Apophatic rhetoric in Shakespeare’s Rival Poet sonnets

Abstract

This article looks at Shakespeare’s paradoxical attitude to rhetoric in the sonnets, more specifically, the Rival Poet sonnets (78–80 and 82–86). Through close reading, it identifies an apophatic resistance to rhetoric and a simultaneous inherent rhetoricity in Shakespeare’s work. Apophasis is a rhetorical figure through which a speaker pretends to conceal that which he actually shows, or denies that he says or does that which he says or does. Apophasis is a self-reflexive, dynamic and ironic device, and works by inversion, highlighting that which it would seem to downplay, including the rhetorical effects of the writing itself.