ABSTRACT
Shakespeare keeps narrative to a minimum in Lucrece until the ending. This chapter looks at his sonnet sequence, a genre in which narrative is traditionally kept to a minimum. Insofar as there is a narrative in Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is not the predictable story of the speaker’s romantic misfortunes, portioned out in micro doses over the course of 154 sonnets, but rather the story of how poems come to be written. There are some events throughout the sequence and certainly much scholarship has been produced about these events and also, notoriously, about the real-life originals of the young man, the dark lady, and the rival poet. In imagining a future in which the man is dead and “His tender heir might bear his memory”, the sonnet gestures towards the idea of reproduction, but even it is not entirely clear what this memory will commemorate.
