셰익스피어 『소넷』의 경제·성·텍스트: 상실의 바로크 시학

Abstract

Although the order of individual poems’ composition is obscure in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, there can be said to be a consistent development in its theme and style. Generally speaking, the praise for the young patron undergoes several strands of confusion and noticeably deteriorates, due to the appearance of the rival poet and the dark lady. This shift is apparent in the three realms annexed to the general theme of decay in the Sonnets: sexuality, economy and textuality. With the advent of the rival poet, the economy of mutual loyalty turns into a contractual one, the agrarian feudal culture into bourgeois mercantile value. The poet’s initial wish for the unmarried youth to produce offspring yields to their promiscuous triangular entanglement with the dark lady, which produces nothing but a unsavory interior awareness. Although the poet begins with celebrating his own poetic ability, the bygone Petrarchan clichés he uses are rapidly exhausted, and just the “lean penury” of his text follows; then, the coarse, unseemly and obscene language involving the dark lady takes over. By the period of Shakespeare, it can be said, Petrarchan and the Neo-Platonic poetics―still hegemonic though trite―had become overdone and undone and a new poetics needed to be explored. The Sonnets shows that the mimesis of an object was being replaced by the invention of a new vocabulary in the time when the poet was allowed a room for inward reflection and subjective poetic creation. The transitions from “riches” to “penury,” and then from res to verba, indicate Shakespeare’s time as the one often called Baroque, or more precisely, mannerism, the cultural mode of which was sandwiched in between the high Renaissance and the modern era.