The questions that concerns Keats in his later poems, from 1820 on, are far different than the questions that he asks in his earlier poems, from 1817 or before. In Keats’s later poems the line of inquiry that he enters into is far more speculative and complex than his early work, tending toward as methodology of thinking that favors process over completion. This trend in Keats’s development not only points to a more complicated relationship with his craft but also to a more complicated understanding of mortality, love, and imagination. Keats’s early poems, though well crafted, show only the outer workings of the poet that he will become some three years on. In the early poems there is a tendency in Keats’s writing to approach his subject more glancingly, to dwell on delight and fancy. Many of the poems read like a bucolic that frames his way of seeing, and appreciating, beauty and, save for a few examples, generally end in a concise affirmation of his subject. In addition to the above progressions in Keats’s writing there is a more marked turn contextually in his poems away from English traditions and toward the classical traditions of Greece and Rome. All of the these transformations in Keats’s writings show a poet who has undertaken to write and consider his position in his art and in the world that is decidedly more complex and mutable; transformations that embraces ambiguity of meanings and the conflicts of reasoning toward complexity and contradiction.
In the early poems of 1817 Keats utilizes a tone and a contextualization in his writing that figures an understanding of the world and his craft that is formed out of an unrestrained fascination with imagination and beauty. Many of the poems, the sonnets in particular, deal with imagery and with themes that are decidedly bucolic and search out for moments of, in Keats’s phrasing, “delighted fancy”. Much of the early work aims to please and sets as its task the discovery of distilled moments of grace. Sonnet IV (“How many bards gild the lapse of time”) works as a typical example of the style and content that Keats was working with. The sonnet deals, ostensibly, with the role of influence on the poet and how influence operates on the poet’s conscious and on the poet’s work. Two things should be noted from the onset: first Keats is figuring his poem toward an English, Anglo-Saxon, context when he asks “[h]ow many bards gild the lapse of time!” (ln 1), and second he is using the Petrarchian sonnet form. These two features point towards Keats’s position at the time concerning which tradition he should draw from, and his basic dilemma: should he face toward the English tradition, the bard, or should he face toward the classical world toward the Rome of Horace and Ovid. This straddling of poetic tradition is not something that Keats will resolve, but as he matures he begins to take on, more and more, classical figures from myth and history. What’s important in this sonnet, and what is typical of Keats’s early works, is how his content and images work toward fancy and follow a progression in reasoning which is fairly consistent within itself, which is, that the poem works toward a resolution of meaning and reaches it without too many turns or lapses. In Sonnet IV the work one does not find questions or doubts about where the poet is in relation to those that have come before; there is no anxiety over status or decisions concerning voice. Instead Keats figures the ‘bards’ that have come before him as writers of “beauties, earthly, or sublime” (4), and though there is some darker resonances in Keats’s speaker’s reading out the ‘sublime’, the poem does not bring it forward. The speaker then discuss how when he begins the act of writing the voices of these past writers will “throng before his mind”, but they do so in a manner that is both productive and charmed: “But no confusion, no disturbance rude/ Do they occasion; ‘tis a pleasing chime” (7-8). The sonnet continues along these line of pleasure for pleasure’s sake and ends with the very temperate line that those past bards “Make pleasing music; and not wild uproar” (14). Keats here is not striving to create a poem that is grappling with metaphysical uncertainty, as his poems after 1817 are, but is trying to create moments of crystallized ideals of beauty and harmony. In the 1817 poems love is courtly and the landscape framed.
However Keats’s poem “Sleep and Poetry” of 1817
develops a number of textual motifs that Keats will come back to in his later poems. “Sleep and Poetry” is a poem, like Sonnet IV, that deals with the craft of writing, of the poet’s task, and the scope of the art, it is also a poem that finds that the task of poetry is powerful, broad, and ‘fearful’. “Sleep and Poetry” sees Keats working on some of the metatextual considerations that will return throughout his work and it also points to the unresolved methodological approach of some of his later works. There is not in “Sleep and Poetry” a clear line or a concise progression in the internal logic of the poem; however, that is not to say that the poem is not reasoned to its own demands. Instead, the poem is dealing in tropes that cannot be easily reasoned with. It is in this poem that there emerges a radical shift in the position of the poet and his figures. In “Sleep and Poetry” the work of the poet is not to find and delineate clean lines of beauty, but is a darker and more difficult work:
And can I ever bid these joys farewell?
Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life,
Where I can find the agonies, the strife
Of human hearts. (122-125)
Here the work of the poet is ontological, it is meant to enter into being, into its extreme and difficult forms and to be multivariant in its looking, to see from diverse perspectives, or as Keats words it, “thousands in a thousand different ways” (148).
By 1820 Keats has accepted the task of the poet that he had laid out in “Sleep in Poetry”. Not only did Keats begin to work in broader strokes, taking on several longer poems, but his poetry began to formulate a position that dealt in difficulty. Typical of the 1820 poems is his “Ode to a Nightingale”. From the onset of the poem one can see that the world is no longer that of middle ages England but has become tied in with classical figures. Here, instead of Spenser and of knights and damsels, Keats is calling on the world of myth: it is hemlock that has been drunk, it is in Lethe were he has sunk. Additionally, Keats is constructing a poem that follows a line of reasoning that is generally more amorphous than the line of his early poems. “Nightingale” operates with a rhetoric which works through the pairing of diverse figures, namelythe nightingale that lacks the knowledge of pain and the poet figure who envies this epistemological state, which work in an interlacing logic that is discordant with the poems of 1817. In “Nightingale” it is knowledge and experience which harbors pain and suffering, it is memory and recollection, two figures which his early poems brought delight, and attached experience to the immortal. In fact, the nightingale’s song, detached as it is from suffering, is instead of a crystallization of ideal beauty, a beauty that the poet longs to die within. It is a song that is devoid of meaning and because of that pain: “I have been half in love with easeful Death,/ Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme…Now more than ever seems it rich to die” (61-64). In effect the speaker in the poem has arrived at the formulation that to be without pain is to be without meaning. An additional break from is early work is made clear in this poem, in “Sleep and Poetry” the poem ends with the poet waking from sleep and preparing to write the lines which the reader has just read. In “Nightingale” there is no clear division between poetic vision and wakefulness, but there is now a line between imagination and reality which has become blurred, or more precisely the differentiation between poetic vision and reality is no longer admitable. In the final line of the poem the speaker posses a question which is, because of its rhetoric, unanswerable and is necessarily so, “Do I wake or sleep?” (89). When Keats asked questions in his poems of 1817 the answer was supplied by the poet or was readily graspable, and almost never ended the poem. Here though Keats has made the final statement of his poem a continuation, an aspect of method. There is no tidy answer to Keats’s question and it is not meant to be. The poem is entering into a new metaphysical ground where it is process and method which are under consideration and not a terminus or crystallization of meaning. Keats here in “Nightingale” and in other of his poems of this period is no longer drawing out lines that inscribe the world in a meaning and in beauty, but is instead confronting his failure to suss out such a meaning, such a beauty. The transition between Keats’s early poems and his later poems is the movement between aligning his poetry along a single perspective toward a vision which contains ‘thousands’. This transition not only presses Keats to write a poetry that is more complicated metaphysically but it also leads him into forms that are more grand and more labyrinthine, and gives an image of a writer that has not settled on the world, a writer that is still naming, that is unfinished.
When thinking about 
Raworth, in the late 60’s in England, faced a different challenge, coming as he did at the tail end of the reconstituted formal Hardyism of the 
Raworth’s poem “Wedding Day” exhibits a number of these qualities concerning the construction of meaning. The poem opens with a line that works as a kind of repeated refrain with variation, “noise of a ring sliding onto a finger” (l. 1). The line does a number of things to open the environment of the poem. First and foremost, it introduces one of the primary sensory markers that will recur in the poem; “noise” will be the single word that will connect the above mentioned refrains which are, in addition to the above: “noise of two cine-cameras” (l. 15) and “noise of a bike freewheeling downhill” (l. 26). What is immediately noticeable about the three lines is that the sense appealed to, that is sound, is not the sense that the image itself is adjusted to: sliding a ring onto a finger should be visual or tactile, cine-cameras do make a wiring sound but they are machines that capture visual images, and again the bike going downhill (notice there is no suggested rider) is a visual phenomenon. Though this is far from a synesthasic effect, there is a cross-pollination of sense and data, events which are registered on the visual plain are here being presented as sonic data, but much of the poem is about the slippage of language and how that sliding of connotation creates different modes of understanding.
Meaning, then, can do just as much work revealing an object or event as it can to conceal. There is in the intuitive valuation of information a lack of dichotomy, and in that, systems of good and bad, valuable and worthless, art and pop, are no longer tenable; there can be no intelligenced right and wrong. The fog in stanza two moves across the landscape in such a manner, “we came by the front/ sea fog twisting light above the pebbles/ toward the cliffs towards the sea” (ll. 3-5). Notice how the fog moves in all directions at once and inhabits what it passes over equally. The movement of the fog is multi-variable and takes no singular perspective or preference but moves both toward the sea and away from the sea toward the cliffs. Of course, at the same time that the fog moves over the landscape, it also obscures the landscape, that is, it replaces the features of the landscape, the sea, the cliffs, with fog. This process is again another iteration of the sensory and lexical morphology mentioned above. The landscape has become unrecognizable, has undergone a metamorphosis which will then be replicated in the following stanza when a presumable groom or guest changes physical experience, “he// came from the toilet wearing/ a suit, people/ didn’t recognize him” (ll. 9-12). Intuition allows for these morphologies to occur and for them to occur with no inscribed meaning enforced upon them.
This movement between and through phrases is what sets Raworth’s poetry off; this is the impetus. It is to pick up disparate parts of language and phenomenon and place them before each other, to let meaning form out a hyper-reality which can not be codified, grammeratized, or rationalized into a solid whole. Raworth’s poetry begs that there be no solid point of completion, that forms and images, allusions and sound, rebound off one another in such a manner as to belie the work of intelligent reading. Raworth’s poetry will not create tidy packages and set the poet up as meaning maker, as a tool for weddings and funerals and anniversaries. Raworth’s poetry is an art that is in opposition to completion. His is a poetry of process and of growth.
Shelley worked over the relationship between how one sees the world and how that frame of seeing informed not only knowledge, but also informed what in the world was perceived. For Shelley looking onto a thing was to change it, that the mind is shaped by and shapes the world around it. The world was for Shelley, to borrow a title from one of his poems, mutable, “that naught may endure but Mutability” (“
Contextually, the balance in the rhymes is mimicked in the symmetries of the flowers in the garden of “The Sensitive-Plant”, for the poem’s main landscape is a landscape of flowers and flowers are the principle actors in the poem. The flowers, however, do not exist in the poem simply as objects but are instead anthropomorphized. They have desire and delights; they ‘pant and tremble’, they sleep, and they love. In addition to lending the flowers in the garden human characteristics, Shelley also describes the flowers in non-mortal terms, that is, as deified beauty, as Naiads, nymphs, and Maenads. During the first section of the poem, the section that focuses on the Sensitive-Plant, the flowers and the climate around them conspire in perpetuating a state of continued beauty. The odors of the flowers are lifted like music into the winds and spread across the garden “like ministering angels” (I. 94) in an “undefiled Paradise” (I. 58). The Sensitive-Plant though is unique in the garden in that it is the only plant that is not a flower and is described as being un-beautiful, “It loves—even like Love—its deep heart is full—/ It desires what it has not—the beautiful” (I. 76-77). This want for the beautiful though is a desire, though unfulfilled, which sustains the Sensitive-Plant and the process of seeking beauty, its own longings, leave the Sensitive-Plant “weary of its delight” (I. 112). It is in the first section of the poem that one of the main arguments concerning the nature of the mind is put forth:
m where the figure of a Lady is introduced into the garden. The figure of the lady, like the flowers, is placed outside of the mortal realm and, like the flowers, she is a source of beauty, but the Lady is one lined as a figure that amplifies the beauty of the garden. She is the “fairest creature from earliest spring” (II. 57). Also, this Lady operates in much the same way that dreams operate on consciousness. She spends most of her time in the garden tending it, by “killing insects” and removing “things of obscene and unlovely form” (II. 41-42). Though she creates shape of the garden she does not “mark” it: “And wherever her aery footstep trod,/ Her trailing hair from the grassy sod/ Erased its light vestige, with shadowy sweep” (II. 25-27). The Lady in the poem moves through the garden in a way similar to the way that dreams move through consciousness, designing what consciousness is without leaving its mark on it. The lady is also presented in ocean metaphors much like the metaphor used to explain consciousness as a Lady “like a sea-flower unfolded beneath the ocean” (II. 8). In effect, the lady is the dream life of the garden, and if dreams then shape the world that is perceived, shape consciousness, then it is logical that the Lady dreams of paradise, “her dreams were less slumber than Paradise” (II. 15). The Lady is, therefore, a figure created in the dreams of Paradise, and Paradise is a figure created out of the dreams of the Lady. They are symbiotic, and when she dies Paradise dies with her.
4).
Nabokov, in his brief afterword to Lolita titled, “On a Book Entitled Lolita”, makes a claim which carries an enduring resonance in regards to his stance on verisimilitude: “‘reality’ [is] (one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes)” (312). Through this brief statement, with its parenthetical aside, Nabokov is positing an understanding of the nature of reality which is suspect and un-fixed, a reality in which there is no sustainable means of identifying a nucleus of certitude. Accordingly, for Nabokov, there can be no “willing suspension of disbelief” since, suis generis, there is no original belief to suspend. Where in the realist fictions that preceded Lolita, there was an impulse to create texts which carried with them a high degree of verisimilitude, an impulse to show the world for what it was, objectively, in a work of art; however, Lolita stands as a work of fiction that continually produces stylistic maneuvers which signal toward its textual nature. Though Nabokov has placed a number of formal mechanisms in the novel which belong to the realist tradition i.e. journal entries, letters, articles, expert 
opinions, existing place names, etc., he does so in order to belie them by encoding them with anagrams, allusions, alliterative devices, et. al., in order to effectively put them in quotes. Humbert himself belongs to a world which is framed by explicitly un-real devices: nymphets, enchanted hunters, a kingdom by the sea, fairy tales, etc., which he mistakes for the attainable and the tenable, in many ways his desire for the mythical in the world is one of the features which designs his monstrous actions. To this, Nabokov, in Lolita, is always making clear how the novel is a work of enchantment; in so doing, he subverts the verisimilitude of the fiction and calls into question how artifice and illusion in literature work as a seduction.
quotation marks, in effect, calling their importance into question and in addition, has insulted readers who rely on these two words as ‘old-fashioned’. Here the text has explicitly called into question the desire to create a fiction which is meant to be read as believable, a text which works to underline some form of universal truth hidden in the world and which is only tenable through the writer who has unlocked this truth. Like most introductory remarks, John Ray’s foreword frames how the text should be read: “[a]s a work of art, it [Lolita] transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader” (5). John Ray has, at this point, designated two different types of readers: one ‘old-fashioned’ and the other ‘serious’ and each reader is meant to take different ‘lessons’ from Humbert’s narrative, one titillating and one ethical. However, all remarks that John Ray makes concerning the Humbert’s text must be viewed with some form of suspicion given the pompous and conceited tone that Nabokov gives to John Ray toward comical ends. It is also worth noting that John Ray won the ‘Poling Prize’ for a book title “Do the Senses Make Sense?” (4), a title which questions the representation of reality.
Also important in this section is the name of the lake that the soon to be Humbert family will visit, “Our Glass Lake”. The name of the lake suggests its reflective surface and plays off the traditional term in pre-modern English for mirror. In this section, the lake is suggestive of doubling and copying its surroundings, of replicating space. Later in the novel the name for the lake will morph in to “Hourglass Lake” (notice that the Humbert Humbert, “HH”, inserts the letter from his name into the title of the lake), the name has transferred from the reflection of space into a reflection of time.
aggrandized in certain fundamental questions concerning the text as a whole i.e. where does the narrative begin: is it in bed just before sleep, is it in a good night kiss, in a cookie dipped in tea, in Combray, in a section called “Swann in Love”, or is it in the history of names? There are even suggestions in the text that the beginning lays even further back in “metempsychosis…of an earlier existence” (3). These questions are not readily answerable, but they do point toward a larger problem in Swann’s Way which concerns the ‘nature’ of experience and the ‘nature’ of things. Rarely is a single object, event, or character presented in the novel in a singular manner, instead the view is fractured, rearranged, and reorganized. This system of narrative organization creates in the novel a perspective which shifts continually the layers of meaning for the object of address. This shifting perspective works to find an essential quality in the object of address, but as it does so, additional information is needed to ground the importance of the object and as more information is brought to bear
The opening of the novel begins with this system layering, in this case of the self and art: “I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V” (3). The quoted section above demonstrates how, form the onset of the text, there is no solid figure, there is no thing that exists in isolation; instead any and all details are filled in through a system of free association. This will be the modus opradi of the section of the novel that precedes “Combray”, and the language of the section points to the free association of a narrative that construes self and object outside of conscious control. Throughout this opening section, Marcel uses words that are indefinite in their character; the quoted section points to the onset of this language where the ‘church’ and the ‘quartet’ are linked to the indefinite article a as opposed to the definite article the. So that both the ‘church’ and the ‘quartet’ mentioned are unspecified and could mean any church or quartet; they are ambiguous and amorphous. This ambiguity of object though had already begun as a pattern before the quoted section, even the first phrase points to a non-specificity of, in this case, time, “For a long time” (3). Here, at the beginning of the text, time is working as a feature more than as a thing that delineates events or inscribes interval, facets which time are generally associated with. As opposed to a demarcation of time that measures duration, the narrative instead addresses time in a manner that obscures its ability to mark out events—it is not stated that it was a ‘long time ago’ or ‘forever’ or even ‘when I was a child’—but simply ‘for a long time’. Again, the indefinite article allows for the ambiguity to seep in to the phrase and invites a reading that allows for multiple readings, allowing the emergence of layers. Immediately following this phrase, the next sentence in the novel opens with a word that works with ambiguity: “Sometimes” (3). This ‘sometimes’ not only carries with it the feature of time, of the temporal, as in the preceding phrase, but it is a ‘sometimes’ that will frame the section quoted earlier. This ‘sometimes’ then adds onto the a of the church and quartet and allows for additional interpretive modes to filter into the sentence, pushing the solidification of self and time even further afield, so that a singularity of time and self become even more problematic than before i.e. not only is the self of the narrator being replaced by what he reads, 
obscuring a solidified understanding of self. In addition, what he reads about is not solidified in time or place. Meaning continues to build on meaning and those systems of representing meaning are, at the outset of the text, opened to allow even further source to enter into the construction. This system of narrative is far removed from the bulk of writers that had come before Proust. Writers like Zola, Balzac, and even, to an extant Flaubert, created narratives that followed a line of narrative that demarcated and inscribed a clear meaning for their reading audience: events happened along a linear progression and narrative voice, generally in the 3rd person, relied on the definitive article. Rarely would one find in such narratives a guiding voice that “did not even understand in the first moment who I was” (5).
into space, to applying it to the whole…which the moving body traverses, in a word, to solidify it: as if this localizing of progress in space did not amount to asserting that, even outside consciousness, the past co-exists along with the present” (65). For Bergson, here, time past is constructed out of the past and are not two states which can be dislodged, one from the other. Likewise, Marcel narrates the architectural formation of the room in which he wakes; it is constructed out of diverse forms, meaning and are constructed out of past rooms, from memory, until something that can be called the room he awakes in is revealed, “Then the memory of a new position would reappear; the wall would slip away in another direction: I was in my room at Mme. de Saint-Loup’s” (7). Just as Marcel’s room is constructed, or found out of memory and recognition, the city of Combray is constructed in much the same way, especially its church which “summ[ed] up the town representing it” (49). For Diane R. Leonard in her essay “Ruskin and the Cathedral of Lost Souls”, this system of construction is the linchpin to the novel itself: “by laying down impressions in the reader’s mind—magic-lantern projections on the walls of his consciousness—which become layered in memory in a vertical ‘fourth dimension’ where they co-exist simultaneously, like the stratifications of different centuries in the Church of Combray” (56). It could be said that the architectural construction of the church in Combray is parallel to the construction of self for Marcel. Like Marcel’s conception of self, which is formed out of all his experiences simultaneously, the church of Combray is likewise formed out of multiple ‘experiences’ of time, a version of Marcel though writ large: “[the church was] something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying a space with, so to speak, four dimensions—the fourth being Time—extending over the centuries its nave which, from bay to bay, from chapel to chapel, seemed to vanquish and penetrate not only a few yards but epoch after epoch from which it emerged” (62). In many ways, this can be seen as the desired end result of Proust’s large novel, which ends with Time Regained, where the self has been formed completed and can stand outside of time.
The orientation of time, as has been suggested above, does not situate outside of space, that is outside of perspective, or view. The perspective most represented in Swann’s Way is most closely associated with what is called the parallax view, which the OED defines as a “[d]ifference or change in the apparent position or direction of an object as seen from two different points” (OED online) i.e. the apparent displacement of an object occurs due to the movement of the observer between two points. As with time, in the novel, which ‘doubles and multiplies’ experience so too does the shifting of perspective, the manner through which an object or event is viewed predicates its meaning as well as its overall form. 
in Swann’s Way that produces the narrative effects in the novel, the feeling that a solid view in time and space is somehow inadequate in expressing the complexity of the reality and its representation. For it is a question in the novel of forming an entirely new relationship in productive mimesis, instead of allowing ‘reality’ to dictate the shape of the art of Swann’s Way. Instead there is a more complicated cross-positioning between reality and its representation; wherein, this binary has equal weight in forming the other or as Harold F. Mosher once commented Proust has created “a reflective fiction dramatizing its own creation” (quoted from Landy 119). What makes the narrative structure of Swann’s Way is that there is no point, or the points are limited, when there is a solidified stance on the nature of reality, there is a deeper meaning which Marcel experiences with his cake and tea, but that deeper meaning is elusive, shifting, and untenable. The difficulty of establishing a beginning to the novel discussed earlier relates to the nature of the novel itself, which is a novel that examines process, not completion. It is a novel that is concerned with the process of memory, of thought, and meaning, and how the process is always in a constantly shifting perspective, that “the past co-exists along with the present”, and that the manner in which perspective, along a time space axis, ranges across the field of experience that allows for the formation of meaning, but a meaning that is always in a state of inception, of process.
number of undo deaths, and the last two acts of the play have been read as belonging to the comedic tradition, one marriage and a reconciliation of a marriage thought to be doomed. The anxiety to find an appropriate genre taxonomy for the play has lead to the creation of the romance for those plays which do not follow the recognizable lines of genre convention common to Shakespeare’s canon: history, tragedy, and comedy. The Winter’s Tale is a unique play in the works of Shakespeare and it can easily be read as ‘bad Shakespeare’, as mentioned above the play is without the stylistic complexities that abound in most of Shakespeare’s plays, there are no lexicological motifs, there are no soliloquies that balance difficult philosophical conjectures concerning ontology and epistemology, and most strikingly there appears throughout the play actions and dialogues gestures which completely undo the illusion of theater. Finally there are a number of conventional theatrical devices which appear in the play that belong to the tradition of theater that were relevant in the generation before Shakespeare began working and which would become obsolete for the generation after Shakespeare; conventions that belong to the mystery plays and the pastorals of late middle-ages England which would have still been the popular form of theater outside of metropolitan London. Though the above can point toward evidence of a writer who is in his “dotage” one should also bear in mind that this is the same writer who in the year following Winter’s Tale will produce The Tempest a play that has had a fairly stable place among Shakespeare’s works as a ‘strong’ work. If then this is not Shakespeare ‘mellowed’ then what are the reasons behind the strange shift in the play and the vulgar conceits that appear in the play? The supposition that this essay will follow is that Winter’s Tale first and for most is a parody, not just of the theater of pre-English renaissance but of broader convention of genre and, possibly, of Shakespeare’s own work, and a parody on the illusion of art.
A number of writers have pointed out that one of the interesting features of Winter’s Tale is that, as opposed to the majority of Shakespeare’s plays, the play follows closely the plot and structure of it source material, Robert Greene’s romance 
speech after first suspecting Hermione of infidelity with Polixenes is a case in point: “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one” (1.2. 186). The beginning of Leontes speech here gives no indication of a broad or deep seated hatred and desire for revenge. The language instead falls around the problem of being mired to the ‘knee-deep’ and ‘inch-thick’. The language points to an image which suggests a minor problem or an uncomfortable position, there is not, as in other of Shakespeare’s tragedies, those powerful images of melting flesh, thundering tongues, daggers in smiles, unsexed women, or references to infanticide, patricide, regicide, or any other cide. Instead Leontes’ ‘rage’ is framed along this fairly comic rant which continues: “And his pond fished by his next neighbor, by/ Sir Smile, his neighbor” (1.2. 196-197). Here there is not just the comically named Sir Smile but there is the unnecessary repetition of ‘neighbor’ reiterating the stumbling inarticulate style of Leontes, a style that is a far cry from the grandiloquence of an Iago or Richard. Leontes indictment treads the same style as his ocular proof of “paddling palms and pinching fingers” (1.2. 117), where again the crime is trifles just as Leontes rage is trifles. Miko acknowledges this system of rhetoric employed by Leontes: “this language…to us is usually absurd; and Shakespeare makes it go on long enough to push us beyond our initial judgment (the man is crazy) to consciousness that this is a psychological study, a symbolic game, and finally a kind of black joke” (262). Later in 2.1. Leontes rhetoric and designs to murder his wife’s presumed lover are openly mocked:
takes a metatextual shift and reminds the reader that they are not just coconspirators in the play but that the play will dramatically shift into a more ‘readable’ comedy. Miko points to these moments in his essay, “I take his attitude to be…playful, especially playful with the extremes which literary conventions exist to control: death, obsession, contrary or excessive emotional attitudes, and at the bottom our ineradicable wish to make the world fit our desires” (“Winter’s Tale” 260).
climate’s delicate, the air most sweet;/ Fertile the isle, the temple much surpassing/ the common praise it bears
a character with a name like Time is highly unorthodox in the Shakespearian canon and the use of an allegorical figure of this nature belongs to the tradition of the mystery and morality plays which began to be performed as early as the 15th century. Plays of this nature, as in the morality play, 
/ www. elizabethanauthors. com /pandosto1.htm.
Hamlet, in its drive toward the speech act as the prime motivator of action in the play uses language as a guiding device that consciously calls this theatrical world into being, language is, throughout the play, a force both generative and destructive. The speech act as deus ex machina cannot be overly represented in a discussion of Hamlet, but in addition to the status of language, or because of this status, the speech act should also be viewed as one of the governing principles of the play, if not its central figure. In effect, language is not a means to convey desire but is in itself the creator of desire and the facilitator of action in the body of Hamlet; what Bruce Danner in his essay “Speaking Daggers” notes is “this congruence between the natural world and narrative language [in Hamlet]” (44).
The calling forth of the world with speech begins with the play’s opening phrase “Who’s there?” (1.1. 1). This question can be seen as the lexicon logical framework for one of the major dilemmas of the play i.e. Hamlet’s questioning of his nature, of his identity and attached to that the nature of his will and motivation, a dilemma which is couched in the following line which carries the imperative “unfold yourself” (1.1. 2). These speech acts reach into the darkness surrounding the scene and call forth the two first players. This calling forth is then echoed in a like manner by Barnardo who, with his narrative concerning the appearance of the Ghost (1.1. 33-37), calls forward the Ghost in a way that suggests that the speech, the language of description, activates the presence of the Ghost, or as Danner has it in the above mentioned essay, “the Ghost’s subsequent presence functions less as an interruption to the tale than a completion of it, as if Bernard’s words take shape in the apparition itself” (44). In addition to the language in this early section bringing forward elements of the world (and the unnatural world),
understanding that Hamlet delivers forward, that his nature is not one of disguise or conceit, but instead his outward appearance and action are in check with his inward self. This stance by Hamlet can be read in a number of ways, it can be seen as a critique on the superficiality of the court and politics, it can be read as consternation concerning the short time between the marriage of his mother and uncle following the death of his father, and it can be read as a characteristic habit of thought and system of understanding that Hamlet will return to throughout the play. It is this last reading of the exchange quoted above that warrants the closest inspection, especially in light of Claudius’ response to Hamlet’s speech. Here Hamlet addresses the state of the world as a thing that is definable, that a state of being is best understood at and for its own sake. For Hamlet, at his core, meaning is derived by addressing directly the subject itself. This may seem an odd statement concerning the character of Hamlet since he has often been judged as a character who’s inability to act has been framed around his indecisiveness, his inability to find meaning directly (interestingly, though, Hamlet speaks through a pun on ‘seems’ and ‘seams’, the nature of a pun though rests on the mutability of language, of a words double-sided nature). Though this may be true, his inaction can also be seen arising from the manner of his rhetoric. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet takes two states of existence and measures one next to the other in an un-transformed state; he takes the subjects directly, “To be, or not to be; that is the question” (3.1. 58). There is no equivocation in the pointedness to which Hamlet holds these
Following Hamlet’s encounter with the Ghost, we are given a verbal portrait of Hamlet, in his antic disposition, as related by Ophelia to the upper branches of the court of Elsinore. Hamlet’s first movement toward his ‘feigned’ madness is positioned as a pantomime. This scene is interesting in the way in which it mirrors the dumb play in the ‘Mousetrap’, in that it ‘acts’ out the inner state of Hamlet without speech and, like the dumb play, does nothing to activate understanding; it gives no meaning and shapes no real action in the world. Here the play takes a turn toward a mode of operation that will be repeated throughout the play, that of contrivance, of resurfacing the world in order to understand it better, or, in the rhetoric discussed concerning Claudius, to order the world by what it is not in order to come at what it is. What has changed at this point in the play is that Hamlet has shifted his public rhetoric to match that of the courts. This shift in Hamlet comes as a binary opposition to his original public statements concerning his position on the way in which he “seems”, at this point Hamlet has conjoined, publicly (this insistence on Hamlet’s public self is here emphasized because Hamlet’s intimate, private self is still concerned with the world behind appearance) the conception of rhetoric and the world that belongs to Claudius. Hamlet uses this form of speech- rhetoric to his advantage, so much so, that his adversaries become unmoored in their conception of language and the world that language creates. It should be noted that Hamlet has entered a world, that of politics and law, that creates through language, through edict and writ, a world where the rule of law follows the mantra ‘so it is written, so it will be done’. Which now points to the contrived meeting of Hamlet and Polonius designed to ‘find the matter out’. In the opening of this interaction (2.2. 173-185) a number of motifs are mirrored in earlier and in later sections of the play concerning language, toward the early parts of the play there is the issue of being “too much in the sun” a notion which is repeated but which is moved onto Ophelia instead of Hamlet, and Hamlet’s insistence on taking the direct route in the meaning of words:
a linear axis, highlights the techniques which are used in literature to ascribe meaning, and at the same time calls these techniques into question. There is around Sound and the Fury a tenable anxiety concerning meaning, not just around abstractions such as theme and intention, but around the ordering of events and the differentiation of the identities of its characters. In many ways, the final section of the novel can be read as a means of alleviating these contextual anxieties, at the same time though, an additional ‘appendix’ was added to the novel after its completion in order to clarify further the events and lives of the Compson family. The impulse to add an appendix to the text points toward a process of understanding which is continually falling short of its intended purpose which is to locate the information which gets at the essential quality of significance within and without the text. However, each addition to the text, every extra narrative only compounds on the perspectives that have come before it, it reiterates that understanding of the world which Kant had presented. This representation of understanding requires that the mimetic stance of Realism and Romanticism be radically called into question. That there is no narrative manner which can penetrate into the ‘truth’ of the world, that the ‘truth’ of the world is actually inside narrative manner rather than in an external force that carries an unquestionable truth-value, can be seen as one of the object-lessons of Sound and the Fury—perception is meaning. A metatextual stance of this nature follows along the lines of Hegel’s understanding of the task of philosophy: “[h]istory is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” (cp 9), where here we can replace the ‘history’ with ‘novel’. So that Sound and the Fury can be read as a novel which is openly questioning its own concept, its own textual nature.
Throughout the 
tell the face thou viewest,/ Now is the time that face should form another”. Linguistically, the opening lines of the sonnet shift, as a number of the sonnets do, meaning and inclination on a single word. In the above quoted passage the way in which the ‘face’ is being addressed is not only skewed first the face is being told to address itself and then, second, the face is being addressed, and then third it is being used as a template to ‘form’ another self-same face, so that, though the word ‘face’ remains static its repetition is by no means a simple rhetoric, but is instead a multi-angular view contained within a single linguistic framework. Contextually, these opening lines point to a system of replication, almost simulation, of a particular ‘form’, of a face fair and beautiful, and though we do not know the gender of the speaker (though the gender of the addressee is explicit by line 4) we can infer, as Sedgwick does in her critical work, that the sexual genders here are male to male. Though the eroticized language contained in a number of the early 126 sonnets is not here as present, (there are no aggrandized 
claims to the young man’s eternal beauty) there is a turning in on genders one into the other, male onto female: “Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee,/ Calls back the lovely April of her prime” (ln 7-8). With these two phrases, the poet transfers the opening two lines of the poem, in context and in language, and performs a radical inter-sexing of the subject and the subject’s mother. By so doing, the speaker not only makes ambiguous the two subject’s, the son and his mother, individuated identities, but also allows for an equal, if reflective, gender personification, each into each, to occur. In addition, it is worth noting that the word “mother” here, like the word “face” is playing double duty from line four’s “unbless some mother”, so that where there was a face in a mirror addressing itself which in turn was being addressed, there is compounded onto this face another face, that of the mother’s, which is also another mother, that of the young man’s as yet unformed wife. Such a dexterity of views of forms and subjects compounding and overlaying is just the type of complexity of gender understanding that the Sonnets tend to favor, and that Shakespeare on the whole tends to favor (I am thinking here of Shakespeare’s use of the pun and the double entendre as devices that speak at different angles simultaneously on the same subject and through the same word: see sonnet 138 and the “Will” sonnets in particular).
The final handful of lines takes this multiplication of views even further so that the actual offspring of the young man will operate as a living version of the mirror image that has been addressed: “So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,/ Despite of wrinkle, this thy golden time” (ln 11-12). Again, the lines and their implications cannot be read in a vacuum but must be read against and with the line concerning the young man’s mother, who is doing just the same thing: looking into her son and seeing her “April” in his looks (this can then be compounded by the fact that the young man, in his later age, is looking through windows, and through his own reflection on the glass, or seeing himself on himself over and again). By the end of the sonnet there is already, by this reasoning, at least four operative images of the young man in action: (1) the young man, (2) the reflection of the young man in the mirror, (3) the image of the young man in his mother’s face, (4) the image of the young man through the speaker’s eye. All of these reflections of the young man’s identity are cross-pollinated temporally, where his mother is the past and he is the present, and his child (male or female) is the future. What is most important for Sedgwick’s reading of the Sonnets, though, is the way in which gender, and by rote identity, is made multivariate and how this multivariance allows for a particular kind of erotized address to occur between the young man and the speaker within the sonnets of, as Sedgwick calls them, a form of address that is “of a specifically homosexual (not just homosocial) male intertexuality” (28).
The interplay between illusion and reality play a significant role in 
This fluctuation is represented in the text by two diametrically opposed groups of characters: one group, consisting of Eliza’s family and friends, favors a realistic, factual, and decidedly moral view of the world portrayed by the novel; the other group is represented, mainly, by the character of Sanford who intentionally deflects reality and succors illusion, illusion which leads to the ‘moral’ degeneration of Eliza and to her tragic death. Interestingly, the novel’s form replicates this predilection for reality and truth through textual devices which create a high degree of 
history’ and ‘fact’ to represent the reality within the book, coupled with the use of the epistolary form as a more editorial authority than authorial, but the literature and art alluded to in the novel follow a particular aesthetic thread which favors texts and arts, which share these same aesthetic goals. For Foster—aesthetic is ethic. Foster demonstrates this dictum by synthesizing the moral imperative of the novels plot with the form of her novel.
represented as being an engine for fabrication whose main aim, aside from the seduction of Eliza, is his desire to “keep up the appearance of affluence” (65). This idea of “appearances” and airs not only links Sanford to the concept of illusion of the deflection of reality, but also given that Sanford’s character is portrayed as rakish, deceitful, and in a sense murderous, given Eliza’s fate, links illusion to these characteristics as well. It must also be added here that Sanford’s wearing of airs as mentioned above points to an intentional decision to construct an illusory fabric around the reality of his circumstances, a fabric which consciously attempts to manipulate those around him, or as in the case of Eliza, those that are given over to such airy designs (as will be shown later this ‘intentional illusion’, as a novelistic design, will be called into question by Foster). Throughout the novel, Eliza’s character is attached to words which deal with illusion or trickery; words such as: “bewitching”, “imagination”, “farce”, “fashion”, “assumed airs”, “appearances”, etc. Dwelling in illusion, her inability to accept her friends concept of reality leads ultimately, in the novel, to ruin and death. Thus the role that either illusion and reality play in a characters life becomes a moral question, or as Eliza’s friend Lucy Freeman states it:
haracter is made up of deflection and digression away from its claimed ‘life’ of Shandy (19, 139). Contrary to Sanford’s predilections for literature, Eliza’s friends and family praise (claiming that it represents the moral dangers which face a young woman) 
illusory reality which Sanford designs, is both a moral and aesthetic imperative. In all, it is arguable that Foster sees the moral implications of Eliza’s fate being grounded in the moral implications of literature and art. Foster favors novels and “diversions”, which are colored through with a moral reality, and disdains works like Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy, which are colored through with the bawdy and the entendre, vomit and blood, deflection and illusion. Though the rhetoric employed to put forward these notions is markedly different from those employed today i.e. a “kind of reading; perfectly chaste” (112), the significance of Foster’s preference still remains, “The closing scene of life can be no pastime, when realized! it must therefore awaken painful sensations, in the representation!” (113). This statement on the portrayal of death gives rise to even further questions given the end of The Coquette, which is the representation of Eliza’s tombstone, that question being not how a novelist can grapple with the ‘correct’ portrayal of a life, but how a novelist can tackle a death, the end of a story, in other words. This by and of itself points to a concept of closure, of finality in a work. That the last page will be the end of a story, that its open and close will be structured in such a way as to leave little doubt as to meaning, or truth. What this calls into question, all in all, is what the novel, or any work of art should aim at as an end goal. For Foster, this goal is the completion of a tale, of a life, and with all the gravity and ‘truthfulness’, that such a life should contain—that literature is a serious matter that should not be taken lightly, that a novel should not be merely, as Tristram Shandy purports to be about “a COCK and a BULL”; rather, a novel should contain an idea of life and death which should never be taken lightly, or a life and death that should not be tri
vialized by the designs, or as Foster would have the ‘egomania’, of an author. In effect, Foster is drawing a line in the sand as to how life and death can, or should be, justifiably represented in order to contain the pathos and bathos of human life. She has made a choice about which genetics of the novel she has chosen to further in the idea of the novel in American literature.
WILKMANSHIRE 