Shakespeare 1–17

Abstract

The two previous chapters should be taken as the context within which Shakespeare’s sonnets are produced. The term ‘context’ is actually rather weak here: it is hardly adequate to the complex ways in which his poems interact with the various issues I have traced in relation to the sonnet. This movement is not simply an intertextual phenomenon, in a reasonably straightforward intimation of poetic allusion. Even the term ‘genre’ is not flexible enough, since it cannot do justice to the ways in which sonneteers play with and sometimes deny any easy postulation of some sort of unity between the sonnet form and courtly love discourse. As I tried to point out with regard to the practice of poets such as Samuel Daniel, a modern retrospective construction of a genre that takes the theoretical writing of conservatives at face value is naive in assuming that he is correct in reducing the sonnet to a present passion only. He has his own agenda. I feel much more comfortable with an awareness that the baggage that goes along with the decision to write a sonnet in the Renaissance forms a loose body of conventions which can be accepted, played with, denied, or some combination of these responses. The effect this has upon sexual politics varies widely, as I have shown.