes the process of thinking aboutand
thinking throughhis desiring and disoriented body.
NOTES
1 Shakespeare, The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or
Other-wise Called the Jew of Venice, in Early Plays and Poems, vol.
1 of The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen,
Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W.
W. Norton, 2008), pp. 112175, III.ii.634.
2 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, III.ii.678.3 Aristotle,
On the Soul, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, and On
Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (London and
Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 1203, 17587.
4 Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp.
1137.5 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Paul T. Durbin, 60
vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 12:590, 1679.6 Helkiah
Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man.
Together with the Controversies thereto Belonging, Collected and
Translated out of All the Best Authors of Anatomy, Especially out
of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentis (London: William Jaggard,
1615), p. 502; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 6062.
7 Thomas Vicary, The Englishemans Treasure: With the True
Anatomie of Mans Bodie (London: George Robinson, 1587), pp. 156;
EEBO STC (2d edn.) 24708.
8 Philip Moore, The Hope of Health, wherein Is Conteined a
Goodlie Regi-ment of Life: As Medicine, Good Diet, and the Goodly
Vertues of Sondrie Herbs (London: J. Kingston, 1565), sig. 8v; EEBO
STC (2d edn.) 18060.
9 John Davies, Mirum in Modum: A Glimpse of Gods Glorie and the
Soules Shape (London: William Aspley, 1602), sig. B3r; EEBO STC (2d
edn.) 6336.
10 Davies, sig. B1r, B2r, B3v, E1r, D1v.11 Crooke, p. 504.12
Ibid.13 Crooke, pp. 5045.14 Andreas Vesalius, Vesalius on the Human
Brain, trans. Charles Singer
(London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), p.
4.15 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits. In which, by
Discovering
the Varieties of Natures, Is Shewed for What Profession Each One
Is Apt, and How Far He Shall Profit Therein, trans. Richard Carew
(London: Adam Islip, 1594), p. 54; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 13891.
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122 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
16 Andr du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the
Sight: Of Melancholike Diseases; Of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans.
Richard Surphlet (London: Felix Kingston, 1599), p. 78; EEBO STC
(2d edn.) 7304.
17 Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises: In the One of Which, the Nature
of Bodies; In the Other, the Nature of Mans Sovle; Is Looked Into:
In a Way of Discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Sovles
(Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1644), pp. 2756; EEBO Wing (2d edn.)
207:15.
18 Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The
Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot
UK: Scolar Press, 1997), p. 29.
19 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An
Intro-duction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 81.
20 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern
European Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 612.
21 Petrarch, Petrarchs Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M.
Durling (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p.
196. The origi-nal reads:
Quando giugne per gli occhi al cor profondolimagin donna, ogni
altra indi si parte,et le vert che lanima compartelascian le membra
quasi immobile pondo. (p. 197)
See also canzone 83, in which the lovers sleep is disturbed by
loves harsh cruel image (limagine aspra et cruda) and canzone 107,
where love-inspiring rays scatter images so widely (limagine lor
son s cosparte) that the speaker seems to be surrounded by them
(pp. 1867, 2147).
22 Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in The Major Works, ed.
Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp.
153211, 154.
23 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, ed.
Kenneth J. Larsen, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 146
(Tempe: Arizona State Univ. Press, 1997), p. 86.
24 Sidney, p. 160.25 Spenser, pp. 70 and 100.26 Michael Drayton,
Englands Heroicall Epistles (London: I. Roberts,
1599), sig. q2; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 7195. Drayton addressed other
sonnets to the soul, sleep, and the senses, thus broadening the
thematic focus of his sequence beyond the Platonic Idea. See Joseph
A. Berthelots discussion in Michael Drayton (New York: Twayne
Press, 1967), p. 31.
27 Samuel Taylor Coleridges famous distinction between
imagination and fancy is particularly precise: the former is the
living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, the latter a
mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space
(Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary
Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 1
[London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983], pp. 3045).
28 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, in The Norton
Shakespeare, pp. 84986, V.i.18 and 25.
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Suparna Roychoudhury 123
29 Shakespeare, sonnets, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp.
17541807, 1802, lines 910. Subsequent references to Shakespeares
sonnets are from this edition and appear in the text by sonnet and
line number.
30 See, for example, Matthew 9:4, And Jesus knowing their
thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?; Luke 24:38,
And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts
arise in your hearts?; and Luke 1:51, He hath scattered the proud
in the imagination of their hearts (The Bible: Authorized King
James Version with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen
Prickett [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997]).
31 William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).
32 Desiderius Erasmus, The First Tome or Volume of the
Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the Newe Testament, trans. Nicholas
Udall (London: 1548), fol. L2r: EEBO STC (2d edn.) 2854.5.
33 Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght
(London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538), E2r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 7659.
34 Crooke, p. 367.35 Shakespeares Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth
(New Haven: Yale Univ.
Press, 1977), pp. 20810; The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, ed.
Helen Vendler (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), p.
234.
36 OED, 2d edn., s.v. picture, 6a. See Duncan-Joness edition of
Shake-speares Sonnets for her interpretation of my loves picture as
a concrete depiction, among other meanings ([London: Thomas Nelson,
1997], p. 47).
37 Booth, p. 208; Joel Fineman, Shakespeares Perjured Eye: The
Inven-tion of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 734 and
87.
38 Gail Kern Paster, Nervous Tension, in The Body in Parts:
Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman
and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 10728,
111.
39 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago and
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 163.
40 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook
Jackson (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 3.2.2.2.
41 OED, 2d edn., s.v. intend, 1 and 18.42 OED, 2d edn., s.v.
function, 3. The word appears also in A Midsum-
mer Nights Dream, in which a character remarks that night from
the eye his function takes (III.ii.178).
43 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert
Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp.
667.
44 Crooke, p. 13.45 Crooke, p. 12.46 Michael C. Schoenfeldt,
Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England:
Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and
Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 12.
47 Vesalius, p. 38.48 Glen Harcourt describes how such
representations helped to legitimize
what was, after all, a fledgling field (Andreas Vesalius and the
Anatomy of Antique Sculpture, Representations 17 [Winter 1987]:
2861, 44).
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124 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets
49 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the
Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge,
1995), p. 110. Sawday provides many visual examples of this; see,
for instance, the impassive women in Adrianus Spigeliuss De Formato
Foeto (1627), whose abdominal flesh is drawn back to reveal their
wombs and ovaries (figures 28 and 30).
50 Vesalius, Plate 22, A Delineation from the Side of the Bones
of the Human Body Freed from the Rest of the Parts Which They
Support, and Placed in Position, in The Illustrations from the
Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels: With Annotations and
Translations, a Discussion of the Plates and Their Background,
Authorship, and Influence, and a Biographical Sketch of Vesalius,
ed. J. B. deC. M. Saunders and Charles D. OMalley (Cleveland: World
Publishing Company, 1950), pp. 867.
51 Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and
Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), p.
96.
52 Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic
Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell
Univ. Press, 2007), p. 178.
53 Kalas, p. 185 and Fineman, p. 139.