ABSTRACT
In light of these critical practices-one historicizing and the other resolutely activist-it is perhaps surprising that “canker,” a term that appears repeatedly across the Shakespearean canon, should have escaped closer examination by critics of early modern literature. This essay will seek to redress that balance, and reconstruct Shakespeare’s “canker” as a term of medical significance, which described a terrifying malignant disease and was entwined with debates about religion, gender, and the nature of illness. In doing so, it will show that early modern “canker” was no less potent or complex a term than modern “cancer.” Focusing on Shakespeare’s Sonnet
95, I will argue that understanding the multivalence of “canker” can help us to uncover this poem’s anxieties about gender, friendship, and the role of the poet.
