On September 8 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a birthday collage allegedly given to the late Jeffrey Epstein by the current U.S. president. This work, a shape poem of sorts, features an empty feminine torso containing a dialogue of male speakers responding to the provocation “There must be more to life than having everything.” In what follows, the speakers refer to an unnamed secret, of a “thing” that is “more” than “everything,” whose clues encompass “Enigmas never age.” Yet, in place of revealing the enigma’s identity, the riddle suggestively if obliquely concludes in a familiar-looking signature at the torso’s pelvis.

This perhaps-unwitting lyric provokes the current panel on sexual riddles between men in poetry from Shakespeare to the present. From the early modern blazon to the French surrealists, love poetry’s object of desire has long been depicted as a puzzle, a mirror, a mise en abyme, and even as a variant of the speaker’s own name. In light of this latest riddle, which reignites the relevance of a long and strange tradition, this all-female panel featuring speakers of different academic ranks convening to discuss timely issues of gender and power, asks: what is the purpose of the poetic enigma and why is it pleasurable? How does enigma both challenge and support male sociability, especially in unintended audiences? Are riddles truly solvable, and do they ever, like the Sphinx, hold power over their interpreters?

This panel will comprise three fifteen-minute papers with the remaining time reserved for a lively discussion.

Paper One (Hock):

While readers and audiences enjoy the crude jokes in Shakespeare’s plays, the laughter dies down when the same wordplay occurs in the sonnets. As have long been objects of scholarly embarrassment and deflection, sonnets 135 and 136 pun bawdily and excessively on Shakespeare’s given name, challenging notions of seriousness in lyric and criticism alike. Why this remains so is the starting point of this paper, which shows how Shakespeare’s “will” sonnets in fact revive an important lyric tradition of self-authorizing wordplay. While it is standard to find in Shakespeare’s materialist sonnets a rejection of Petrarchan idealism, this paper argues that Shakespeare rather updates its self-referential, onomastic puns to reflect a more materialist world informed by Ovid’s Amores and Elizabethan ideas of jest.

Paper Two (Kadue):

Though beauty might seem like a straightforward and immediate quality, many Renaissance love poets present beautiful women as a hermeneutic problem. Casting doubt on the nature of praise, the speakers of their poems decode fair exteriors to reveal the foulness lurking beneath; every youthful appearance, for instance, obscures an inevitably aging body. Often on behalf of other men, these female body inspectors use complex rhetorical paradoxes to expose the truth that women are never what they seem and thus they deserve less of men’s attention than convention would suggest. Nowhere is this clearer than in the so-called “ugly beauty poem” that asks: how do you praise a woman who is not beautiful but grotesque, deformed, or defiled, and how does she reflect women in general? This paper will show how ugly beauty poems by Shakespeare, Donne, and James Shirley register fatigue with the poetic demands elicited by women’s beauty while exposing the interpretive structures of more conventional erotic praise as a sham. These poets suggest that the secret uncovered about a beautiful woman is laughably simple: that there’s no such thing, and thus even the most desirable woman is truly not so hard to “get.”

Paper Three (Scozzaro):

Since Oedipus conquered the sphinx, the feminine riddle has been a scene of desire and ironic male confidence. Shakespeare’s Cymbeline features a sexual wager between Innogen’s husband and a riddling trickster, Iachimo, who claims he can prove she is not as chaste as she seems, turning her (and all women) into dangerous enigmas to be tested by experience. Spying on her as she sleeps, Iachimo takes note of her body and steals her bracelet as false “proof” she has been unfaithful—a strategy that succeeds with her foolish husband. Yet, though critics have noted Iachimo’s digressiveness, they overlook the role of the poetic identity riddle in the play’s presentation of impossible sexual knowing. This paper, then, argues that the riddle, which also informs the ugly beauty tradition and Shakespeare’s self-puns, makes true revelation seductive but unattainable. Looking back to Epstein’s birthday poem, the paper argues that the riddle does not decode the object but rather recodes it, displacing desire onto the poem itself as the real “enigma” gifted by one knowing man to another.