Date of Award
1-2007
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. Anthony P. Russell
Second Advisor
Dr. Louis Schwartz
Third Advisor
Dr. Alan S. Loxterman
Abstract
William Shakespeare reinvents the speaker of his Dark Lady sonnets as Antony of Antony and Cleopatra, with the former's hesitant appreciation of the benefits of a "lying," lustful relationship reconfigured into the latter's total embrace of an edifying, creative mutuality. This represents an important philosophical shift in Shakespeare's view of aesthetics: where in the Dark Lady sonnets, the speaker chastises himself for feeding his desire with lies and self delusions, Antony, his parallel, believes that the love he and his queen have created is somehow noble, even ideal. He rejects the "truth"- perhaps as the Romans would see it- in favor of an idealized love by way of an idealized self. This swing demonstrates a shift from poetry that strives only to represent some epideictic truth or fixed reality to that which extols the creation of the self as a supreme work of artifice, a malleable product shaped by will and belief.
Recommended Citation
Bishop, Dorrie Turner, "Reworking "seeming trust" into "excellent falsehood" : the lying heroes of William Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets and Antony and Cleopatra" (2007). Master's Theses. 685.
https://scholarship.richmond.edu/masters-theses/685