ELH

I. Will

Shakespeare’s sonnet 136 offers a curiously heterogeneous meditation on will. Its final statement inspires speculations ranging from get-to-know-Shakespeare literalism to Joel Fineman’s claim concerning “the specific materiality of absence that regularly defines what is in a Shakespearean name.”² Gordon Williams, in A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language, cites its unsubtle puns to illustrate the use of “will” as genital slang.³ The reference to lovers in remarkable yet unremarked number takes homosociality to an extreme, leading to Eve Sedgwick’s observation that “the men, or their ‘wills,’ seem to be reduced to the scale of homunculi, almost plankton, in a warm but unobservant sea.”⁴ The intercourse of “will” and “soul” evokes faculty theory, with its ordered relations among the psychic parts, and through its images of deception and blindness puts that order in peril. Will is often taken as a synonym for intention, and often as a synonym for desire; yet intention and desire bear an uneasy relationship to [End Page 737] one another, and the sonnet heightens that friction as it forces their convergence. The process of subjective constitution—“make but my name thy love”—locates the agency of self-making outside the self, its perverse imperative mystifying the questions of whose volition is at stake and of what a claim to possession might mean. It seems impossible to confine this sonnet’s will to a single purpose or sense; as Lisa Freinkel writes, “[a] list of implausibly discrete and distinct definitions takes the place of paraphrase.”⁵

Full beyond capacity, sonnet 136 reveals something at once dense and volatile in that word “will,” with its power to implicate and intimate so much: as a faculty and a name, a sexual synecdoche and an intentional fallacy, will circulates in unpredictable and incommensurate ways. It stands as a metonym for an idea of subjectivity, and at the same time metonymically entangles the causes and consequences, persons and impersonations, vitalized and held hostage by that subjective conceit. Freinkel argues that because the rhetorical strategies of the will sonnets refuse to distinguish immediacy from citation, they render a key question unanswerable: “Who is speaking in this poem, and whom is the language of the poem bespeaking (or interpellating)?”⁶ Sonnet 136 can be read as a sexist slur (this lady is open to all comers), as a sexual homogeny (all men want the same thing), as a social hegemony (all men are the same thing), as a philosophical observation (when the soul is blind, the will runs wild), and as a theory of interpersonal subjectivity (you complete me). What does it mean that it can say all of these things at once, in cacophonous and irreducible chorus? In fourteen lines, as in the 28 poems for which they are a focal point, will interweaves its subjects: heterosocial desire works not as a categorical scheme but as a convergence of porous and protean sites of meaning, deeply complicating the premises of agency, autonomy, and hierarchy that rest on sexual distinction.

Those premises appear, in sonnet 136, through the familiar misogynist move that unites men in relation to a promiscuous feminine sexuality, but they appear at an angle, turned askew or perhaps set adrift by the more intricate promiscuity of will itself. Misogyny makes objects of women in order to assert...