Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 128 first decades of the 20th century reflects “the cultural turn” of literary studies and reaches out into the wider field of immigration studies. The essays collected in Imagology Revisited confirm Waldemar Zacharasiewicz’s standing as one of the leading imagologists in the field of Anglo- American literature and culture. His work is based on the conviction that literary scholars can offer a contribution to an improved understanding between nations and ethnic groups. Not the least of the many merits of his scholarly activities is to have made imagology an esteemed part of English and American studies. Günther Blaicher Katholische Universität Eichstätt Sonja Fielitz (ed.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Loves, Layers, Languages. (Anglistische Forschungen 411). Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Daniella Jancsó The quartercentenary of the publication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the year 2009 was celebrated in the daily press and in the theatre, where Peter Brook’s staging of the sonnets was a major event. In the academic world, the jubilee was marked by, among other things, the publication of A Quartercentenary Anthology, a commendable treasury of translations in 72 languages with a critical commentary, edited by Manfred Pfister and Jürgen Gutsch. The anniversary also occasioned a number of academic conferences. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages, edited by Sonja Fielitz, is a collection of the papers given by distinguished scholars at an international conference hosted by the University of Marburg. The title of the volume bears upon “three major fields of criticism”, as Fielitz explains in her introduction: “‘Loves’ refers to a section dedicated to the texts themselves, that is, matters of gender and sex, including the fictional identity of the Dark Lady and the ‘sweet youth.’ ‘Layers’ is related not only to the general idea of ‘layers of meaning’ but rather to various degrees of friction and synthesis, that is, between form and content, discourses and expression, word and image”, while “[t]he third section, ‘Languages’, covers [...] the (linguistic) afterlife of the sonnets” (p. viii). This triad, for all its alliterative allure, cannot quite conceal the fact that the book lacks a unifying idea, and the result is a thematically heterogeneous collection. It is also regrettable that the description does not exactly match the actual scheme of the book, which is divided into three Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 129 parts entitled “Prelude”, “(Fe)male Matters”, and “Afterlife: Great Britain and Beyond”. Thus, there is no section corresponding to “Layers”. Although this very broadly defined theme can be discerned in the contributions in different forms, these connections remain largely implicit, with their import often unspecified. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s casually autobiographical “Touched by Shakespeare’s World” is categorised as the “Prelude” to the essays that follow. Recalling his first encounter with Shakespeare’s poetry during his schooldays, Gumbrecht seeks explanations for his lasting fascination by exploring the sonnets’ aesthetic value. He notes that Shakespeare’s texts “show a potential to reach an extravagant concentration and immediacy in the realization of their own world”, and adds that “this Stimmung, and Shakespeare’s world, is preserved in the sonnets in various layers, which can [...] be separated and ordered as individual phenomena” (p. 2). Gumbrecht characterises the Stimmung in Shakespeare’s sonnets as a “many-voiced, suspenseful, and moving unity of tones” (p. 6), although he also warns against conceiving of the aesthetic effect in terms of unity: “[t]he formerly conjured correspondence between contents and sound is nonexistent”, for readers “seem only to be able to concentrate either on the contours of the contents or on those of the sound” (ibid.). His tentative conclusion is that the “specific magic of [Sonnet 18] is so hard to name [...] because it is connected to the intensity of the suspenseful and likewise oscillating harmony of rhythm and contents” (p. 7). In “Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Sex”, the opening essay of the section “(Fe)male Matters”, Stanley Wells concisely claims that “Shakespeare’s concern with sex in his sonnets is both exceptionally explicit [...] and profoundly serious” (p. 10). By carefully phrasing his argument that the sonnets “reveal what [Shakespeare] could imagine as personal experience, even if not his own” (p. 13), Wells elegantly avoids crude biographical criticism. At the same time, he achieves a renewed focus on the existential depth of these poems, reading them as documents of human predicament rather than as ingenious literary exercises. These sensitive readings demonstrate that the sonnets, autobiographical or not, “afford profound, and sometimes deeply troubling, insights into human sexuality” (20). In “The Effect of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, also included in “(Fe)male Matters“, Paul Edmondson approaches the sonnets from three reasonable, if unfortunately unrelated, perspectives. First, he is interested in the “incredibly intricate relationship between sound, sense, and metre” (p. 24). Contrary to Gumbrecht, Edmondson emphasises the power of their unity, and comes to the conclusion in his analysis of Sonnet 8 that “[p]art of the cumulative impact is the awareness that the progressive sound and sense of the sonnet is as interconnected as the musical notes it describes”, creating an “irrevocable, harmonious effect” (p. 25). Secondly, Edmondson stresses the importance of relating Shakespeare’s plays to his sonnets. And indeed, this is still a relatively neglected field of study, despite David Schalkwyk’s groundbreaking Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (2002). In the final part, Edmondson does, however, adduce good reasons to regard “A Lover’s Com- Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 130 plaint”, the closing poem of the 1609 quarto edition, as Shakespeare’s own “creative and antithetical response” (p. 29) to his sonnets. Paul Franssen’s “How dark is the dark lady? ” and Thomas Kullmann’s “Shakespeare and the Love of Boys” round off the section “(Fe)male Matters”. Franssen addresses the question of “how to avoid compounding the ostensible misogyny of the Sonnets with racism” (p. 31), an issue most pertinent to the appropriation in popular culture of the Dark Lady as a woman of African descent. He clearly points out that in contemporary figurations of the Dark Lady, “political correctness often wins out over historical plausibility” (p. 41) and concludes that “[t]o whitewash the Black Lady, in the name of political correctness, Shakespeare, the archetypal DWEM, is all too often accused of a multitude of sins, ranging from misogyny and racism to bad breath - and usually without a great deal of evidence” (ibid.). Kullmann, in contrast, focuses on the historical discursive and cultural contexts of the sonnets, and argues that Shakespeare drew on classical literary discourses to “give shape and meaning to the experience described in the sonnets: pederasty, or the love of boys, as practiced in Greek and Roman antiquity” (p. 43). Kullmann's historically informed analysis leads him to the assumption that Shakespeare “saw himself as a Platonic lover of boys, as one who admired the boy’s beauty for its transcendental perfection, engendering a love which is nobler and more perfect than a love of women which is based on sexual practice” (p. 50f.). The section “Afterlife: Great Britain and Beyond” opens with an essay that is somewhat at odds with this heading: Roy T. Eriksen’s “Shaping the Sonnet Italian Style: Petrarch, Tasso, Daniel and Shakespeare” reviews the development of the sonnet up to Shakespeare’s time and addresses the question of how “Shakespeare’s practice of the sonnet form relate[s] to that of his Italian predecessors” (p. 55). Eriksen, like Edmondson, conceives of the sonnet as a spatial and a musical experience. Furthermore, he proposes a structural approach he calls “topomorphology”, which “considers the rhetorical shape and integration of topoi, or themes, within the body of a poem” (p. 56), and his reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 indicates how this approach can yield valuable insights. Boris Dunch, Uwe Meyer, and Wolfgang Weiß discuss the translations of Shakespeare’s sonnets into Latin, Esperanto, and various German dialects and sociolects, respectively. Their essays not only enrich the territory opened up by A Quartercentenary Anthology, but also raise important questions about the quality of translations and the cultural status of dialects. The contributions by Erich Poppe, Wolfram R. Keller, and Christian Pauls consider the legacy of the sonnet form - but not specifically the legacy of Shakespeare’s sonnets - in Welsh, Scottish, and contemporary British poetry. Although they are all well worth reading, their inclusion in a volume entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets would require some form of explanation. Erich Poppe’s highly informative “Welsh Contexts for the Sonnet: The years 1833/ 1834, c. 1600, and 1909 (and after)” calls attention to the interesting fact that the sonnet form made its first appearance in Welsh literature as late as 1833. The subtlety of Poppe’s argument is evident in his observation that “the foreign form of the Rezensionen AAA Band 37 (2011) Heft 1 131 sonnet did not cause colonial anxieties, but was rather considered to have a liberating effect” (p. 79), as it allowed Welsh poets more flexibility than their strict metres, which they increasingly perceived as being too limiting. Wolfram R. Keller’s “‘Unconquered into chaos’: Edwin Muir, the Sonnet, and the (Scottish) Renaissance” is an excellent exposition of the poetological relevance of the sonnet form for Muir’s later work. Keller impressively demonstrates that by means of the sonnet, “Muir literally recasts Scotland’s twentieth-century literary renaissance as the historical Renaissance that did not take place, rooting Scottish traditions firmly in the middle-ground between Continental and English poetic models” (p. 111). Finally, Christian Pauls’ “A ‘Fourteen-Liner most Apposite’? - Taking a Cross-eyed Look at the Sonnet in Peter Reading’s Diplopic” presents a remarkable contemporary appropriation of the form: Diplopic consists of twin texts in which the subject of the first poem is reworked in the second one as a sonnet (of sorts). Pauls elaborates primarily on the thematic transformations within the pairs, but perhaps a more in-depth formal analysis would have sharpened the essay’s argument. Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Loves, Layers, Languages, despite its lack of a unifying approach, does offer some interesting perspectives on Shakespeare’s sonnets in particular, and the sonnet form in general. Whereas the “Introduction” relates the volume to the revived critical interest in the aesthetic value of Shakespeare’s sonnets (p. i), this issue is addressed directly in merely three (of the thirteen) contributions. The volume does raise, though only implicitly, questions about aesthetic experience, whose exploration might have contributed to the overall coherence of the collection. Gumbrecht’s essay ends, surprisingly, with the following evasive conclusion: “Maybe there is no elaborate description or explanation for [the sonnet’s] beauty beyond the reference to the poem, and to whatever one expects from it. Each moment of aesthetic experience is an event that cannot be guaranteed success, which is only ever proven by means of the empirical judgement of those experiencing it” (p. 7). And Edmondson concludes by noting “the elusive effect of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” (p. 29), and it is also telling that he reverts to the trope of personification to stress his point: “They [the sonnets] have a habit of breaking free from any interpretative system that tries to contextualise or control them [...]” (ibid.). If elusiveness is the last word on the aesthetic experience in general, or on the effect of Shakespeare’s ‘unruly’ sonnets in particular, then criticism with an aesthetic focus also risks drifting off into the elusory itself. One would certainly welcome more substantial insights from such a long overdue readmission of aesthetics into literary studies. Daniella Jancsó Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München