10th Britgrad Conference

next weekend at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford on Avon. (approx 11:30 am Sat 21st june) Yours truly will be delivering a paper entitled:

A Prosodic Odyssey:
Sorting the sonnets from page to stage.

10 years ago I completed my post-grad diploma thesis on Q1609 sonnets. Being a bear of little-brain I sought help from the best on the subject: Booth, Kerrigan, Wells, KD Jones, Vendler. All these big-brained creatures explicated the various intellectual pitfalls and insights of these poems and their writer.

Their rhetorical preciosity none of them could help me with. For that I had books by Hall, Rodenburg, Linklater and all-too-brief workshops with Cicely Berry and Andrew Wade. For the rest I was on my own with a lot of company from a-historical fantasists and madmen (Oxfordians et al) to arcane hermeticists.

I’ve moved from the ideas of Caroline Spurgeon’s imagery to Northrop Frye’s neo-platonism and reached the transactive analyses of Holland and Schwarz and Davis’ electrifying book called Shakespeare’s Thinking. I’ve embraced numerology, symbolism and Fowler’s triumphal forms.

I’ve performed two sonnet marathons at the Rose, recited good old sonnet 116 at weddings and recently sonnets 44 and 45 at a funeral. I also stood and delivered proudly on the Old Vic stage and moved to a milkcrate in front of the castle at Haye-on-Wye.

This paper then separates Q1609 Sonnets from A Lover’s Complaint, plus the sonnet form from the writer of that series of 154. I arrived at the confessional voice as a rhetorical stance within this series. My conclusion, like Sasha Roberts, is they are brilliant displays of lit-wit and I’m a nit-wit for learning them all.

If you want to read the rest of the paper (approx. 3,000 words) see the link under pages!!!