The poem is not actorish, it is quiet and private, but – with its formidably intricate rhetoric – it is entirely in the round: it is full of feeling but has a poise and control at once humane and removed. But Sonnet 57 is the voice of the man, the man who achieved both great comedies and great tragedies. Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply than this. Though you do anything, he thinks no ill. So true a fool is love, that in your will, Save where you are how happy you make those. Where you may be, nor your affairs suppose,īut like a sad slave sit and think of naught Nor dare I question with my jealous thought When you have bid your servant once adieu. Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
But number 57 gives some sense of what the Shakespearean stance is like:īeing your slave, what should I do but tend Since they are so various, covering many moods and many situations, there is no representative Sonnet. These are poems at once so inward as to be enigmas for editors, yet so entirely realised as to be available to any reader who wants to experience them. Actors helplessly act – whereas the Sonnets have a certain autonomy and self-containment that is also expressive and outgoing. Professionals sometimes like to read the Sonnets in public, but it never quite works. Their voice is not (as you might expect) the voice of an actor.
The Elizabethan sonnet can seem intolerably artificial Shakespeare’s invent a rhetoric and a music that is entirely new. None of his predecessors speaks as Shakespeare does, like a voice in the next room – even like a voice in the reader’s mind. Some of this sonnet-writing, Sidney’s in particular, is highly accomplished some is haunting, such as Drayton’s (very late) ‘Since there’s no help, come, let us kiss and part.’ But Drayton learned this humanity from Shakespeare. But, if we except Sir Thomas Wyatt’s magnificent though sometimes stumbling work, many of these are paper poems, manifestations of a particular moment in Tudor court culture. At their best they have an extraordinarily rich, dense and delicate verbal texture: they form an inimitable network of ideas, images, echoes and ambiguities, a world that is real yet always in process of change and evolution.īy 1609 the Elizabethan rage for sonnet-writing had been over for ten or twenty years – one of the oddities of this collection that needs to be borne in mind. The Sonnets vary a lot, in quality as in substance. But Shakespeare is no less ‘poetic’ than Petrarch.
Sonnet sequences were written in language series#
With its series of stanzas, the Shakespearean form will always seem more a speaking than a singing poem, more reflective, meant for thinking or arguing in. The other, the Petrarchan, is more coherent aesthetically, having only two rhymes in the octave (the first eight lines) and two more in the sestet (the last six), but it is much harder to write in English than in Italian, because English has fewer rhymes. There are only two major sonnet forms in English, and this is one of them, the Shakespearean. With the exception of two, each of the poems has three quatrains, each containing two rhymes, followed by a rhyming couplet. The book contains 154 poems, all except two made up of 14 lines with the exception of one poem, each of these lines has ten syllables and five iambic feet. So much is problematic about this first edition that it is best to start off with simplicities. The 1609 text is the only authentic source for all the editions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets published since. The rhyme of his sonnet is ab cd ef gg.If we speak of ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, we mean a collection with this name first published in 1609, when Shakespeare was 45 and most of his plays had been staged he died only seven years later. Like Spenser's sonnets, the Shakespearian sonnet has three quatrains and a concluding couplet. Their excellence lies in the rare beauty of the images and style. Unforgettable lines and epithets are scattered plentifully over his sonnets. He transcends the personal and raises it to the level of the universal. In these sonnets, the poet has unlocked his heart. They remain as the monument of devoted love. The rest of them are addressed to an unknown lady called Dark Lady. Of these, 126 sonnets have addressed to a young friend, most probably the Earl of Southampton. They are the only poems in which the dramatist speaks in his person. The sonnets of Shakespeare are different from that of Sidney and Spenser in respect of rhyme scheme.
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