Praising the Negative: Value, Quantity, and the Nature of “No” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Is it possible to “be negative” in literature? Or in literary criticism? In examining Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which appear when the Petrarchan vogue in England had already begun to subside, this essay seeks to explore the relationship between poetry and value, as a form and a concept, at a particularly important historical point in the latter’s development.2 It also examines the relationship between interpretation and value, whether readers, professional or otherwise, necessarily value the poems they analyze, if only by selecting them for attention. I do not imply in this essay that scholars are all hucksters, secretly plumping for whatever poem or poet we happen to be taking the time to write about. I do seek to demonstrate how Shakespeare’s Sonnets provide an examination of the trap that is the value form, a trap that makes it very difficult to avoid revaluing the negative, turning it into something paradoxically positive or a pedagogical mechanism for the reassertion of a harmonious order.