ABSTRACT
In the last of the Sonnets one sees Petrarch’s drama of the divided self, that drama performed so cunningly by Astrophil, played out by Shakespeare’s speaker in relation to two objects of desire, not within devotion to a single, unpossessable beloved. It seems that the fair haired young man remains a focus of the speaker’s attachment; the so-called Dark Lady, perhaps the woman to whom allusion is made in sonnets 40-42, likewise enthrals him. The speaker does in fact claim that his involvement with the Dark Lady resembles imprison ment: that he, and the young man as well, are prisoners of their sexual obsessions with her.1 There are clearly, then, important differences between the earlier sonnets, especially 20-126, and the later. There are nonetheless important similarities between sonnets 127-154 and their predecessors. For example, prior to the speaker’s portrayal of the Dark Lady as a truly ‘ugly beauty’ — as profoundly antithetic both to Laura and to the young man — he depicts her through a process of wavering and oscillation, imposing fictions precariously upon her much as he did upon the youth.2 (Thus his portrayal of her is initially ambiguous but not ultimately sceptical.) He continues, moreover, his unstable portrayal of the young man, evoking the contraries that pervade his earlier representations of the ‘master mistress’. Again, too, he imposes fictions of empowerment and of disempowerment upon himself. He plays with and interplays the discourses of Petrarchism, friendship and misogyny: implicitly iterating his transference of the Petrarchan language and rhetoric of love to the young man, he also relates them to the Dark Lady, using them neither simply to parody her nor her simply to parody them; conventional notions of amity are at once followed and violated; the misogyny already intense within the discourse of friendship, and prominent in sonnets 20-126, is
intensified. Where that play with and interplay of discourses begins is where the speaker begins everything in the final group of sonnets, with conflicting fictions of beauty.
