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Figuring linguistic ambiguity as Shakespeare's "fatal Cleopatra," the temptation "for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it," Samuel Johnson conjures up a mixture of "dark" womanhood, implications of gratified lust, and the exoticism of cross-rank erotics-opposing a standard of verbal economy to a sense of pleasant, feminized, and useless diversion.1 The image deals in durable categories. The modern term "wordplay," for instance, retains this distinction between the productivity of work and the waste of fun, a dividing line that, as Margreta de Grazia has argued, was not widely incorporated into English usage until Johnson's own eighteenth-century efforts at "lexical standardization." 2 Work and play, de Grazia claims, do not map so cleanly onto the language of Shakespearean texts. As an example, she follows the variations on one word ("bear") in The Winter's Tale, and shows how the capacity of a single sound to gather together multiple meanings could be a definitive source of both structure and action.3 To disregard the "wordplay" in the play, then, may be to miss the very ways it makes sense, to lose what makes it work.
Although Johnson's distinction between productivity and waste seems worth complicating, his Cleopatra aptly suggests the vague air of eroticism that so often marks Shakespeare's use of homonyms. The puns, as everybody knows, are bawdy, particularly in the sonnets, where a dangerously alluring "dark lady" and a reluctant young man are surrounded by what has been called an "imprecise[ly] create[d] . . . aura of sexuality," a suggestiveness that "abides in the half-light of wordplay, implica- tion, and insinuation."4 I want to question the value of reading this text as a coherent whole, but first would like to note how central the collective "aura" created by ambiguous language has been to the long and contested tradition of making sense of the sonnets. Peter Stallybrass and de Grazia have both traced the cultural anxiety that has marked these poems' reception, exemplified by the fervent denials of Shakespeare's homosexuality by critics such as Samuel Coleridge and George Chalmers.5 More recently, Joseph Pequigney has reversed these claims, arguing in Such is My Love: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets that, if read correctly, the sonnets tell the clear story of an "amorous transaction" between Shakespeare...