Shakespeare's Perversion: A Reading of Sonnet 20

Abstract

This article reviews the critical debate about the sexual politics of Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, the “Master-Mistress” sonnet. It argues that, while the sonnet is available to queer readings, it draws its power from the way it queers desire while perverting gender. That is, Sonnet 20 does not offer a queer sexuality, one which refuses gender identifications, but a reading of the relationship between desire and gender which demonstrates the way gender binds desire. This is why the homoeroticism in the sonnet cannot be repressed, even as its queerness cannot be celebrated. Sonnet 20 speaks to the sequence's use of Petrarchism, and allows us to see beyond the rules which make its speaking possible, at the same time as it offers a focus on the constitutive power of structure. The sonnet's sexual meanings are irreducible even as its gendered meanings are conventional. In its use of gender, the article argues, Sonnet 20 makes perverts of us all.