Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Our modern sense of the word “spectrum” as a “colored band into which a beam of light is decomposed by means of a prism” came into the English language in 1671 in Isaac Newton's writings on optics and the reflecting telescope. Before Newton, however, the word meant an apparition or phantom, a sense that survives in our current meaning of “specter.” Both spectrum and specter have the Latin specere , “to look,” as their root, and both words raise questions about the nature of bodies and the role of the senses, particularly vision. The etymological coupling of these connotations of the spectral will inform this essay, for I will argue here that color is a discourse that haunts early modern poetics, not least in the commonplace phrase “the colors of rhetoric,” which designated a linkage of language with visible color, an analogical modeling of rhetoric on painting. I will suggest, however, that the parallel between language and art was far from simple, and that rhetoric's colors depended upon a ghostly discourse of natural historical knowledge that invisibly shaped the chromatic lexicon of Shakespeare's sonnets and early modern poetry in general. Readers of Shakespeare's sonnets have noted that the sequence moves along a gamut of color, from the “fairest creatures” of the first sonnet to the praise of “black” in sonnet 127. The narrative of the sequence is often described as an opposition ... log in or subscribe to read full text