Time’s Shadows: Crisis of Subjectivity and Reconciled Concord in Robert Wilson’s Performative Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Let us start by a commonplace assumption, one which may correspond to the deliberately vulgar gestures or grotesque grimaces of Robert Wilson’s stage figures performatively delivering Shakespeare sonnets in his 2009 Berliner Ensemble production,^[1] the subject of this essay. The path leading from classical archetypal myths and medieval heroic romance or religious compulsive, single master narrative, towards humanist individualism, navigated Western human subjectivity through common narratives, populated by dramatic characters and what happened to them. Those were commonly attached and clinging to historical characters or their mythological counterparts in the intimacy of modern fiction, but still retained their addressees’ constant desire for salvation in concord: whether endowed by cathartic texture of tragedy or arousing satiric laughter, the sweet resonance of Pythagorean music of the spheres loomed beyond the ongoing flow of the action as an achieved  goal or token of a lost destination. Shakespeare the dramatist is a master storyteller of such narratives, following the footsteps of a Chaucer, Boccaccio, or Rabelais, sharing contemporaneous concerns with Sidney, Spenser, or Cervantes, and preceding the Molières, Dickenses or Dostoevskys of later years.

In his sonnets, however, which, as our paper argues, are fundamentally divorced both formally and thematically from the rest of his work, Shakespeare lays the ground for modern dissociation from narrative, the essence of which is informed by the realized or forfeited contingency of salvation through concord. His sonnets (unlike those of other contemporary sonneteers such as Sidney, Spenser or Drayton), eschew plots and action and embrace the emotional subjectivity of the lyric persona delivering them, directly or indirectly derived from the poet's inner world of feelings and sensibilities. In this they may be regarded as very early prefigurations of modernist poetics of non-continuity, anticipating, say, Pound, Eliot or Lorca. 

The later failures of the Enlightenment to provide salvation through the sustained logic of narrative, culminating in the apocalyptic abyss of an Auschwitz or Hiroshima (to cite but two primary emblems of the decline of reason in the modern world), re-harnessed human history to the natural vagaries of time. Rather than advancing through the inevitable or probable coherence of narration, they transgress established order, inscribing in the reader's memory a succession of fragmented outbursts of passionate desire or the ferocious tyranny of all devouring time, challenging the substance behind shadows, or permanently questioning the eternalization of love or beauty in the lines of poetry. All these are inexplicable in terms of the legacy of storytelling, thus undermining the rule of narratives and leading artistic creation into their decomposition or deconstruction of inherent concord.

Robert Wilson, among others, initialized his artistic project in countering the rule of verbal narratives or reference to realism by clinging to abstract visual and musical images devoid of any allegiance to stable meaning or harmony. By deploying through ritual reiteration the texts of Shakespeare’s sonnets for his artistic ventures, and drawing them further on towards his vision of a universe endorsing the paradoxical presence of concord, he intrinsically engages (whether consciously or not) with the very project Shakespeare himself launched in his sonnets, in harnessing, as Joel Fineman would like to see it, the ancient tradition of poetry of praise, “in an unprecedentedly serious way [to] the equally antique genre of the mock encomium, or what may be alternatively called the paradox of praise.”[1]

This is a rather simplistic outline or formulation of the cultural scene of modernity and postmodernity out of which Wilson’s production may be described as stemming. Yet it may serve to delineate what one may designate as the battleground on which Robert Wilson meets Shakespeare sonnets at the outset of the current millennium. In our topical reading of its product, it is doubly emphasized in a world continuously turning its back to its age-old origins in humanist narratives yet parodying it in powerfully engaging with their typological conceits, whether visually, verbally, or musically. The topic of Wilson’s ongoing deconstruction of the dramatic text, be it Shakespeare's, Ibsen's, Büchner's, or others, has been exhausted by him and a host of commentators throughout the years. Enough would be to attend a production of Peer Gynt in Norwegian, being familiar with the play but not the language of its performance, to experience the mechanism of Wilson’s intriguing work in separating the verbal from the visual and musical: the stark, geometric set designs and a striking use of color, often creating painterly tableaus on stage; the slow, stylized movements of the actors in a choreographed precision, making each gesture deliberate and symbolic; the lighting, Wilson's notable virtuosity, used to define space, shift moods, and create illusions, often bathing characters in ethereal glows or deep shadows; the music and sound, possibly incorporating minimalist compositions or electronic elements, enhancing the dreamlike atmosphere. All these become a language through which the original stories are being narrated.

Wilson's theatrical rendition of Shakespeare's sonnets, however, is a different histrionic challenge, significantly varying from Wilson’s other encounters with the bard, such as King Lear, The Tempest, or Macbeth (the latter via Verdi's melodic intermediation). In the case of The Shakespeare Sonnets production, the audience, while aware of Shakespeare's career as a poet beside his stage plays, may find it hard to ignore its predominant knowledge of Shakespeare as a dramatist once his unique non-dramatic work as reflected in his sonnets sequence challenges the very essence of a vivid theatrical event.

However, the core of Wilson's approach to the project of devising a fragmented, non-dramatic yet full-fledged theatrical performance based on the texts of Shakespeare's sonnets, we would argue, is not a totally innovative departure from Shakespeare's own poetic vision, but deeply rooted in Shakespeare's original texts. A prominent product and representative of rising Renaissance humanism, Shakespeare deploys his dramatic oeuvres as pawns in the struggle of a host of writers, artists, and intellectuals to define Western culture's newborn site of human individualism and subjectivity. On the face of it, his foray into the sonnets was supposed to lead him further into the intimate core of individualism. However, with the growing distantiation of the interpretive reading of the sonnets from the mere biographical hunting for the identifications of its “characters” from real models in reality, it has been suggested more often that Shakespeare's sonnets significantly deviated from his dramatic work designed for the stage, in being devoid of the basic elements turning a verbal sequence into a dramatic narrative subjected to the Aristotelian formula of beginning, middle, and an end.

Heather Dubrow, for one, argues that although “we assume that the nondramatic poetry of a great playwright will in fact be dramatic in many senses of that complex term . . . Several of the characteristics central to other dramatic and narrative poetry, including other Renaissance sonnets sequences, are signally absent from Shakespeare’s contributions to the genre.”[2] Of the examples she uses to substantiate her claim, we may choose to refer here as a point of departure of our discussion of Wilson’s sonnets project to one particular sonnet which serves Wilson and Wainright as one of the culmination points of the show. Comparing Renaissance leave-taking sonnets, one may remember one of the most well-known sonnets of Shakespeare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, namely, his famous parting sonnet 61 of his sonnet sequence Idea:

            Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.

Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;

And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart,

That thus so cleanly I myself can free.

Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows,

And when we meet at any time again,

Be it not seen in either of our brows

That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;

When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And Innocence is closing up his eyes —

Now, if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,

From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!

Not only is the scene of the lover taking leave of his beloved narrated, but it is fully enacted. Indeed the allegorical framework of the third quatrain does create distantiation from the actual moment; yet, as Dubrow rightly observes, it is a ploy designed “to create a foil against which his final appeal to the woman [in the closing rhyme] will seem all the more immediate.”[3] In this, Drayton, although subscribing to the structural innovation of the “English sonnet,” inspired by Wyatt or Sidney, does not depart from the Petrarchan sonnet which even when designed to describe a state of mind will do so by telling a story, as in the famous Canzonière 190, where the poet narrates the story of his finding Laura, his love, in the shape of a white doe, he praises her and then she is lost to him forever.

When Shakespeare, however, addresses the same subject of leave taking, in sonnet 87, the story element entirely disappears:

            Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,

And like enough thou knowst thy estimate.

The Charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;

My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,

And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing,

Or me, to whom thou gav'st it, else mistaking,

So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,

Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:

             In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

Shakespeare’s approach to the same topic here substitutes a subjective account of his sentiment (or rather that of his lyrical persona devised as the presenter of the sonnets) for a narrated story depicting the very action of taking leave of the beloved. Whereas the account of departure from an existing stage of love relations with the lyric persona would call, in the sonnets of Petrarch or Drayton cited above, for a procedural depiction of the poet’s vision in terms of a story, the concern of Shakespeare's sonnet is rather a state of mind, emanating from the poet's inner subjectivity. Rather than advancing in time, it progresses from one image to another: the inner flow between the metaphors has nothing to do with the passing of time, but is navigated by intrinsic successions of insights, feelings and thoughts. In that, Sonnet 87 corresponds with the thematic structure dominating most of the sequence's sonnet, yet it differs from other leave-taking sonnets in its tone of compliance, resignation and self-doubt, with the speaker acknowledging that the beloved is too valuable for him. This contrasts with other sonnets where the speaker pleads for love or rails against betrayal (as in Sonnets 129 or 147). Expressing a trail of thoughts estimating the lover’s situation vis a vis the fair youth, the sonnet uses measurable legal and financial metaphors to discuss love as a transaction, with the speaker seemingly losing possession of his beloved's love, leading him to the realization that he never truly owned it. What he deemed true happiness was indeed an illusion, his possession of his beloved hzving had no more substance than a flattering dream. Of whom does he take his leave, then, if his possession was nothing but an illusion?

This ambivalence fits the approaches of various readers of the sonnets, from Catherine Belsey who sees self-division and instability in Shakespeare's poetry,[4] through Joel Fineman, for whom the sonnet marks a breakdown in the speaker’s ability to maintain a stable identity, revealing that selfhood is dependent on the beloved’s recognition (the latter being for him, in Lacanian terms, the master-signifier, the thing that gives his identity meaning yet its own meaning is void, or unachievable). The exclamation “Farewell!” at the outset of the sonnet, which suggests finality, could indeed lead to an action or a story, as it would do in the hands of Sidney, Spenser or Drayton, yet this is immediately undermined by subjective questioning rather than narration: If possession was ever real, why does the speaker need to renounce it? If the beloved was always “too dear,” then was possession ever possible?

            For Wilson, who uses the text of the sonnets as a point of departure for his imaginative rendering of the sonnets as a theatrical performance, Shakespeare's deployment of a non-dramatic practice in order to convey a crisis of subjectivity serves as an asset. A clue to Wilson's approach to the Shakespearean text may give us a text, included in the original program of the show, by Heiner Müller, who, among other things, served as a director of the Berliner Ensemble, later to be the host theatre of Wilson's production of the sonnets. In this text, Müller states that when he reads a poetic text, he does not first want to understand it, but rather "somehow to welcome it as a perceptive rather than conceptual activity… there is a tradition of rationalism that hinders the sensorial perception of texts. Only if a text is first perceived with the senses, is it then possible to understand it.”[5]  Sonnet 87 serves indeed as an act of leave taking: performed by the entire company gradually gathering together on stage, stripped of the colors of their former attire, lost gradually throughout the second half of the show and icked u and collected by the Fool in a recently preceding scene, it is placed just before the Finalé of the show, and (set to the dreamlike music of Rufus Wainright) uses visual images of parting with an unseen object which seems to constantly slip out of their reach. Their hands are stretched towards the sky, then held behind the back, and then raised again with the fingers folding in the gesture of grasping nothingness, some shadowy object that escapes both them and the audience. Is this the performative version of the final verse of the sonnet?

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:

             In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

There is a line of development here, since the dream of love at the closure of the show abrogates the dream from Sonnet 43 with which the show has opened: 

            All days are nights to see till I see thee,            And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me

That opening dream, to which we shall return later, and which affirms love even though through the mediation of darkness and night, serves as a cue for the non-narrated figures populating the show first gather on stage. Here, once the show approaches its Finalé, the dream refers to love suggesting there is "no such matter."  Once the characters have gathered all on stage, the scene reaches its culminating point when the Queen herself, perhaps the master signifier of their collective community, whose costume is now stripped of colors like those of most of the other characters but for the functional, meta-theatrical figures of the Fool and the poet, recites the sonnet against their singing chorus. What is it that they are parting with? Is it that Lacanian  unachievable "master-signifier" having endowed them with meaning which now is waning away with their lost colors? The dreamlike setting of the scene's movement and music corresponds with the flattering dream of line 13, which by the end of the sonnet proclaims the speaker's possession of love, introducing the poem, a mere illusion.

            Yet although Wilson uses the verbal foundation of the poem as a bedrock for this fragmented piece, forming a chapter within an overall succession of performative scenes, the meaning of sequence which he borrows from the Shakespearean original is not welded by a train of occurrences progressing in time, informed by a continuity of action and events. In spite of the presence of characters, at this stage of the advances of the show familiar to us, having followed them and been attended by them for two hours (allegedly the standard measure of a stage play as stated by the prologue to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), acting, moving, singing and producing meaning through visual images and verbal metaphors, we do not get a story. What we do get is a trail of moving and musical tableaux, whose implicit ordered succession, having no bearing on their original order in Thorpe's 1609 quarto edition – is not easy to fathom or, for that matter, inevitably necessary for the sake of artistic gratification. The  combined effect of the show does not depend on any story line or coherent narrative. It is not fortuitous, however, that the dreamlike, melancholic leave-taking of love follows, and indeed ironically abrogates the scorching, feverish emotional eruption of Sonnet 129, one of Shakespeare’s most intense and deeply psychological sonnets, describing the destructive nature of lust, exploring the cycle of desire, action, and regret, with a relentless and almost obsessive tone:

            Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

            Is lust in action; and till action, lust

            Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

            Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

            Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

            Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

            Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

            On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

            Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

            Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

            A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

            Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

            All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

            To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Sonnet 129 may be the first poem in English literature depicting the culmination point of desire in sexual orgasm. Here it prepares the audience for the waning of desire, which reverses the "joy proposed" into a void. T. S. Eliot viewed Sonnet 129 as a precursor to metaphysical poetry, particularly John Donne’s conflicted religious verse. He admired its harsh, compressed energy, calling it one of Shakespeare’s most profound meditations on the soul’s struggle with the flesh. In terms of Wilson's reordering of the sonnets, Sonnet 129 fiercely foreshadows the crisis of subjectivity depicted in a complete change of mood in Sonnet 87. As Joel Fineman sees it, Sonnet 129 is a deconstruction of desire itself, which causes selfhood to collapse in lust. The poem, he argues, exposes the instability of identity, as the speaker is trapped in a repetitive cycle of wanting, taking, and regretting. Sonnet 129 presents a paradox: desire promises fulfillment but delivers only emptiness — a theme that resonates with Renaissance anxieties about self-control and moral failure. Wilson and Wainright manage to capture, both visually and musically, the “lack” that drives desire as it figures in 129. Lust is never truly satisfied — it only intensifies the absence it seeks to fill. The speaker experiences jouissance (self-destructive pleasure in Lacanian terms), where the pursuit of pleasure becomes an unbearable torment. As Jonathan Dollimore suggests, the violent language of this sonnet suggests that the Renaissance ideal of self-restraint was impossible to uphold; and Helene Vendler reminds us that the relentless structure and lack of pauses in the poem, the enjambment and rapid rhythm mirror the breathlessness of desire, showing how lust overrides reason. The poem’s final line, “All this the world well knows; yet none knows well,” creates a paradox of knowledge and ignorance—we understand lust’s consequences, yet we continue the cycle. It is hard not to notice this attitude simulated in Wilson and Wainright's wild visual and discordant music.

            By positioning the dreamlike inhibited gazing of Sonnet 87 immediately after the boisterous, pervert turbulence of Sonnet 129, in which he parodies the Shakespearean text both choreographically and musically in terms of exhibitionist mimicry, Wilson completes a move he has been meticulously promoting and advancing throughout his entire performative rendition of Shakespeare's sonnets. This innovative passage of seemingly fragmentary scenes, substituting a rather abstract ideational progression of thematic images for an Aristotelian narrative informed by a solid story line, navigates the audience's sensibilities throughout a sequence of evolving moods towards a cathartic conclusion at his carefully devised finale, to which we will subsequently return. A product of a nonlinear composition of glimmering histrionic eruptions (remindful of Wilson's performative vision of Gertrude Stein's Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights mounted almost two decades earlier in the same city of Berin), where meaning emerges through accumulation rather than a succession of cause-and-effect, this resolution eschews traditional denouement yet endorses a new kind of subjective concord.

This sequence of accumulating scenes may be traced back to the very beginning of the show, using Sonnet 43 to establish the framework of the performance as circumscribed by a dream vision, informing the entire production from "when dreams do show thee me" of Sonnet 43 to the "dream [which] doth flatter" of Sonnet 87. It is the Fool figure which performs the sonnet at the outset, thus proclaiming Wilson's function as the provisional creator of the spectators' histrionic experience over the next two hours, in pronouncing his version of "Let there be light:"

When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,

For all the day they view things unrespected;

But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee

And, darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.

Then thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright,

How would thy shadow’s form form happy show

To the clear day with thy much clearer light

When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!

How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd made

By looking on thee in the living day,

When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade

Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay! 

All days are nights to see till I see thee, 

And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

The sonnet is recited at the very beginning of the show by the functional, meta-theatrical figure of the Fool, as an enveloping exposition of the entire event. A cultural construct, whose life outside the boundaries of nature as a not entirely human stage artifact, his initial presence which marks the passage from ephemeral reality to the ritual sanctuary of performance, signifies for the spectators their initiation into a stylized, temporal existence within a theatrically mediated sphere. It alerts their consciousness from the very outset the terms of the world Wilson is creating for his audience. It is a world the contours of which are mediated by seeing and hearing, by light and music, and it is not fortuitous that Wilson chooses to cite on the rear cover of the show's program a paraphrase of John Cage's reflection on Henry David Thoreau’s solo sojourn in Walden Woods: “Each day his eyes and ears were open and empty to see and hear the world he lived in."[6] It is a risky frontier of encountering the messages imprinted in the audience' awareness through the bare, pioneering relying on the evidence of words, movement, light and sound. It is a world lacking the protective framework of narrative, designed in turn to cement and provide meaning to one's subjective negotiation with a vast universe, devoid of the providence of a guiding God by the Aristotelian formula of a beginning, middle and an end. It is a world exposing human consciousness even further than the predicament of its habitual fragility to the vagaries of the elements, time, or death, by which the circular cast of  the sonnets' universe is surrounded and whereby it is composed. Within the span of 154 fourteen-line measures of situation or reflection, its raw material in the words of Shakespeare's sonnets, becoming the artistic creator's working tools, focuses mainly on three loosely epitomized human characters, surrounded by the remote presence of individual others such as rival poets, or a collective community praising or deriding their predicament. Destiny and decay become adverse digits in a world in which poetry alone, delivered by sight and hearing, enjoys successive continuity endowing meaning to the presence of human life.

            Thus when Wilson chooses to apply his deconstructive practice to Shakespeare's sonnets, he propels their interchange with meaning further than the protective bosom of enlightenment, led by the signification of the word. In a world where visual images have transcended the halo of avant-garde to become an ephemeral phenomenon shared by everyone; where one's intuitive response to every sensation is an immediate urge to capture and transmit it by camera, which has become almost an organic extension of our presence in the world of phenomena, the return of the sublime text to inhabit artistic practice poses a new, invigorated challenge to the aesthetics of deconstructing human experience. The task of creating a histrionic sequence where privileged texts partake in the theatrical moment not in their customary leading role, but as equal components of the visual and musical effects, without being enveloped by narrative structure, takes Wilson's non-interpretive work with the theatrical text, familiar from previous works to different realms, challenging both concepts of drama and sonnet alike. A more detailed analysis of the Sonnets production than the limited span of this paper allows may shed new perspectives on Wilson's challenge to the traditional treatment of text in the theatre, and, contrary to many responses to this work, ignoring his meticulous delving into the minute details of his verbal raw material, also on his thoughtful and creative encounter, be it combat, or dialogue, with the sublimity of Shakespeare's texts.

            Within the limited scope of this paper we shall but scantily indicate some of the effects of Wilson's innovative rendering of Shakespeare's sonnet sequence, diving back into the bard's project to substitute subjectivity for detached, objective narration, and pushing forward towards the bitter "joy proposed" of  imaginative progression towards a sour concord, full of sound and fury, yet, such as Lacan's master signifier, signifying nothing but the paradox of subjectivity. A major feature of Wilson's treatment of his textual material is his insistence on deconstructing personalities by blurring the binarity of essentialist gendered communities among the characters delivering the text. This procedure serves as a complementary device to his deconstruction of the presence of narrative continuity in his reading of the sonnets, as representing concepts and states of minds rather than essential "stories." Indeed such an act must require a gendered statement as its transformational core, namely, women actors playing men's parts and men actors playing women's parts. This deployment has its bearing on the Elizabethan practice of men playing women on stage. However, once this exchange has been established, the direct implication of its undisguised practice is erasure of binarity, rather than its emphatic preservation as subservient to narrative as in the plays. While exaggerated moustaches or flaring Elizabethan styled robes are used as means of gender transformation, the end result is establishing a diminished insistence on typical gender properties, without erasing the very concepts of manhood or womanhood. The identities qualifying the characters become functions of the intuitive sensation of the impact of abstract concepts such as love and hate, shadow and light, dream  and wake.

This blurring corresponds with much of the meaning advanced by Shakespeare's texts, which accounts for the notable presence of Sonnet 20 in the theatrical texture of Wilson/Wainwright's production:

            A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created,

Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she pricked thee out for women's pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

The rendition of Sonnet 20 by Wilson and Wainwright initially inhabits a whole scene, recited in German by the hosting poet and sung in English by the androgynous figure, then performed again by the cabaretist, and finally repeated during the curtain call by Wainright himself. However, while in the sonnet the binarity of genders is still manifestly emphatic, not only in the stressed effacement of gendered individuality in the "master-mistress" figure of the addressed lover, but also in the association of "women's fashion" with shifting change, beside their gentle heart, in the performative construction of the human figures as types rather than individual characters, the concept of narrative collapses into performative abstraction. As such, Sonnet 20, even though not located as the overture of Wilson's multifarious forays into the realm of abstract action, serves an appropriate and charismatic milestone on its road to expunge the individuality of identities of the histrionic formation of Shakespeare's text, making  most of blurring the gendered borders of the lovers to foreground the abstract impact of love itself.

Binarity, in Wilson's entire production, is transformed into conceptual abstractions, such as the two boy constructs (both embodied by similarly attired, with Seurat like hairdo, female actresses), where one is rather mirthful and romantic, and the other rude and malevolent. It is the latter who serves as the third side of the triangle of deliverers of Sonnet 20. The others are the Shakespeare figure, who, encapsuled in a remote window high above at the background, rendering him an external entity, recites the sonnet in German, and the androgynous character, corresponding the depiction of the beloved figure in the sonnet, who sings the text in the original to Wainright's moving score, the instrumental accompaniment of which  infiltrates the last verses of the poet's emotional recitation of the sonnet. All three, like all the other characters, have their faces painted white, blurring their individuality, and one of the keywords picked up by the boy, the alter ego of the androgynous in the scene, from the text to repeat emphatically, is "painted," which bears a special significance in the sonnet. In the brief interim passage before the androgynous figure starts singing, the "malevolent" boy, temptingly reclined on a small bed, injects some unknown stuff, smilingly, while the androgynous turns in a tempting gesture to the far above poet, dropping down his Elizabethan overcoat the black feathers collar of which he turns into a kind of fan. In a visual pun on "since she pricked thee," the androgynous stoops to pick (Stephen Booth marks one of the double meanings of "prick" as "select") a shawl, to be "used" (another visual pun provided by Wilson to Shakespear's text here) for surprisingly terminate the scene by the sudden self-hanging of the androgynous: an ultimate act of blurring and effacement of the gendered subject by "dying," in its various meanings.

            The successive sequence of such tableaux and reciting units, originated in a series of dramatic monologues written by the bard, advances in Wilson's performance by subserving the deconstructed words and phrases into a mélange of movements, ranging from concrete ones as dropping sugar cubes, metonymic ones such as the tearing of pages as signifying poetic rivalry to cryptic grimaces, yawns, weeping, or totally abstract actions such as stabbing a child without a pronounced narrative reference; sounds, ranging from meaningful texts and melodic constructs to isolated cries, buzzes, animal laughter, or roaring thunders; and flooding or glittering lights.

            Wilson's motto for the whole sequence is the couplet ending Sonnet 43, stressing the ambivalence of day and night, light and darkness as partaking in the complex relation between the speaker and his beloved figure. The text of Sonnet 43, thus dominating the entire exposition of the non-developing figures of the show, until sudden burst of light, commanded by the Queen, enlarges the borders of the theatrical playground within which the non-narrative action is about to take place. Settled in their gendered blurred formations, none but Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth bear similarity to real life, historical characters, to whom a shade of narrative framework can be attached. However, even that hypothetical shade is not actually realized: the Shakespeare-like figure, virtuously portrayed by a 87 years old female stage veteran, bears no relation in its conduct or choice of delivered sonnets even to whatever scant knowledge one has of the life of William Shakespeare, nor does the grotesque figure of the Queen, brilliantly rendered by an elderly male actor, relate to any concrete episode in the life of Queen Elizabeth I, a fact that is humorously emphasized when the same actor surprisingly appears in a figure remindful of Queen Elizabeth II, endowed by her blurred gendered attire, reciting one of the more episodic sonnets, Sonnet 143, in which the beloved woman is compared to a neglecting mother. It is perhaps no accident that the sonnet  is delivered by the stage figure which seems closest to a real-life historical character : the Queen of England reigning during the time Wilson's production was performed, whose emblematic stature as "the mother of the nation" did not lag much behind Shakespeare's Queen. In a move almost close to narration (but not quite), it employs the metaphor of a housewife chasing a wayward chicken while neglecting her crying child to explore themes of unrequited love, jealousy, and longing. In this sonnet, the speaker likens himself to the neglected child, yearning for the attention of his beloved, who is preoccupied with pursuing another. The sonnet opens with the image of a diligent housewife setting down her infant to chase after a runaway "feathered creature" (likely a chicken). This scenario serves as an extended metaphor: the housewife represents the speaker's mistress, the “Dark Lady,” the fleeing bird symbolizes another man she desires (possibly the "Fair Youth"), and the abandoned child embodies the lyric speaking persona himself. This vivid imagery underscores the speaker's feelings of neglect and his desperate longing for her affection. Even though a visual resemblance is stressed in both images to their historical models, the tentatively implied suggestion that "a queen" is an abstract mental category when in spite of the visual affinity with the actual originals the same actor may condense in himself the entire assembled features of the entity expressed by this stage figure. When it suggests power and dominance, for instance, she wildly delivers the famous Sonnet 18, while her alarmed subjects are peering at her from the side, a frenzy which may correspond with her later delivery of Sonnet 147, appended by an outburst of wild laughter.

            All the other characters figuring on stage, however, are an eclectic assemblage of archetypes and abstractions, serving unindividuated situations, abstract stage metaphors, or geometrical deployment of human figures. Even when an almost narratively justified moment is evoked when the fictionally framed Sonnet 154 is recited by a winged cupid character, its nearly consequential impact is blurred when the same sonnet is later peculiarly repeated within a similar visual framework by the figure of the rival poet, holding the torn pages representing his adverse rivalry with the young poet, who serves as a budding version of the presiding figure of the veteran  poet.

            The avoidance of narrative is also reinforced by the fragmentation and lack of consistency of conduct of the various characters. Whereas characters such as the Fool, represented by an elderly woman actress who accompanies many scenes compassionately as an "aside" figure, winking to and interchanging with the audience, or the superimposed character of the comedian Georgette, who addresses the audience directly in a cabaret manner, sustain a great measure of consistency throughout the entire show, other participants are fragmentary in their function and conduct. Wilson's imagination evokes, for instance, in the expository sequence of tableaux, a "secretary" for the Shakespeare figure, as if to assist the "master of the ceremony" to handle the performative event using the texts of the sonnets as its basic verbal component, that figure, in the introductory chapter of the performance, serves routine functions such as guarding documents or collecting payment from the Queen-Sponsor. However, once its function has been established at the outset, the figure never returns to its "secretarial" role, but partakes in the general distribution of movement, gestural action, and reciting sonnets (in her case, addressing the Queen with Sonnet 121 –"’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed" – or partaking in the "gasoline pumps turned gun machines" rendering of Sonnet 23, and the collective delivery of sonnet 71 – " No longer mourn for me when I am dead." What is notable is the metaphor, combined by visual, sound, light and gesture.

            The scope of this paper, again, is too narrow for a detailed analysis of the histrionic dialogue between Shakespeare's poetry and Wilson's theatrical practice, yet a major theme conspicuous in this dialogue should not go unnoticed, namely, the irrational interchange between scenes of good and evil and its implications on the political level of that dialogue.  It looms in the sudden flogging of the figures of the rival poet and Cupid in the midst of a stormy scene, or the above-mentioned gasoline pumps turned gun machines accompanying Sonnet 23. In the current world where the daily augmented presence of human corpses substitutes individuality, and the routine evil of violence replaces meaningful narrative, Wilson's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets often approaches the Guernica of our time. If one wishes to relate the impact of Wilson's work here to the current mood of world reality and its cultural reflection, one may speak to it in terms of the blurring and fragmentation of sensibility. Individuality of love and pain is fading in a world of inequality busy counting the victims of aggression, poverty, famine and neglect by masses,  rather than promoting humanism and individuality. Scenes of violence abound and are dispersed with no obvious succession of rational narrative throughout the scenes of Wilson's show, mixing sources of inspiration and reference. Such is the appearance of a fragment of the video Deafman Glance (1970) by Wilson, which is incorporated in the scene devoted to Sonnet 29, placed at the beginning of the second half of the show. The video evokes a murder scene of an innocent boy, much remindful of Lady Macbeth's shocking juxtaposition of innocence and evil in her famous (or notorious) "naked babe" speech. It is evoked in the context of a sonnet whose first octet depicts an alienated subjectivity lost in an alienated world and then shifts into an elated mood: 

            When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

            That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Joel Fineman, as we mentioned above, contends that Shakespeare's sonnets mark a pivotal moment in literary history, wherein the poet crafts a novel form of poetic subjectivity. This innovation emerges through the interplay of traditional poetic forms, such as panegyric (poems of praise), and their subversion via mock encomium (ironic or satirical praise). By intertwining these elements, Shakespeare delves into the complexities of self-perception, desire, and the reliability of language (see p.2 above).

In the context of Sonnet 29, Fineman's argument may elucidate the poem's exploration of personal despair and redemption. The sonnet commences with the speaker's profound sense of alienation and envy, lamenting his misfortune and longing for the attributes and successes of others. This introspective anguish exemplifies the "poetic subjectivity" that Fineman identifies—where the speaker's internal emotional landscape becomes the focal point, diverging from the external praise typical of traditional panegyric poetry. As the sonnet progresses, a transformative shift occurs when the speaker reflects on a cherished relationship. This turn towards the redemptive power of love not only alleviates the speaker's despair but also underscores the tension between personal experience and poetic expression. Fineman's analysis suggests that such moments in the sonnets reveal the instability of identity and the challenges inherent in articulating genuine emotion through language. The speaker's oscillation between despondency and elation reflects the broader theme of "perjury" or self-deception, as the language employed strives to convey the profundity of personal transformation, yet remains inherently limited by its own constructs.

            Applying Fineman's critical perspective to Sonnet 29 illuminates how Shakespeare navigates the intricate dynamics of selfhood, desire, and linguistic representation. The sonnet becomes a site where the poet interrogates the capacity of language to authentically capture the fluidity of human emotion and the complexities of personal identity. Wilson's rendering of the sonnet, which opens the second part of the show, starts, like most other scenes, in the rise of the curtain, revealing a luminous backdrop; but in this case the composition is more complex: it hosts chairs, characters seated or stretched out in different poses, two supports with lights, and, focuses of the visual frame, two easels each supporting a monitor, placed symmetrically at the center of the scene. Inside them is the same video, duplicated: it is  a fragment of the 1970 Wilson video. The dark figures on the light background start singing the sonnet, in English, to a balladic score. The black figure in the film resembles the real figures. The long shot continues the space of the stage into that of the monitor. The Ladies move, creating relationships with the images on the monitor. The Rival at the end repeats the sonnet, this time  recited in German, while behind him the video offers a scene of surreal cruelty: first, the child is softly and kindly offered a glass of water, then we see the sharpening of a knife, and following this, the sharpened knife is stuck in the child's body.

Is there a message of hope and concord at the end of Wilson's dialogue with the sonnets of one of the champions of humanist individualism? May it be invested in the rendering of Sonnet 87 memory of past dreams caught and released like unseen butterflies at the final scene, or the clinging to love as the only counterpart of injustice and death at the end of Sonnet 66, repeated at the Finalé? To time, the big rival of vitality in the sonnets, the answer is reserved.

            Enough would be to indicate a topical view of what Wilson offers us here, to regard a stereotypical anti-humanist figure such as Trump or Netanyahu, in an appearance calling up a perpetual election campaign, passionately mumbling insouciant narratives and texts in front of a captive audience, as impersonated by the Wilsonian vulgar figure of Eve, reiterating the ominous world view of Sonnet 66 between the stereotyped figures of the poet and the Queen:

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry:

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,

And purest faith unhappily forsworn,

And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,

And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,

And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,

And strength by limping sway disablèd,

And art made tongue-tied by authority,

And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,

And simple truth miscalled simplicity,

And captive good attending captain ill. 

Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, 

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

It would take great measures of neglect to ignore the significant political presence contributed by Sonnet 66 to the thematic structure of Wilson's production. The sonnet  is one of the most politically informed in the entire sequence. It presents a bleak view of the world, listing one injustice after another, exposing a world in which truth is suppressed, power is corrupt, and justice is perverted. One of the most striking features of the sonnet is the repetition of "Tired with all these" at the beginning and near the end, an anaphora reinforcing the speaker’s exhaustion and despair. Only ultimately, at the closing couplet,  love is presented as a reason to continue living.

            In his rendition of the sonnet, Wilson aptly translates it into a visual and musical conceit which brings out its lament, its critique of power, its ironic inversion of values (such as "Folly (doctor-like) controlling skill"), and an example of Shakespeare’s linguistic genius in layering meaning, such as the structural paradox whereby a desire for death (corresponding with his surprising suicidal act performed by the androgynous figure terminating his former episodic rendering of Sonnet 20, not fortuitously reminded by Georgette right before the Sonnet 66 scene) interrupted by the necessity of love.[7] The black silhouette of a tree, clad with red apples, stands out in the center of a scene uncovered by a dark curtain. In correspondence with the tree, the performer having formerly represented the Lady, now appearing as Biblical Eve dressed in white, to evoke the mythological sense of guilt informing humanity. This symbolic image of shame is completed when she raises her right arm, holding a wriggling rubber snake between her index finger and thumb, while the other hand exhibits a red apple. symmetrically, on either side of both object and character, sit Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare. They sing in turn the song composed on sonnet 66: the perfect immobility of the figures contrasts with the gesture of avidly biting Eve's apple (a gesture anticipated formerly by Georgette's munching the strawberries...), with drool and spit: the verses of the sonnet sing of the rottenness of the world and the desire to abandon it, if it were not for the fact that the poet's death would leave the beloved alone.

            As Christina Grazioli reminds us, the tree, "image of guilt (but whose risk is taken into account by the love of beauty)" had appeared in a “barer” version before, where a structure formed by the carcass of a car impaled on a tree trunk is introduced.[8] Thus, Wilson's mixing of images from the cold, bare powerhouse of the modern, fragmented world of 2009 with the fiery and decaying conceits of 1609, endows us with a most charismatic artistic account of the progression of time over four stormy centuries, bringing together the crisis of subjectivity and a revived view of concord, in summing up the tortured way we have come since Shakespeare's time to ours, in the attempt to open our empty eyes and ears to see and hear the world we live in.