Milli mála - 2021, Blaðsíða 192
Milli mála 13/2021 191
be it an oral recitation before an audience, an inscription on stone
voiced by passers-by, or a printed sonnet read silently in solitude.23
Each “instantiation template” involves a dense assemblage of tech-
nologies, agents, institutions, situations, materials, and ideologies
which determine its affordances and limitations; in many, perhaps
all, cultures several templates operate concurrently.
The issue of poetic ontology acquired special poignancy in the
context of the rapid technological, economic, philosophical, and
aesthetic change that engulfed sixteenth-century England. New
and old poetic forms clashed, coexisted, and cross-pollinated with
new and old forms of instantiation, creating a multilayered and
volatile ecology of textual potentialities. The past three decades
have yielded vast scholarship on the social, cultural, economic, and
political history of the technologies of literary production, dissemi-
nation, and consumption in Renaissance England. But more re-
cently critics have been interested in “the relationship between the
materiality of the text (including the processes of book making) and
the workings of the literary imagination.”24 Similarly, my aim is to
examine the reverberations between the Petrarchan rhetoric of un-
fulfilled desire, the density of poetic language, and the material
practices of Elizabethan poetry in the sonnets of Sidney, Daniel,
Spenser, and others. Petrarchism, Cynthia Marshall writes, “undoes
the constructed self, dissolving symbolic certainty and creating a
challenge for linguistic utterance.”25 Triangulating the fragmenta-
tion of selfhood and language in Petrarchan poetry, the troubled
vicissitudes of textuality in early modern England, and the fragility
of the idea of lyric in the period, I investigate how sonnets imagine
a precarious form of poetic ontology.
The word “precarious” also calls for brief commentary. It was
first recorded in English as a legal term for a tenancy “held or en-
joyed by the favour of and at the pleasure of another person,” al-
though it soon acquired metaphorical meanings of “dependent on
chance or circumstance; uncertain; liable to fail; exposed to risk,
hazardous; insecure, unstable” and “subject to or fraught with
23 Soy Ribeiro, “Spoken and Written.”
24 Smyth, Material Texts, 8.
25 Marshall, Shattering of the Self, 68.
DANILA SOKOLOV