Abstract
Abstract
This chapter pursues two interrelated questions: what constitutes pleasure in Shakespeare’s poems and what pleasure does the reader derive from reading them? The discussion utilizes Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text as a heuristic framework for pursuing these questions, and the chapter takes Sonnet 18 as its central case study, as this poem captures an elevated state of love that is at heart indescribable. The discussion is enhanced by analysis of collective memory and the promise of bliss in Sonnet 55, Sonnet 122, and Sonnet 126. The discussion underscores how memory—both the speaker’s and the reader’s—cannot be disaggregated from the pleasures described in the poems.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford