The Perfect Ceremony of Love's Rite: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint

The Perfect Ceremony of Love’s Rite is a critical reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and its companion volume, A Lover’s Complaint, together with their affinities to the Petrarchan conventions and more locally to the work of contemporary Elizabethan poets, especially Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel. Central to this treatment is the examination of the role of Shakespeare’s speaker, and the speaker’s concern for the ways in which poetry renders admiration, passion, guilt, obsessive longing, and a preoccupation with time and its victims, beauty and youth, all of these expressed brilliantly but without resolution to the problems they raise. This last feature is deliberate, showing itself in the lack of narrative shape and thematic closure. Shakespeare keeps us guessing but his poems never drive us away.