Between the Lines

With my dissertation well under way, I hope to use this blog to think through some of my ideas and share the direction of my writing. The overarching aim of my dissertation, titled Large and Spacious Will: Sex and Sexuality in Shakespeare's Sonnets , is to attempt to reclaim the 'dark lady' from a figure which functions merely as an example of misogynist discourse to a woman who is a rebel and a threat to patriarchy and social order. To achieve this aim, I am taking an intersection approach. The oppression of race, class, gender, sexuality and many other spheres of oppression are always interlinked and inseparable and so, in my analysis of the sonnets, I feel it is important to consider the role of race, class, gender and sexuality. In this blog I want to outline some of the ways in which the woman of sonnets 127-154, sometimes known as the 'dark lady', disrupts class structures. The first 18 of Shakespeare's sonnets urge a fair young man to procreate in ord...

I have decided to use this blog to track some of my research ideas and findings as I begin the process of writing my Masters dissertation. The following is the script of a presentation I delivered on the 25th of May 2017. The conference was a chance to explore our dissertation proposals, and I delivered my paper in a session chaired by Professor Phillip Schwyzer titled: Early Modern Discourses: Bodies, Politics, Performance. Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady': A Sexual Revolutionary? Hello, I am Antonio Hehir, and I have been conducting research into sex and sexuality in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Today, I want to talk a little bit about the Dark Lady of the sonnets and how we can seek to redefine her and to ask the question: Was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets a sexual revolutionary? When it comes to the sonnets, there has been a tendency among Shakespeare scholars to focus on the ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets (1-126) and much of that focus has orbited around a biographical...