CHAPTER 18.
In reading Shakespeare's sonnets, declares Samuel Schoenbaum, "the biographer, in his eagerness for
answers to the unanswerable, runs the risk of confusing the dancer with the dance” (Schoenbaum 1975,
134). This curious warning against seeking "answers to the unanswerable" has a distinguished genealogy
in Shakespeare criticism. Many critics –
ironically many Shakespeare biographers -- fear that readers
who endorse a biographical paradigm for the Sonnets risk falling into overt apostasy. The biographer Sir
Sidney Lee, an early enthusiast for Shakespeare's "fancy,” holds that the bard's "dramatic instinct never
slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of
a personal confession” (Lee 1898 159: emphasis added). Schoenbaum, however, is more clever than any
previous critic of the biographical school of Sonnet interpretation. His Romantic premise that poets are
uninterested in proof is supported not by the authority of Sidney Lee, but of William Butler Yeats (1865-
1939), whose famous couplet
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can I know the dancer from the dance
has become a locus classicus in contemporary debates about critical method.
As a matter of faith, it is impossible for Schoenbaum to distinguish the dancer from the dance; those
who make the attempt are frustrated empiricists who have no business pretending to be literary critics.
Curiously, the line from Yeats which Schoenbaum cites has become a locus classicus of contemporary
hermeneutics; in deconstruction according to Paul DeMan, just as in bardography according to
Schoenbaum, it has indeed become impossible to "know" the dancer from dance. In such discourses, the
verb "to know" is construed necessarily to mean "to distinguish" --
and anyone who doesn't accept the
impossibility of distinguishing the dancer from her dance is revealed to be something of an
epistemological simpleton.
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