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The question that inevitably arises with openly-appropriative texts is the relationship of the new text to its source; what, to invoke Pound, “makes it new”? This is also, of course, the dilemma for writing in general, from Pound’s dictum to Bloom’s anxiety of influence and beyond — but in some ways we do not choose our influences or how those influences affect our writing. When at one time Keats may mean nothing, a year, two years, ten years later we find ourselves consciously appropriating his devices; or, more often, we find ourselves in a state of unconscious appropriation, suddenly becoming aware of the Keatsian trace mirrored in our line or language. But in appropriative writing the appropriation is conscious and intentional; something of a motif in the genre of such writing is, in fact, the narrative of finding or choosing the source from which to work.[1]
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With writing that then goes on to “treat” or “ruin”[2] the source text, we tread on ground where authorial intention and decision are again part of how, as readers, we understand the meaning-making of the text. Decisions are made, not only in the choice of source text, but precisely at the site of each word on the page: “to leave or not to leave,” if you excuse the pun, does seem to be the question. See, for example, Jen Bervin’s treatment of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 45:
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The other two, slight air and purging fire
Are both with thee, wherever I abide;
The first my thought, the other my desire
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;
Until life’s composition be recured
By those swift messengers return’d from thee,
Who even but now come back again, assured
Of they fair health, recounting it to me.
This told, I joy, but then no longer glad,
I send them back again, and straight grow sad. (Bervin “45”)[3]
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As Bervin describes in the “Working Note” to her treatment of the Sonnets, she “stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets,’” and in doing so presents us not only with an alternative text cut out of the Shakespearean source, but the “present-absent” ghost of the original. We are, in such a way, given access to Bervin’s decision-making process; we are made aware, at each word-site, of the choice that was made, and of each choice’s alternative. In the space of appropriated and treated text, writing and reading are conflated. These treated texts, writes Craig Dworkin in Reading the Illegible, “record a reading down the page,” “replacing the serial and linear horizontality of conventional reading” and “constructing new syntaxes” (130). Similarly, Steve McCaffery calls Ronald Johnson’s Radi os (a treatment of Paradise Lost) “[l]ess a writing [than] a precise transcription of a tactical reading” (127).
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In this essay I will show how Bervin’s treatment of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, NETS (2006), as well as that of Stephen Ratcliffe’s earlier, similar project, [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (1989), provide insight on a treated text’s relation to its source, and how the text’s dependence on, and transcendence of, the source text works in the resultant text’s meaning-making. At the conclusion of the essay, I consider what it means for these two works to treat or ruin the Sonnets not only in relation to the Shakespearean text but also in relation to “Shakespeare” the institution and cultural signifier, and propose suggestions for further study.
¶
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“I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the ‘nets,’” Bervin writes in her “Working Note,” “to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible — a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest.” Bervin’s main strategy in NETS seems to attempt a balance between “stripping bare” the source and retaining the text that was ostensibly erased or stripped away. More than other treatments, such as Johnson’s Radi os or Tom Phillips’s A Humument, in which the majority of the source text is missing or otherwise irretrievable,[4] Bervin’s use of the source text as a grayscale background forces our recognition of the ghost of Shakespeare she is writing “with or against.” The palimpsest of the source text is, in this sense, wavering somewhere between the “present-absent” and the “present-present.”
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Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-obvious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover’s eyes. (“55”)
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“[A]gainst the infinite instability and surplus of the source text, the treatment isolates and stabilizes one potential route for the outlet of its excessive significatory capacity,” Dworkin writes of treated texts in general. “By retaining and incorporating the trace of the source text in the form of the original page layout...the treated page constantly reminds its reader that the words still visible have been diverted from their intended function” (132). But Dworkin is writing about texts where the erased source is literally absent. In her use of the source text as a wholly-present (albeit gossamer) background, Bervin risks her alternative reading-meaning in the face of Shakespeare’s text. How are we to read these “nets” in relation to their source? Are the words in bold Bervin’s, or Shakespeare’s? Is she working “with” or “against” the source text, and does her treatment succeed in transcending its source enough to “make it new”?
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In her presentation of Sonnet 55, Bervin’s reading-treatment draws an unambiguous statement out of Shakespeare’s text; a statement that, if taken out of the context of Shakespeare-as-source, would probably seem naïve, obvious, or unnecessary: “sluttish / wasteful war // you // wear this world out.” Even against the palimpsest-sonnet, our answer is “yes, I agree,” and wish this resurrected Shakespeare had something more interesting to say. More successful in transcending the source in a meaningful and new way are the “nets” that seem to directly address Shakespeare (or the Shakespearean source text) while referring to the treatment process itself:
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O that you were yourself but, love, you are
No longer yours than you yourself here live.
Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give.
So should that beauty which you hold in lease
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again after yourself’s decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.
Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O, none but unthrifts! Dear my love, you know
You had a father; let your son say so. (“13”)
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These poems that emphasize the treatment process shift the context of the questions asked above. The question isn’t so much “whose words?” but “whose process?” — a question Bervin is able to answer by textualizing and dramatizing the process itself. Whether or not we can say the meaning of Bervin’s text is working with or against Shakespeare’s, we can say her process is working against the Shakespearean process, and it is this tension that proves some level of Bervin’s independence from, or transcendence of, her source. “Make it new,” in this sense, is recontextualized as “make it different.”
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“By the Sonnets we are invited to become critics, urged to experience something about the writing of poetry, the making of fictions, and the meanings of poetry to a poet and to any literate man,” writes Rosalie L. Colie. “The Sonnets...dramatize literary criticism” (29). Similarly, NETS invites us to take on Bervin’s role as a divergent reader-writer of texts; and the “nets,” at their best, serve to dramatize the treatment process. By leaving the source text on the page Bervin invites the reader’s own alterative readings, not only against the Shakespearean original, but against Bervin’s own. In short, Bervin’s “divergent elsewhere,” in including the grayscale ghost of its source, necessarily includes, precisely, the divergences of all other possible readings. The intrinsic value of NETS lies less in the meanings of Bervin’s foregrounded text than in the implicit democratization of the process of divergent reading as a form of writing, as finding “an unfamiliar text within a text, present in [the source] but via habitual reading unseen” (McCaffery 124).
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That said, the relation between Bervin’s text as a dramatization of the treatment procedure and Shakespeare’s Sonnets seems tenuous. We would come away with a similar call for divergent reading had Bervin treated in a similar way Sidney’s or Donne’s or Wordsworth’s sonnets — or, for that matter, the phone book (though to make poetry out of the phone book would likely be the greater accomplishment). Often, Bervin’s foregrounded text, as in her treatment of Sonnet 55, isn’t able to stand on its own outside the Shakespearean grayscale box — and may not stand even within it. Within the given confines of the Shakespearean text, the word-by-word choice of “to leave or not to leave” always seems to fall — at least for this reader — on the side of the original, Shakespearean choice. While Bervin’s decision to retain the whole of the source text works to emphasize the populist, DIY aesthetic of divergent reading-writing, it also dooms any attempts to “make it new.” As Terry Eagleton notes in his study of Shakespeare, “we have yet to catch up with him” (x).
¶
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As opposed to Bervin’s approach, Ratcliffe’s strategy in [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG stretches his text’s relation to the Sonnets, even to meaning itself, to the limit. All traces of Shakespearean voice or Elizabethan English have been eroded away. Further, Ratcliffe does away with the Sonnets’ numbers and places his treatments two to a page, divided by a short line (see example below). Without knowing this is a treatment (or, as Ratcliffe says, an “echo” [Listening 45]) of the Sonnets, we would probably not associate these texts in any way with their Shakespearean source. What we have in reference to Shakespeare is the title, citing both Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”) and Ratcliffe’s process, where the words in brackets are those erased from the treated text. We also have, on the back cover, the whole of Sonnet 73 with Ratcliffe’s words highlighted — in a way similar to Bervin’s “nets” — again illustrating the book’s process, though in negative.
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But Ratcliffe’s text, with its minimalism and open-field poetics, seems more modern than Bervin’s, and the new syntaxes it finds in the Sonnets push syntax nearly to a breaking point. Compare, for example, Ratcliffe’s treatment of Sonnet 55 to Bervin’s treatment of the same text (above):
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Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-obvious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and
_______________
Sweet love, renew thy force! Be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite,
Which but today by feeding is allayed,
Tomorrow sharpened in his former might.
So, love, be thou; although today thou fill
Thy hungry eyes even till they wink with fullness,
Tomorrow see again, and do not kill
The spirit of love with a perpetual dullness.
Let this sad int’rim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore where two contracted new
Come daily to the banks, that, when they see
Return of love, more blest may be the view;
As call it winter, which being full of care
Makes summer’s welcome thrice wished, more rare.
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What are we to make of this? What does the “nor” refer to? In a cluster of words such as “the record of/all/pace/in the ear/this judge,” where do we begin and end a meaningful phrase? Is it “the record of all/pace in the ear,” or “the record of all pace/in the ear”? Is “pace” the verb for “record” or “judge”? Is it a noun? Or is “the ear” “this judge”?
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Instead of making the “leave or not to leave” decision at each word, as Bervin generally does, Ratcliffe further distances his “echoes” from their source by mining individual words for other words hidden within them. In the bottom half of the example above, Sonnet 56, Ratcliffe mines several words in such a way: “to” from Shakespeare’s “today,” “form” from “former,” “though” from “although,” and “‘rim” from “interim.” Ratcliffe creates even more separation from his Shakespearean source by blurring the lines between the treatments of individual sonnets, forcing a reader to decide how to read the syntax between the sonnet-treatments themselves. Often, a bridging of the separator is possible, even called-for, as with Sonnets 55 and 56, where “this,” at the end of the top section seems to find its object in “said/edge” at the top of the lower section:
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in this, and
_______________
Sweet love, renew thy force! Be it not said
Thy edge should blunter
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This is writing that demands a context. Ratcliffe, in his essay “Writing [Echoes] Writing,” claims that the subject of writing that “echoes” [treats] writing is “not the self (itself) but what can be made of it in words, of words. What is in the foreground (i.e., what is written) suggest the absence of what is not, i.e. what was presence (writing) echoed as the sound of all the writer means to transcribe” (Listening 47, italics in original). With Ratcliffe’s “echoes” of the Sonnets, not only are we aware of this “absence of what is not,” but it seems that, as a function of its meaning-making, the text demands engagement — if not with the actual text of “what was presence,” then with the themes associated with that text. Where Bervin’s dependence on Shakespeare is explicit, Ratcliffe’s is implicit, but more demanding, having stripped the Sonnets so far to the bone. But engagement pays dividends, for the reader, demanding a framework for meaning, finds it in the present-absent thematics of the Sonnets themselves: loss, ephemerality, immortality, and the power of the aesthetic in relation to all these.
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McCaffery writes that “[s]ight should not be lost of the fundamental negativity involved in this method as a production through loss” (125, italics in original). While Bervin’s text dramatizes the treatment process itself, Ratcliffe’s dramatizes the inevitable outcomes of that process — loss and its analogues, longing and lament — on several planes of text and meaning. Because Bervin’s dramatization of the treatment process retains the source-text in grayscale, the “nets” operate without a real sense of this loss — and the tension that may result. But Ratcliffe’s text both emphasizes and thematicizes it. In this sense, [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG is an elegy: for Shakespeare’s text, perhaps Shakespeare himself — and, as we may infer from the book’s dedication, Ratcliffe’s father. Of course, the lines from which Ratcliffe draws his title are themselves a famous Shakespearean lament:
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That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. (Shakespeare 1727, lines 1—4)
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In this context we can begin to attach meanings to words and phrases, though the effects of the process of meaning-making are cumulative and transitory from one sonnet-treatment to the next. Having in mind Shakespeare’s theme of the aesthetic preservation of beauty in the face of “sluttish time” (Sonnet 55) — coupled with the general notion of elegy or lament — we can attach both meaning and emotional resonance to words and phrases, as in “to/from/though/eyes/see again” and “Which parts/see/the view/being full of/more” from Ratcliffe’s treatment of Sonnet 56. But Ratcliffe’s meanings never quite come to conclusion; they continue to mutate and interweave. We are asked to see the book as a whole as a kind of symphony or suite, where we derive meaning from the ongoing motions, repetitions, and accretions of language, thought, and emotion. Ratcliffe makes, in effect, the Sonnets into a single meditative, elegiac poem — one constantly distancing itself from, and demanding the thematic context of, its Shakespearean source.
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In the end, Ratcliffe “makes it new” through his treatment’s strategy of distance from the source text and its demand for, and intimacy with, the source-text’s thematic concerns. By incorporating the loss of the source text as a theme parallel to the loss of his father, Ratcliffe’s text both depends on the source while transcending it. Through his process, Ratcliffe moves his text far enough away from the Sonnets that a qualitative comparison between the two is irrelevant and fruitless. But perhaps the greatest accomplishment of [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG is its effect on the reader. If in Bervin we are always aware of the alternative that could have been chosen, with Ratcliffe we are always aware of the loss of that alternative to a “divergent elsewhere” not immediately available, a distance and separation that the treated text laments. “Writing is a kind of ‘memory,’” Ratcliffe writes, “to cast a net across the whole field of possible words, draw together those that maximize as much of what has been ‘said’ before, and what will be ‘said’ from now on: how else to know perception, my present feeling, thought’s pulse” (Listening 192—193). While Ratcliffe’s work may not be as immediate as Bervin’s, it performs a much more important function, reminding us of the emotional resonance of writing and language — “my present feeling, thought’s pulse” — through a textualized illustration of loss.[5]
¶
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A treatment’s success in “making it new” — if conclusions can be drawn from these two examples — depends on a productive tension between its dependence on, and its transcendence of, the source. We may say the originality of a treated text comes down to an originality of reading and seeing — in “find[ing] alternate sentiments embedded in texts” (Dworkin 130). In this case Ratcliffe’s reading is the riskier and more original, precisely because it demands the original sentiments it ostensibly rejected, and then thematicizes that yearning for what was lost. If Bervin’s book falls short, it’s because the book fails to depend enough on the source (it does not achieve a productive relationship with Shakespeare’s themes; its schema can be applied to any text with similar results), and because it fails to transcend the original (the treatments can rarely stand outside of the source-text background; Shakespeare’s text will overwhelm most alternatives). Successful treatment, therefore, must reach beyond mere dramatization of the process and understand the complex thematic relationships among the source, the process — and, if we take Ratcliffe as an exemplar — the poet him- or her-self. In short, the treatment must achieve a balance among conservative and radical, traditional and new — and must be aware of the productive tensions these dichotomies imply for “my present feeling.”
Coda: Shakespeare as Source Text
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“Is there a text, or group of texts, in the literary canon,” writes Howard Felperin, “that so readily lends itself to exploration of negativities, absences, and indeterminacies of textuality itself?” (94). When a writer chooses to treat or ruin Shakespeare’s Sonnets, he or she chooses to step into a tangle of ambiguities, “Shakespeare’s cavalier unconcern with exactitude or verisimilitude of reference and representation” (Felperin 103). Indeed, with the Sonnets one is presented with apparently personal lyrics that may or may not be autobiographical, with the signifiers of the “young man,” “the rival,” and the “dark lady” still unable, after centuries of scholarship, to connect to their actual or historical referents, if indeed those referents ever existed.
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But these ambiguities not only involve the texts, but address the status of “Shakespeare” as a signifier standing, at times, for the whole of literature, high art, and Anglo-American, or even Western, Culture. The treater of the Sonnets must be aware of the issues foregrounded by the critical subgenre of Shakespearean appropriation studies: how, that is, Shakespearean texts and the figure of “Shakespeare” itself are deployed in the service of cultural and ideological processes. While few will question the canonical status of Paradise Lost — the source Ronald Johnson treats in Radi os — “ruining” Milton doesn’t carry the same weight as doing the same to Shakespeare — the text, signifier, and institution. “Shakespeare,” that is, carries more cultural capital than “Milton” (and most of the rest of our cultural signifiers) — a capital available for use by those who appropriate his texts. When one appropriates and treats Shakespeare, one implicitly signifies a relation not only with the source text but with the symbolical “Shakespeare” as well.
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“[L]ike it or not, all we can ever do is use Shakespeare as a powerful element in specific ideological strategies,” writes Terence Hawkes. “Shakespeare doesn’t mean: we mean by Shakespeare” (3, italics in original). Jean Marsden, in her introduction to the anthology The Appropriation of Shakespeare, writes of “an ongoing process of literary and cultural appropriation in which each new generation attempts to redefine Shakespeare’s genius in contemporary terms, projecting its desires and anxieties onto his work.” This process, in short, is “[an] attempt to make over Shakespeare in our own image” (1). What does it mean then, to not only appropriate, but to “treat” or even “ruin” a Shakespearean text, the Sonnets specifically? How do Ratcliffe and Bervin’s processes and texts project our time’s “desires and anxieties” onto Shakespeare’s work? How do these treatments reflect “our own image”?
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Here I propose two possible routes for further study. The first is in relation to history and our notion of the historical. “At a time when most Americans have never, arguably, been more ignorant about history, Shakespeare has never been more popular,” Linda Charnes writes.
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For the recent upswing of mass cultural attention to Shakespeare is inseparable from a revival of popular interest in what I would call, for lack of a better term, “the historical”... I don’t mean historiography as the art of writing events into the reified form we call “history,” but rather a philosophical “structure of feeling”... that lets us postmoderns feel as if we’re still living in a world marked by the passage of meaningful time. (51, italics in original)
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Are these treatments, erasures, or ruinations of Shakespeare attempts at marking “the passage of meaningful time” — or at least attempts to provide evidence of an historical event, the treatment itself? On another level, do treatments of the Sonnets — with their themes of time, decay, and the aesthetic — signal a complex and tendentious exploration of history and historicity through an exploration of a Shakespeare that signifies “History itself” (Charnes 51)?
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A second route of study involves reading treatments of texts in light of the practices of early modern manuscript culture. Before the advent of print culture and copyright laws, editors, publishers, and ordinary readers treated, not only Shakespearean texts but all texts, in a way similar to our contemporaries Ratcliffe and Bervin. In “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” Arthur F. Marotti writes that “In a system of manuscript circulation of literature, those into whose hands texts came could, in a real sense, ‘own’ them: they could collect, alter, and transmit them” (143). He goes on to discuss the Sonnets specifically:
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In a seventeenth-century commonplace book found in the Rosenbach Library, there is a version of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106 that begins “When in the Annales of all-wasting time” (instead of “When in the chronicle of wasted time”), an alternate version that appears, as well, in at least one other manuscript. Here, however, the poem is conflated with the text of a lyric that is found also, in slightly different form, in the 1660 poetical anthology pretending to be an edition of the poems of Pembroke and Rudyerd. (148—149)
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“In such situations,” Marotti concludes, “Shakespeare’s sonnet was not being treated like a sacred text, but as a found-object capable of being put to a number of rhetorical uses” (149).
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In the transition from manuscript culture to print culture, writers earned more rights, particularly in the form of copyright law. If there are parallels to be drawn between then and now it is in the shift between dominant modes of mediation and textual production and distribution. Dworkin, in introducing his chapter on treated texts, discusses an IBM ad from 1965 featuring “a photograph of the earthworks at Stonehenge, which IBM computers helped to map.” He goes on to say that “the writers on Madison Avenue uncannily anticipated the fact that within the year a number of poets and artists would set independently to work on projects that replicated those fragmentary documents of antiquity and prehistory [discussed in the ad]” (123). It may be that Dworkin got it slightly wrong: maybe it wasn’t the ad’s “fragmentary documents” which anticipate these experiments, but the IBM computers themselves. Are we to find some parallel between the manuscript age and the digital age, where PC-, Mac-, and Internet-enabled textual appropriation, manipulation, and dissemination is not only easy, but stand as the paradigm for our own self-image? Do these treatments mark a complex process of signifying the shift from print to digital and internet culture, a culture where text is increasingly more ephemeral, and less material? What then would it mean to engage with a Shakespeare that signifies that earlier paradigm shift — or, that signifies “literature” itself?
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The original impetus of this paper began with a consideration of why, of all possible texts, two poets writing books in a relatively unnoticed and underdeveloped sub-sub-genre of contemporary poetry chose Shakespeare’s Sonnets as source texts. The paper became something different, but the original inquiry still stands as one I find important, one that transcends specialized study in Renaissance literature or contemporary poetics: why Shakespeare, and why now?
[1] See, for example, “A Note and a Dedication” in Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, and “Notes on A Humument” in Tom Phillips’s A Humument.
[2] Using Dworkin’s definition, each treated text “erases or overprints to render most of the original text illegible, allowing the remaining clusters of words or fragmented parts of words to reforge new syntactic relationships” (127). Other terms to describe this process include “erasure,” “erosion,” Ratcliffe’s “echo,” and McCaffery’s “corrosive poetics,” among others. Here, I follow Dworkin’s lead (following Phillips’s lead) in generally using “treat” and “treatment” as a term with relatively neutral connotations. See Dworkin 126.
[3] Neither Ratcliffe nor Bervin provides page numbers, though Bervin does include the number corresponding to Shakespeare’s sonnet. Here, Bervin’s text is as it appears in NETS, with the “left out” words of Shakespeare’s original remaining as a grayed-out background, and the words Bervin chooses to retain set in black, bold type. Neither poet specifies which edition of the Sonnets they work with. Due to the importance of space and word placement in these texts, I present the examples from both Bervin and Ratcliffe as closely as possible to the original, particularly in terms of leading between lines. While Bervin retains a standard single-line spacing, the leading in Ratcliffe’s treatments are wider; I have therefore set them at a 1.5-line spacing.
[4] See also Ratcliffe’s version of Sonnet 55 below.
[5] Or, as McCaffery writes in relation to Johnson: “In its material realization by way of deletion Radi os is the literal loss of Milton’s text and as such exemplary of Bataille’s notion of the poem as ‘the least degraded and least intellectualized form of the expression of the state of loss [and signifying] in the most precious way, creation by means of loss’” (McCaffery 125). The Bataille quote is from Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927—1939. Tr. Allan Stoekl with C. R. Lovitt and D. M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985: 120.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927—1939. Tr. Allan Stoekl with C. R. Lovitt and D. M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bervin, Jen. NETS. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006.
Charnes, Linda. “We Were Never Early Modern.” Philosophical Shakespeares. Ed. John J. Joughin. London and New York: Routledge, 2000: 51—67.
Colie, Rosalie L. “Criticism and the Analysis of Craft: The Sonnets.” Modern Critical Interpretations: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 29—46.
Dworkin, Craig. Reading the Illegible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003.
Eagleton, Terry. William Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.
Felperin, Howard. “Toward a Poststructuralist Practice: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.”
Modern Critical Interpretations: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987: 93—132.
Hawkes, Terence. Meaning By Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Johnson, Ronald. Radi os. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005.
Marotti, Arthur F. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property.” Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 143–173.
Marsden, Jean I. “Introduction.” The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth. Ed. Jean I. Marsden. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991: 1—10.
McCaffery, Steve. “Corrosive Poetics: The Relief Composition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os.”Pretexts: literary and cultural studies 11:2 (2002): 121—132. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCOhost. GALILEO. 15 Apr. 2007. http://www.galileo.usg.edu/
Phillips, Tom. A Humament: A Treated Victorian Novel. 4th Edition. London and New York:
Thames & Hudson, 2005.
Ratcliffe, Stephen. [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG. Oakland: O Books, 1989.
———. Listening to Reading. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 73 [That time of year thou mayst in me behold].” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 5th Edition. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004: 1727.
Andy Frazee
Andy Frazee Andy Frazee is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. His reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Verse, Cutbank Reviews, Galatea Resurrects and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 1913, Eleven Eleven, Bath House, Rhino, Sycamore Review and Faultline.