SOURCE: “Since First Your Eye I Eyed: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Poetics of Narcissism,” in Style, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 1-30.

In the essay below, Hedley argues that Shakespeare's sonnets to the fair young man are narcissistic in their distinctive use of language and form.

The love that is celebrated in the first one hundred and twenty-six of Shakespeare's Sonnets is narcissistic, as several commentators have noticed¹: “it is love by identification,” as C. L. Barber explains (662).² Writing about the Sonnets in 1960, Barber preferred to try to understand the lover's posture in these poems “without resort to psychoanalytic formulations” (667); more recently, however, Joseph Pequigney has analyzed that posture in terms of Freud's account of “the inclination toward a narcissistic object choice” in homosexual men. The parallels are so close and so pervasive, Pequigney argues, that the Sonnets “could usefully be considered a proof-text” for Freud's account of homosexual...