ABSTRACT
When an outbreak of plague closed the London theaters in 1593, Shakespeare turned to writing the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece. By the early 1600s, he had begun A Lover's Complaint. Although numerous studies scrutinize the way in which Petrarch explores agency and vulnerability through Ovid's stories of metamorphosis, Ovid's influence on Shakespeare's sonnets has gone largely unaddressed, perhaps because direct allusions to the Metamorphoses inform a mere handful of these poems. Focused readings of several sonnets addressing the boy will help people to appreciate how Shakespeare complicates the Petrarchan goal of immortalizing love by viewing it through a lens forged by Ovid's art. These sonnets do not represent Shakespeare's full range, which moves from beauty to ugliness, friendship to jealousy, praise to introspection, trust to betrayal, idealism to compromise. Sonnet 127 does more than contest the Petrarchan ideal of female beauty as blond, pale, and bright-eyed.
