Applying Intentional Fallacy to Shakespeare’s Sonnets Essay

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Updated: Mar 16th, 2024

Introduction

Literary criticism in the twentieth century was a revolution of sorts. The world was falling out of pattern with the World Wars and Modernist literature was trying to capture this chaos. However, as a reaction against the extreme subjectivity of the Romantics and the social emphasis of the Victorian Age, literary criticism under the label of ‘New Criticism’ or the Formalists took the shape of a disciplined science. According to I. A. Richards and T.S. Eliot’s famous theories of literary criticism, literature began to be viewed objectively and scientifically, instead of tracing the poet and the poet’s intentions in the text. According to the New Critics, there was always a structural and thematic meaning of the text, independent of the biographical, socio-political, or moral connotations of a text. A true literary critic would appreciate the text for its form and pattern and internal harmony, not because it belonged to a certain author. The ‘text’ was independent of the author.

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Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley

Two of the New Critics, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley contributed to this theory with their essay, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) on two important aspects of literary appreciation: they termed it Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy. Intentional Fallacy, according to them, was the mistake of the critic or the reader’s assumption that the author, his background, and his thought pervade a literary work. What an author means in his work is of sole importance in interpreting and appreciating the text. Also, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley, the intentional fallacy is the tool of operations where there is a definite perplexity in the context of the art form, poem or otherwise, and its link with the origin. The theory also states that there would be a trend that starts with the fundamental cause of writing the poem in the first place and ends with the details of the poet’s life. Thus, they talked of a fallacy in ‘intent’, in the viewpoint of the critic.

Wimsatt and Beardsley have established three main categories of evidence that are used to interpret literary texts.

Internal Evidence: This category involves the facts of a text, like the historical content of the text or the forms and traditions of the text being studied, e.g., the form of a sonnet, the rhyme scheme, literary allusions used in the text all that is present in the body of the poem. To quote Wimsatt and Beardsley, the internal evidence: “it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture” (Margolis, 385).

External Evidence: All facts and history of the work is included in external evidence. All statements about the work made by the author in his journals, in letters, the reasons stated by the author for writing the particular text, and the author’s statements are included in external evidence. To quote from the authors, it is the “private or idiosyncratic; not part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations… about how or why the poet wrote the poem” (Margolis, 385).

Contextual or Intermediate Evidence: This category would be related to any special meanings or connotations that the author attaches to the work of art. Quoted again from the essay, it is the –“private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author” (Margolis, 386).

According to New Criticism, too much interest in the author’s biography detaches the critic from the meaning of the work. This strain was later taken up by the Post-Structuralist literary theoretician, Roland Barthes in his 1986 essay, ‘The Death of the Author’, in which he clearly states that all texts stem from the same themes and the author is a public figure, not a mystical God who is omnipresent in his works. One must learn to read the text in a detached, dispassionate, objective manner and not try to find links with the author’s personality. According to the Intentional Fallacy theory too, a poem or a work of art must stand in the public gaze for itself and not for the fame or quirkiness of the author’s personality.

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The Intentional Fallacy and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

This section of the paper will look at Shakespeare’s sonnet no. 23 and the Intentional Fallacy theory shall be applied to its interpretation. Let us look at the sonnet first:

Sonnet 23

“As an unperfect actor on the stage
Who with his fear is put besides his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
Overcharged with burden of mine own love’s might.
O, let my books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love and look for recompense
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O, learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit” (Shakespeare, 228).

Analysis

Shakespeare’s sonnets are divided into two clear sections: Sonnet 1-126, which is dedicated to a handsome, young, male friend, and Sonnet 127-154 dedicated to the Dark Lady. If we take these sonnets to be a dedication to the people in Shakespeare’s life, it might turn out to be the Intentional Fallacy that Wimsatt and Beardsley mention in the essay. The sonnets have been read as intensely personal and autobiographical details of Shakespeare’s court life and his homo-social love for a young titled person. Let us look at the poem objectively, forgetting for a moment that Shakespeare is the author.

We find an intense love poem in the above-mentioned sonnet. The poet has used the English sonnet form with the rhyme scheme of three quatrains and one couplet, abab cdcd efef gg. The poet seems to be addressing a cold-hearted beloved, who does not understand the language of the poet’s love or under some social differences of status, the poet cannot express his love openly. He states that he suffers from an excess of passion, just as an imperfect actor’s performance is marred with his stage fright; just as a fiercely angry person chokes on his emotions and loses strength to fight—-so also is the pitiable condition of the poet who is so ‘overcharged’ with the ‘burden’ of unexpressed love that he wishes for a means of expression. The poet turns to his poetry to give ‘words’ to his feelings. His intense passion shall be recorded for ages in his eloquent verse, printed immortally in books, and shall thus become timeless proof of his silent love so that every reader shall learn of the sincere and beautiful feelings of the poet.

According to an article by Joseph Sobran called, The End of Stratfordism, the common fallacy of the readers and critics of Shakespeare’s sonnets is that they tend to ‘read’ the poems by identifying the personality of Shakespeare in it. However, Joseph Sobran argues that the poet described in the sonnets doesn’t match with William Shakespeare of Stratford of the 1590s who was a rich, brilliant, and highly respected poet and playwright in London, not the middle-aged or aging, love-stricken, disgraced, lame, depressed and poor poet figure described in the sonnets. According to Sobran, the descriptions match Christopher Marlowe, a poet-playwright at that time who was accused of homosexuality and died disgracefully, or even the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, who led a similar scandalous life and ended in poverty and ruin.

Conclusion

There might be instances of Shakespeare’s life in the sonnets but it is wrong to assume that the sonnets tell us all about Shakespeare’s life and his loves. Thus, the sonnets might be mere fictions, though the young man of the sonnets has been identified as Sir Henry Wriothesley. The Intentional Fallacy lies in assuming that it is Shakespeare speaking in the poems and that he is disclosing the darkest secrets of his life in the sonnets. John Keats had once said that a great poet has ‘Negative Capability’ and Shakespeare could deny his ego and personality to objectively become a Hamlet or an Iago. Thus, his sonnets should not be judged personally. The Intentional Fallacy theory does not, of course, maintain that no poem can be autobiographical. E.g., the sonnets of John Keats or John Milton clearly express subjective emotions.

Works Cited

Margolis, Joseph. Philosophy looks at the arts: contemporary readings in aesthetics. London: Temple University Press, 1987.

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Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Auckland: BWL Shakespeare Society, 2001.

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IvyPanda. (2024) 'Applying Intentional Fallacy to Shakespeare’s Sonnets'. 16 March.

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IvyPanda. 2024. "Applying Intentional Fallacy to Shakespeare’s Sonnets." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/applying-intentional-fallacy-to-shakespeares-sonnets/.

1. IvyPanda. "Applying Intentional Fallacy to Shakespeare’s Sonnets." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/applying-intentional-fallacy-to-shakespeares-sonnets/.


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IvyPanda. "Applying Intentional Fallacy to Shakespeare’s Sonnets." March 16, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/applying-intentional-fallacy-to-shakespeares-sonnets/.

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