ABSTRACT
The story about sonnets and shows—situated in 'the familiar Shakespearean territory of sexual betrayal'—is even more complex. In A Lover's Complaint both poetry and theater are potentially double-voiced and double-gendered. As the phrases for these twin forms of production suggest—'deep-brained sonnets" and 'tragic shows'—Shakespeare presents the forms authored and gendered as themselves in opposition, even in conflict. By attending to the conjunction of poetry and theater in A Lover's Complaint, we can see Shakespeare plotting his characters' aesthetic and subjective struggle for identity amid a love affair in Marlowe's terms, drawn along an Ovidian path of amorous poetry and tragedic theater. In the 1609 quarto, Shakespeare treats the Spenserian/Virgilian characters with the unsettling doubleness of an arch-magus. To read through A Lover's Complaint is to witness the failure of Elizabethan masculine literature's greatest art to achieve its intended cultural goal: the theological protection of the 'concave womb' within the 'sist'ring vale.'
