Love Notes and Sonnets in Early Modern Tragedy

This essay engages a previously underexplored motif in a handful of early modern and Shakespearean tragedies that, other than the Inns of Court play, Tancred and Gismund (1567), are fairly well studied. It explores the conjunction of secretly exchanged verses (often sonnets, or almost) and material love tokens in Shakespeare's love tragedies Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida after first observing the trope in the more familiar Seneca-influenced tragedies, The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet. In each instance the sonnet fails to find completion and the token is lost, misplaced, or re-gifted signalling that the love of the play cannot be perfected or sustained. This exchange, and loss of physical love token conjoined or connected to failed or incomplete text acts in concert with the failed love that is the essence of love tragedy in the period.

Automated summary

This essay explores a previously underexplored motif in some early modern and Shakespearean tragedies, which is the connection between secretly exchanged verses and love tokens with failed love in the tragedies.