A plain reading of the sonnets

Let’s call this a PLAIN reading of the Sonnets.

We wanted then a reading for the sounds, and not for any particular meaning inherent within the sonnets.

Intent is a fickle mistress. What we intended and what we have done is here for your appraisal and approval. Or diss! Kan ook!

We intend to make another professional studio recording, which will tackle the argument a little more personally.

Some suggestions for individual and series of sonnets:

1
From fairest creatures we desire increase

Numero uno because it starts the series and looks like it may have been placed there on purpose.

Our pet theory: number 4 started the lot.

The dedication of the sonnets sets forth this theory, which wishes the well-wishing adventurer in setting.

But did Sh even write the dedication? Oxford couldn’t have, he being 5 years dead when published.

Thomas Thorpe their publisher obviously got them from somewhere. Why was 1609 the right time to leak out his most personal of poems?

Conjecture aside, it’s a good sonnet filled with ideas that will be developed later in the series. We won’t go into details but remain with the flow of the overall narrative.

But hey, it’s number one and its bound to tell us something about what’s to happen right?

The clue for the first seventeen sonnets is that he’s trying to convince an ostensibly rich, beautiful, and social young man to marry and have children. Thus ensuring he lives on.

Number eighteen is the notorious
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
where immortality through eternal poetry becomes the new meta-theme.

Is this perhaps the original first sonnet? The first 17 being a presumed commission.

But then again 145 is dated by Andrew Gurr to the mid 1580’s, so that makes it the first one.

And again it was a loose sonnet and one doth not a sequence make.

Yet again what means first? He must have done some practice sonnets.

And there are several scattered throughout the plays.eg R+J HV LLL AYLI.

It is oft-recited that the first seventeen sonnets were a commission for his patron’s 17th birthday by the 3rd Earl of Southampton’s mother. No, not Queen Elizabeth, silly sausage. Maybe so, after we see Anonymous.

Sh always dives straight into the action in story telling. For proof see the first lines of his plays or poems. All of them suck you in, anticipating a reply or further developments.

So wethinks with the sonnet story. For a story there is, though t’ain’t very deep in narrative.

For that depth we refer you to the Authorship commentators. Several of whom may have just snorted in indignation.

We favour Shakespeare as having chosen to do a series of sonnets, with a complaint to follow them.

We imagine he and Drayton challenging each other. Both reworking their sonnet sequence over a 20 year period. And them being friends and poets. No proof, just intuition. Snort, snort.

A Lover’s Complaint is a mirror image of the sonnet story from a woman’s perspective. And is rarely dealt with, and often dismissed. But you paid your 5d in 1609 and it followed the Sonnets FINIS page in your purchase.

Sonnet series with complaints were all the vogue in the publishing industry of the time.

And besides it sounds and looks like the same writer to us. Read it for yourself if you haven’t already. It’s a short read and worth it.

Our theory on the sonnets is that 154 is the number, for the simple fact that it mirrors the maximum number of syllables in a sonnet.

Following Q’s punctuation there’s only one truly masculine end-stopped sonnet (number 150) and one wholly feminine lined sonnet (number 20).

Making a macrocosm and microcosm of the whole event. A unification of the whole in one.

And so back to the numbering.

Number one’s opener
‘From fairest creatures we desire increase,’
requires us to think and can put us to sleep in no time. it’s dense and wordy, whereas in two, three and four the argument develops apace.

Number two with its
‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,’ opener
is a challenge to the listener, especially if it’s delivered to that person in person. But still a ‘this’ll happen if’ scenario.

Number three’s gambit of
‘LOok in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
is a direct address to the subject but a reflection of direct contact.

We think number four’s direct address and stern alarm is a wake-up call to whoever hears it. Certainly attention grabbing.

Our problem, with this pet theory is that number four is pretty insulting. Basically calling him a wanker and a banker. Insulting on both counts for early-moderns as post-moderns.

We can see number one being the more diplomatic route into the good graces of your subject. Or his mum’s.

But we also don’t like to read biography into his sonnets.

That they contain deeply and intimately Sh’s personal feelings, yes.

But a re-telling of auto-biographical events in verse, no.

SO when was sonnet one written? Not the year, in ordering. Did he start with it and give up and go back to it? Or did he work backwards from four?

All the time dampening his mood
from Unthrifty loveliness
to Look in thy glass,
to When forty winters
to From fairest creatures.

By way of the dedication, the sequence starts with number four, then one, two, three, then five, six etc.

But the way we have them is as they are. Who can argue successfully with that?

Pragmatic as well as plain.

You can listen for yourself and play them in any order. Nature is in all four sonnets. Growth and ripening, decay and waste,

2
WHen forty Winters shall besiege thy brow,

3
LOok in they glass and tell the face thou viewest,

4
UNthrifty loveliness why dost thou spend,

5
THose hours that with gentle work did frame,

OH yes the two capital letters at the start of each sonnet is the way it was done in the quarto. FOr us it sets up your first sound.