But there is so little time here, an undergraduate degree is so hyperactive and glancing. She has three days total to research and write her whole Sonnets essay. Plenty of topics are therefore outside the penumbra of the possible. She cannot write about the Sonnets’ connections to other sonnet sequences, to other Shakespeare plays, to historical context. Or real-life candidates for the Young Man or the Dark Lady, or the authority for printing, or the vagaries of the sequencing. She needs something sharp, like a dagger: to slip in and quickly out again.
