A Study on Shakespeare's Eye Imagery (7)

In Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, the poet's beloved, Stella，is symbolized as the sun. This has been a very traditional way of expressing the sonneteer's love since Petrarch，and this idealization of the beloved can be observed very often in the sonnet sequences of the Renaissance. On the other hand， Shakespeare does not idealize his loved one. She is not depicted as a beautiful woman. His poems don't aim at an idealization but at a severe criticism of the woman. This kind of writing was very new and fresh in his age. The reason why Shakespeare did not idealize will be explained，in part, by the development of the poetic subject of the Elizabethan writers. Referring to Joel Fineman's theory of subjects and objects， I win try to find an answer to this mystery of Shakespeare's anti-idealization. Some brief notes win be added on Jacques Lacan，a French psychoanalyst，on whose essays Fineman bases his own theory