- The Oxford Handbook of shakespeare’s Poetry
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Shakespeare’s Styles
- Shakespeare’s Style in the 1590s
- Shakespeare’s Late Style
- Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition
- Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean ‘Numbers’
- Classical Influences
- Shakespeare and Italian Poetry
- Du Bellay and Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- Open Voicing: Wyatt and Shakespeare
- ‘Grammar Rules’ in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare
- Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Shake-Speares Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida
- Philomela’s Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays
- Shakespeare, Elegy, and Epitaph <i>1557–1640</i>
- Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency
- Shakespeare’s Popular Songs and the Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric
- Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse Line
- Shakespeare’s Word Music
- Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare’s Verse
- From Bad to Verse: Poetry and Spectacle on the Modern Shakespearean Stage
- ‘Make My Image but an Alehouse Sign’: The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse
- ‘To Show … and so to Publish’: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narrative Poems
- Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: The Disorienting Narrative of Venus and Adonis
- Shame, Love, Fear, and Pride in <i>the Rape of Lucrece</i>
- The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, Editor-Annotator(s), and Cruxes
- ‘Fortify Yourself in Your Decay’: Sounding Rhyme and Rhyming Effects in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- The Conceptual Investigations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- ‘Pretty Rooms’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design
- The Poetics of Feminine Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and ‘a Lover’s Complaint’
- Poetry and Compassion in Shakespeare’s ‘a Lover’s Complaint’
- Reading ‘the Phoenix and Turtle’
- Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics
- Shakespearean Being: The Victorian Bard
- Shakespeare’s Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet
- The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking
- Melted in American Air
- Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare as a French Poet
- Glocal Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Poems in Germany
- Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare’s Poetry In (Between) Spain and Spanish America
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter explores how we might be compelled to alter our understanding of the emergence of gendered identifications and hierarchies if we were to borrow some of the rethinking of sexuality that queer theory has done with regards to same-sex desire and apply it to other non-normative sexualities—in this case, female promiscuity. Modern scholars have largely rejected the stigma attached to homoerotic desire and practice, and they have thereby been able better to understand and contest the cultural privileges accorded to heterosexual relationships. Similarly, by rejecting the stigma attached to female promiscuity, we as critics can examine how this stigma works to sustain gendered hierarchies. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint dramatize the power of the discourse of promiscuity to shape the horizons of female identity and male prerogative.
Keywords: lyric poetry, feminism, queer theory, gender, sexuality, Shakespeare, sonnets
Melissa E. Sanchez is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature, along with numerous articles on gender, sexuality, and politics in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is currently writing a book on the relation between feminism and queer theory in early modern studies.
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- The Oxford Handbook of shakespeare’s Poetry
- Preface
- List of Figures
- List of Contributors
- Shakespeare’s Styles
- Shakespeare’s Style in the 1590s
- Shakespeare’s Late Style
- Shakespeare and the Arts of Cognition
- Fatal Cleopatras and Golden Apples: Economies of Wordplay in Some Shakespearean ‘Numbers’
- Classical Influences
- Shakespeare and Italian Poetry
- Du Bellay and Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- Open Voicing: Wyatt and Shakespeare
- ‘Grammar Rules’ in the Sonnets: Sidney and Shakespeare
- Commonplace Shakespeare: Value, Vulgarity, and the Poetics of Increase in Shake-Speares Sonnets and Troilus and Cressida
- Philomela’s Marks: Ekphrasis and Gender in Shakespeare’s Poems and Plays
- Shakespeare, Elegy, and Epitaph <i>1557–1640</i>
- Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency
- Shakespeare’s Popular Songs and the Great Temptations of Lesser Lyric
- Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse Line
- Shakespeare’s Word Music
- Finding Your Footing in Shakespeare’s Verse
- From Bad to Verse: Poetry and Spectacle on the Modern Shakespearean Stage
- ‘Make My Image but an Alehouse Sign’: The Poetry of Women in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Verse
- ‘To Show … and so to Publish’: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narrative Poems
- Outgrowing Adonis, outgrowing Ovid: The Disorienting Narrative of Venus and Adonis
- Shame, Love, Fear, and Pride in <i>the Rape of Lucrece</i>
- The Sonnets in the Classroom: Student, Teacher, Editor-Annotator(s), and Cruxes
- ‘Fortify Yourself in Your Decay’: Sounding Rhyme and Rhyming Effects in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- The Conceptual Investigations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
- ‘Pretty Rooms’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Elizabethan Architecture, and Early Modern Visual Design
- The Poetics of Feminine Subjectivity in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and ‘a Lover’s Complaint’
- Poetry and Compassion in Shakespeare’s ‘a Lover’s Complaint’
- Reading ‘the Phoenix and Turtle’
- Shakespearean Poetry and the Romantics
- Shakespearean Being: The Victorian Bard
- Shakespeare’s Loose Ends and the Contemporary Poet
- The Sound of Shakespeare Thinking
- Melted in American Air
- Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare as a French Poet
- Glocal Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s Poems in Germany
- Negotiating the Universal: Translations of Shakespeare’s Poetry In (Between) Spain and Spanish America
- Index
