Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008

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 Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets: a Darwinian view

“O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem/ By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! (Sonnet 54)

by  

Christopher Perricone

Iona College

            Helen Vendler’s approach to Shakespeare’s sonnets is fundamentally sound. Given the lyric character of the sonnets, it is reasonable that the critic place in the background of her criticism the poem’s content  in order to highlight its essential linguistic features. The emphasis in lyric is on “subgenre, structure, syntax, and linguistic play.”[1]  This is not to say that semantics does not count in literary forms other than lyric. However, “The true ‘actors’ in lyric are words, not ‘dramatic persons’; and the drama of any lyric is constituted by the successive entrances of new sets of words...”(Vendler,3)   Vendler’s position on lyric’s nature comes,  in part, from poets, most significantly from Wallace Stevens and W.H. Auden. Citing Stevens, Vendler says: “A poem (must  exhibit) ‘the poetry of the idea’ and ‘the poetry of the words.’ Citing Auden, she says that Auden asked himself two questions when reading a poem. “The first is technical: ‘Here is a verbal contraption. How does it work?’ The second is... moral: ‘What kind of guy inhabits this poem? What is his notion of the good life or the good place?”(Vendler, 11)

            In this essay, I am going to look at Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1-17, the “procreation sonnets.”  With Vendler’s help, I come to understand better these poems as “verbal contraptions.”  With Charles Darwin’s help, I come to understand better “what kind of guy inhabits” these poems, his notions of the good life, etc.

            It is obvious why I would enlist Vendler in my endeavor, but why Darwin? The reason is that literary scholars typically exercise their critical skills having subsumed explicitly or implicitly not only a theory of language, but also some idea of human nature and the human mind. Hence literature  is examined by Christian critics, feminist critics, right and left wing critics, Freudian critics, etc. etc. None of the past or current views of human nature or mind seems particularly adequate for understanding what kinds of guys we are in any empirical sense of the word, that is, except for the scientific research that is being conducted under what might be called Darwinian. This research not only explains how we are descended by natural selection from other creatures, but it is also helps to explain our sensations, feelings, and thoughts – the very nature of consciousness and perhaps the nature of our arts.[2]   It seems to me (and to others, as well) that this approach to human nature through biology, psychology, and anthropology is most fruitful. Although there are disagreements, indeed sometimes vicious debates, among current Darwinians, [3]  nevertheless all agree that man morphologically and behaviorally is the result of a long natural selectionist process, the drama of which continues today. Given what we know today, Darwinism offers the best opportunities for coming to know who we are, what is our relationship to each other, and what is our place in the world. If this is true, it would be foolish, perhaps irresponsible, for anyone seeking a better understanding of the arts to neglect the best of what we know about ourselves. As Shakespeare himself says: “O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem/ By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!”[4](Sonnet, 54, 1-2)

So, first I shall try to arrive at an overview of the first 17 sonnets with which  formidable Shakespeare scholars, such as, Vendler might agree. If I can achieve an overview such that a Vendler would say: “Fine. So, what’s your point?”, then I will be in a position to make my Darwinian argument. I should mention that I know of no one who has taken a Darwinian approach to Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially to Sonnets 1-17 which seem to cry out for such treatment. [5]

Let’s take a look at some lines non randomly, yet casually, chosen from Sonnets 1-17.

Sonnet 1:

“From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.

Sonnet 2:

“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tottered weed of small worth held.”

Sonnet 3:

“Now is the time that face should form another.”

Sonnet 4:

“Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend

And being frank she lends to those are free.”

Sonnet 5:

“For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there,

Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’ersnowed and bareness everywhere.”

Sonnet 6:

“Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair,

To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.”

Sonnet 7:

“So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.”

Sonnet 8:

“If the true concord of well tuned sounds,

By unions married, do offend thine ear,

They do but sweetly chied thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering:

Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother.”

Sonnet 9:

“Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife...

No love towards others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.”

Sonnet 10:

“Make thee another self for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.”

Sonnet 11:

“As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou grow’st –

In one of thine, from that which thou departest,

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st

Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest.

Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;

Without this folly, age, and cold decay...

Let those whom nature hath not made for store,

Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.”

Sonnet 12:

“When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night...”

Sonnet 13:

“Against this coming end you should prepare,

And your sweet semblance to some other give.”

Sonnet 14:

“Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,

And yet methinks I have astronomy...

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive...”

Sonnet 15:

“When I consider everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment...”

Sonnet 16:

But wherefore do not you a mightier way

Make war upon this bloody tyrant time?

And fortify yourself in your decay

With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?

            Sonnet 17:

            Who will believe my verse in time to come

            If it were filled with your most high desert?

            Though yet heav’n knows it is but as a tomb

            Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts...

            But were some child of your alive that time,

            You should live twice in it and in my rhyme.

Sonnets 1-17 are commands to procreate. They shout loud and clear:  reproduce or die! One might add: Poet says to young man: 1. you are beautiful; 2. you are wasting your time; 3 you better find a mate and reproduce; 4. if you don’t, you’ll die leaving nothing behind. So, Sonnets 1-17 are meditations on mortality and perhaps suggestions, ironies, and illusions of immortality. In the vernacular of jazz, one might also say the sonnets are “riffs” on mortality, in some sense a simple tune of life and death, something we all understand and don’t understand. A simple tune that can be played 17 ways, or if you’ve got the “chops” – and Shakespeare had them – 170 or 1700 ways...  a simple tune but not so simple after all. Hence Sonnets 1-17 mean and  don’t just mean “reproduce or die.” They mean that and more because of the different ways Shakespeare was able to express that simple command, as it were every variation in form generating more content and substance... and as I shall later suggest, a window into the ground of  language and our evolved consciousness.

 More specifically than saying that  Sonnets 1-17 are meditations on mortality, I would like to suggest further that they are both moral and aesthetic commands. If you don’t reproduce, your beauty will die with you. If you don’t reproduce, you are selfish, shameful, unhappy, and unwise. In Sonnets 1-17, the poet speaks of time, as the sun and the seasons passing, how at the end of day, there is darkness, at year’s end nothing but the cold. Of course, there is the ever present sense, that time is short, and that death is nothing other than oblivion. The poet holds out no hope of anything like a life after death. The poet even suggests to the youth that not even the poet’s work fully captures life, or in a figurative sense, sustains it. The poet suggests a Lucretian universe of atoms bumping around in the dark, a universe of chance and contingency; that very same but much more sophisticated universe of Stephen Weinberg who tells us that the more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless it seems to be.[6]  However, for Shakespeare, even though there may not be consolation for the human spirit on a cosmic scale, nevertheless we can wage war against the tyrant, time. Although nature and time are partners in our destruction, nevertheless nature does offer us some consolation, a here and now consolation. Nature offers fecundity; it endows us with the power of increase, the power of copia, of variety and abundance. One might say, following Vendler’s suggestion, that nature offers us the power of lyric, that power to “reduplicate and elaborate.”(Vendler, 10) The way to increase is by using one’s beauty; it is knowing how to invest oneself  efficiently and wisely; it is learning how to be generous, to reciprocate, and not to be self-destructive and self-consumed; it is learning how to fight and to compete bravely not only against Time, but also against others and oneself. Ultimately the meaning, and surely the richness of meaning in  Sonnets 1-17 is the result of Shakespeare’s special genius for the making of verbal contraptions. The poet not only urges the youth to reproduce, to increase, the poet’s very performance as poet, the director of words, is itself a model of increase, as it were a model, an imitation of the fecundity of the natural world.

There is nothing more platitudinous than to say that Shakespeare had a genius for making verbal contraptions. However, it is enlightening to view Shakespeare in respect to Sonnets 1-17 through Darwinian lenses. Now, Shakespeare knew nothing about Darwinism, nor anything about neo-Darwinism. Nevertheless it is remarkable that Shakespeare had such sound Darwinian intuitions -  sound intuitions about kin selection, reciprocal altruism, and the language instinct. Indeed, one of the crucial points of this essay is that not only did Shakespeare have a profound sense of these key Darwinian ideas, but also that these key ideas reveal, according to current research, the place of human nature and human consciousness in the evolution of life overall.

            Vendler speaks of the poet Frank O’Hara who spoke of “the essential semantic emptiness of love lyrics.” (Vendler, 14)  According to O’Hara all love lyrics boil down to “I need you, you need me, yum, yum.” (Vendler, 14) Given love lyrics’ paucity of meaning, the value of love lyric must not lie altogether in its surface or proximate content, it must lie in the “arrangement of statement.” This reminds me of a distinction Darwinians make between proximate and ultimate causation, a distinction furthermore, about which Shakespeare had sound intuitions. The distinction is best stated by Ernst Mayr. Causation in physics and chemistry is problematic to be sure, but it is also straightforward. As Mayr says: “... the standard treatments of causality in the philosophical literature are based on problems of physics,  ...?” [7]  Causation in biology and in the sciences of human behavior is more complicated. Mayr says: “Every phenomenon or process in living organisms is the result of two separate causations, usually referred to as proximate (functional) causations and ultimate (evolutionary) causations. All the activities or processes involving instructions from a program are proximate causations. This means particularly the causation of physiological, developmental, and behavioral processes that are controlled by genetic and somatic programs. They are answers to ‘How?’ questions. Ultimate or evolutionary causations are those that lead to the origin of new genetic programs or to the modification of existing ones – in other words, all causes leading to the changes that occur during the process of evolution. They are the past events or processes that changed the genotype. And they are investigated by the testing of historical narratives. They are usually the answer to ‘Why?’ questions.” (Mayr, 67)

            The reason I mention this is because Shakespeare, contrary to O’Hara, seems to suggest that there is more semantically to love lyric than “I need you, you need me, yum, yum.” In a proximate sense, “yum, yum” and other synonymous indications of pleasure are the terms one uses in explaining how sexual desires arise and get expressed. The proximate causes of  “beauty’s rose,” (Sonnet 1,2) “youth’s proud livery,” (Sonnet 2,3) “lusty leaves.” (Sonnet, 5,7), etc. require functional, physiological explanations, such as hormone production and sex controlling genes.  But that’s not the whole story. The ultimate causes of  “yum, yum,” etc. also require complementary evolutionary explanations such as sexual selection, i.e. selection for characteristics enhancing  reproductive success, such as the ability to compete with members of the same sex and the qualities required to attract the opposite sex. Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare suggests that sexual pleasure is not to be understood in a proximate sense. There is more to sex than fun. Shakespeare continually invites us to think of sex in ultimate terms, in long historical perspective. Sexual pleasure has the power to delude us into thinking that the moment, now, is the essence of one’s existence. But that is just another one of Time’s tyrannical means of destroying us. To fall victim to Time’s tyranny in this sense would be to waste one’s beauty: “beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,/ And kept unused the user so destroys it.” (Sonnet 9, 11-12)  “...nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence/ Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.” (Sonnet 12, 13-14)  The ultimate cause of sexual pleasure is reproductive success.  Genes build bodies and minds through natural selection that experience sexual pleasure so that copies of those genes will show up in the next generation. The world in which we find ourselves is such that  “never-resting time leads summer on/ To hideous winter...” (Sonnet 5, 5-6)  “...were not summer’s distillation left,/ A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,/Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft./ Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was.” (Sonnet, 5, 9-12) To treat sexual pleasure, so Shakespeare clearly suggests, as merely “yum, yum” is to miss the richness, the complexity, and ultimately the raison d’etre of sexual experience. Perhaps it is to miss, as well, the elan vital that drives poetic expression.

It is overwhelmingly evident that Shakespeare in Sonnets 1-17 hears well and profoundly the “voice” of our genes. Intuitively Shakespeare seems to know what Darwinians are confirming day by day. For Shakespeare and Darwinians alike, life is a Red Queen tournament. “This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece Alice meets in Through the Looking Glass, who perpetually runs without getting very far because the landscape moves with her... The faster you run, the more the world moves with you and the less progress you make.”[8] In the sonnets, that sense that we are always running to keep up with the world, is expressed through the image of time and time as a tyrant. “When forty winters shall beseige thy brow...(your youth) will be a totter’d weed of small worth held.”(Sonnet 2,1,4)   As I have already suggested, genes build bodies that have the best chance of reproductive success. Our genes through natural selection have developed (of course, not at all consciously) strategies to “Make war upon this bloody Tyrant, Time” (Sonnet 16,2) Only through reproduction can we keep up with the world. By not reproducing, we make “a famine where abundance lies.”(Sonnet 1,7). By not reproducing “thine image dies with thee.”(Sonnet 3,14) Darwinians today realize that “survival of the fittest” is not the essence of Darwin’s message, as it has developed since 1859. Emphasizing the idea of sexual selection, Darwinians now argue that “the principal insight of sexual selection is that the goal of an animal is not just to survive but to breed. Indeed, where breeding and survival come into conflict, it is breeding that takes precedence: for example, salmon starve to death while breeding. And breeding, in sexual species, consists of finding an appropriate partner and persauding it to part with a package of genes. This goal is so central to life that it has influenced the design not only of the body but of the psyche. Simply put, anything that increases reproductive success will spread at the expense of anything that does not – even if it threatens survival.”  (Ridley, 20)[9]  Shakespeare “knows” that our bodies and psyches are shaped by Nature, how our genes in their “bounteous largess” (Sonnet 4,6) dispose us to desire and to praise “fresh blood,”(Sonnet 11,3), “the summer’s green,”(Sonnet 12, 7), beauty, and youth. As Darwinians will tell you, “if you spot somebody with good genes, it is your inherited habit to seek to buy some of those genes; or put more prosaically, people are attracted to people of high reproductive and genetic potential – the healthy, the fit, and powerful.” (Ridley, 14)  Shakespeare, too, knows we’re in the serious business of buying genes; it’s the highest stakes game we play: “Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place/With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed. That use is not forbidden usury,/ Which happies those that pay the willing loan;/ That’s for thy self to breed another thee,/ Or ten times happier, be it ten for one:/Ten times thy self were happier than thou art,/If ten of thine ten times refigured thee.” (Sonnet 6, 3-10)  Furthermore, the more we reproduce the greater our potential for happiness: “Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase:/ Without this folly, age, and cold decay.”(Sonnet 11,5-6) Shakespeare knows, too, that the business of genes is not peculiar to one or another species; it is the very business of life itself. Shakespeare says: “men as plants increase,/Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky.”(Sonnet 15,5-6) Finally, Shakespeare knows that not only is a wasted beauty a failure, i.e. a beauty not reproduced, but also that those unfortunate creatures “whom nature hath not made for store,/ Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.”(Sonnet 11,9-10)  As Darwinians would say: “Only bodies that suit the survival and perpetuation of genes will remain.”(Ridley, 9)

The poet in Sonnets 1-17  implores the youth “to make thee another self.”(Sonnet 10,13)  The poet’s command in significant part is a moral command. It is not only that if you don’t reproduce, you’ll die; more significantly if you don’t reproduce you will be “Thy self thy foe,.” (Sonnet 1,8) a “glutton,” (Sonnet 1,13)  shameful, (Sonnet, 1,13), etc, etc. In short, if you don’t reproduce,  you are selfish, you are not developing that social sense crucial to happiness and to wisdom, that social sense that begins in the family experience and radiates into the community. Of course, given man’s flexible nature, he may choose, albeit erroneously, to live on the yum yum side of life, alone. Shakespeare, like many Darwinians, understands there is more to a mind than its proximate self conscious traits; he understands that neither genes nor God determines every step we take. He understands people make choices, sometimes bad ones, and that things are apt to go wrong. But furthermore, Shakespeare is inviting us to listen to the poet of our deeper and fundamental self. And perhaps that poet might teach us something that is true to our nature and thus true to virtue, as well.

            Of course, there is no guarantee that happiness or virtue will follow given reproduction. However, through reproduction one establishes a closer connection with the world. As Shakespeare suggests in Sonnet 4, to reproduce is to invest in the future, such that one has a greater stake in it. If one listens to the music of the world, one hears how “one string, sweet husband to another,/Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;/ Resembling sire and child and happy mother,/Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing.” (Sonnet 8,9-12)  Shakespeare, here, is reminiscent of Confucius, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, men also of many sound intuitions, who argue that good moral and political lives begin with piety, that sense of loyalty to and reverence of the sources of our being, i.e. the family.  It is the family that is the material, biological ground of our existence; it is the family that gives us our peculiar language, our sense of belonging, our social sense, ultimately a sense of self. It is also the family that develops our disposition to compete and to cooperate, and even perhaps extend that narrow sense of cooperation beyond the family’s bounds. “...who is he so fond will be the tomb of his self-love, to stop posterity?” (Sonnet 3,7-8)  Perhaps Shakespeare’s strongest moral claim regarding one’s duty, especially the beautiful one’s duty, is expressed when he says:“No love toward others in that bosom sits/ That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.” (Sonnet, 3,7-8) The selfish young man reveals a lack of love for others in so far as his actions are equivalent to murdering himself and all his heirs.

             Darwinians express a variety of opinion on the relationship between theory of evolution and morality. Notwithstanding that variety of opinion, Darwinians agree on two points, which are relevant to Shakespeare’s sound intuitions. They agree that if there is any possibility of morality at all, the essence of such a morality would rest in the idea of altruism. Altruism alone is not the whole of any morality. However, without the possibility of altruism, neither a sense of rights, obligations, nor responsibilities could be formed.

            There is no Darwinian I know of who disagrees, in principle, with the ideas of kin selection and reciprocal altruism devleoped by William D. Hamilton and Robert Trivers, respectively. [10] The problem that Hamilton and Trivers faced was: Altruism seems to occur on all levels of life. However, in an environment that rewards selfishness and fierce competition with the trophy of reproductive success, how can altruism stand a chance?  The answers are: 1. when it comes to relatives kin selection explains altruistic behavior; 2. when it comes to non-relatives reciprocal altruism explains altruistic behavior.

            Kin selection: We now know that kin share many common genes. We also know that genes can spread by benefiting other carriers of those same genes. In an altruistic relationship an altruistic agent bears a cost (c) and a benefactor (b)  receives a pay-off. If there is a probability that the altruistic agent and the benefactor are related,  then there exists a coefficient of relatedness between the altruistic agent and benefactor; the coefficient of relatedness is indicated by r. Hamilton’s rule states  rb>c. In English, this means when agents are related they will profit if the cost to the altruist is less than the benefit to the recipient multiplied by the probability that the benefactor shares genes with the altruistic agent. The long and the short of Hamilton’s rule is that when it comes to sharing food or when it comes to life threatening situations, etc., you are more likely to help those with whom you share genetic material, and furthermore the greater the percentage of shared genetic material the greater the probability you will help.

Reciprocal altruism: Reciprocal altruism is not based on agents who share genetic material. Reciprocal altruism occurs only in species with a social sense.  Robert Trivers’ problem was to explain how cooperation evolves among non-relatives. The essence of Trivers’ explanation is  “Tit for tat.” The Tit for Tat strategy enjoins you to act kindly toward any other individual who acted kindly toward you on your last encounter, or toward newcomers with no previous track record of behavior, but to act nastily toward anyone who was nasty to you the last time. If other members of the population  practice the same Tit for Tat strategy, then individuals using this strategy will become reciprocal altruists toward one another, and they will all benefit from the altruism.

The ideas of kin selection and reciprocal altruism are suggested throughout Sonnets 1-17. However, here are several more: Kin selection: “His tender heir might bear his memory.” (Sonnet 1,4) Kin selection and reciprocal altruism: “Within thine own bud buriest thy content,/And tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding” (Sonnet 1, 11-12) (The miser does not understand tit for tat.)  Kin selection and reciprocal altruism: he who is self indulgent experiences an “all-eating shame” and receives “thriftless praise.” He satisfies neither himself, the community, nor nature. (Sonnet 2, 5ff)

Kin selection and reciprocal altruism: Again in Sonnet 4, terms such as “unthrifty,” “niggard,” “profitless,” are used. Without reproduction and the family one winds up “having traffic with thy self alone.”(Sonnet 4, 9), i.e. the family is the ground for altruistic acts extended beyond the family circle. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism: Perhaps Sonnet 8 better than any other of the  17 Sonnets expresses best the central place of the family as both ground and providing a platform for extended moral behavior. “If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,/ By unions married...”(Sonnet 8, 5-6) “Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,/Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;/ Resembling sire and child and happy mother,/Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing.”(Sonnet 8, 9-12) Shakespeare makes similar suggestions in the remaining sonnets. However, I’ll stop here. The point is made.

Here is a summary of the point: If you don’t reproduce: 1. you lose the battle against time, the Tyrant. 2. when you die, you die entirely. 3. any of the beauty you possess is useless, wasted, and lost. 4. you have never laid down a foundation of morality, because you have never had children toward whom you were instinctively, i.e. genetically, motivated to act altruistically. 5. you have never had a stake in the moral and social realm, since, given your non-reproductive behavior, you don’t have  the psychological/social platform from which to extend your sympathies toward others by means of reciprocal altruism.

On a negative note, Shakespeare suggests, like Hamilton, Trivers, and others that there are limits to the reach and range of our sympathies. Perhaps morality is sometimes universal in word. However, it is rarely global in deed. Just as we are bound by time, we must be satisfied with a local morality, which  brings care and fairness to our small circle of family and friends and nothing more than apathy or empty gestures of morality to the world at large. Shakespeare neither in the sonnets nor in the plays seems to hold out much hope for anything resembling a universal morality. Although kin selection and reciprocal altruism provide a natural basis for moral action, they also bring with them the natural sense of the group which distinguishes who’s in from who’s out, and sometimes does so viciously.  If it is true that our kind of mind is evolved and thus embodied, none of these negative suggestions should come as any surprise. [11]

At the beginning, I cited Vendler’s lines: “The true ‘actors’ in lyric are words, not ‘dramatic persons’. Let’s return to that point in order to draw out its Darwinian implications in respect to what I suggested might be characterized as an aesthetic command.

In Sonnets 1-17, Shakespeare employs the conceit of a poet speaking to a youth. Throughout, he urges the youth not to waste himself in pleasure alone. In Sonnet 10, the poet even strikes a  personal note when he says: “Make thee another self for love of me.” (Sonnet 10,13) So who is the poet? Again, I want to follow and not follow Vendler. I want to follow Vendler and say that the poet is the word master. But at the same time, he is also the gene master. Nature offers us two gifts. One we share with all life. One is our species’gift alone. In the former sense, we possess fecundity, the power of reproductive success. In the latter sense, we possess a correlative fecundity, the power of linguistic expression. Or how about this: the poet is a deep dual personality, which is the ground of the youth’s surface personality. So, 1. The poet is the voice of our genes in the obvious sense of urging our reproductive success.  2. The poet is the voice of our genes in the less obvious sense of the personification of our language instinct.

I have already argued how the poet is the voice of our genes in urging our reproductive success.  Thus the poet speaks as an investment advisor about our natural resources,  riches, and our hope for the future. However, the poet speaks two related languages. He speaks the language of song, a local language the youth can understand, the language of poetry, of the sonnet, its rhythm and rhyme, the power of its metaphor, its power to persuade and engage, in a word the poet speaks through the power of the arrangement of words to convince the youth to reproduce or die; that is the poet’s moral command. This particular language is the Elizabethan English language of Shakespeare’s sound intuitions. It is the language, one might say, of the phenotype; it is the language of our self conscious selves. But underlying and supporting that phenotypic language is the language of the genotype, i.e.,one might say, the game theoretic language I summarized above of the not merely sound intutions of Hamilton, Trivers, et al, but the evidence and argument that ultimately make both sweet and true the poet’s song. Thus, Shakespeare in his Elizabethan language  sings his Elizabethan song: “Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend/ Upon thy self thy beauty’s legacy?”(Sonnet 4,11-12), the ground of which is the language of Hamilton’s rule: rb>c, and the language of the computer models which are argument and evidence for “tit for tat.” 

The poet in so far as he is the self conscious voice of the sonnet, and by implication, the voice of the lyric, is thereby the unconscious- evolved by natural selection- voice of the language instinct, as well - that deep, generative grammar, which is the source of Shakespeare’s expressive power.  I lift the phrase “the language instinct” from the title of one of Steven Pinker’s books. Simplistically, the book is about how language is a universally evolved behavior of the human species. Again, simplistically, the reason we acquire language and monkeys (and other species) don’t is that we have specific brain structures that allow for linguistic behaviors and monkeys don’t. No matter how intensive the language courses you require of monkeys, they just don’t get it. Short of putting human children into solitary confinement, they get it,  i.e. acquire language,  just fine. Why children get it and monkeys don’t tells us some quite significant things about Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1-17 and  what Vendler says about lyrics. As I suggested earlier, nature does not offer us immortality, it offers us fecundity, the power to reproduce in a biological sense. As we shall see, here, nature offers us, again, not immortality, but through an embodied consciousness and the power of language evolved through natural selection, a glimpse at immortality, an embrace of eternity and the infinite by means of sentences and words.

Pinker does well in explaining how children get it and monkeys don’t and at the same time explains well the fundamentals that are of particular interest to my purposes here. Pinker says:

1.”Darwin concluded that language ability is “an instinctive tendency to acquire an art.”[12]

2. “One of Darwin’s followers, William James, noted that an instinct possessor need not act as a ‘fatal automaton.’ He argued that we have all the instincts that animal do, and many more besides; our flexible intelligence comes from the interplay of many instincts competing.” (Pinker, 20)

3. “Chomsky says there are two fundamental facts about language. First, virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore, a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words. That program may be called a mental grammar... The second fundamental fact is that children develop these complex grammars rapidly and without formal instruction and grow up to give consistent interpretations to novel sentence constructions that they have never before encountered. Therefore, he argued, children must innately be equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages, a Universal Grammar, that tells how to distill the syntactic patterns out of the speech of their parents.” (Pinker, 22)

To paraphrase Vendler, nothing could better clarify the copia of language and its lyric nature, its apparent reduplication and elaboration than Steven Pinker’s explanation of the language instinct, as developed in the tradition of Darwin, James, and Chomsky. Note Vendler’s allusion to the generative character of the lyric: “No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate (my italics) human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets.”(Vendler, 17)  This complements what Vendler says about how the successful poem qua “linguistic play” embodies “structural mimesis,” i.e. the structure of the poem and the structure of thinking in surface and deep grammatical relation. (Vendler, 3)  If Vendler is correct about Shakespeare,  Pinker provides nicely the argument and evidence for her sound intuitions.

As I have suggested, Shakespeare can say “reproduce or die” in 17, 1700, or 17,000 ways. Although we cannot yet fully understand why, Shakespeare seems virtually to be able to make “infinite use of finite media.”(Pinker,84), not merely by stringing together prepositional phrases which go on forever (but also go nowhere), but rather by developing meaningful hierarchies that possess a sense, a life, and a fitness about them. The hierarchical character of Shakespeare’s art  is so astonishing  that it creates, as Harold Bloom would say,  anxieties of influence, which seem impossible to overcome. [13]  Shakespeare is the ultimate power poet, and thus the ultimate aesthetic commander. However, this power of language  is a potential that is shared by Shakespeares and non-Shakespeares alike. As Pinker puts it, human beings “use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar...  A grammar is a example of a ‘discrete combinatorial system.’ A finite number of discrete elements (in this case, words) are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures ( in this case, sentences) with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements. For example, the meaning of Man bites dog is different from the meaning of the same words combined in the reverse order. In a discrete combinatorial system like language, there can be an unlimited number of completely distinct combinations with an infinite range of properties. Another noteworthy discrete combinatorial system in the natural world is the genetic code in DNA, where four kinds of nucleotides are combined into 64 kinds of codons, and the codons can be strung into an unlimited number of different genes. Many biologists have capitalized on the close parallel between the principles of grammatical combination and the principles of genetic combination. In the technical language of genetics, sequences of DNA are said to contain “letters” and “puncuation”; may be “palindromic,” “meaningless,” or “synonymous”; are “transcribed” and “translated”; and are even stored in “libraries.” The immunologist Niels Jerne entitled his Nobel Prize address, ‘The Generative Grammar of the Immune System.’ “ (Pinker85)  What Pinker says here is analogous to what I suggested is the relationship between Shakespeare’s song of reproductive success and Hamilton’s rule. Here, Pinker is able to say by means of evidence and argument what Shakespeare’s stylistically sound intuitions show by his lyrical genius.

Correlative to the combinatorial character of language and life is the recursive character of language, i.e. the rules of the language instinct allow us to “embed one instance of a symbol inside another instance of the same symbol.”(Pinker 101) Recursion allows us to generate an infinite number of structures in a branching like fashion from a common node. Pinker explains: “if children are blinkered to look for only a small number of phrase types, they automatically gain the ability to produce an infinite number of sentences... Take the phrase the tree in the park. If the child mentally labels the park as an NP (noun phrase) and also labels the tree in the park as an NP, the resulting rules generate an NP inside a PP (prepositional phrase) inside an NP – a loop that can be iterated indefinitely, as in the tree near the ledge by the lake in the park in the city in the east of the state... In  contrast,  a child who was free to label in the park  as one kind of phrase and the tree in the park as another kind would be deprived of the insight that the phrase contains an example of itself. The child would be limited to reproducing that phrase structure alone. Mental flexibility confines children; innate constraints set them free.” (Pinker,287)

In so far as language and life are combinatorial and recursive both are lyrical in Vendler’s sense. Just as the combinatorial and recursive, i.e. branching, character of the evolution of life (as it were one species imbedded in another), naturally enriches the diversity of the natural world, so, too, those very same characteristics in a linguistic sense enrich both consciously and poetically, i.e. aesthetically  the human world. If I were in a romantic mood, I would say that Shakespeare is the paradigmatic naturally language acquistive child. Just as Hamilton and Trivers provide evidence and argument for Shakespeare’s sound intuitions on reproductive success, Pinker makes clear the very lyrical/child-like character of Shakespeare’s “verbal contraptions.” by showing what Shakespeare does so elegantly is what is at the heart of what we all do naturally albeit often clumsily but occasionally with panache and perhaps poetically, as well. As with so many Darwinian accounts of human biology and behavior, the application of Darwinian ideas to Shakespearean poetry reveals a difference in degree, not in kind, between the Shakespeares and the non-Shakespeares of this world. It is not the case that the Shakespeares of the world have special access to the muse and the rest of us don’t; that’s also romanticism, an insipid one.  From a Darwinian perspective, the poet is admired and yet de-mystified. Thus, he finds both his place and function in the community. Also, the Darwinian approach here speaks to the deepest  reasons why, not only Vendler, but many others have wanted “to defend (the Sonnets’) high value.” (Vendler, 1)

As I have suggested, the lyric as an arrangement of words with its focus on linguistic strategies, etc. is the very model of language itself as a combinatory and recursive system. In this sense, again,  it is a mirror not only conceptually but also biologically of the genetic “language” of life itself. Perhaps the reason the sonnet qua lyric is so appealing is that it is by its very nature the language instinct brought into relief, thus revealing  both the very best of linguistic expression and the universal ground of linguistic power. In other words, the lyric qua Shakespearean sonnet is a display of the power of language both combinatorily and recursively, and at the very same time it is a model and reminder of the combinatory character at the basis of all life, i.e.  a reminder of sexual selection, kin selection, reciprocal altruism... of the genetic code itself. The kind of poetry that discloses those deeper universals about ourselves, our evolved nature and consciousness,  is the kind of poetry that seems to evoke our sense of awe and appreciation and seems, also, to withstand the test of time, i.e. it survives and inspires reproduction.