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.

KEYWORDS:

• Shakespeare
• biosemiotics
• ecocriticism
• umwelt
• holobiont
• artificial intelligence
• genetics
• afterlives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Her article ‘Words as Battle Cries: Symbiogenesis and the New Field of Endocytobiology’ (Bioscience, October 1st, 1990) lays out her issues with words like ‘benefit’: ‘Attempts to clarify meaning have compounded the problem, because measuring benefit (a unitless quantity), either in the field or laboratory, has not been feasible.’

2 The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote a fascinating book, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery on his struggles with Lyme disease that was contracted through a tick bite and greatly impacted his ability to write and think.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy Ryan Day

Timothy Ryan Day is Associate Professor of English Literature at Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus where he teaches Shakespeare, Ecocriticism, and Creative Writing. His research interests include biosemiotics, food, and consciousness. His academic and creative work focuses on the relationship between mind and environment. Ryan’s monograph Shakespeare and the Evolution of the Human Umwelt: Adapt, Interpret, Mutate (Routledge 2021) addresses biosemiotics and emergence alongside literary adaptation. His novel Big Sky (Adelaide Books 2020) is a creative and historical engagement with the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The poetry collection Green & Grey (Lemons Street Press 2019) aims to look at poetic emergence both in consciousness and nature. He has recently published articles in Green Letters, and Ecozon@, and has a chapter forthcoming in an MLA collection on food and literature. He holds a BA from Northeastern Illinois University, an MA in English from Saint Louis University, a Masters from the Autonomous University of Madrid, and a PhD from Arizona State University. He has taught at Universities in the United States, China, and Spain.