ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s Sonnets radically depart from and nonetheless closely adhere to Petrarchan precedent. Some points of their departure from Petrarch’s Rime sparse are well known. This chapter argues that especially in one respect Shakespeare’s speaker imagines the Petrarchan discourse of love anew and overturns it: by refiguring, both in the sonnets to a male and those to a female addressee (or focus of consideration), the topos of the donna angelica. Shakespeare’s speaker diversely portrays, throughout some of the initial 126 sonnets, an aristocratic, transgendered male version of the donna angelica who precariously embodies grace. The chapter considers notions of grace that occur chiefly but not exclusively in Castiglione’s The Courtier and Della Casa’s Galateo, examining ways in which they are used to postulate ideal male behaviour: according to Castiglione, within the world of a court; according to Della Casa, amid the world at large.
