William Shakespeare Sonnets 1609

William Shakespeare Sonnets 1609

Aristotle 384-322 B.C. 1564-1616

Sonnet Structure • There are fourteen lines in a Shakespearean sonnet. • The first twelve lines are divided into three quatrains with four lines each. • In the three quatrains the poet establishes a theme or problem and then resolves it in the final two lines, called the couplet.

Sonnet Structure • The rhyme scheme of the quatrains is ababcdcdefef. Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled,Thy beauty's form in table of my heart;My body is the frame wherein 'tis held,And perspective that is best painter's art. • The couplet has the rhyme scheme gg. Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art, They draw but what they see, know not the heart.

Sonnet Structure • This sonnet structure is commonly called the English sonnet or the Shakespearean sonnet, to distinguish it from the Italian Petrarchan sonnet form which has two parts: • A rhyming octave (abbaabba) and a rhyming sestet (cdcdcd).

Sonnet Structure • The Petrarchan sonnet style was extremely popular with Elizabethan sonneteers, much to Shakespeare's disdain (he mocks the conventional and excessive Petrarchan style in Sonnet 130.).Only three of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets do not conform to this structure: Sonnet 99, which has 15 lines; Sonnet 12626, which has 12 lines; and Sonnet 145, which is written in iambic tetrameter. • The most popular Sonnets: 18, 24, 29, 98, 104, 106, 116, 130, 134, 138

General Introduction to the Sonnets • The Art of the Sonnets, and the Speaker They Create • With respect to the Sonnets – a text now almost four hundred years old – what can a commentary offer that is new? • It can, I think, approach the sonnets, from the vantage point of the poet who wrote them, asking the questions that a poet would ask about any poem.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • What was the aesthetic challenge for Shakespeare in writing these poems, of confining himself (with a few exceptions) to a single architectural form? • A writer of Shakespeare’s seriousness writes from internal necessity –to do the best he can to perfect his art. • What is the inner agenda of the Sonnets? • What are their compositional motivations?

General Introduction to the Sonnets • What does a writer gain from working, over and over, in one subgenre? • The brief answer is that Shakespeare learned to find strategies to enact feeling in form, feelings in forms, multiplying both to a superlative degree through 154 poems. • No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • Shakespeare comes late in the sonnet tradition, and he is challenged by that very fact to a display of virtuosity, since he is competing against great predecessors. • His thematic originality in his dramatis personae makes the sequence new in Western lyric. • In the Sonnets there is always a sort of “plot”, treated by Shakespeare elegiacally, sardonically, ironically, and tragically, making the Sonnets a repository of relationships and moods wholly without peer in the sonnet tradition.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • However, thematic originality alone never yet made a memorable artwork. • Nor did psychological depth – though that is at least a prerequisite for lyric profundity. • No sufficient description exists in the critical literature of how Shakespeare makes his speaker “real.” • The speaker is the only “person” interiorized in the Sonnets, though there are other dramatis personae. (main character, focal point).

General Introduction to the Sonnets • The act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say. • This would make the reader an eavesdropping voyeur of the writer’s sensations. • Nor is the poet “speaking to himself” without reference to a reader.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • While the social genres “build in” the reader either as listener (to a narrator of a novel) or as audience (to a play), the private literary genres – such as the Psalms, or prayers printed in prayer books, or secular lyrics – are scripted for repeated personal recitation. • One is to utter them as one’s own words, not as the words of another.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • It is indispensable, then, if we are to be made to want to enter the lyric script, that the voice offered for our use be “believable” to us, resembling a “real voice” coming from a “real mind” like our own. • Shakespeare renders his sonnet-speaker convincing in a mere fourteen lines.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • The Sonnets cannot be “dramatic” in the ordinary sense because in them, as in every lyric of a normative sort, there is only one authorized voice. • True drama requires at least two voices (so that even Beckett’s monologues often include an offstage voice, or a tape of a voice, to fulfill this requirement). • Some feminist critics, mistaking lyric for a social genre, have taken offense that the women who figure as dramatis personae within sonnet sequences are “silenced,” meaning that they are not allowed to expostulate or reply.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • In that (mistaken) sense one would have to see all addressees in lyric as “silenced”, since no addressee, in normative lyric, is given a counter and equal voice responding to that of the speaker. • Since the person uttering a lyric is always represented as alone with his/her thoughts, his/her imagined addressee can by definition never be present. • Shakespeare’s speaker, alone with his thoughts, is the greatest achievement, imaginatively speaking, of the Sonnets.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • He is given “depth” of character in each individual sonnet by several compositional strategies on Shakespeare’s part. • These will be more fully described and demonstrated in the individual commentaries below, but in brief they are: • Temporal.The establishment of several retreating “panels” of time, representing episodes or epochs in the speaker’s past, gives him a continuous, nontransient existence and a continuity of memory. (See, for example, sonnet 30, When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, p. 29)

General Introduction to the Sonnets • Emotional.The reflection, within the same poem, of sharply conflicting moods with respect to the same topic (see, e.g., sonnet 148, O me! what eyes hath love put in my head, p. 127). • This can be abetted by contradictory or at least nonhomogeneous discourses rendering a topic complicated (see, e.g., sonnet 125, Wer’t aught to me I bore the canopy, p. 107).

General Introduction to the Sonnets • The volatility of moods in the speaker (symbolized by the famous lark at break of day arising of sonnet 29) suggests a flexibility – even an instability – of response verbally “guaranteeing” the presence of passion. • Semantic. The speaker’s mind has a great number of compartments of discourse (theological, legal, alchemical, medicinal, political, aesthetic, etc.).

General Introduction to the Sonnets • These compartments are like permeable surfaces to each other, and the osmosis between them is directed by an invisible discourse-master, who stands for the intellectual imagination. • Conceptual.The speaker resorts to many incompatible models of existence even within the same poem; • For example, sonnet 60 (pp. 53-54) first describes life as a homogeneous steady-state succession of identical waves/minutes (a stoic model);

General Introduction to the Sonnets • then as a sharply delineated rise-and-eclipse of a sun (a tragic model); • And next as a series of incessant violent extinctions (a brutal model). • Philosophical. The speaker is a rebel against received ideas. • He is well aware of the received topoi of his culture, but he subjects them to interrogation,

General Introduction to the Sonnets • as he counters different kinds love of as shown by Sonnet (116, p. 100), • or the Christian Trinity with the Platonic Triad (The good and under it, truth, beauty, justice (105, p. 91), • or analogizes sacred hermeneutics to literary tradition (106, p. 92). • No topics are more sharply scrutinized than those we now subsume under the phrase “gender relations”:

General Introduction to the Sonnets • the speaker interrogates androgyny of appearance by evoking a comic myth of Nature’s own dissatisfaction with her creation (20, p. 20); • he criticizes hyperbolic praise of female beauty in 130 (p. 112) • he condones adultery throughout the “will” sonnets and elsewhere (and sees adultery as less criminal than adulterated discourse, e.g., in 152, p. 131).

General Introduction to the Sonnets • This is not even to mention the interrogations of “love” and “lust” in 116, p. 100) (and 129, p. 111). • Perceptual.The speaker is also given depth by the things he notices,from damask roses to the odor of marjoram to a canopy of state. • Though the sonnets are always openly drifting toward emblematic or allegorical language, they are plucked back into the perceptual, as their symbolic rose is distilled into “real” perfume (54, p. 48)

General Introduction to the Sonnets • or as an emblematic April is burned by hot June (104, p. 91). • The speaker stands poised between a medieval emblematic tendency and a more modern empirical posture; • within his moral and philosophical systems, he savors the flavor of the “sensual feast.”

General Introduction to the Sonnets • Dramatic. The speaker indirectly quotes his antagonist. • Though no one but the speaker “speaks” in a lyric, Shakespeare exploits the usefulness of having the speaker, in private, quote in indirect discourse something one or the other of the dramatis personae previously said. • Many of the sonnets (e.g., 76, p. 67 and 116, p. 100) have been misunderstood because they have been thought to be free-standing statements on the speaker’s part rather than replies to the antagonist’s implicitly quoted words.

General Introduction to the Sonnets • One can see what a difference it makes to interpretation whether in sonnet 76 the poet-speaker means to criticize his own verse – “Why is my verse so barren of new pride?” • – or whether he is repeating, by quoting, an anterior criticism by the young man: “Why [you ask] is my verse so [in your words] ‘barren of new pride’?”

General Introduction to the Sonnets • If we follow this approach we come closest, in the sonnets, to Shakespeare the dramatist.

Sonnet XVIII • Sonnet 18 shows how poetic form and convention in the sonnet bring about a transformation of passion and sexuality making the "summer" indeed more "temperate". • This simply highlights an implicit and suppressed erotic tension in the original, but the poem is also about something else.

Sonnet XVIII • First, because the weather, references to the seasons, are metaphorical: they refer probably to the full bloom of youth and, perhaps, of passion, to time itself and the effects it has, not only on the beauty of the loved one, but, as we will more clearly see, on the sexual ardour of (probably) both men and women. • However, we might say that Sonnet 18 is really a reshuffling “vulgar” sentiments themselves, that this is, in fact, what love sonnets do. First, let us consider the original sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? • Thou art more lovely and more temperate: • Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May • And summer's lease hath all too short a date; • Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, • And often in his gold complexion dimmed; • And every fair from fair sometime declines, • By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd: • But thy eternal summer shall not fade, • Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, • Nor shall death brag thou wand' rest in his shade, • When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. • So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, • So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet XVIII • It is traditionally accepted that Shakespeare's sonnet sequence can be divided into three sections: • The first expresses the devotion and admiration of the poetic voice (often associated with that of Shakespeare himself) towards an anonymous young man (this would include Sonnet 18); • This is followed by a sequence addressed to the dark lady towards whom the poet is attracted;

Sonnet XVIII • And finally, there are the sonnets which deal with the young man's attraction towards the same lady. • While Sonnet 18 belongs to the first group, the first anomaly to be taken into account becomes clear when we consider the sonnet as text and remove it from its given context’.

Sonnet XVIII • By doing this, it becomes apparent that the language of love and devotion used here to address a member of the same sex is traditionally how we would expect a man to address a woman, which further adds to the tension implicit in the poem. • Of course, Shakespeare's sonnets are full of allusions to classical works (of which Ovid's Metamorphosis XV is the most prevalent), proverbial expressions and stock situations.

Sonnet XVIII • An idealised concept of woman which usually inspires this kind of poetry is substituted here by his admiration for a man; • the theme of unrequited love and how earthly love can elevate the human soul are also implicit, although in spite of the idealisation of the fair youth, it is the effects of time and nature that tend to be given greater emphasis.

Sonnet XVIII • The opening lines of the sonnet • Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? • Thou art more lovely and more temperate: • Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May • And summer's lease hath all too short a date;” • say "as good as one shall see in a summer's day", meaning also "as good as the best there is”.

Sonnet XVIII • It goes on to refer to the way in which time affects beauty. • Summertime alludes to a season which is hot and fertile • “And summer's lease hath all too short a date” • which is the possibly ardent and passionate state of the addressee.

Sonnet XVIII • On one level, the sonnet emphasis on the relation between the seasons and the different stages of man's development: • “And often in his gold complexion dimmed; • And every fair from fair sometime declines […] • By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:”. • Passion is associated with summer, however, like a young man or woman's prime, lasts but a short time, particularly if we compare it to the immortality offered by the poet.

Sonnet XVIII • The poem develops into a comparison between things of limited duration -things that change. • And summer's lease hath all too short a date; • Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, • And often in his gold complexion dimmed; • And every fair from fair sometime declines, • By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:

Sonnet XVIII • Things of lasting duration things that are unchanging- and things of limited duration -things that change. • But thy eternal summer shall not fade, • Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, • Nor shall death brag thou wand' rest in his shade, • When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. • The (not so) implicit connotations of the following lines are full of allusions to youth, beauty, possession (desire) and possible loss, and the eternal summer might mean continuing passion which will not fade;

Sonnet XVIII • The (not so) implicit connotations of the following lines are full of allusions to youth, beauty, possession (desire) and possible loss, and the eternal summer might mean continuing passion which will not fade; • "possession of that fair thou ow’st" might refer to the sexual act; • more comical readings, taking things still in context, might suggest that love will last though the loved one grows fat in, "When in eternal lines to time thou growest";

Sonnet XVIII • And living and breathing are terms easily associated with love and passion. • The "this" of the final line, refers perhaps to the lines of the poem itself, but refers more fittingly to the "eternal summer", the love, passion or desire of the speaker, which motivates and permeates the whole poem. • Sonnet 18 shows that we have an idealised concept of men and a women, and the supposed purity of courtly love is continually undermined by the sexual connotations of the text.

Sonnet XVIII • Of course, in the case of Sonnet 18, this erotic sub-text at first might appear obscure, particularly given that it is supposedly (potentially) addressed to a man, • Moreover, in this respect, we can suggest that Shakespeare's sonnets, and this one in particular, explore the possibilities for emotional expression and here he plays with the tensions inherent in language by drawing attention to the fact that the language traditionally associated with sexual love or amorous affection can be used in a different context.

Sonnet XVIII • Christ and his beloved, the Church or the love of a Christian to Jesus.

THE SONG OF SONGS • CHAPTER 1 • 1 The Song of songs, which is Solomon’s. • Beloved • 2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; for your love is better than wine. 3 Your oils have a pleasing fragrance. Your name is oil poured out, therefore the virgins love you. 4 Take me away with you. Let us hurry. The king has brought me into his rooms.

THE SONG OF SONGS • CHAPTER 1 • Friends • We will be glad and rejoice in you. We will praise your love more than wine! • Beloved • They are right to love you. 5 I am dark, but lovely, you daughters of Jerusalem, like Kedar’s tents, like Solomon’s curtains. 6 Don’t stare at me because I am dark, because the sun has scorched me.

William Shakespeare Sonnets 1609