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Shakespeare's Preservation Fantasy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Aaron Kunin
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Abstract

This essay uses Shakespeare's sonnets to test the implications of the fantasy that poems, although not living things, preserve human life. The most valuable object in the community of the sonnets is the face of a beautiful young man. The speaker in the poems argues that the young man should entrust his most valuable quality to some technology of preservation, such as sexual reproduction or poetry. In every scenario, his beauty is preserved in a form that will not allow him to enjoy it: he inevitably has to die while his beauty lives on. Preservation thus turns out to be an unattractive plan against the fact of mortality and the possibility of holocaust. The fantasy of preservation is compatible with and even encourages a holocaust fantasy: everyone else has to die to prove that the young man's beautiful face is indestructible.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 92 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by The Modern Language Association of America

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