SOURCE: "Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd: The Politics of Plotting Shakespeare's Sonnets," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 291-305.

In the following essay, Dubrow challenges assumptions that Shakespeare's sonnet sequence has a two-part structure and a linear plot, and contends that the traditional association of the Friend with the laudatory or positive sonnets and the association of the Dark Lady with the largely negative ones has fostered the notion that in these lyrics, evil has a feminine gender.

I

Indeterminate in their chronology, destabilized by their textual cruxes, and opaque in much of their language, Shakespeare's sonnets have nonetheless attracted curiously positivistic claims. In particular, critics who differ on many interpretive problems are nevertheless likely to agree that the direction of address of these poems can be established with certainty: the first 126 sonnets refer to and are generally addressed to the Friend, while the succeeding ones concern...