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This essay explores the peculiarly claustrophilic nature of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the claustrophobic response they provoke in the reader, and how space is opened up around and within the Sonnets by modern writers, specifically Anthony Burgess in Nothing Like the Sun (1964) and William Boyd in the screenplay, A Waste of Shame (2005). The essay argues that claustrophilia - a desire for increasingly narrow enclosures - is a thematic and structural motif in the Sonnets, reflected as well in the physical layout of the 1609 Quarto, which might partly explain why they were so little read in their own time. The essay then examines how Burgess and Boyd imaginatively locate the Sonnets within the closet, bedchamber, chest, breast and hand, in response to the image of Shakespeare as an obstructive Author-figure who resists the dissemination and reinterpretation of his work. By visually creating gaps within and around the Sonnets, on both page and screen, these writers encourage a new generation of readers, while creating space for the Sonnets' appropriation in other literary and cultural forms.