SOURCE: "Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakspeare's Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism," in Style, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 1-30.

In the following excerpt, Hedley contends that self-love or narcissism is pervasive in Shakespeare's sonnets. After observing that the sonnet genre in general can be perceived as one where the poet is "talking to himself, " Hedley also remarks that Shakespeare's sonnets in particular convey narcissism through their use of puns and through the poet's clear desire to become one with his beloved.

The love that is celebrated in the first one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets is narcissistic, as several commentators have noticed¹: "it is love by identification," as C. L. Barber explains (662).² Writing about the Sonnets in 1960, Barber preferred to try to understand the lover's posture in these poems "without resort to psychoanalytic formulations" (667); more recently, however, Joseph Pequigney has analyzed that posture in terms...