SOURCE: “What May Words Do? The Performative of Praise in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3, Fall, 1998, pp. 251-68.

In the following essay, Schalkwyk maintains that in the sonnets Shakespeare used language as a method of social action.

In a previous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets and their relation to performance, I have suggested that it may not be especially fruitful to approach these sonnets in particular, and early modern Petrarchan poetry in general, by assuming that their linguistic aims are primarily epistemological.¹ I argue in that essay that commentators' mistaken assumptions about what the language of the sonnets is doing lead them to overlook the ways in which a sonnet's conditions of address are embodied in particular social and political contexts of performance. To pursue the fact of embodiment as the condition of a sonnet's address, I claim,

is to problematize the relationship between the signified and...