Queer Shakespeare

The term ‘glass’ appears ten times across Shakespeare’s sonnets, and it represents one of the few material objects depicted in the poems. Such prevalence corresponds with its material history, given that objects made from glass claimed a prominent place in the cultural imagination of the early modern period. Crystal mirrors had recently emerged as a new technology, replacing old versions made of metal, offering another way to see oneself. Innovations related to the glass lens fuelled the scientific revolution – including improvements upon the microscope, telescope and prism – and thus opened the promise that one could view the world from new angles and with new perspicuity. In turn, early modern writers seized upon terms related to glass to describe the poetic process. Herbert Grabes has traced 398 English books published between 1500 and 1700 whose titles refer to mirrors, and Margaret Ezell notes a startling increase in texts about mirrors and glass in the seventeenth century.1 As Rayna Kalas has shown, Renaissance poets frequently deployed glass-related vocabulary – ranging from ‘framing’ to ‘perspective’ to ‘reflection’ – in order to talk about the making of a poem.2 With their frequent references to glass, Shakespeare’s sonnets invite us to explore how the material object shapes discussions of identity and poesis.

Shakespeare seems particularly keen to tap into the properties of glass for a meditation on the operations of desire and of desirability.3 And this meditation seizes upon glass’ inherent queerness, both in the material’s refusal to be singularly categorized and in its ability to skew the way a subject sees a desired object (as well as how a subject sees her- or himself when desiring). The sonnets seem to associate the material with same-sex desire, as glass appears in only those typically understood to be addressed to the young man.4 As this essay will argue, glass offers a particularly apt vessel for contemplations about the operations of erotic desire, both clarifying how and why one wants while simultaneously emphasizing the complexity and stubborn opacity of what drives our experience of wanting. Such contemplations inevitably link to identity and to making, as desire continually renders and undoes us as subjects and objects. Thinking about the ties between glass and sexuality, one might immediately think of narcissism or the Lacanian mirror-stage. However, reflection is only one of the possible functions of glass that has purchase on the nature of sexuality. In a world of objects, glass constitutes a particularly queer object. As a material substance, it provocatively disturbs fundamental distinctions often used to define objects. Scientists continue to debate whether glass is a liquid or a solid, as it stubbornly refuses to fall squarely into either category. Glass is marked by a profound instability, and not simply because the threat of it cracking or shattering seems always imminent. It can be either (and sometimes simultaneously) reflective, opaque or transparent. It can be used to gain clarity or to obfuscate, as well as to demarcate a surface while giving the illusion of depth. Certainly, physical operations often associated with glass – gazing, mirroring, transparency – have been translated into more abstract concepts by those thinking about how we perceive the world and ourselves. Yet even these common understandings of glass are perverted and queered by Shakespeare in ways that still feel startlingly new. Taking glass as an object of study in the sonnets calls our attention to how the very thing that should be transparent mitigates relations between people, as well as between people and their desired objects and experiences. Glass reveals mediation to always be present (even when transparent or invisible) and desire to be fluid (even when solidified into a seemingly static state).5

Object formulation

The complex etymology of the word ‘glass’ renders visible its vexed properties as an object, as well as its vexing effect on other objects. The word comes to us from Old English, and the OED suggests that the ultimate root may be the Germanic glă-, glæ̂ – ablaut-variant of glô- ‘to shine’. By transitioning from an action to a thing, the object’s effects came to be grounded in the essence of the object itself. ‘To shine’ enables something to stand out, to look new or promising. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the word ‘glass’ also functioned as an adjective that indicated the colour grey, and this use may derive from the Welsh term glas. This strand of the genealogy suggests another operation of glass, which paradoxically is at the heart of the material’s operations as well. Grey seems innocuous and perhaps acts as a marker of the undesirable if we understand the colour to be associated with decay and lack. While it can be used to showcase something, glass is also used for its transparent qualities; glass exists to make us notice; glass exists to be ignored.

We can see the conflation of these effects – making something shine while making something grey – in Sonnet 22, which opens:

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,

So long as youth and thou are of one date.

(1–2)6

The poet may gaze at himself in the mirror, but he thinks of the young man. Indeed, the poem itself is offered as a mirror into which the addressee is invited to gaze upon his reflection lovingly rendered by the poet. Thus both speaker and addressee look into the glass and encounter a face other than his own. This mirror functions as an object that takes them away from themselves. Like all mirrors perhaps, this one urges the gazer to look at the surface in an effort to understand better the interiority of the individual reflected there. However, as André Greene nicely puts it, surface representation is ‘an unreliable ally, vulnerable to every trap, the scene of every trick with mirrors’; his metaphor of the mirror is an apt choice to emphasize that glass uniquely toys with us to suggest that it could hold ‘knowledge which might lay claim to some solidity, even if it is unable to be an object of certainty.’7

In Sonnet 62, the poet’s encounter with his own reflection in the mirror leads him to admonish himself and alter his sense of identity:

But when my glass shows me myself indeed,

Beated and chopped with tanned antiquity,

Mine own self-love quite contrary I read.

(9–11)

He cannot understand why he would love himself and chastises himself in the next line, ‘Self, so self-loving were iniquity’ (12). The encounter with oneself in the mirror awakens one to how narcissism generates a shine in the mind that often serves to counterbalance awareness of the limits of one’s attractiveness. Here, glass serves to remind us of how unlovable we are and how brief states of eros can be. But perhaps Blondie captured this best in 1978:

Once I had a love and it was a gas

Soon turned out had a heart of glass

Seemed like the real thing, only to find

Mucho mistrust, love’s gone behind.8

At the end of the affair, glass brings clarity alongside fragility. In the song, glass points to the lover’s changing state from airy and light to solid and breakable. Glass’ dynamic qualities – at times molten, finding its origin in sand and fire, becoming smooth, brittle and cold – resemble the changeability of love.

We find a useful instance of glass’ queer tendencies in John Donne’s poem, ‘The Broken Heart’, which contains a vivid depiction of glass’ ability to articulate the fragility of the self, especially in the throes of a bad romance. The speaker laments, ‘what did become / Of my heart, when I first saw thee? / I brought a heart into the room, / But from the room I carried none with me’ (17–20).9 One of Cupid’s arrows ‘at one first blow did shiver it as glass’ (24). The heart takes on the qualities of glass only once exposed to love, not simply at the scene of the break-up. Donne’s poem ends:

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,

Nor any place be empty quite;

Therefore I think my breast hath all

Those pieces still, though they be not unite;

And now, as broken glasses show

A hundred lesser faces, so

My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore,

But after one such love, can love no more.

(25–32)

‘The Broken Heart’ shows us rejection’s capacity to make us feel, to borrow the title of Ian Bogost’s 2012 monograph on object studies, ‘what it’s like to be a thing’. Unrequited attraction can undermine the dominant position of the desiring subject because the subject is transformed into an object under the catastrophic duress of another subject’s rejecting gaze. To drive his point home, Donne structures his poem to resemble shattered glass. The easy flow of stanzas while the speaker pursues his beloved transitions into a final stanza made jagged and stilted with caesurae to coincide with the breaking of his heart. Rayna Kalas’s argument that glass offered a powerful heuristic device that was seized upon by early modern poets has purchase here. I believe we can see an instantiation of Kalas’ argument in Donne’s poem, as well as an example of what Samuel Daniel describes in his 1603 Defence of Ryme: that ‘All verse is but a frame of wordes confined within certain measure’, a claim which Kalas interprets to indicate that ‘the musical and lexical harmony of the world’s frame manifests itself in verse.’10 This poem and Shakespeare’s sonnets underscore the ways that glass can disturb that harmony.

Glass is an object made complex by what humans project onto it. In the same way, people who are objects of our affection become screens upon which we project our desires. Shakespeare’s sonnets, Blondie’s song and Donne’s poem underscore both how we become objects when under the scrutiny of another’s desire and how we feel like we’ve lost our subjectivity when we are rejected. As Tristan Garcia observes, humans need the world of objects to reinforce ontological claims of superiority. He remarks, ‘Humanity identifies with machines to self-differentiate from other animals. Humanity identifies with other animals to self-differentiate from machines’.11 Glass offers a fascinating case study for Garcia’s claims, as it is the material machine that enables us to see ourselves and to see others.

Beginning in the medieval period, the term ‘glass’ was used as a noun to denote a mirror and, beginning in the Renaissance, indicated an hourglass.12 Thus the object was very much a tool for gaining perspective on space and time. Today, we think of glass primarily as a material or a substance, something from which other, recognizable objects are constructed. We can see an intriguing instance of glass’s multiple connotations and its power to drive fantasy in Sonnet 126, which opens with these lines:

O Thou my lovely Boy, who in thy power,

Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour,

Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st

Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st.

(1–4)

Lines 3–4 parallel the structure of the hemiepes in ancient Greek and Latin elegiac poetry, where a line is clearly divided into two half-lines. The line form itself resembles the queer form of mirroring that takes place in the sonnet. That is, the two sides of the caesura are not equivalent. They are each other’s obverse. One side is grey, the other shines. The two halves of the line seem dialectical, as well. While mirroring renders visible desire based in difference within the sonnets, the mirroring and gazing operations here do not track to the complementary, reproductive logics of heterosexual difference. The mirror suggests subtler forms of difference tied to queerer forms of desire. Garcia reminds us that ‘signification is a circulation of things in networks, in meta-relations.’13 Glass complicates these logics because its significations are fluid as they shift according to who gazes into or through it. Aranye Fradenburg describes the sonnets as ‘go-betweens – public relations, perhaps, for growing boys. They are transitional (and transitioning) objects’.14 The material glass enables the addressee and speaker to project themselves into each others’ positions, while the reader is invited to imagine her- or himself in either role.

Glass enables multiplicity, then, in ways that grant access to queer erotic arrangements. Melissa Sanchez has recently traced possibilities for female promiscuity in the sonnets, and the poems’ mirroring capacities open opportunities for male promiscuity as well. Sanchez argues that ‘Shakespeare’s poetic language makes legible the cultural work of the stigma attached to women who desire non-monogamous sex—women who, as it were, desire like men’, and I would extend her argument to claim that glass enables readers to desire someone else and to desire like someone else.15 The trope of multiplication within the sonnets also links to rhetorical strategies favoured by early modern writers. George Puttenham explains that repetition enhances a word’s ‘beautie’, and Henry Peacham lauds repetition for it adds ‘much comelynesse’ to a word.16 In The Garden of Eloquence (1577, rev. 1593), Peacham attributes the terms ‘pleasure’ and ‘pleasantnesse’ to repeated words.17 He goes on to stress that repetition enables ‘affinitie’ and ‘affections’ between words, as well as between words and feelings.18 Peacham emphasizes that likeness is generated by repetition, an idea later echoed by Jacques Derrida.19 It also adds ‘swéetnesse’ in the sound of the words, a term which Jeffrey Masten has shown to resonate with homoerotic valences.20 Like other poems that use popular early modern rhetorical devices such as epanalepsis (repetition) and epanadiplosis (doubling) for effect, Shakespeare’s sonnets embrace mirroring and reflection – at the level of language and at the level of conceptual relations made possible by glass objects – to emphasize the evocative complexities in the relations between poet and reader.

Sonnet 126 uses glass to describe the power that the addressee has over the speaker. Like in many of the sonnets, the speaker suggests ways that he functions as a double of the young man and presents his poem as a double as well. Both strategies use forms of multiplicity tied to pleasure and to reproduction. The addressee holds ‘time’s fickle glass’, yet the exact nature of that glass object is ambiguous. Does the young man hold a mirror, which might show Shakespeare aging, show the young man aging or emphasize Shakespeare’s age compared to the reflection of the young man? Or is the glass held by the young man an hourglass? If so, we see that young people serve to remind us that youthful beauty will fade and that we ourselves are not as young as we once were. If we imagine the object to be an hourglass, then youth is aligned with the movement of sand to mark time. Given that glass itself is generated from sand, we see an example of how glass comes to be associated with time in general, as well as how the passing of time can change how we see glass. The hourglass began as sand in its raw material, and later was crafted into the object that now captures sand. In the same way, the aging speaker was once young and now captures the young man in his depiction.

In either of these cases – whether the glass contains the reflection of an aging lover or the glass controls the flow of sand to mark the aging of the lover – we see glass linked to time and to desire. The connection is underscored in Sonnet 77, where ‘Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear, / Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste’ (1–2). The speaker’s concern with aging runs through the sonnets because it ‘leads to death, destroys beauty.’21 That is, the speaker depicts the young man as desirable by throwing into relief the speaker’s own lack of desirability as an older man. In this sonnet, the ‘lovely boy’ seems simultaneously to be the speaker’s beloved and the boy-god Cupid, who inspires the miserable madness of love and who is depicted in the final two sonnets of Shakespeare’s overall sequence. A reading of the boy as Cupid makes it difficult to ignore the presence of ‘sick’ in Sonnet 126’s ‘sickle’, as the events in the final two sonnets (153 and 154) can be understood to depict baths for the treatment of gonorrhea or syphilis.

The erotics of containment

Sonnet 126 ultimately uses its glass object to remind us that desire and time are inextricably connected, as the young man is described as ‘minion of [Nature’s] pleasure’ all-the-while he is cautioned that Nature ‘may detain but, not still keep, her treasure!’ (11–12).

The speaker imagines that glass would allow him to do what Nature cannot. Sonnets 5 and 6 imagine ways in which the young man’s beauty might be distilled and preserved before he ages. Though these poems rest at the heart of the ‘procreation sonnets’, they use glass in order to urge forms of stasis.22 In Sonnet 5, the poet likens the urgency to have children to the onset of winter. We seemingly assuage ourselves about the coming of colder weather and of old age with ‘summer’s distillation’ as ‘a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass’ (9–10). The scent of flowers transforms into perfume trapped in a glass bottle and can recall for us the sensorium we associate with a summer’s day in the same way a child recalls the youth of the parent. As Stephen Guy-Bray puts it, ‘the other person is a mechanism like a sonnet: something that enables one to remember things about oneself.’23 ‘The point that Shakespeare’s sonnets make about erotic memory’, he continues, ‘is that erotic memory is essentially the memory of oneself, of one’s own thoughts, feelings, and experiences.’24 We need the perfume or the sonnet to remember what has been forgotten. Glass enables this powerful ‘remembrance’ because

flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

(13–14)

We encounter a hemiepes-like structure again here in the first line of this couplet. That is, the line seems broken about evenly between two states of being. And those two states of being are queerly juxtaposed as related unequals: the arrival of winter and the dissipation into liquid. In her study of perfume in the Renaissance, Holly Dugan notes that ‘olfaction, like other sensory ways of knowing, emphasizes the fungible relationship between material objects, the body, and embodiment.’25 This holds particularly true in Sonnet 5, where the young man’s desirable body becomes liquid encased in a glass object.

In Sonnet 6, Shakespeare leaves it evocatively ambiguous whether the young man will be encased in glass or whether he will become glass:

Then let not winter’s wragged hand deface,

In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled:

Make sweet some vial.

(1–3)

Metaphorically, the young man can be kept beautiful by preserving some part of him in his prime in the form of a child. In the fantasy, though, either he becomes perfume that makes the vial sweet or he is made into the vial itself. Shakespeare invites us to read line 3 as ‘make thee some sweet vial’. Further, the young man has transformative powers, as we can interpret the line to read ‘make sweet something vile’, if he can synaesthetically transform an object such as glass (which has no real flavour) into a flavour. Shakespeare chooses the material object of the vial because glass can be beautiful in its own right. We choose glass, rather than wood or metal, to contain perfume because it allows us to see the liquid and because the container itself can suggest the beauty one will acquire when donning the scent. Shakespeare’s sonnet and Dugan’s claim help us see that glass is not solely linked with sight as a sensory operation. In the case of perfume, glass allows a scent to be powerfully and beautifully contained, and it allows for a sudden release of a scent that sparks the pleasure centres, corresponds with memory and entices for potential contact to come. As Garrett Sullivan puts it, ‘literary texts don’t invalidate normative conceptions of memory, sexuality, and selfhood’; instead ‘they expose the wishful thinking residing at the core.’26 Sonnets 5 and 6 crystallize (so to speak) the wish at the heart of the speaker’s and addressee’s shared desire to defy age within the space of poetry, while simultaneously exposing the fantasmatic underpinnings of that wish.

In Shakespeare’s time, ‘glass’ could be used as a verb meaning to enclose in glass or to place an object in front of a mirror. We can see in Sonnets 5 and 6 a combination, perhaps, of the two meanings. To enclose something in glass is at once to preserve it at its best and to showcase it for viewing. Glass calls our attention to other objects, but it calls our attention in a specific way: it ‘persuades’ us, as Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 22. And while glass seems to take on a subjectivity of its own, it transforms subjects into objects. In the sonnets, glass shows us how both desirability and rejection possess the capacity to make us sense how ‘human being and thinghood overlap’.27 The role of glass in the sonnets illuminates how queer studies and object oriented ontology share common ground. We are all things as a result of desire and as a result of being desired. Shakespeare’s queer glass reveals what Leo Bersani pointedly describes as ‘the very essence of the sexual [that consists] in a shattering of ego boundaries produced by any number of “unaccountable”, unclassifiable objects’.28 What seems particularly at stake in the sonnets is a model of desire that admits that we lose subjecthood by gaining access to more complex experiences of love. The sonnets immortalize the young man, but they also seize upon glass objects in order to render the young man as a liquid prisoner. The speaker’s poetry creates this textual mirror or glass container, yet both speaker and addressee are rendered objects in the process. Unrequited attraction can undermine the dominant position of the desiring subject because the subject is transformed into an object under the ego-dissipating effects of rejection by another subject.29

It is worth noting here that glass mirrors in the Renaissance differed from our own contemporary mirrors and from mirrors in previous periods. Pre-Renaissance mirrors were largely polished metal. The introduction of the crystal mirror in the Renaissance introduced an object more similar to our own in look and feel, yet the glass was curved and thus did not truly give an accurate reflection of the physical self. Subjects saw themselves in miniature – rendered more precisely than with previous surfaces but also made less knowable, significantly smaller. Assessing one’s desirability in a Renaissance mirror was a strange science, where either one accepted the reflection as an inaccurate depiction of how one looked to others or admitted that all looking is refracted through the warped lens of subjectivity. As Deborah Shuger has shown, mirrors in early modern art or literature are rarely depicted as used for examining one’s own physical characteristics.30 Instead, mirrors are depicted where individuals view an aspirational figure, such as Christ or the Virgin Mary, looking back upon them, or individuals might see the future state of their face in the form of a skull gazing back. These were speculative selves, one might say.31 That is, one aspired to be like one of these individuals in the future – if one sought the virtue of Mary, for example – or one faced the inevitability of becoming like the image in the mirror, in the case of memento mori. At the same time, mirrors were imagined to translate nature (the human body) into art (a painting, a literary figure).

Object orientations, sexual orientations

Objects are central to the process of orientation, including the process of navigating sexual orientation. Sara Ahmed remarks, ‘to be orientated is also to be turned towards certain objects, those that help us find our way’.32 And, indeed, as we begin to ask which objects have particular power in the sonnets and in our world, we inevitably run into questions about erotics. Ahmed invites us to consider:

What does it mean for sexuality to be lived as orientated? What difference does it make ‘what’ or ‘who’ we are orientated toward in the very direction of our desire?33

The sonnets’ speaker and addressee orientate towards each other and repeatedly orientate themselves towards glass. If ones orientates towards an object as a mediator for desire, and if that object is one that both reflects back the gazer and multiplies the person being gazed upon, might that object enable new forms of erotic engagement? Objects, orientation and desire collide in the sonnets.

Ahmed’s reflections on object orientation help us see why patron relations offer an incomplete explanatory model for what we see when we take as glass our focus when reading the sonnets. Indeed, Jonathan Culler remarks that ‘our attention should be directed towards experiencing the poem as an event, not to discovering what the author might have experienced.’34 To set aside biography and to explore ‘queer Shakespeare’ is to explore Shakespeare’s (and, by result, our own) queer ways of knowing and being. Such an approach opens up new readings of not only the sonnets, but also a volume such as George Gascoigne’s The Steele Glas (1576). Its epilogue on one level pleads with the patron for support. When we focus on the role of glass in sparking new ways to desire and be desired, though, we can trace more imaginative possibilities. Gascoigne writes, ‘my lord, let shut the glass apace, / High time it were for my poor muse to wink’, and moves into the mode of flirtation:

But if my glass do like my lovely lord,

We will espy, some sunny summer’s day,

To look again, and see some seemly sights.35

If the patron likes what he sees, the author might show a bit more. Yet, one cannot help but wonder if the first line is not necessarily inverted syntax. Perhaps glass does the desiring here. If the book, which contains a reflection of the speaker and the addressee, likes the patron, more pleasure might yet be yielded. In these few lines, we see how glass emphasizes surface and tantalizes us with the promise of depth. To reach out and touch the mirror is to discover that the three-dimensional world beyond it cannot be reached. Yet Gascoigne’s text itself constitutes the very glass that the reader is invited to desire. Within it lies a mirror world that can be explored.

As a final line of inquiry into how queer theory, object studies and desire intertwine in the sonnets, consider how Sonnet 3 closes:

Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime:

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.

But if thou live remembered not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

(9–14)

Shakespeare urges the young man to see his mother in his face and to see his aging self within the face of his aging mother. The realization rejuvenates both the aging woman’s face and the addressee’s own sense of youth still dwelling inside of him. His youthful countenance recalls her youth or ‘April’, offering an opportunity to interpret his own appearance as ‘windows’ into her youth and into his own ‘golden time.’ The addressee of Shakespeare’s poem is reminded that to ‘die single’ is to foreclose the replication of his appearance in future generations. Sonnet 3 opens, ‘Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another’ (1–2). By insisting for the formation of ‘another’ (printed ‘an other’ in the original), the speaker insists that the addressee generate another him and an Other. This depiction of an encounter with versions of oneself in glass reminds us that the material collapses time in ways that generate diverse responses: at times celebratory, optimistic and brimming with expectation, while at other times melancholy, maudlin and meditating upon what it means to be finite.

John Dee nicely calls our attention to how glass simultaneously estranges us from ourselves and encourages a flirtation with ourselves imagined to an Other:

if you, being (alone) nere a certaine glasse, and proffer, with dagger or sword, to foyne at the glasse, you shall suddenly be moved to give backe (in maner) by reason of an Image, appearing in the ayre, betwene you & the glasse, with like hand, sword or dagger, & with like quicknes, foyning at your very eye, likewise as you do at the Glasse.36

When we see ourselves constructed from a physical object, it becomes easy to render our self as a stranger. And when we encounter that Other, our impulse is to engage in play. ‘Our fantasies’, as Adam Phillips notes, ‘may reveal that we are not excessively sexual, but excessively frightened of other people.’37 Indeed, this opens the possibility that ‘what we call love is our hatred of the future; and it is because other people represent our future as objects of desire, what might happen next to us, we fear them.’38 This helps us see the erotic appeal of glass, which alloerotically and autoerotically presents us with an attractive and extremely safe sexual partner.39 In the quotation above, Dee is engaged in a dance that simultaneously entices the other individual and fights him off.

Foucault’s description of the mirror as a heterotopia offers a fitting description of the dynamic in Dee’s depiction and in Shakespeare’s sonnets:

From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.40

The sonnets show us how encountering a reflection of ourselves does not necessarily wake us to self-knowledge. The experience is ecstatic, in the sense that it only drives our desire to be outside of ourselves and underlines that such a desire has sexual implications. José Esteban Muñoz observes that the self-shattering potential of jouissance connects to ecstasy’s ability to take one out of oneself, especially given the etymology of ‘ecstasy’ from the Greek ex- meaning ‘out’ and -stasis meaning ‘to stand.’41 Muñoz argues that ecstasy cannot be disaggregated from a yearning for a time-defying experience that ‘contains the potential to help us encounter a queer temporality’.42 Indeed, most of us can relate to the notion that looking in a mirror has, at times, made us wish we were someone other than ourselves, somewhere other than where we were or someone we used to be. Rather than offering clarity and self-knowledge, the glass mirror estranges the gazer from her or his subjecthood. We can wish we were elsewhere, but we can also inhabit other worlds or other personas (just as the poet can). The gazer is no longer a single, discrete entity. The subject also understands itself as an object – as the object of another’s gaze and as an entity made of glass. The tantalizing appeal of glass in the sonnets – for the speaker, the addressee, reader and for the queer scholar – involves the promise that we might see our objects of study and objects of desire just as they see us.