The Master Mistress of my Passion: Trans-eroticism in Shakespeare’s Sonnet

JED CHANDLER , UNIVERSITY PF WALES NEWPORT, ADDRESS: 31, FREEHOLDLAND, PONTNEWYNYDD, TORFAEN. NP4 8LW

Shakespeare’s sonnets are dedicated to a Mr W.H. and addressed to a ’dark lady’, generally identified as Anne Hathaway, and a mysterious male-bodied ’fair youth’ who is described as having ’a woman’s face’ and ’a woman’s heart’ The poems directed to the youth have a long history of strategic critical neglect, allocation to an otherwise virtually empty genre of male friendship poems. More recently, however, they have been generally regarded as homoerotic poems.

There has been a great deal of speculation as to who WH and the youth might be, and an increasingly strong contender for both roles is Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron and the dedicatee of other poems. However, the discovery in 2002 of the portrait of the Earl of Southampton dressed and made up as a woman invites enquiry into the issues Shakespeare was addressing.

The sonnets speak of Shakespeare’s infatuation for the youth and his feminine qualities, with the occasional paroxysm of self-disgust. Significantly, he urges the youth to fulfil his male role in society. From this focus on transeroticism in the sonnets, the paper will broaden out to consider the awareness of gender plasticity and ambiguity in other of Shakespeare’s works.

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