Will and the Reconciled Maid: Rereading Confession and Remembering Sin in Shake-speares Sonnets

Abstract

The 1609 quarto Shake-speares Sonnets, which includes a sequence of 154 sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, is a collection of confessional poems and a collection of poems about confession. In the sonnet sequence, Shakespeare presents a first-person narrator who repeatedly uses confessional language and tropes in his struggle with the repercussions of transgressive sexual desire. Similarly, in A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare recapitulates this confessional dilemma, but from the perspective of an anonymous narrator recounting a “fickle maid[‘s]” confession (5) to a “reverend man” (57).¹ The Sonnets-speaker’s and the fickle maid’s confessions, though they differ in form, both reveal that they share and are constituted by a similar object of desire—a young man. When considered as a linear narrative, their confessions of sexual shame and guilt stemming from their respective relationships with a young man create a mutually constitutive poetic space in which Shakespeare explores the emotional, psychological, and spiritual effects of seduction and desire.²