Abstract

Patrick Hart "Asking Death’s Aid Against Death: Shakespeare's Plaguey Petrarchism & the Closing of the Theatres"

Were it not for the plague, we would have neither Petrarch’s Canzoniere nor Shakespeare's sonnets in their extant forms. Petrarch first conceived of unifying his rime sparse into a single work in the wake of the Great Mortality, whose passage is marked in the Vatican’s autograph manuscript by seven blank folios, dividing the poems in vita from those in morte. A quarter of a millennium later, the closure of London’s theatres was a contributing factor in both the writing and the publication of Shake-Speare’s Sonnets, its maleficent touch traceable in the peculiarities of the 1609 printing. Unsurprisingly given these common origins, no English sonnet sequence comes as close to Petrarch’s preoccupation with death as does Shakespeare’s. Yet this resemblance has been almost completely overlooked by studies of the sonnets’ relation to Petrarchism, which remains both disputed and understudied.

While the sonnets have sometimes been described as ‘intensely Petrarchan’, Petrarch is still most often evoked in order to establish Shakespeare’s distinctiveness, as when Dympna Callaghan contrasts his ‘agitated urgency’ with Petrarch’s ‘protracted’ natural rhythms. This paper argues to the contrary that in their fixation on mortality Shakespeare’s sonnets enact an uncanny fulfillment of potentialities embedded in Petrarchism’s ur-sequence, and that to contrast Shakespeare’s speeding time with Petrarch’s supposedly slow temporalities is to elide the bifurcations of the Petrarchan lento correr that run (slowly) through both. While acknowledging that these bifurcations derive in part from a mutual understanding of desire and its impact on the will, it suggests that they are also underwritten by a fundamentally shared response to the trauma of plague. In splitting Petrarch’s Canzoniere in two even as it made it whole, and in shutting Shakespeare’s theatres, it concludes, the medieval and early modern pandemics resulted in remarkably similar mortal quickenings.