anatomies of imagination in shakespeare’s sonnets

Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares SonnetsSuparna Roychoudhury

SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 54, Number 1,Winter 2014, pp. 105-124 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/sel.2014.0005

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Suparna Roychoudhury 105SEL 54, 1 (Winter 2014): 105124ISSN 0039-3657 2014 Rice University

105

Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets

SUPARNA ROYCHOUDHURY

Tell me where is fancy bred,Or in the heart, or in the head?

Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice1

As Bassanio chooses among three caskets in Shakespeares The Merchant of Venice, a nearby singer ponders the location of fancy, and determines that neither heart nor head is the an-swer. Instead, fancy is engendered in the eyes and With gazing fed.2 Why does it localize in the eyes here, and not the heart or head? These questions, raised momentarily in The Merchant of Venice, are investigated more deeply in Shakespeares sonnets, in which conflicts among heart, eye, and mind abound. In what fol-lows, I read such conflicts in light of the early modern discourse of the imaginative faculty, for which fancy was another name. The physiological status of the imaginationits position in the brain and its corporeal natureis inconsistently presented in scientific literature of the Renaissance, and was further complicated by the findings of anatomist Andreas Vesaliuss dissections. In the liter-ary sphere, however, this movable faculty enriches the imagery of quarreling organs conventionally found in Petrarchist poetry. Shakespeares sonnets are attuned to these trends, although they do not establish where fancy is bred. In them, the lover seeks repeatedly to pinpoint within himself the shifting corporeal presence of the beloveds phantasmatic image. In this pursuit, he both demonstrates that the search for fancy proliferates theories

Suparna Roychoudhury is Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holy-oke College. She is completing a book on Shakespeares representation of the imaginative faculty.

106 Anatomies of Imagination in Shakespeares Sonnets

about how the body works and approaches the humanistic aim of self-knowledge that was a primary goal of anatomists.

Before turning to Shakespeare, I wish to outline some points of contact between the imagination of anatomy and the anatomy of imagination, as it were. In late sixteenth-century physiological accounts, fancy is often used interchangeably with fantasy or imagination, referring to the mental faculty that abstracts data from the senses into intelligible forms known as phantasms. Fancy works alongside the other faculties of common sense, judgment, and memory. Ideas about the nature and function of imagination have evolved a good deal over time. Aristotle, in De Anima, speaks of an image-making faculty distinguished from sense and memory.3 Later, Arabic philosophers take fantasy and imagination as two faculties, one to do with the collection of sense impressions, the other with intellective synthesis.4 Still later, medieval scholars delineate the ontological properties of the phantasm.5

Renaissance discussions offer different and sometimes in-consistent definitions of fancy and its cognates. For example, Helkiah Crookes Mikrokosmographia (1615), a compendium of sixteenth-century anatomical writings, describes Imagination as that faculty which conceyueth, apprehendeth and retaineth the same Images or representations which the common sense receiued this conception or apprehension we call Phansie.6 However, Thomas Vicary, surgeon to Henry VIII, distinguishes be-tween fantasie that taketh all the formes or ordinances that be disposed of the fiue Wittes, and imagina[tion] that apprehends the fourme or shape of sensible things.7 In a third variation, the physician Philip Moore lists the three faculties as imaginacion or common sense, reason or phantasie, and memorie.8 The confusion was apparent to the poet John Davies of Hereford, who writes in his Neo-Platonic verse treatise Mirum in Modum: A Glimpse of Gods Glorie and the Soules Shape,

Imagination, Fancie, Common-sence, In nature brooketh oddes or vnion, Some makes them one, and some makes difference, But wee will vse them with distinction. With sence to shunne the Sence confusion.9

It is arguable whether Davies manages to dispel the confusion, since his poem freely mingles Aristotelian categories (the motive, sensitive, and principal powers) with physical brain tissue (pia

Suparna Roychoudhury 107

mater and dura mater) and abstractions such as spirit, contem-plation, and truth.10

Imaginations location within the brain is also unclear. Crooke cites the view held by Islamic philosophers Avicenna and Averroes that the faculties are housed in certaine mansions in the braine, with Phantasie in the forward ventricles, Reason in the middle, and Memory in the hinder.11 He explains his logic: Almost all the sences are placed in the forepart of the head, wherefore be-cause the Imagination is to receiue and apprehend the species and representations of sensible things it must be placed in the fore-part.12 Still, there was disagreement about the number and function of ventricles. Crooke himself ends up rejecting the Schoole of Arabians, instead concurring with Galen that the faculties must be dispersed throughout the brain. For Crooke, only this would explain why diseases such as epilepsy are wholly debilitating.13

All of this had to be reconciled with rapid advances in the burgeoning field of human anatomy. Vesaliuss groundbreaking De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) presented organs such as the eye, brain, and heart in unprecedented detail, illustrating a new commitment to empirical scrutiny. However, these break-throughs did not lay to rest the mysteries of cognition that had puzzled philosophers for ages, as Vesalius himself admits: I can in some degree follow the brains functions in dissections of living animals, with sufficient probability and truth, but I am unable to understand how the brain can perform its office of imagining, meditating, thinking, and remembering.14 The need to theorize brain function remained, therefore, and older models of psychol-ogy had to be integrated with emerging knowledge.

The problem is apparent in commentaries of the period. The Spanish physician Juan Huarte, for instance, tries to determine in which of these ventricles the vnderstanding is placed, in which the memorie, and in which the imagination. This is difficult, because the cells are so vnited and nere neighboured, that they [cannot] be distinguished or discerned.15 The French anato-mist Andr du Laurens, meanwhile, states with confidence that these chambers are not for nothing, yea and there is no man that can thinke, that they were made for any other vse, then to be lodgings for [the] three faculties.16 Seventeenth-century natural philosopher Kenelm Digby sutures together a range of intellectual traditions in his paraphrase of Descartes: [Light is] a percussion made by the illuminant vpon the ayre that striketh also our sense; which [Descartes] calleth the nerue that reacheth from the


place stricken The part of the braine which is thus struken, he supposeth to be the fantasie, where he deemeth the soule doth reside.17 An atomic percussion activates an anatomical nerve that alerts the relevant faculty and so invokes the soul. There is almost the hope that the accumulated knowledge of the centuries may yet be brought together and bound up, with nothing lost or relegated to inconsequence.

The previous examples show two modes of approach: one focused on how the soul executes its offices, the other on the architecture of the body. Andrew Cunningham puts it thus: anatomy as structure was concerned with learning about the body through the inspection of the viscera; anatomy as key to function, in contrast, concentrated on how bodily operations were carried out.18 Plato and Aristotle had in effect developed functional theories, while Galen and Avicenna were concerned with the physical fabric. The two approaches were not necessarily at odds, as Nancy G. Siraisi notes: the differences between the philosophers and the physicians did not lead to any radical or unambiguous separation of the medical from the philosophical approach.19 The organization of Crookes Mikrokosmographia illustrates the point; each section deals with a different region of the body and is broken into two parts. One part presents the corporeal circuitry with diagrams and labels, while the other, entitled Controversies, explains how it all works.

What emerges from this contextualization is that the enter-prise of locating fancy in the body had rather broad implications. At stake was an understanding of how the souls faculties could be mapped onto a physiological body whose contours were coming into increasingly sharp focus. In one sense, the early modern dis-course of imagination was conjectural and inconclusive; this was an anatomy of synthetic approximations. Yet, in part because of its positional instability, imagination provides a conceptual space for theorization in which ideas about the body and brain can be tested and explored. For the remainder of the essay, I consider how this knowledge might enrich our reading of Shakespeares sonnets, if not of Elizabethan love poetry as a whole. Whereas the inconclusive anatomy of imagination was a problem for scientific thinkers, it presented literary practitioners with artistic possibili-ties. According to the sequence of phantasm creation, a visual encounter initiates a bodily response; inward images are then created that come to influence and shape future encounters. This is also the progress of erotic love, as mythologized in the Western canon; Eros enters through the eye, penetrates the heart, and


profoundly alters subsequent perception. Phantasmal theory thus dovetails with aesthetic conceptions of desire.

To be sure, imagination had other valences. It was, for ex-ample, closely tied in early modern thought to the supernatural and the pathological. While these darker undercurrents of pos-session and madness can certainly be traced in the Elizabethan sonnet, I focus here on a particular subset of imaginative dis-ordernamely, malfunctioning hearts and eyesso as to point out the resonance between early modern cognitive theory and a specifically Petrarchist topos. It is also worth bearing in mind that the meaning of phantasm was in flux, its more neutral senses image or appearance giving way to associations with illusory and fictive representations.20 It is best not to privilege one set of meanings over the other, especially as the poetry of this period is instrumental to shifting definitions, precisely in the midst of negotiating the difference between phantasms and fancies.

In this poetry, heart and eye are disrupted by the potent in-trusions of the beloveds image. In Petrarch, this image carries both a representational and a phantasmatic sense, and is able to engender physiological chaos. Canzone 94 reads, When through my eyes to my deepest heart comes the image that masters me, every other departs, and the powers that the soul distributes leave the members an almost immobile weight.21 This effect is frequent in Renaissance poetry. Philip Sidney writes in Astrophil and Stella, what we call Cupids dart, / An image is, which for ourselves we carve; / And, fools, adore in temple of our heart.22 In the Amoretti, Spensers lover exhorts the lady to give up her christall clene glass and instead use his heart for a mirror, for in it the fayre Idea of your celestiall hew remains immortally.23 Sidneys temple and Spensers Idea allude to the Platonic ideal and the notion of Christs picture inscribed in the believer. Yet the vocabulary used also evokes the mechanics of imagination.

Image, fancy, and wit: such words have cognitive connotations in a culture that conceived of desire as a phantasmatic process in the stricter sense. Sidney often uses the word wit in lines from Astrophil and Stella such as, My wit doth strive those pas-sions to defend, / Which spoil it with vain annoys and My best wits still their own disgrace invent.24 The Amoretti likewise invokes fancies, by which Spensers lover is amazed and sus-tained.25 Mental images are also implicitly involved with heart/eye wrangling in Michael Draytons Idea 33. In the 1599 edition, the sonnet is addressed To Imagination:


Whilst yet mine eyes do surfet with delight, My wofull hart imprisond in my brest,

Wisheth to be transformd into my sight,That it like those, in looking might be blest,But whilst my eyes thus greedily doe gaze,Finding their objects oversoone depart,These now the others happines doe praise,Wishing themselues that they were now my hart,That eyes had heart, or that the hart had eyes,As couetous the others vse to haue;

But finding reason still the same denies,This to each other mutually they craue, That since each other yet they cannot bee, That eyes could thinke, or that my hart could see.26

What makes this a sonnet about imagination? Is it because the speaker is represented in the act of imagining the beloved? Or perhaps it implies that poetry is a supremely imaginative act. Perhaps the activity of imagination engenders physiological con-fusion. Or maybe the speakers phenomenological speculation about his interior workings constitutes imagination. All of these meanings are in play.

These examples reiterate that distinctions between terms such as fancy and imagination were less than crispcertainly less crisp than they would become in subsequent periods of literary history.27 As a rule, the more purely cognitive terms imagination and fantasy are emphasized in medico-philosophical literature; but when phantasm creation is transported into literary contexts, the more expressive, affective, and subtly erotic fancy arises. This rule does not hold true for every text, however; for we find Phan-sie in Crooke and Imagination in Drayton, and when Theseus and Hippolyta converse about strong imagination and fancys images in A Midsummer Nights Dream, the distinction between the terms is not immediately apparent.28 Still, the very difference between the mechanical and the subjective aspects of cognition is a conscious theme in Elizabethan poetry.

Certainly this could be said about Shakespeares sonnet se-quence. Fancy and imagination are never mentioned explicitly, yet the sonnets recurring dialogues among heart, mind, and eye contemplate how perception and cognition are inflected by volition or desire. Repeatedly, the lover traces the anatomical movements of his fancy, grasping at the phantasmatic manifestation of the be-loved within himself. In doing this, he probes the relation between


the bodys structure and function; between inward vision and literal sight; and between the minds unruliness and the agency of the self. For Shakespeare, it seems more important to ask the question of where fancy lives than to settle upon an answer. My analysis of the following sonnets demonstrates the various ways in which Shakespeare poses this question.

It is clear that Shakespeare knew of the inward wits, or mental faculties. In sonnet 141, In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, the lover says that neither my five wits nor my five senses can / Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.29 All ten wits and senses participate in this foolish devotion, but the specific relation between eyes and heart is especially emphasized through rhyming lines: In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes But tis my heart that loves what they despise. Sonnets 46 and 47 treat this relation more extensively; in them, phantasms emerge as a means of resolving self-division. Here is sonnet 46:

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal warHow to divide the conquest of thy sight.Mine eye my heart thy pictures sight would bar,My heart, mine eye the freedom of that right.My heart doth plead that thou in him does lie,A closet never pierced with crystal eyes;But the defendant doth that plea deny,And says in him thy fair appearance lies.To cide this title is empanelldA quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart,And by their verdict is determindThe clear eyes moiety and the dear hearts part, As thus: mine eyes due is thy outward part And my hearts right thy inward love of heart.

The sonnets syntax mimics the difficulty of determining prece-dence between the two organsMine eye, my heart and My heart mine eye. There is no I in this lyric (unless we count the pun lurking in eye). The conceit of the mock trial is florid, complete with defendant, jury, and verdict, yet it does not gather full momentum until the second quatrain. Moreover, the trial or quest seems one-sided; the hearts tenant thoughts are empanelld. Why is this a stacked jury? And how can a heart have thoughts?

The heart was the seat of cognition for centuries. In the Bible, it represents an array of powers including perception, reason,


conscience, and piety.30 As William W. E. Slights has shown, the heart in the age of Shakespeare was embedded in theological, anatomical, and medical discourses, bound up with ideas not only of the body, but also the soul, faith, narrative, and art.31

In the early half of the sixteenth century, Erasmus writes that The seate of the soule or minde, is in the heart.32 And Thomas Elyot, diplomat and physician, writes in his medical dictionary of 1538: Cor, cordis, the herte. somtyme it is taken for the mynde.33 That being said, in Renaissance anatomical literature the hearts physiological role is no longer central in the way it had been in classical sources. Crooke voices the gathering view among early modern commentators that this organ was not as Aristotle called it principall; it was the author of the pulse and a generator of vital heat, but not the center of life and sense.34

Shakespeares decision to imbue the heart with implicit but muted power in sonnet 46 is shrewd; from the perspective of early modern discourse, this organ represents the shifting locus of the bodys intellective center. Though generally a metonym for romantic devotion, Shakespeares heart takes on many guises. It is a source of moral corruption in sonnet 62, infecting all mine eye and all my soul with sinful love (lines 1 and 2). Elsewhere, it stands for the power of imagination: Those parts of thee that the worlds eye doth view / Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend (sonnet 69, lines 12). In sonnet 93, it denotes the inaccessibility of others: Thy looks [are] with me, thy heart in other place (line 4). This range of connotations underlines the hearts unfixed significance and its many physiological roles. It is linked to passion and feeling, yet is able to see like the eye and think like the brain.

In sonnet 46, the jury of the hearts thoughts fails to award it sovereignty over the whole; the eye winds up with the moiety, and the heart is given a part. Through a resolution that verges on trite (neatly, each organ gets one line of the couplet), the son-net points to the artificiality of its conflict. Indeed, the division of outward part and inward love separates two things that were arguably discrete to begin with. Critics intuit a dialectic in this sonnet. For Stephen Booth, it is between infatuation and true love; for Helen Vendler, it is between loves aesthetic and affective aspects.35 I would suggest that the two disputants represent dif-ferent facets of consciousness, perception and contemplation, the eye being a window to the world and the heart being the closet of interiority. These are not alternatives; they are distinct yet con-nected aspects of ordinary cognitive experience.


Perhaps the surest proof that there was never any real dis-agreement in sonnet 46 is that the truce presented in its sequel, sonnet 47, is more compelling than the original quarrel:

Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took,And each doth good turns now unto the other.When that mine eye is famished for a look,Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother,With my loves picture then my eye doth feast,And to the painted banquet bids my heart.Another time mine eye is my hearts guestAnd in his thoughts of love doth share a part.So either by thy picture or my love,Thyself away art present still with me;For thou no farther than my thoughts canst move,And I am still with them, and they with thee; Or if they sleep, thy picture in my sight Awakes my heart to hearts and eyes delight.

Instead of legalistic wrangling, the sonnet cites rituals of hospital-ity, such as feast, banquet, and guest. Heart and eye indulge together in the painted banquet of my loves picture, while the eye shares in the hearts thoughts of love. How does this sharing occur? It could be that the lover is referring to a concrete paint-ing, but he must also be speaking of something like a phantasm, an image that can be passed between parts of the mind (in this period, picture could in fact mean mental image).36 Picture and thought evoke the faculties of imagination and understand-ing, shown here in seamless and serene collaboration. Addition-ally, the banquet is painted, hinting at a mediated quality. This picture is a representation of sorts, colored by feelingmore fancy, perhaps, than phantasm.

The single-mindedness with which sonnets 46 and 47 pursue the relation between heart and eye can seem overwrought. Booth, for example, finds in their chiastic tangles and derivative theme a barren ingenuity, while for Joel Fineman their systematic complementarity illustrates praise poetrys usual derivation of similarity from difference.37 I argue that interactions between heart and eye encode narratives about inward images. The sonnets of-fer allegorized representations of cognitionheart sometimes stands for brain or mind, and eye for minds eyebut they are not purely metaphorical. As Gail Kern Paster writes, that which is bodily or emotional figuration for us was the literal


stuff of physiological theory for early modern scriptors of the body.38 Only when such poems are read in light of the theory of phantasms do they make sense from the perspective of physiologi-cal plausibility and become more than just rhetorical flourishes.

These interpretive principles can be applied to other poems in the sequence. In sonnet 137, for example, the heart/eye quarrel implicitly calls attention to the materiality of phantasms:

Thou blind fool love, what dost thou to mine eyesThat they behold and see not what they see?They know what beauty is, see where it lies,Yet what the best is take the worst to be.If eyes corrupt by over-partial looksBe anchored in the bay where all men ride,Why of eyes falsehood hast thou forgd hooksWhereto the judgement of my heart is tied?Why should my heart think that a several plotWhich my heart knows the wide worlds common place?Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,To put fair truth upon so foul a face? In things right true my heart and eyes have erred, And to this false plague are they now transferred.

The opening lines distinguish between beholding and seeing, the sense of touch hidden in behold hinting at what Susan Stewart calls hallucinatory tactilityin this case, the elusive texture of the mental image.39 The ties between perception and estimation are heavily material in this sonnet, with eyes chained by forgd hooks to hearts judgement. This, along with the glancing invocation of plague, recalls the contemporary belief that the anatomical heart could send up harmful spirits to the eyes, causing toxic vapors to be transmitted through the gaze.40

Mental images come to the fore of consciousness in the sen-sory vacuum of darkness, in which the mind draws away from the body and phantasms become akin to haunting phantoms. We see this in sonnet 27:

Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;But then begins a journey in my headTo work my mind when bodys works expired;For then my thoughts, from far where I abide,Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,


And keep my drooping eyelids open wideLooking on darkness which the blind do see:Save that my souls imaginary sightPresents thy shadow to my sightless view,Which like a jewel hung in ghastly nightMakes black night beauteous and her old face new. Lo, thus by day my limbs, by night my mind, For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.

From limbs to head, mind, thoughts, and soul, the diction gradu-ally leaves behind the weary body and moves into a bodiless, nocturnal journey. Like behold in sonnet 137, intend is a suggestive choicetend inall the more apt because it denotes both mental fixedness and extension, and so suggests nicely imaginations drifting grasp.41 Supernatural undertones (zeal-ous, ghastly, and pilgrimage) and metaphysical paradoxes (Looking on darkness and the blind do see) intimate how, in the deepest recesses of the mind, vision becomes visionary.

The separation of eye and minds eye is not always exalted, however. Sonnet 113 hints at the dichotomy of function and structure that, as we noted previously, underwrites the history of anatomy:

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,And that which governs me to go aboutDoth part his function and is partly blind,Seems seeing, but effectually is out;For it no form delivers to the heartOf bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch.Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch;For if it see the rudst or gentlest sight,The most sweet favour or deformdst creature,The mountain or the sea, the day, or night,The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable of more, replete with you, My most true mind thus maketh mine eye untrue.

The first quatrain outlines various ruptures, between I and you, eye and mind, and of course within the eyes parted function. This is the only time, in fact, that Shakespeare uses function in the sonnets, a word newly coined in sixteenth-century Eng-lish.42 The speaker is physically intact, and yet something is not


right. He can still see and still form mental images, but the two processes are no longer connected. This can only occur if func-tion and form can indeed part ways. The dark lady sonnets often play with the inversion of opposites such as fair and black, but here such categories become meaningless. Medical treatises proposed that in cases of extreme love melancholy the phantasmal love object could become lodged in the mind, crowding out all else and eventually driving the subject mad.43 Yet this sonnets final couplet suggests that sensory dissolution can be self-induced, even pleasurable, for the lover easily absolves the deceiving mind, calling it most true.

In sonnet 114, the partnership between eye and mind is more devious:

Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,Drink up the monarchs plague, this flattery,Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,And that your love taught it this alchemy,To make of monsters and things indigestSuch cherubins as your sweet self resemble,Creating every bad a perfect bestAs fast as objects to his beams assemble?O, tis the first, tis flattery in my seeing,And my great mind most kingly drinks it up.Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,And to his palate doth prepare the cup. If it be poisoned, tis the lesser sin That mine eye loves it and doth first begin.

The aural correspondences of mine, mind, eye, and I seem to underscore the tangled power structurewho, or what, is in control? The mind is king, but it is being duped by the servile eye. Then there is the first-person pronoun in line three, the persona posing the questions of the sonnet and observing the dynamic between monarch and flatterer. Crooke believed that the study of anatomy enables a man to moderate and order the conditions and affections of his minde: all things shal accord and ioyne in a mutuall agreement, and the inferiors shall obey the superiors, the passions obey the rule of right reason.44 Yet here we see not a well-tuned state, but rather something closer to a political coup. The sonnet expresses an awareness and wari-ness of the ideological stakes of the schematization of cognition.


These stakes were real, as Crooke notes: knowledge of a mans selfe, as it is a very glorious thing, so it is also very hard and dif-ficult. And yet by the dissection of the body, and by Anatomy, wee shall easily attaine vnto this knowledge.45 This was the humanis-tic goal to which, as Michael C. Schoenfeldt writes, much of the physiological work of the period arises as an explicit response.46 The dictum was nosce te ipsum, know thyself. Mere introspec-tion was of little use, however, at least according to Vesalius, who castigated his precursors for fabricating ideas about the brain: Anyone who examines carefully the parts of the human fabric for himselfnot merely applying himself to the writings and drawings of others (as certainly none should)would discover that Galen imagined many things.47 The misleading effects of writings and drawings had to be tempered by firsthand experience; represen-tations were useful only if they called to mind things previously seen directly.

That said, the stunning illustrations of Vesaliuss De Humani Corporis Fabrica, in which flayed musclemen pose in passionate attitudes amid pastoral landscapes, are vigorously fantastical. So too is the frontispiece of the work, a scene of teeming figures gathered around an open cadaver (Figure 1). It seems therefore that although observation was essential to procuring anatomical knowledge, affective representational strategies could be used to display its fruits.48 At the same time, there was the urge, as Jona-than Sawday puts it, to imagine the human anatomical subject as in some form or another participating in its own dissection.49 One illustration in Vesaliuss work reveals a tension inherent in this. The picture is of a skeletal Hamlet staring morosely at a skull; the inscription reads vivitur ingenio caetera mortis erunt, Genius lives, all else is mortal (Figure 2).50 An alternative tag line, though, might be this is, and is not, me, for the image emblematizes the irremediable otherness of the dissected corpse that is supposed to represent the self. Indeed, this rift could only have been compounded by the irony that, although the pedagogic ideal of the anatomical body was a healthy, well-developed young man, the cadavers used for dissection tended to be of executed criminals, paupers, or friendless foreigners.51

Sonnet 24 brings these dissonances togetherthe chasm between subject and object that simultaneously contracts and expands in the moment of bodily scrutiny, and the inalienable distortions of representation:


Figure 1. Frontispiece of Andreas Vesaliuss De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Reproduced with the permission of Wellcome Library, London.


Figure 2. Plate 164 of Andreas Vesaliuss De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Reproduced with the permission of Wellcome Library, London.


Mine eye hath played the painter, and hath steeledThy beautys form in table of my heart.My body is the frame wherein tis held,And perspective it is best painters art;For through the painter must you see his skillTo find where your true image pictured lies,Which in my bosoms shop is hanging still,That hath his windows glazd with thine eyes.Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for meAre windows to my breast, wherethrough the sunDelights to peep, to gaze therein on thee. Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art: They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

As Rayna Kalas points out, the sonnet begins with an anatomical frame (table of my heart) that turns into a two-dimensional, perspectival frame.52 The lover invites the beloved to look inside him (through the painter you must see), but the view is distorted and obfuscated. The true image is an anamorphic perspective, which is, moreover, hidden inside the workshop of the bosom. To see through the painters eyes is also difficult because they are glazd with the beloveds reflection. The fusion of images on the surface of glass is enthralling, yet it is flawed because it is superficial; eyes draw but what they see, know not the heart. This sonnet is plainly about representation. For Kalas, the ocular windows mimic the reflective transparency of poesy; for Fine-man, they epitomize the idealizing visuality of the Elizabethan lyric.53 But the poem is also about the difficulty of trying to wit-ness, or capture, an inward image. This problem is exacerbated by the external stance of the anatomistthe obscuration of the specimen by the observers shadowand, ultimately, represen-tational perspectives are needed to mitigate it.

The knowledge that the anatomical body is necessarily imag-ined resides uneasily in the discourses devoted to its study; yet this is the knowledge to which Shakespeares sonnets return re-peatedly. They confirm that empirical discoveries do not diminish, but rather redouble our need to tell satisfying stories about our insides. Indeed, were Bassanio simply to accept that fancy is bred in the eye, he would not come up with the complicated expla-nation that compels him to choose lead instead of gold. In some ways, Shakespeares lover echoes Vesaliuss disinterest, as he is less interested in noble symmetries and syncretized knowledge


than in the discernible realities of body and mind. Yet, he is also like Crooke in his commitment to forging figurative hypotheses that are intuitive, if not provable. In their repeated and precise investigations of inward imagery, the sonnets belong very much to the period that was the dawn of modern anatomy. They also suggest, however, that the tactics of faculty psychology remain relevant to the Renaissance project of self-dissection. Shake-speares lover knows, perhaps, that fancy is not to be found in either heart or eye; rather, it constitutes the process of thinking aboutand thinking throughhis desiring and disoriented body.

NOTES

1 Shakespeare, The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Other-wise Called the Jew of Venice, in Early Plays and Poems, vol. 1 of The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 112175, III.ii.634.

2 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, III.ii.678.3 Aristotle, On the Soul, in On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, and On

Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library (London and Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 1203, 17587.

4 Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 1137.5 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Paul T. Durbin, 60 vols.

(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 12:590, 1679.6 Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man.

Together with the Controversies thereto Belonging, Collected and Translated out of All the Best Authors of Anatomy, Especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentis (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 502; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 6062.

7 Thomas Vicary, The Englishemans Treasure: With the True Anatomie of Mans Bodie (London: George Robinson, 1587), pp. 156; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 24708.

8 Philip Moore, The Hope of Health, wherein Is Conteined a Goodlie Regi-ment of Life: As Medicine, Good Diet, and the Goodly Vertues of Sondrie Herbs (London: J. Kingston, 1565), sig. 8v; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 18060.

9 John Davies, Mirum in Modum: A Glimpse of Gods Glorie and the Soules Shape (London: William Aspley, 1602), sig. B3r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 6336.

10 Davies, sig. B1r, B2r, B3v, E1r, D1v.11 Crooke, p. 504.12 Ibid.13 Crooke, pp. 5045.14 Andreas Vesalius, Vesalius on the Human Brain, trans. Charles Singer

(London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1952), p. 4.15 Juan Huarte, The Examination of Mens Wits. In which, by Discovering

the Varieties of Natures, Is Shewed for What Profession Each One Is Apt, and How Far He Shall Profit Therein, trans. Richard Carew (London: Adam Islip, 1594), p. 54; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 13891.


16 Andr du Laurens, A Discourse of the Preservation of the Sight: Of Melancholike Diseases; Of Rheumes, and of Old Age, trans. Richard Surphlet (London: Felix Kingston, 1599), p. 78; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 7304.

17 Kenelm Digby, Two Treatises: In the One of Which, the Nature of Bodies; In the Other, the Nature of Mans Sovle; Is Looked Into: In a Way of Discovery, of the Immortality of Reasonable Sovles (Paris: Gilles Blaizot, 1644), pp. 2756; EEBO Wing (2d edn.) 207:15.

18 Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot UK: Scolar Press, 1997), p. 29.

19 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Intro-duction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 81.

20 Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 612.

21 Petrarch, Petrarchs Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), p. 196. The origi-nal reads:

Quando giugne per gli occhi al cor profondolimagin donna, ogni altra indi si parte,et le vert che lanima compartelascian le membra quasi immobile pondo. (p. 197)

See also canzone 83, in which the lovers sleep is disturbed by loves harsh cruel image (limagine aspra et cruda) and canzone 107, where love-inspiring rays scatter images so widely (limagine lor son s cosparte) that the speaker seems to be surrounded by them (pp. 1867, 2147).

22 Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 153211, 154.

23 Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, ed. Kenneth J. Larsen, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 146 (Tempe: Arizona State Univ. Press, 1997), p. 86.

24 Sidney, p. 160.25 Spenser, pp. 70 and 100.26 Michael Drayton, Englands Heroicall Epistles (London: I. Roberts,

1599), sig. q2; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 7195. Drayton addressed other sonnets to the soul, sleep, and the senses, thus broadening the thematic focus of his sequence beyond the Platonic Idea. See Joseph A. Berthelots discussion in Michael Drayton (New York: Twayne Press, 1967), p. 31.

27 Samuel Taylor Coleridges famous distinction between imagination and fancy is particularly precise: the former is the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, the latter a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space (Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 1 [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983], pp. 3045).

28 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 84986, V.i.18 and 25.


29 Shakespeare, sonnets, in The Norton Shakespeare, pp. 17541807, 1802, lines 910. Subsequent references to Shakespeares sonnets are from this edition and appear in the text by sonnet and line number.

30 See, for example, Matthew 9:4, And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts?; Luke 24:38, And he said unto them, Why are ye troubled? and why do thoughts arise in your hearts?; and Luke 1:51, He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts (The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, ed. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett [Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997]).

31 William W. E. Slights, The Heart in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008).

32 Desiderius Erasmus, The First Tome or Volume of the Paraphrase of Erasmus vpon the Newe Testament, trans. Nicholas Udall (London: 1548), fol. L2r: EEBO STC (2d edn.) 2854.5.

33 Thomas Elyot, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538), E2r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 7659.

34 Crooke, p. 367.35 Shakespeares Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven: Yale Univ.

Press, 1977), pp. 20810; The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, ed. Helen Vendler (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), p. 234.

36 OED, 2d edn., s.v. picture, 6a. See Duncan-Joness edition of Shake-speares Sonnets for her interpretation of my loves picture as a concrete depiction, among other meanings ([London: Thomas Nelson, 1997], p. 47).

37 Booth, p. 208; Joel Fineman, Shakespeares Perjured Eye: The Inven-tion of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1986), pp. 734 and 87.

38 Gail Kern Paster, Nervous Tension, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 10728, 111.

39 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 163.

40 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 3.2.2.2.

41 OED, 2d edn., s.v. intend, 1 and 18.42 OED, 2d edn., s.v. function, 3. The word appears also in A Midsum-

mer Nights Dream, in which a character remarks that night from the eye his function takes (III.ii.178).

43 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 667.

44 Crooke, p. 13.45 Crooke, p. 12.46 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England:

Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 12.

47 Vesalius, p. 38.48 Glen Harcourt describes how such representations helped to legitimize

what was, after all, a fledgling field (Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture, Representations 17 [Winter 1987]: 2861, 44).


49 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 110. Sawday provides many visual examples of this; see, for instance, the impassive women in Adrianus Spigeliuss De Formato Foeto (1627), whose abdominal flesh is drawn back to reveal their wombs and ovaries (figures 28 and 30).

50 Vesalius, Plate 22, A Delineation from the Side of the Bones of the Human Body Freed from the Rest of the Parts Which They Support, and Placed in Position, in The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels: With Annotations and Translations, a Discussion of the Plates and Their Background, Authorship, and Influence, and a Biographical Sketch of Vesalius, ed. J. B. deC. M. Saunders and Charles D. OMalley (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1950), pp. 867.

51 Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), p. 96.

52 Rayna Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse: The Technology of Poetic Invention in the English Renaissance (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007), p. 178.

53 Kalas, p. 185 and Fineman, p. 139.

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