Words, words, words

Hi!

Amber, like you I was taken with the repeated pronouns.  At first, I didn't read them as mocking, but you've made a strong case for that reading.  My initial impression was that the repeated you, you, you was an erotic attachment, building toward the climactic "Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive."  Perhaps these two readings can remain in tension, explaining the halfhearted rhetorical commitment I hear in the speaker.

I was interested in the word "use"; my mind immediately jumped to a few other Shakespearean lines.  First was the senator's warning to Othello in 1.3 to "Use Desdemona well."  Here, the sense is something like, "Treat her properly," or "Understand her nature so as to gain your full advantage from her" (This second sense has a dark side which echoes Brabantio's warning that women are deceptive.)  Othello is such an elemental play; other uses of "use" in the play seem connected to the importance of properly understanding nature (And, by extension, humanity as well.  Consider Gail Paster's talks this summer about the early modern understanding of the body as governed by humors).

I also remembered Hamlet's lament in 1.2: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world."  Here, uses can be taken to mean ways of ordering or investing resources for my profit, allowing Hamlet's speech to be about renunciation.  Or it could mean ways of applying myself, hobbies, occupations.  Both of these speak to new understandings of the self encoded in the mercantile, professionalized urban life that was appearing at the time.

The two uses of use I cited illustrate the divergent worldviews that lend Elizabethan literature some of its energy--to some extent the world is still enchanted, and can be controlled through contemplation, but to some extent the world is now seen as resources, ready to be put to use and invested.  Consider how the negation of use changes with context:  For the Aristotelian Christian trying to understand the natural world, the opposite of use is abuse: misunderstanding, sin.  For the economist, the opposite of used is unused: missed opportunities, waste.  Both terms appear in Sonnet 4. 

In a second post, I plan to connect the difference between these approaches to Jacob's interest in the glass darkly, and the relationship between the present and the transcendent.  Maybe even going back to our former interest in the nature of beauty.  But it's late, and I can't access the OED from home.