Unconventional Love and its Counterparts: Desire, Pain, and Betrayal in Early Modern Love Lyrics
- Shahrez Chauhan
- Jan 21
- 2 min read
Author Bio:
Shahrez Chauhan is a final-year undergraduate student from Pakistan pursuing a degree in History of Art and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests range from global modernisms and postcolonial theory to queer narratives from across the literary canon, with a specific focus on fin-de-siècle aestheticism and early twentieth-century literature. He is particularly interested in queer modernist aesthetics, identity and textual politics, spatio-temporalities in stream-of-consciousness narratives, as well as the intersections between visual culture and literary texts. In the past, he has worked for cultural heritage institutions across Pakistan and the UK, and hopes to continue pursuing a career in this line of work.
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.
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