An Insight into the Role of Visual Perception in Romeo and Juliet

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 Introduction

2 Exploring visual perception – theories of sight

3 A Historical Panorama of the Theme of Sight in Relation to Shakespeare
3.1 The dangers of reflection
3.1.1 The wounded lover
3.2 Visual perception as a proof for veracity

4 Sight and its effects in Romeo and Juliet
4.1 The correlation between love and sight in Romeo and Juliet
4.2 Sight as a catalyst in other instances

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliography
6.1 Primary sources
6.2 Secondary sources

2 Introduction

Sight is a leading theme in Romeo and Juliet and the frequent use of words relating to visual perception is not random or gratuitous. Therefore, the primary object of this thesis is demonstrating that beside the well-debated forces that govern the action there are others that may have been neglected. Precisely because readers may focus too much on the love story or on other outstanding elements of the play, such as the comic passages which stand in stark contrast with the tragic theme of the play, a considerable amount of intriguing aspects might escape our attention. These are subtle details, which serve a great purpose in the plot development. On many occasions vision becomes the cause of a series of events in the play. By this reflection on the faculty of seeing and the organ of visual perception I wish to consider closely these items that can be easily overlooked when dealing with the play.

Owing to the fact that Romeo and Juliet is the best-known tragedy of Shakespeare, much has been written about it, mostly concerning the extent of the lovers' and the parents' culpability or destiny's role in contributing to the tragical ending. In spite of this, Paul Gleed develops the following claim:

Romeo and Juliet appears to be driven by plot rather than thematic and intellectual concerns. . . In light of this, Romeo and Juliet can be difficult to write about precisely because it is so simple.¹

We consider that such a belief is untenable and the elements to be examined belie the simplicity of the play, while the treatment of visual images serves as proof of an unparalleled complexity. Thereby we reject an unjust, clicheic treatment of the play, denying its alleged inferiority to the other tragedies of Shakespeare.

There is ample support for the claim that the main aspects upon which emphasis was laid by most scholars were destiny's and man's culpability with regards to the death of the lovers. A closer look at the play indicates that this bipolar view can be further analyzed which allows for a supplementary distribution. The culpability of man can be attributed either to society, or solely to the main characters' hamart í a. Harold Bloom recognizes the dichotomy created in the mind of the readers and how it becomes the overriding concern in the analysis of the play. This can undoubtedly lead to the disregard of other complex elements in the play that may be worthy of equal focus.

Shakespeare's first authentic tragedy has sometimes been critically undervalued, perhaps because of its popularity. Though Romeo and Juliet is a triumph of dramatic lyricism, its tragic ending usurps most other aspects of the play and abandons us to unhappy estimates of whether, and to what degree, its young lovers are responsible for their own catastrophe.²

Critics and readers have attributed the tragic downfall of the lovers to such factors as impatience, irresponsibility, excessive passion on the lovers' part, the defiance of the parents, to fate presumably due to the fact that there are abounding references to fate made by the chorus (''star-cross'd lovers'') and the characters as well (Romeo: ’’O, I am fortune’s fool’’ (3.1.131.), Juliet: ‘’Fortune, be fickle’’ (3.5.62.), etc.). The literature shows no clear consensus on the topic.

There is overwhelming evidence that the lives of the young lovers were predestined if we take into consideration the numerous instances when this is stated directly. Through the course of the play, references to fate are abounding: the word ''fortune'' appears seven times, however ''stars'', which is synonymous with destiny, is used six times (apart from the term ''star-cross'd''), that is, more than in any other play of Shakespeare. Whether Shakespeare intended the statements concerning fortune to be read literally remains inconclusive. Burton Raffel argues that their life was subject to the unknowable forces of fate and destiny, or astrological configurations. He also puts forward the view that while rebellion against such forces was possible, it was evidently unsuccessful: ''fatalism was not simply another way of looking at life but a recognition of fundamental reality.''³ Charles Boyce shares a similar view claiming that:

Romeo and Juliet seems somewhat out of place in the line of Shakespeare’s development as a writer of tragedy. Shakespeare’s extraordinary later tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, are centered on magnificent but flawed individuals whose personalities lead them to attempt to control their destiny and thereby succumb to an inevitable downfall. Romeo and Juliet bear no resemblance to these mighty protagonists; although they have faults, it is not their weaknesses that bring them to their unhappy end but their “inauspicious stars”.⁴

In contrast, Catherine Bates develops the claim that ''from the opening lines of this early play it is clear that man’s incivility to man is to be the drama’s key issue''⁵. Nevertheless, Burton Raffel takes a middle-ground position on the issue and argues that ' ' Romeo and Juliet ’s misfortunes are not caused exclusively by dark, mysterious, and unfathomable powers.''⁶ His argument against the fatalistic approach is grounded upon Lawrence Stone’s observations highlighting a ''social vector'':

To an Elizabethan audience the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet . . . lay not so much in their ill-starred romance as in the way they brought destruction upon themselves by violating the norms of the society in which they lived, which . . . meant strict filial obedience and loyalty to the traditional friendships and enmities of the lineage. . . We may say with equal justice that the “norms” of the society in which these lovers lived, which tolerated (even if they did not encourage) deep and dangerous feuds, brought destruction and death to many more than Romeo and Juliet alone. In the course of the tragedy, Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris die for exactly the same flawed cause.⁷

James Holly Hanford's take on Shakespeare's characters runs as follows:

Their errors have been more than expiated by their sufferings; their death is but the culmination of that overplus of evil which rains down upon the inconsequence of their faults. . . Their downfall is the outcome of some flaw or weakness in their natures. Thus the suicide of Romeo may be said to be associated with intemperance, in so far as Romeo's passion was excessive and unrestrained.⁸

He claims that it is the ''intensity and resistlessness of the passion which drives them to their death''⁹, thus suggesting that death is entirely self-inflicted and a direct effect of intemperance. Ernest Southerland Bates takes an anti-fatalistic approach. He mentions Bradley gives the definition of Shakespearean tragedy by describing it as a story of human actions producing an exceptional calamity and ending in the death of a man in high estate."¹⁰ Thereby he also acknowledges that ''it is not the suffering itself which constitutes tragedy, but the human action whereby suffering is produced''¹¹. Along similar lines, he offers another argument countering Bates's point of view:

It is no external fate or destiny that seems to cause the tragedy: destiny is the logical working out of traits in a man's own nature. Character is destiny. Romeo is precipitate: he goes to the Capulet ball uninvited, he jumps over the garden wall to speak with the girl he has just met, he marries Juliet off-hand, he comes between Tybalt and Mercutio, he slays the bloody Tybalt and later he slays himself at the tomb of his lover? it is all of a piece. The tragedy comes from the qualities of Romeo's character and not from an unfavorable star or frowning Providence... the "exceptional calamity" comes from the characters themselves being exceptional in the minds of the poet and in the view of the audience; and because this is so, there results tragedy.¹²

Upon meditating on the causes of tragedy, Sybil Truchet also supports the anti-deterministic view of the critics who have been mentioned. She notes that lack of reason and moderation is a ''destructive force in the play, one that wreaks havoc, a major cause in fact of the tragedy.¹³

The debate about these plot elements that received serious attention seems to be inconclusive, nevertheless the dominant view seems to be that rash decisions and hastily made choices set forth the disastrous effects. If it had not been for the impatience fiery nature of the young couple, the tragical ending may have never materialized. This view supports an underlying moral of prudence also noted by Georg Gottfried Gervinus and Fanny Elizabeth Bunnett. They argue for a moralistic reading which is disapproving of excess in any enjoyment.¹⁴ The aforementioned theories still remain viable, however some aspects gain a fuller understanding which implicates a misattribution of blame in several cases. Both leading ideas concerning the character's responsibility might solidify, and other dimensions can be added to them. Visual perception is an involuntary act, independent of one's will, therefore the young lovers cannot be held entirely responsible. In contrast, in other cases, characters are conscious of the effects of their actions, therefore the responsibility can be attributed to them. We will deal with such examples in a subsequent chapters.

As has been mentioned, the aim of this dissertation is to focus on such factors as are implicitly present in the play and can be easily overlooked. The upcoming chapters will deal with instances in Romeo and Juliet that are related to visual perception and serve as crucial a role in the succession of events as fate or the ancient grudge between the two households. We will refer to these elements as catalysts in the action on the grounds that, had there not been for some of these occurrences, the tragic outcome may not have materialized.

The close rereading of the play allowed us to arrive at the conclusion that the act of seeing involves a certain kind of predestination. Starting from the birth of love, the reliance on eyes is prevailing over reason. Visual perception becomes an overriding figure acting as a déclencheur in the course of the play. This dissertation serves as a platform in discussing its implications.

The statistics that we have conducted in relation to this matter on the website Opensource Shakespeare reveal that the noun ''eyes'' occurs 785 times in 684 speeches within 42 works, 25 times in Romeo and Juliet.¹⁵ The only play in which it appears more frequently is Trolius and Cressida with 31 entries and King Lear with 37. Its form in the singular occurs 479 times in 424 speeches within 42 works, 17 times in Romeo and Juliet, making it the only tragedy in which the word appears this frequently. "Eye" as part of a word (eyesight, eye's, eyeball(s), green-eyed) occurs 13 times. Likewise, the word ''gaze'' occurs 29 times in 29 speeches within 19 works, out of which 3 are from Romeo and Juliet. It is also worth mentioning that out of 154 sonnets, 52 contain the word ''eye'' (26) or ''eyes'' (34).

Moreover, we have also noticed the excessive repetition of the interjection ''O'' in several plays, but the most poignant presence is in Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. This might be a thought-provoking element, because in a study on Othello, the author draws attention to the significance of the shape of this letter. In this tragedy ''O'' occurs 131 times. Tim Blake, the director of a free adaptation of Othello in 2011, made sure to emphasize the role of this symbol. Some critics claim that ''the oval 'O' recalls the shape of an eye''¹⁶. The numbers are shocking: ''O'' crops up 2746 times within 42 works, and figures on 125 occasions in Hamlet (30,557), 131 in Othello (26,450), 116 in Romeo and Juliet (24,545). After taking into consideration the word count of the plays, we made a percentage calculation and we have arrived at the result that in Hamlet 0,409% of the words is ''o'', whereas in Romeo and Juliet it amounts to 0,472%. On the basis of the evidence currently available, it seems fair to suggest that these results cannot be arbitrary and Shakespeare made conscious use of them.

In light of this, we hope to demonstrate that the eyes are ''not only anatomical mechanisms for receiving stimuli''¹⁷, but that they have a special role in the Shakespearian tragedy. The over-reliance on sight becomes the hamartia of the characters that brings about considerable damage. Thus, by disclosing the effects of this flaw and on account of the evidence currently available, it seems fair to suggest that Shakespeare might have underscored the perils of reflection. In other words, the elements that ultimately govern the fate of the lovers and ultimately help to catalyse the tragical outcome, in our opinion, are also part of a larger scope, mainly Shakespeare's aim to implicitly cast an indictment upon relying solely on one sense.

It is worth taking a closer look on the sources of the play in order to determine what elements the playwright borrowed and innovations he inserted into the play that may also support our aforementioned ideas regarding the role of visual perception. Similarly, we shall also deal with the origins of the theme of sight and the role eyes had in literary works before and after Shakespeare as well. Following, we shall examine the instances in Romeo and Juliet which play a quintessential role in arriving at the conclusion that visual perception, sight and the organ of sight govern much of the events in the play.

3 Exploring visual perception – theories of sight

Sight is a faculty that has always fascinated mankind and provided a fertile soil for research for many philosophers and scientists. There were essentially two competing theories that the medieval world inherited from classical antiquity concerning visual perception: eyes were considered to be either receivers or emitters of rays.¹⁸ The first theory about eyesight was called the Extramission Theory, which was put forward by Alcmaeon of Croton (450 BC) and by Plato (427-347 BC) who held the belief that there is something streaming out of the eyes. They believed that there is fire within the eyes that combines with natural daylight, enabling us to see the objects around us. Later, Euclid (ca. 300 BC) claimed that only those objects can be perceived that the visual rays can reach. Folkerth noted that based on this model, the eye is to be associated with activity and that it can be aligned with “notions of activity, individualism, aggression”¹⁹ Similarly, Jennifer McDermott mentions Brathwaite who in Essaies Upon the Five Senses (1620) attributes the eyes adjectival cases of personhood (for example “discreet”, ”jealous”, ”resolved”), which also stresses their being considered as active organs.²⁰ In stark contrast, the advocates of the Intromission Theory (ex. Democritus, 420 BC, Epicurus, 341-270 BC, Lucretius, 60 BC) argued that it was from the object itself that rays emerged and entered the eye.²¹

Aristotle offers the first detailed description about the mechanism behind vision. According to him, sight is the most ennobling of the senses. Plato also attributed pre-eminence to sight, owing to the fact that the eyes are the principal means by which knowledge can be acquired from the outside world.²² One of the reasons why it was held in a position above the other senses is also noted by Jennifer McRae Dermott, who says that this is due to the fact that it does not rely on direct contact with the object perceived.²³ She enumerates other reasons as well:

Indeed, why should the senses necessarily appear as sight, hearing, smell, taste, and then touch?. . . that despite the fluidity of arrangement among the “lower” bodily senses in the hierarchy, seeing and hearing typically comprise the first two links of the chain and are frequently viewed as twinned “intellectual” senses; that eye and ear are the organs deemed most inward or perspicacious; and that they are accordingly the most vulnerable.

Aristotle also questioned the existing beliefs and deemed them unreasonable, so he developed his own intromission theory. He upheld the idea that a transparent medium was necessary for vision to occur, and this was the light. Slowly, there was a decline of extramission views after their disproval by various scientists, but it still persisted in some areas.²⁴ There was a widespread belief in the “evil eye” which set fort superstitions all around the world. It is, as Charles Gross notes, “the most widespread example of something coming out of the eye, a very powerful extramission belief.”²⁵ While these theories have long been disproved, we can find their traces in literature and discover how deeply people believed in them. Nevertheless, even before literary works, it was already present in ancient texts, from which poets could have drawn inspiration. The following first three quotes are taken from the mentioned issue of The Neuroscientist magazine and are extracts from various religious texts:

The evil eye approached and the storm sent no rain. . . (Sumerian incantation, ca. 4000 BCE)

Simon ben Johai and Rabbi Jochanan could with their looks transfom people into heap of stones. (Talmud)

Almost would the infidels strike thee down with their very looks. . . (Koran)

They perish at thy glance of ire. (Psalm 81)

The glance that produces harm also became a popular topos in literature, which later on came to be known as the 'aggressive eye topos', a term coined by Lance Donaldson-Evans²⁶. Therefore, as Julie Singer explains, the debate about intromission and extramission was not limited to scientific discourse and: ” poets, drawing upon the convention of love as a condition stemming from the sight of the beloved, also struggled with the exact nature of the mechanisms that allowed for the introduction of the beloved's image in the lover's heart.“²⁷ Interestingly, with the exception of Cupid, the fundamentally extramissive model was associated exclusively with the woman's body (as she shoots harmful darts into the eyes of the other sex), while the male lover's physiology was constructed according to the intromissive model (his eyes being passive receptors). This opposition in the love-imprint model transforms the eyes into another sex organ.²⁸ What we are concerned with and we will discuss in the subsequent chapters is the reflection of these topoi in literature, extending from the Classic poets to Shakespeare, but most importantly in his Romeo and Juliet.

4 A Historical Panorama of the Theme of Sight in Relation to Shakespeare

This chapter is dedicated to the analysis of ancient and medieval literature, where visual perception plays a crucial role in the development of the action. We will notice many similarities, if not matching elements between the works that will be mentioned and Romeo and Juliet. The purpose of this enquiry is to determine what themes Shakespeare might have borrowed and in what ways he has innovated. Our aim is to draw a comparison between works in which sight and visual perception play a central role. It is possible that Shakespeare used some of them as an essential context for Romeo and Juliet.

As has been shown, Romeo and Juliet has various possible plot sources (Arthur Brooke: The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet (1562), Matteo Bandello: Giulietta e Romeo (1554), Luigi Da Porto: A Story Newly Found of two Noble Lovers (1530), etc.)²⁹, but Burton Raffel argues that there is convincing evidence that he worked from Brooke alone³⁰. The dull version lacking any poetic decoration was remedied by Shakespeare who added its dramatic and highly aestheticised form. Apart from this, in comparing the play with its sources, the most noticeable difference seems to be the compression of the action from several months to a few days. Furthermore, in the earlier versions, Tybalt and Mercutio were much later introduced, only at the pivotal moments when they were about to be killed. However, Shakespeare places them at the very beginning, making them part of the initial fight as well. Arthur J. Roberts argues that this must be due to the fact that Shakespeare aimed at preparing the minds of the readers for the parts these characters were to play. He claims that “by this time we are properly prepared for Tybalt's doing the thing he is in the play for, namely, getting into a quarrel that shall result in his death at the hands of Romeo”³¹. In our opinion, such reasoning would stand proof of inconsistence on the part of the playwright taking into consideration the reduction of the time-scale, because we were not at all prepared for such a sudden marriage and death of the two lovers, therefore it seems to be odd that Shakespeare would pay attention only to the former issue. Consequently, this renders it highly unlikely that he did it for preparatory reasons. Rather than that, it seems more reasonable that these changes facilitated the reinforcement of the power of visual perception which is made manifest in the fight between the members of the two houses in which Tybalt took part (see Chapter 4.) or in the sudden infatuation of the lovers which led to foolish, rash decisions.

4.1 The dangers of reflection

4.1.1 The wounded lover

That seeing is a dangerous act is discussed by Starobinski. He reflects on various characters of Greek mythology whose fate was to a large extent influenced by visual perception.³² Oedipus shamefully blinded himself so he would never have to face his family. Medusa's gaze made men turn to stone. Orpheus and Psyche both broke their vows by looking at their lovers which led to losing them.³³ About the myth of Narcissus, a man who stared at his own reflection until he died, critics acknowledge that:

Visual perception is the essential ingredient. . . In the myth, metaphysical delusions are bolstered by one's imago, or visual reflexion, and nothing else, which is to say, through an exclusively optical and visual regime.³⁴

This affirmation can be are true with regards to the other above mentioned myths.

Harold Bloom refers to Chaucer as “the ancestor of Shakespeare's greatest originality”³⁵ and he emphasises that time's ironies and its influence on the lovers' life are equally powerful aspects of both of the works, putting forward the idea that Troilus and Criseyde might have been an influential text for Romeo and Juliet. It is certain that as far as the birth of the sentiment of love is concerned, the resemblance of the description of the phenomenon is uncanny:

This Troilus, of every wight aboute,

- On this lady and now on that lokinge,
- Wher-so she were of toune, or of with-oute:
- And up-on cas bifel, that thorugh a route
- His eye perced, and so depe it wente
- Til on Criseyde it smoot, and ther it stente.
- Lo, he that leet him-selven so konninge,
- And scorned hem that loves peynes dryen,
- Was ful unwar that love hadde his dwellinge
- With-inne the subtile stremes of hir yen;
- That sodeynly him thoughte he felte dyen,
- Right with hir look, the spirit in his herte;
-Blissed be love, that thus can folk converte!³⁶ (268-308)

Ernest Sutherland Bates names Petrarch as the poet who set forth the highest types of the beauty of hopeless love. The later poets strived to equal or surpass him in the treatment of the same topics, and this enabled them to show their individuality.³⁷ Evans identifies this as a challenge to emulate what the predecessors have done before.³⁸ It has been remarked by many scholars that Chaucer might also have been influenced by Petrarch. This assumption is grounded upon the fact that the origins of the correlation between love and sight can be traced in his work. The following extracts from Rime Sparse in comparison with the extracts above from Chaucer well illustrate this idea:

It was on that day when the sun’s ray

- was darkened in pity for its Maker,
- that I was captured, and did not defend myself,
- because your lovely eyes had bound me, Lady.
- It did not seem to me to be a time to guard myself
- against Love.s blows: so I went on
- confident, unsuspecting; from that, my troubles
- started, amongst the public sorrows.
- Love discovered me all weaponless,
- and opened the way to the heart through the eyes,
- which are made the passageways and doors of tears:
- so that it seems to me it does him little honour
- to wound me with his arrow, in that state,
- he not showing his bow at all to you who are armed. (Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro)³⁹

Similarly to Rime Sparse, The Knight’s Tale contains the same eye imagery. Palamon and Arcite, who lead a life of imprisonment secluded in a tower, catch a glimpse of the fair Emelye, and thus their love-sickness begins, because they know that the woman is unreachable. However, the mere sight from a distance was enough for them to fall in love. Again, the algorithm of infatuation is the same: suddenly catching sight of a beautiful woman, the sight evokes a twitching feeling, as if pierced with the arrows of Cupid, and the man falls desperately in love. Undoubtedly, it is considered that there is a direct pathway between the eyes and the heart. Eyes are represented as the indispensable medium for the birth of love:

[...]

---

¹ Paul Gleed, "Bloom's How to Write about William Shakespeare."Barnes & Noble. Infobase Publishing, 2009, p. 71.

² Harold Bloom, Shakespeare : The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999, p. 87.

³ William Shakespeare, Burton Raffel, and Harold Bloom. Romeo and Juliet. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004, p. xvii.

⁴ Charles Boyce, A Critical Companion to William Shakespeare Vol.1. New York: Facts on File Inc., 2005, p. 534.

⁵ Claire McEachern, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 183.

⁶ Ibid. Burton Raffel and Harold Bloom, p. xviii.

⁷ Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, New York: Harper, 1977, p. 87.

⁸ James Holly Hanford, ''Suicide in the Plays of Shakespeare'' , PMLA, (1912), p. 9.

⁹ Ibid., p. 7.

¹⁰ Ernest Sutherland Bates, “The Sincerity of Shakespeare's Sonnets”. Modern Philology 8.1 (1910):pp. 11-12

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² John Bell Henneman, ’’Shakespeare in Recent Years: II. Themes of Tragedy.’’ The Sewanee Review, Vol. 16 (1908), p. 12.

¹³ Sybil Truchet, "Madness and Folly and the Extraordinary Reason of Love in Romeo and Juliet."Shakespeare Actes Des Congrès De La Société Française Shakespeare 7 (1989), p. 8.

¹⁴ Georg Gottfried Gervinus and Bunnett, Fanny Elizabeth, Shakespeare Commentaries; tr. By F. E. Bennett, London, 1877, p. 211.

¹⁵ The data that is mentioned is taken from the Concordance of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/ .

¹⁶ Sarah Hatchuel, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Shakespeare on Screen: Othello, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 94.

¹⁷ Jennifer Rae McDermott, ''Perceiving Shakespeare: A Study of Sight, Sound, and Stage.'' Early Modern Literary Studies. Special Issue 19 (2009), § 9

¹⁸ Julie Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry, Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2011, p. 46.

¹⁹ Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 18.

²⁰ McDermott, §9

²¹ Charles G. Gross, “The Fire that Comes from the Eye”, The Neuroscientist 5.1 (1999):58-64, p. 58.

²² Lance K.Donaldson-Evans, “Love's Fatal Glance: Eye Imagery and Maurice Scève's Délie”. Neophilologus 62.2(Apr 1, 1978):203.

²³ McDermott, §2

²⁴ Gross, p. 61.

²⁵ Ibid, p. 62.

²⁶ Lance K . Donaldson-Evans, “Chapter I: The Eyes’ Role in Love Literature since Antiquity.” Love’s Fatal Glance: A Study of Eye Imagery in the Poets of the École Lyonnaise. 9. n.p.: 1980. Supplemental Index. Web. 14 May 2016.

²⁷ Singer, p. 47.

²⁸ Ibid, p. 48.

²⁹ Amanda Mabillard, “Sources forRomeo and Juliet ”. Shakespeare Online. 21 Nov. 2009. Web. 12. Apr. 2016.

³⁰ William Shakespeare, Burton Raffel, and Harold Bloom. Romeo and Juliet. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, p. xv.

³¹ Arthur J. Roberts,. ''The Sources of Romeo and Juliet''. Modern Language Notes, , Vol. 17, No. 2 (Feb., 1902), Johns Hopkins University Press Stable, pp. 41-44.

³² Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye. Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 4.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Syntetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, University of Chicago Press, 2014, p. 191.

³⁵ Bloom, p. 87.

³⁶ Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, http://www.librarius.com/troicris.html. , my emphases

³⁷ Ernest Sutherland Bates, “The Sincerity of Shakespeare's Sonnets”. Modern Philology 8.1 (1910): 87–106, p. 11.

³⁸ Maurice Evans, Elizabethan Sonnets. Revised by Roy Booth. London: Dent, 1994, p. VXI.

³⁹ A. S. Kline, "Petrarch: The Canzoniere."Poetry in Translation. 2002. Web. 14 May 2016.