Shakespeare's Perfume. Richard Halpern
rather, from aestheticizing the theological categories that construct sodomy. Here I will venture a preliminary formula: Shakespearean homosexuality is the aesthetic sublimate of sodomy. This way of putting it reverses the terms of Freudian sublimation, since, instead of regarding art as the displacement of sexual aims, it posits Shakespearean homosexuality as itself a product or effect of the aesthetic. In this sense, the thesis championed by readers from Wilde to Auden to Fineman—that Shakespearean homosexuality is idealized or sublimated—seems exactly right. The sublimating rhetoric of the sonnets separates out an impeccably refined and aestheticized form of desire from a sodomitical discourse that is then abjected as fecal remainder. This remainder is not, however, expelled to a space outside the poems, but is rather relegated to a nonspace within the poems. That is to say, it abides in the half-light of wordplay, implication, and insinuation. Sodomy subsists as the speaking of the unspeakable, as the topos of the inexpressible or unnameable. Perhaps it is more correct, then, to identify Shakespearean homosexuality with both sublimate and remainder, or indeed with the very separation that produces this double product. The Shakespearean sonnet gives off a perfume that contains just the slightest hint of feces.
But while Shakespeare’s sublimating rhetoric produces a significant poetic achievement, it does so at some cost. For what the division into spiritualized friendship and obscene wordplay evacuates is precisely the middle space of eros. Shakespeare’s sacrifice may become clearer when the Sonnets are contrasted with another piece of homoerotic verse from roughly the same period: Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd:
O would to God (so might I have my fee)
My lips were honey, and thy mouth a Bee.
Then shouldst thou sucke my sweet and my faire flower
That now is ripe, and full of honey-berries:
Then would I leade thee to my pleasant Bower
Fild full of Grapes, of Mulberries and Cherries;
Then shouldst thou be my Waspe or else my Bee,
I would thy hive, and thou my honey bee.23
Shakespeare’s sonnets (and, for the most part, the plays) produce nothing like the erotic concreteness of such verse. Indeed, the first 126 sonnets evacuate fleshly desire to the point that they do not even allow the reader to visualize the young man. Shakespeare never shares even those qualities such as hair and eye color that typify the poetic blazon, although we learn in Sonnet 20 that the young man’s appearance is androgynous. One of the fundamental ironies of Wilde’s Portrait of Mr. W.H., then, is that Shakespeare provides no directions for such a portrait. The sublimating logic of the first 126 sonnets drains their poetic subject of all corporeal specificity, leaving only a glassy, transparent vehicle of poetic comparison: the young man as perfume bottle.
* * *
We now arrive at a question that we will pose and repose throughout this book: what is the link between sublimation, a psychoanalytic (and alchemical) concept, and the sublime, a theological and aesthetic one? The way to negotiate this crossing in Sonnet 5 is far from obvious. Certainly, the poem does not ascend to anything recognizable as an aesthetics of the sublime; the image of the perfume bottle is, rather, beautiful, and may even emblematize the sonnets’ fidelity to an aesthetics of the beautiful. In this section, then, I want to address the problem of the sublime directly, in the hope of reconciling it with Shakespeare’s poetics of sublimation.
My starting point here will be chapter one of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Having divided the world into Jews and gentiles, Paul then identifies idolatry as the defining sin of the gentiles, and especially of the Greeks:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness;
19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath showed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.
24 Wherefore God gave them up to uncleanness, through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. (KJV)
This passage is interesting to me on several counts. First, Paul defines Greek culture by homosexuality on the one hand and an unhealthy addiction to statues on the other. But as in Shakespeare, it is an excess of the aesthetic, one might say, that gives rise to homosexuality, rather than homosexuality that finds its sexual desire sublimed into art. Second, by specifying homosexuality as the punishment for idolatry, Paul situates it in relation to the unrepresentability of God, and hence in relation to what would later be called the sublime.
The logic by which Paul connects homosexuality and idolatry is not immediately apparent, but we can elaborate it by noticing that this passage is constructed around three occurrences of the Greek verb (met)ellaxan or “exchange.” Because the Greeks have exchanged the unrepresentable God for visible, created things (representations of nature), they are forced to exchange the “natural” objects of desire for unnatural ones. But this means that homosexuality, as a failure of natural vision, mimics that transcendence of nature which the Greeks otherwise fail to achieve. In other words, homosexuality is the equivalent, as well as the opposite, of sublime transcendence.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 exhibits similar traits. When the inhabitants of Sodom attempt to break down Lot’s door and ravish the angels within, they are blinded by a bright light, and this failure of vision mockingly repeats their refusal to recognize the invisible God and his messengers. The blinding light in the doorway, moreover, presages the consuming fires that will destroy Sodom in a sublime act of divine de-creation. These flames, as a direct manifestation of godhead, are also under a visual prohibition, as Lot’s wife learns the hard way.24 Thus the Sodom story likewise connects homosexuality, loss or cancellation of vision, and the sublime transcendence of God. (Chapter 5 of Peter Martyr’s Book of Gomorrah articulates Romans 1 and Genesis 19 on all three of these counts.)25
What that same Peter Martyr will be the first to call “sodomy”26 thus occupies an ambiguous relation to the sublime God, at once his demonic opposite and his troubling equivalent. Nowhere is this clearer than in sodomy’s status as the unnameable or unspeakable vice, from whose utterance even God’s angels will flee. For this prohibition on speech makes sodomy the obscene counterpart to the Tetragrammaton, or the unspeakable name of God.27 John Bale’s Protestant morality play, The Three Laws of Nature, Moses, and Christ (1538), pairs the allegorical characters Sodomy and Idolatry, thus betraying the influence of Romans 1 and its elaboration by Thomas Aquinas. When the character Infidelity conjures up this devilish pair, he does so as follows: “By Tetragrammaton, I charge ye, apere anon, / And come out of the darke.”28 Not only are Sodomy and Idolatry invoked by the divine Tetragrammaton, but in being ordered to “come out of the dark,” they are depicted as inhabitants of a hidden space that resists representation. Sodomy is, here as elsewhere, a devilish subspecies of the sublime.
This connection between sodomy and sublimity is crucial, I