Kenneth J. Larsen Essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets
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The Dark Lady of the Merchant of Venice
3 The dark lady of The Merchant of Venice ‘The Sonnets of Shakespeare offer us the greatest puzzle in the history of English literature.’ So began the voyage of Alfred Leslie Rowse (1903–97) through the murky waters cloaking the identi- ties of four persons associated with the publication in 1609 of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’: the enigmatic ‘Mr. W.H.’ cited in the forepages as ‘onlie begetter’ of the poems; the unnamed ‘fair youth’ addressed in sonnets 1–126; the ‘rival poet’ who surfaces and submerges in sonnets 78–86; and the mysterious ‘dark lady’ celebrated and castigated in sonnets 127–52.1 Doubtless, even as Thomas Thorpe’s edition was passing through George Eld’s press, London’s mice-eyed must have begun their search for the shadowy four; it has not slacked since. As to those nominated as ‘Mr. W.H.’, the list ranges from William Herbert to Henry Wroithesley (with initials reversed) to William Harvey (Wroithesley’s stepfather). In 1964 Leslie Hotson proposed one William Hatcliffe of Lincolnshire [!], while Thomas Tyrwitt, Edmond Malone, and Oscar Wilde all favoured a (fictional) boy actor, Willie Hughes. Among candidates for the ‘fair youth’, Henry Wroithesley, Earl of Southampton (1573–1624), appears to have outlasted all comers. Those proposed as the rival poet include Christopher Marlowe (more interested in boys than ladies dark or light); Samuel Daniel (Herbert’s sometime tutor);2 Michael Drayton, drinking partner of Jonson and Shakespeare; George Chapman, whose Seaven Bookes of the Iliades (1598) were a source for Troilus and Cressida; and Barnabe Barnes, lampooned by Nashe as ‘Barnaby Bright’ in Have with you to Saffron-Walden. -
Shakespeare's Penknife
Shakespeare’s Penknife: Grafting and Seedless Generation in the Procreation Sonnets Vin Nardizzi University of British Columbia Cet essai remet dans son contexte la figure de la greffe qu’utilise Shakespeare dans ses « sonnets de procréation » (numéro 1-17) par l’examen de la présentation de cette technique horticole dans la littérature de jardinage des seizième et dix-septièmes siècles. On y argue que le personnage du sonnet 15 se réfère à cette littérature, se terminant sur le vers « I engraft you new », visualisant la greffe horticole autant comme une technique d’écriture que comme une forme analogue à la procréation humaine. En tant qu’écriture, la greffe permet à l’orateur de se hisser au niveau des héritiers et de la poésie, puisque le canif est indispensable autant au poète qu’au jardinier, respectivement pour préparer une plume et une greffe. Toutefois, en tant qu’analogue de la procréation humaine, la greffe ne procède pas par semis ou par mélange des semences. Au lieu de cela, elle constitue une forme de génération ne nécessitant pas de semences, et de ce fait évoque le potentiel de la greffe comme reproduction travestie dans les Sonnets de Shakespeare. t the close of Sonnet 15, the speaker of Shakespeare’s Sonnets makes a spectacular Apronouncement to the beautiful young man: “I engraft you new” (l.14).1 In doing so, he links procreation to poetry-making through an image of plant grafting. As Bruce R. Smith observes, Sonnet 15 not only “sets up” the figures of generation in Sonnet 16 (“maiden gardens” [l.6] and “living flowers” [l.7]) but also embeds a pun on graphein (Greek: “to write”). -
Poetry-II-Teacher-Sample-3Rd-Ed.Pdf
Contents Contents How to Use This Study Guide with the Text & Literature Notebook ......5 Notes & Instructions to Teacher ....................................................................7 Taking With Us What Matters .......................................................................9 Four Stages to the Central One Idea ............................................................13 How to Mark a Book ......................................................................................18 THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE PERIOD Introduction ................................................................................................... 22 Basic Features & Background ....................................................................... 24 Queen Elizabeth On Monsieur’s Departure ............................................................................. 30 Speech to the Troops at Tilbury ..................................................................... 33 Edmund Spenser – from The Faerie Queene, Canto I ..............................................37 Christopher Marlowe – The Passionate Shepherd to His Love ...............................47 Sir Walter Raleigh – The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd .......................................50 Sir Philip Sidney – Sonnet 31 ...............................................................................................54 George Peele – A Farewell to Arms .....................................................................................57 Robert Southwell – The Burning Babe .............................................................................60 -
The History, Printing, and Editing of the Returne from Pernassus
W&M ScholarWorks Undergraduate Honors Theses Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1-2009 The History, Printing, and Editing of The Returne from Pernassus Christopher A. Adams College of William and Mary Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Adams, Christopher A., "The History, Printing, and Editing of The Returne from Pernassus" (2009). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 237. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/237 This Honors Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Undergraduate Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The History, Printing, and Editing of The Returne from Pernassus A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in English from The College of William and Mary by Christopher A. Adams Accepted for____________________________ (Honors, High Honors, Highest Honors ) _________________________ ___________________________ Paula Blank , Director Monica Potkay , Committee Chair English Department English Department _________________________ ___________________________ Erin Minear George Greenia English Department Modern Language Department Williamsburg, VA December, 2008 1 The History, Printing, and Editing of The Returne from Pernassus 2 Dominus illuminatio mea -ceiling panels of Duke Humfrey’s Library, Oxford 3 Acknowledgments I am deeply indebted to my former adviser, Dr. R. Carter Hailey, for starting me on this pilgrimage with the Parnassus plays. He not only introduced me to the world of Parnassus , but also to the wider world of bibliography. Through his help and guidance I have discovered a fascinating field of research. -
Teaching Shakespeare's Sonnets
Teaching Shakespeare’s Sonnets: time as fracture in sonnets 18, 60 and 63 Miguel Martínez López UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA Literary studies on the Sonnets before the seventies were usually part of larger works on Sha- kespeare or on the sonnet. Specialization and detailed analyses of individual and groups of sonnets is absolutely necessary before attempting any further generalizations, which so far have led nowhere.1 In this paper I suggest a possible approach to the discussion of Shakespeare’s poetic stance as regards the intellectual metamorphosis of human apprehension of time at the dawn of the Modern Age. My reading and analysis of three of the «time-sonnets» (nos. 18, 60 & 73) is set within the context of a final-year or graduate class, minimally fluent in rhetoric, in basic medieval and Renaissance philosophy and in the intellectual history of this period.2 My central contention is that Shakespeare superbly epitomizes in his poetry and drama the fear of death resulting from a radical change in the apprehension of time: time passus (the form typical of the M. A.) becomes now time fractus.3 Humankind is and has always been fearful of death (the ultimate consequence of the passing of time) but there is a historical period -broadly between the mid-fourteenth century and the mid-seventeenth century- in which existential anguish has been at its highest. For three centuries, a series of endless calamities assaulted Europe: the Black Death, the Hundred-Year War, the invasions of the Turks, the Great Schism of the Reformation… . In the Autumn of the M. -
Light on the Sonnets
LIGHT ON THE SONNETS By Michael Brame and Galina Popova At the Second International Congress of Mathematicians that convened in Paris in 1900, the great Goettingen mathematician David Hilbert marked the century’s turn with his famous list of twenty-three unsolved problems. His thesis was as simple then as it is apposite today, that mathematics grows and advances through its attention to and subsequent resolution of unsolved problems. Literary criticism is no different, or if it is, it should not be so, for literary problems constitute its very lifeblood, its raison d'être.1 Viewing literary criticism as motivated by its problems brings out the similarity between it and the empirical sciences, while the history of science amply illustrates that puzzles are often solved as a consequence of embracing a powerful new idea motivating a fresh perspective. The old guard is expected to resist such ideas; they may rant and rave and even seek to vilify the new ideas and their authors, very much as we witness today in connection with the Shakespeare authorship debate. Truly, science advances death by death, and the same may be true of literary criticism. When one encounters a range of problems that cannot be resolved within orthodoxy, a crisis is inevitable. When a new theory or framework is advanced whose effect is to resolve such puzzles by showing that they follow naturally from a bold new hypothesis, real progress ensues and the crisis eventually abates. To illustrate, we will briefly look at three simple puzzles drawn from Shakespeare’s sonnets, beginning with Edward George Harman’s observation made sometime prior to 1925: There are many things about the Sonnets which seem quite irreconcilable with their authorship by an actor of humble origin. -
Spenser╎s Epithalamion: a Representation of Colonization
Proceedings of GREAT Day Volume 2014 Article 2 2015 Spenser’s Epithalamion: A Representation of Colonization through Marriage Emily Ercolano SUNY Geneseo Follow this and additional works at: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/proceedings-of-great-day Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Ercolano, Emily (2015) "Spenser’s Epithalamion: A Representation of Colonization through Marriage," Proceedings of GREAT Day: Vol. 2014 , Article 2. Available at: https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/proceedings-of-great-day/vol2014/iss1/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the GREAT Day at KnightScholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Proceedings of GREAT Day by an authorized editor of KnightScholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Ercolano: Spenser’s Epithalamion Spenser’s Epithalamion: A Representation of Colonization through Marriage Emily Ercolano dmund Spenser is believed to have been born mation through sexual intercourse. The speaker, who in London in the year 1552 and to have died is the groom, begins by calling upon the muses and in 1599 in Ireland, where he spent the major- then describes the procession of the bride, the ritual Eity of his career. Unlike the contemporary English rites, the wedding party, the preparation for the wed- poets of his age, Spenser was not born into wealth ding night, and lastly the wedding night with the and nobility, but after receiving an impressive educa- physical consummation of the marriage. The form of tion at the Merchant Taylors’ School, Pembroke Col- the poem parallels the content and firmly places the lege, and Cambridge, he served as an aid and secre- setting in Ireland. -
Sir Robert Sidney's Poems Revisited
Sir Robert Sidney’s Poems Revisited: the Alternative Sequence Maria de Jesus Crespo Candeias Velez Relvas UNIVERSIDADE ABERTA DE PORTUGAL For the last five or six years, and for some different occasions, I have had the opportunity, and the pleasure, of dedicating myself to the study of Sir Robert Sidney’s poetic work. This “revisitation” is primarily motivated by the fact that, as far as I know, The Poems keep being neglected by the potential readers but also because the text keeps offering varied possibilities of analysis, further paths to be explored. After the rediscovery of the corpus in 1973 and its publication in 1984, Mr P. J. Croft’s own excellent critical edition,1 and some articles (all of them enthusiastic, I must say) by a few scholars,2 constitute the only approaches to the work. I strongly believe that this new voice from the Elizabethan golden age, that has brought new and important elements to our perspective of the time, should not be forgotten. Therefore, I cannot understand or accept the criteria adopted by the editors of a very recent anthology of poetry, who selected a wide range of works written by Elizabethan and Jacobean authors, even by some anonymous ones, and did not publish a single composition of Robert Sidney. Besides the interest of the poems, his sequence discloses relevant peculiarities: it is the longest autograph manuscript from the period discovered until now, contained in a bound notebook which survived complete and admirably preserved for four centuries, exhibiting the unity, revisions, corrections and organisation outlined by the poet himself. -
Exploring Shakespeare's Sonnets with SPARSAR
Linguistics and Literature Studies 4(1): 61-95, 2016 http://www.hrpub.org DOI: 10.13189/lls.2016.040110 Exploring Shakespeare’s Sonnets with SPARSAR Rodolfo Delmonte Department of Language Studies & Department of Computer Science, Ca’ Foscari University, Italy Copyright © 2016 by authors, all rights reserved. Authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International License Abstract Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been studied by rhetorical devices. Most if not all of these facets of a poem literary critics for centuries after their publication. However, are derived from the analysis of SPARSAR, the system for only recently studies made on the basis of computational poetry analysis which has been presented to a number of analyses and quantitative evaluations have started to appear international conferences [1,2,3] - and to Demo sessions in and they are not many. In our exploration of the Sonnets we its TTS “expressive reading” version [4,5,6]1. have used the output of SPARSAR which allows a Most of a poem's content can be captured considering full-fledged linguistic analysis which is structured at three three basic levels or views on the poem itself: one that covers macro levels, a Phonetic Relational Level where phonetic what can be called the overall sound pattern of the poem - and phonological features are highlighted; a Poetic and this is related to the phonetics and the phonology of the Relational Level that accounts for a poetic devices, i.e. words contained in the poem - Phonetic Relational View. -
Sonnet 30 to the Sessions 11 February 1601
THE PRISON YEARS OXFORD SUMMONED TO THE TRIAL DAY FOUR IN THE TOWER Sonnet 30 To The Sessions 11 February 1601 Edward de Vere is “summoned” to be a judge at the “Sessions” or treason trial of Essex and Southampton, to be held in Westminster Hall eight days from now. Oxford is filled with grief over the “losses” suffered by his royal son – loss of honor, loss of liberty, loss of the crown, and likely even the loss of his life by execution. Oxford’s expression of overwhelming sorrow demonstrates that, in life itself, he suffered every bit as greatly as do the characters of his plays. When his son by the Queen was born, Oxford had been forced to "pay" by being unable to acknowledge him. Now he must "new pay" for his son by making a crucial bargain with Robert Cecil and King James of Scotland, who, barring civil war around the throne, will become James I of England. Sonnet 30 Translation When to the Sessions of sweet silent thought When to the Trial with royal secret thoughts I summon up remembrance of things past, I am summoned to remember past things, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, I sigh the lack of your rights that I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s And cry anew over my son’s wasted royal time: waste: Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow) Then I can weep tears (like never before) For precious friends hid in death’s dateless For my royal son imprisoned, facing death and night, disgraced forever, And weep afresh love’s long-since cancelled And weep again over his royalty’s cancellation, woe, And moan th’ expense of many a vanished sight. -
Summer Reading 12 AP
English 12AP Summer Reading Assignment (Revised 9/19) All seniors entering English 12 AP in the fall must read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, which is a compilation of myths drawn from classical literature. Paperback editions are available at local bookstores and libraries as well as through on-line merchants. E-texts can be found here and here. As you read, keep a reading log, take notes, or annotate in a way that will help you to remember the characters and storylines of each myth. After you read, choose one poem from the list below and write a 500-word explication discussing how the allusion in the poem supports the poet’s aim. Consider the following features of allusion: 1. An allusion is a reference to another work (e.g., mythological, classical, biblical, literary, or historical). 2. An extended allusion is more than an isolated reference but calls to the reader’s mind the entire context of its source in order to comment on the poet’s subject. 3. The reference (classical, biblical, or mythological, for example) is not itself the subject of the work in which it appears. For example, it would not be an allusion if a poem reviews, retells, or revises a myth or part of a myth, as do Pope in “Argus,” Byron in “Prometheus,” Keats in “Ode to Psyche,” Tennyson in “Ulysses,” Swinburne in “The Garden of Proserpine,” Yeats in “The Fascination with What’s Difficult,” and Parker in “Penelope,” and Blake in “Why Was Cupid a Boy?” You will be graded on the following: 1. -
Poetic Tradition and the History of Love in Early Modern
POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of The requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Ashley Thomas SPRING 2020 © 2020 Ashley Thomas ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH A Thesis by Ashley Thomas Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Jason Gieger, Ph.D. __________________________________, Second Reader David Toise, Ph.D. ____________________________ Date iii Student: Ashley Thomas I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and this thesis is suitable for electronic submission to the library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ Doug Rice, Ph.D. Date Department of English iv Abstract of POETIC TRADITION AND THE HISTORY OF LOVE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND: EXPLORING REPRESENTATIONS OF LOVE IN THE SONNET SEQUENCES OF SIDNEY, SPENSER, BARNFIELD, AND WROTH by Ashley Thomas This study explores representations of love, power, gender, and sexuality in the sonnet sequences of Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Richard Barnfield, and Lady Mary Wroth. Although Sidney and Spenser are esteemed authors whose work has shaped our perceptions of Renaissance thought, I look at the sequences of Sidney and Spenser as problematic works that endorse misogynist and hierarchical models of love.