Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition

XU Zixian

doi:10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

Volume 6 Issue 2

Jun. 2023

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XU Zixian. Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(2): 124-136. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

Citation:

XU Zixian. Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(2): 124-136. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

XU Zixian. Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(2): 124-136. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

Citation:

XU Zixian. Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2023, 6(2): 124-136. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

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Sincerity or Duplicity? Shakespeare's Ironic Rewriting of the Sonnet Tradition

doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20236208

XU Zixian^,

Peking University

Received Date: 2023-03-07
Accepted Date: 2023-05-17

Abstract

Abstract

Shakespeare's Sonnets has been generally hailed as a monument to the English sonnet tradition, while the concluding poem A Lover's Complaint, which figures prominently in the collection's formal patterning, has been mostly in disfavour, if not disrepute, with critics of Shakespeare. A closer look at a group of sonnet collections from the 1590s, within what has been recently identified as the tradition of the "Delian structure," promises a typological division between three concluding patterns, namely the conformist, the conciliatory, and, most strikingly, the ironic. Shakespeare's collection, itself formally recognized with a quasi-Delian structure, might have addressed itself to the ironic concluding pattern, which warrants a reappraisal of the narrative piece as integral to a proper appreciation of the book. By examining a set of metatextual images that register in the Complaint, the collection can be shown to have developed the ironic pattern by fashioning suggestive intertextual allusions between the discourses employed in the 154 sonnets and the concluding piece, which, coupled with parodic references to the genre's clichéd rhetoric as well as a presumably unreliable narrator, informs the collection with conflicting voices, thereby rewriting the Petrarchan sonnet tradition in an implicitly ironic manner. Besides, such a structural investigation points to a new approach to the problem of sincerity and duplicity in Shakespeare's sonnets, giving an edge to the reading that the poetic persona in the sonnets is essentially invested with a sense of self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. It is well advisable, moreover, for the generic originality of the Sonnets to be subtly contextualized with a revisiting of the Elizabethan sonnet genre's cultural and political valences, including its amorous discourse as an allegorical articulation of politically-charged desires. In this light, the collection is arguably a masqueraded critique of the rigid social hierarchy the sonnet tradition is founded upon.
- Shakespeare,
- sonnet,
- A Lover's Complaint,
- irony

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References(44)

References

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