Unconventional Love and its Counterparts: Desire, Pain, and Betrayal in Early Modern Love Lyrics

Abstract

This essay was written during the author’s second year of undergraduate study and addresses portrayals of romantic love in the English Renaissance tradition of lyric poetry. It engages specifically with the sonnet sequences of William Shakespeare and Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, arguing that both writers reshaped existing structural and thematic conventions to put forth a re-conceptualised understanding of love in the English canon. Through a comparative analytical approach, the essay highlights Wroth’s subversive adaptations of Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms as a way to recentre the feminine poetic voice in early modern romance narratives. In doing so, she diverges from traditional power dynamics associated with the roles of Lover and Beloved; effectively rearticulating the patriarchal constructs of virtue, constancy, and fidelity from a remarkably feminist lens. Shakespeare, on the other hand, reshapes similar conventional concerns with betrayal, desire, and transgression in the contexts of romantic love. Whilst his treatment of romantic relationships transcends traditional heteronormative ideals of monogamy and faithfulness, his sonnets nevertheless embody a duality that simultaneously celebrates love even as it condemns its shortcomings. In the truest sense of the word, then, both Wroth and Shakespeare represent the liminality of lovers and their beloveds as depicted in the early modern English sonnet.