"Love is Not Love": Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order

Marotti, Arthur F.

doi:10.2307/2872989

Cited by 221 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Love me; for I love you. 21 It is wit, of course, and from a modern perspective grovelling flattery, but for the Catholics in the Tower the utterance contains an uncomfortable truth. Hatton declares that to wrong the Queen is to suffer the torment of the 'greatest lack'.…”

Section: Illmentioning

confidence: 97%

Racked on the tyrant's bed: The politics of pleasure and pain and the Elizabethan sonnet sequences

Wilson

1989

Textual Practice

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Section: Illmentioning

confidence: 97%

Racked on the tyrant's bed: The politics of pleasure and pain and the Elizabethan sonnet sequences

Wilson

1989

Textual Practice

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“…The sonnet ends by stating that the addressee’s friendship is worth more than kingship. However, as Arthur Marotti aptly puts it, Sonnet 29’s final couplet is “an eloquent, but patently disingenuous, gesture” (411). That is, the economic valences seem to overwhelm claims to lacking self‐interest.…”

Section: Essaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare and Friendship: An Intersection of Interest

Garrison

2012

Literature Compass

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This essay examines the role of friendship in Shakespeare’s work. Friendship was a highly valued social relation in early modern England and constituted an important theme for humanist writers attempting to revive the virtues associated with classical antiquity. Recent scholarship has demonstrated how the terms of friendship helped legitimate and define social ties ranging from those between literary collaborators to those between political allies. Shakespeare’s work frequently depicts friendship’s complex relationship to rivalry and to marriage, as well as how same‐sex relations offered a means to navigate group environs including the martial encampment, the marketplace, and the court. These depictions at times come into conflict with a major Renaissance humanist concept of friendship as a relationship characterized by parity and lack of self‐interest. This essay focuses on recent critical approaches that have opened new lines of inquiry into the role of friendship in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, especially with regards to how his work may attempt to reconcile friendship ideals with the increasing opportunities for advancement in England’s expanding economy and increasingly diverse social sphere.

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“…Like the sonnet and masque, which, as critics like Arthur Marotti and Stephen Orgel have demonstrated, helped to secure patronage relationships and display royal authority, conversational games concealed negotiations for status. 10 As Castiglione remarks, "under various concealments, those present revealed their thoughts allegorically to whomever they chose" (p. 13). The Jacobean court was particularly enamored with games and entertainments.…”

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confidence: 99%

Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Shakespeare'sLove's Labour's Lostand Mary Wroth'sLove's Victory

Larson

2010

English Literary Renaissance

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The authorizing potential of ludic spaces offers a valuable and overlooked context for considering the critique of conventional courtship roles that grounds Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost and Mary Wroth's Love's Victory. Love's Labour's Lost stands as an important precursor to Love's Victory in featuring conversational play as a formal and thematic device and in emphasizing the ladies' skilled and authoritative leadership of the courtship games that pervade the drama. Both plays rely on three elements derived from ludic conventions: an emphasis on isolated or semi‐isolated playing spaces, the establishment of rules and hierarchies particular to those contexts, and an elaborate system of punishments and rewards that governs not only the smaller playing spaces that permeate both dramas but their courtly and pastoral play worlds as well. In giving Love's Labour's Lost and Love's Victory an overarching ludic framework, Shakespeare and Wroth challenge the conventional ephemerality of ludic spaces, blurring the boundaries between individual games and the broader realms their characters inhabit. In so doing, they extend the agency of their female protagonists beyond the parameters of their seemingly isolated playing spaces. (K.R.L.)

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"Love is Not Love": Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order

Cited by 221 publications

References 0 publications

Racked on the tyrant's bed: The politics of pleasure and pain and the Elizabethan sonnet sequences

Racked on the tyrant's bed: The politics of pleasure and pain and the Elizabethan sonnet sequences

Shakespeare and Friendship: An Intersection of Interest

Conversational Games and the Articulation of Desire in Shakespeare'sLove's Labour's Lostand Mary Wroth'sLove's Victory

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