Immortal codes: genetics,ghosts,and Shakespeare's sonnets

Abstract

This essay is built around three narratives of Shakespeare, code, and immortality: the first, the parallel between the passage of encoded genetic material in the body and the cultural transmission of text which converge in the reproduction of Shakespeare's sonnets into the medium of DNA, potentially collapsing a metaphorical relationship into a literal one; the second, the supposed conveying of information from a deceased Shakespeare to a superstitious Victor Hugo through the tapping out of code onto a tabletop during a nineteenth-century seance; and third, one in which I consider an alternative—or perhaps parallel—reading of Shakespeare's sonnets in which the author himself intends, against all odds and rationality, to preserve his deceased son in the form of sonnets that have more frequently been read as love letters to a young male lover.