ABSTRACT
One of the most ironic and beautiful of Shakespeare’s sonnets begins, ‘Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing.’ It opens, as King Lear does, with an ambiguity or pun, a single word which turns like a hinge on a door between two separate mansions of our thought which yet, word and poet maintain, may communicate the one with the other. That turning ‘dear’ suggests that the laws of love and laws of economics may be con nected. (Shakespeare would not be alone among the poets in suggesting th is; there are hints of it in Novalis’s Fragmente, and Shaw sets it down explicitly while claiming it as one of the great Wagnerian insights.) We shall not follow here this particular poetic sally between private and public affairs, any more than we can pursue the equally fascinating one in this sonnet’s last line where the phrase ‘In sleep a king’ brings dream and monarchy into a connection which, once made, rings numerous bells
through later literature, from King Henry IV, Part I I and The Duchess o f Malfi and Calderon’s La Vida es Sueho through Grillparzer to Christopher Fry. That we dream up, as Americans say, our kings may well be true in some sense, with that corporate imagination of which little is known yet and which goes to the shaping or misshaping of all our forms of public life and government. For the present, however, we shall have enough with the connection between the law and the dream which the middle of this sonnet proposes.
