The period of Renaissance in English literature content s

2.2. Latinity and Desire in Shakespeare sonnets
The maze of repetitions, puns, and cross-references in Shakespeare’s sonnets constitutes one of their principal seductions, a powerful version of the erotic pull whose structure they unfold in their analysis of friendship, love, desire, jealousy, hope, frustration, and self-deception. Shakespeare exploits the fact that English vocabulary draws so heavily on Latin⁸.As distinct from much work on Shakespeare’s Latinity. We model a way of reading the sonnets in which Shakespeare’s training in Latin emerges as part of the poems’ basic texture, as their way of hearing words and of approaching meaning through that hearing.
When Shakespeare tells the beloved young man that «thou art all my art, and doost aduance / As high as learning, my rude ignorance» (78. 13.14), «thou art» wittily doubles «my art.» The first «art» is native in origin, the second Roman (Lat. ars, «art» or «skill»); juxtaposed, they bring together being and poetry, in order to reinforce the poem’s argument that the beloved gives Shakespeare’s verse its entire substance and being, rather than its mere «stile» (78. 12). Typical here is how Shakespeare activates the pun through the line’s internal symmetries, so that the two «arts,» one the poet’s and the other the beloved’s, pivot around «all» and thus, in that balancing, absorb a little of one another’s meaning. Technically, the pun involves the figure of antanaclasis, «which in repeating a word shifts from one of its meanings to another.»
The auxiliary meanings that emerge through etymological hearing are produced by the poem rather than being prior to it: Shakespeare’s line, that is, exerts a pressure on both words in order to make each one’s etymological structure audible as philosophical.
Sonnet 38 explicitly takes up the relation of Shakespeare’s English poetry to the poetry and language of the classical past, by transforming the young man into a tenth muse to supplement the Greek nine, and by audibly pitching English and Latin against one another:
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Then those old nine which rimers invocate,
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to out-live long date.
Scrupulously mirroring the mere rhymers’ invocation (Lat. in-vocare, «to call») of their muses, the poet instead «calls on» his new and English muse. Similarly, deriving from the Latin aeternus, the «eternal» numbers of immortal poetry receive a vernacular equivalent in «out-liue long date,» a modest and even creaky formulation that nonetheless precisely captures the distinction, alive in Latin, between a perpetual endurance in time and an eternal elevation above time.
Sonnet 44 opens by turning the distance between the poet and the young man into injury:
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then dispight of space I would be brought,
From limits farre remote, where thou doost stay,
No matter then although my foote did stand
Vpon the farthest earth remoou’d from thee,
For nimble thought can jumpe both sea and land,
As soone as thinke the place where he would be.
But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought
To leape large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend, times leasure with my mone.
Receiving naughts by elements so sloe,
But heauie teares, badges of eithers woe.
The argument of the poem unfolds in a series of feints around the corporeal and incorporeal, spirit and matter. Because flesh is substance (that is, matter) and not thought, distance opposes itself to eros, exactly by becoming like matter, that is, an obstacle to «stop» the poet’s «way.» This is, curiously, to say that distance materially blocks, not just the poet’s access to the beloved, but also the intervening distance (or «way») between them. Immaterial and material, distance does injury by working against itself even as it works against the poet/lover.
Shakespeare locates something of this paradox in the word itself:distance,rooted in the latin dis-and stare (to stand or to stay ),is spesifically a standing or staying apart.
The poem registers that parting in lines 4-6 in the difference between the foot’s standing and friend’s staying; accordingly the erotically charged distance between poet and friend is figured as a standing apart from a standing. Extending the pun deeper into the poem’s syntax, Shakespeare makes distance the state of difference, also, between two moods of the same verb: in «did stand» (l. 5), the foot’s removal from the beloved is marked as a di[d]stance and as a distance from «doost stay» (l. 4).The poem is about overcoming these real and textual distances, about the desire, in despite of distance, to reach the beloved. The poem’s linguistic playfulness contributes to this program, because the turning of and returning to the word’s origins effectively unmakes the word; by so doing, Shakespeare reimagines the structure of distance itself,in order then to identify a way around it.As part of the analysis, the poem pitches distance against dispight:»for then dispight of space I would be brought «(1.3) The punning juxtaposition of the words makes distance’s spite audible. But the proximity of the words is resonant also in a more important way, since «spight» has been identified in sonnet 36 as the very principle that separates the lovers from one another.
In our two loves there is but one respect
Though in our lives a seperable spight,
Which though it alter not loves sole effect,
Yet doth it steale sweet houres from loves delight...(36.5-8)
The seperable spight here is some force, probably social, capable of seperating of the poet and beloved or keeping them at a distance from one another. In sonnet 44 where the poet longs to be immaterial in order that «then dispight of space I would be brought, From limits farre remote,where thou doost stay»,part of the force of the formulation is that, in analogy with distance as a standing apart,»dispight» momentarily splits the separating «spight» from itself. «Dispight,» that is, gently reverses the work of»distance» by making the distance that spitefully separates loving poet and beloved
friend stand apart from itself, exactly as a «dispight of space.» The adverbial phrase thus provides, as a kind of pulse inside the syntactic meaning, a curiously apposite defi nition of “distance.”
Distance itself is a “dispight of space,” a contempt for space in the sense of being the agent, as it were, of moving across itself by already including the space it semantically refers to. Just as the poem has materialized distance against itself (as it sown material obstacle), so too, through the play of “distance” and “dispight,” it finds in distance the dematerialization of space as the word’s instantaneous absorption of the space it designates. This is, in language, already the equivalent of the poet’s wish to collapse distance by thinking his flesh across space as “thought” (44. 1).The poem’s verbal materialization and dematerialization of distance grounds its argument about the nature of the erotic body, and it does so through a second and coordinated set of puns about standing. The play of material and immaterial through which Shakespeare understands “distance” is replicated in his treatment of “substance,” a concept introduced in the first line: “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought” (44. 1). Distance, the poem says, would be “no matter” (l. 5) if flesh were thought, that is, if flesh were precisely no matter.