Shakespeare's Sonnets

LECTURE -7 Intro To Shakespeare & his Sonnets William Shakespeare William Shakespeare is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language. He was born on or around 23 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a prosperous glover and local dignitary, and Mary Arden, the daughter of a wealthy farmer. There are no records of William’s education, but he probably went to King’s New School – a reputable Stratford grammar school where he would have learned Latin, Greek, theology and rhetoric – and may have had a Catholic upbringing. He may also have seen plays by the travelling theatre groups touring Stratford in the 1560s and 70s. At 18, William married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had three children over the next few years. What are Shakespeare’s ‘lost years’? No-one knows what Shakespeare did between 1587 – the last documentary record of his youth in Stratford – and 1592 when he is first mentioned in London. There is much speculation about these ‘lost years’, including stories that Shakespeare was exiled from Warwickshire for deer-stealing and that he worked at the London playhouses holding horses for theatre-goers. What did Shakespeare write? Between about 1590 and 1613, Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays and collaborated on several more. His 17 comedies include The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado About Nothing. Among his 10 history plays are Henry V and Richard III. The most famous among his tragedies are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. Shakespeare also wrote 4 poems, and a famous collection of Sonnets which was first published in 1609. Was Shakespeare successful in his lifetime? By 1592, Shakespeare was well-known enough as a writer and actor to be criticised by jealous rival Robert Greene as an ‘upstart crow’ and ‘Johannes Factotum’ (a ‘Johnny do-it-all’) in his pamphlet Groats-worth of Wit (a groat being a small coin). Although it is difficult to determine the chronology of Shakespeare’s works, it is likely that by 1592 he had authored 11 plays, including Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. His plays were successful: the box office takings from the first performance of Henry VI, Part 1 at the Rose in 1592 were £3 16s. 8d., the highest recorded for the season. For much of the period from September 1592 to June 1594, the London playhouses were shut because of the plague. Shakespeare published two epic poems during this time, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Shakespeare’s success grew through the 1590s. He joined and became a shareholder of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men who performed before Queen Elizabeth on numerous occasions, and as well as writing more plays, he published several poems and circulated his sonnet sequence in manuscript. His successes enabled him in 1597 to buy New Place, the second largest house in Stratford. This success was not untainted by tragedy however: in 1596 his 11 year old son Hamnet, died. Where were Shakespeare’s plays performed? In 1599, Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men took up residence in the newly built Globe. Julius Caesar was one of the first plays performed there. Performances at the Globe were divided into three seasons with breaks around Christmas when the players performed at court; Lent, when playing was intermittent; and summer when the players toured the provinces escaping the infection and infestation of the city. When Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, her successor, King James I, announced that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men would now be the King’s Men. This patronage was a huge coup for the troupe, but Shakespeare was by no means a puppet playwright and he continued to write plays that posed difficult questions about kingship. The Jacobean works of 1604–08 were darker and include the mature tragedies Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. In 1608 the King’s Men took on a second theatre, a candlelit indoor venue at Blackfriars, whose expensive seats catered to a more elite audience and whose lighting may have influenced the atmosphere of late plays such as The Tempest. When did Shakespeare die? In 1613 the Globe burned down and the same year Shakespeare retired from the London theatre world and returned to Stratford. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church, where he had been baptised 52 years earlier. What is the First Folio? The first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the First Folio, was collated and published in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. Of the 36 plays in the First Folio, 18 had not yet been printed at all. It is this fact that makes the First Folio so important; without it, many of Shakespeare’s plays, including Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Julius Caesar and The Tempest, might never have survived. The text was collated by two of Shakespeare's fellow actors and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who edited it and supervised the printing. They divided the plays into comedies, tragedies and histories, an editorial decision that has come to shape our idea of the Shakespearean canon. SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS Shakespeare’s sonnets are composed of 14 lines, and most are divided into three quatrains and a final, concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet form and rhyme scheme is known as the ‘English’ sonnet. It first appeared in the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), who translated Italian sonnets into English as well as composing his own. Many later Renaissance English writers used this sonnet form, and Shakespeare did so particularly inventively. His sonnets vary its configurations and effects repeatedly. Shakespearean sonnets use the alternate rhymes of each quatrain to create powerful oppositions between different lines and different sections, or to develop a sense of progression across the poem. The final couplet can either provide a decisive, epigrammatic conclusion to the narrative or argument of the rest of the sonnet, or subvert it. Sonnet 130, for example, builds up a paradoxical picture of the speaker’s mistress as defective in all the conventional standards of beauty, but the final couplet remarks that, though all this is true, And yet by heaven I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are often breath-taking, sometimes disturbing and sometimes puzzling and elusive in their meanings. As sonnets, their main concern is ‘love’, but they also reflect upon time, change, aging, lust, absence, infidelity and the problematic gap between ideal and reality when it comes to the person you love. Even after 400 years, ‘what are Shakespeare’s sonnets about?’ and ‘how are we to read them?’ are still central and unresolved questions. The ‘Fair Youth’ sonnets Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, socially superior to the speaker. The first 17 sonnets encourage this youth to marry and father children, because otherwise ‘[t]hy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date’ (Sonnet 14) – that is, his beauty will die with him. After this, the sonnets diversify in their subjects. Some erotically celebrate the ‘master mistress of my passion’ (Sonnet 20), while others reflect upon the ‘lovely boy’ (Sonnet 126) as a cause of anguish, as the speaker desperately wishes for his behaviour to be different to the cruelty that it sometimes is. ‘For if you were by my unkindness shaken, / As I by yours’, laments the speaker of Sonnet 120, ‘you have passed a hell of time’. The ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets Sonnets 127 to 152 seem to be addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespearean legend. This woman is elusive, often tyrannous, and causes the speaker great pain and shame. Many of these sonnets reflect on the paradox of the ‘fair’ lady’s ‘dark’ complexion. As Sonnet 127 punningly puts it, ‘black was not counted fair’ in Shakespeare’s era, which favoured fair hair and light complexions. This woman’s eyes and hair are ‘raven black’ – and yet the speaker finds her most alluring. The two final sonnets (Sonnets 153 and 154) focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail desire and longing. They do not seem to directly relate to the rest of the collection. When were Shakespeare’s Sonnets composed and published? The sonnets were probably written, and perhaps revised, between the early 1590s and about 1605. Versions of Sonnets 128 and 144 were printed in the poetry collection The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. They were first printed as a sequence in 1609, with a mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’ The dedication has led to intense speculation: who is ‘W.H.’? Is he the young man of the sonnets? As with the ‘Dark Lady’, various candidates have been proposed, such as William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. No conclusive identification has been made, and it may never be, because it is not clear that the sonnets are even about particular historical individuals. Moreover, since this dedication is by the printer, not Shakespeare, and we don’t know if Shakespeare was involved in the 1609 printing of his Sonnets, it may have no relationship to the series of feelings, relationships and anguishes that the poems map out. Form and structure of the sonnets The sonnets are almost all constructed of three quatrains (four-line stanzas) followed by a final couplet. The sonnets are composed in iambic pentameter, the meter used in Shakespeare's plays. The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

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