Chapter 2 - Fantasies of Private Language

Summary

This chapter explores the notion of a private language as a way to achieve perfect communication and defeat skepticism. Borrowing from Wittgenstein's idea of private language as interpreted by Stanley Cavell, the chapter argues that Shakespeare and Donne experiment with an elusive tongue so as to investigate the possibility of Edenic intimacy in marriage. Each imagines a sublime and transparent marital union as overcoming the problem of other minds, but each represents this in opposed ways. In “The Phoenix and Turtle” Shakespeare creates the semblance of a private language by a virtuoso tour of poetic genres. His lyric thus entertains a Wittgensteinian puzzle: namely, that genre, the most consensual of linguistic conventions, can resist signification and become an abstruse language game. In “The Ecstasy,” by contrast, Donne invents an arcane dialect for his true lovers, showing private language in action, until he turns to the body for more complete erotic communication. Shakespeare’s and Donne’s contested engagements with skepticism and with deferred or partial knowledge inform the way these two poems parry the temptations of a private language.