About classification

I’m busy putting together a thesaurus of the sonnets and these thoughts arise. The classifications follow those of Marvin Spevack’s Shakespeare Thesaurus.

Classifying is box-making.

But the questions always remain:
does everything fit into one box, or occupy places in one more, or many more boxes?

If a word is a box, association is the box-cutter. Shakespeare associates on many different levels of classification.

Always there’s an intelligence behind the lines, mind-gaming them, morphing thoughts with states with moods in words, which fail and succeed with seemingly equal indifference.

Overtones or undertones of sound echo throughout his twists of thought-made-tangible, as quickly dissolving into solitary slight contemplation. His aloneness made dual by virtue of your eyes.

A thesaurus enables us to see the different catagories or classes in a bird’s-eye perspective. The 3 thousand odd different forms of words he used in the sonnets shows where his interests lie.

Shakespeare had never heard of a thesaurus, in the way that we know one. And whether he would agree with Spevack’s classifications or not is a moot point. He obviously had some ideas that he stuck to and repeated.

Shadow versus substance or show versus essence; the 2 lovers in 1 breast idea; the war between eye and heart or mind and soul; the mirroring of emotions with weather conditions; the dislike of fawners and hangers on; to name a few he likes.

The sonnets were intended as a lie (to the extent we can know they were intended) and they’ve lain about for many years, lying to ages past and yet to be. Including you and me in this our time.

They promise an argument centred around truth, beauty and goodness and contain lies, ugliness, and badness therein. The love-rat triangle disses on his mistress and forgives the true architect of his desire before dismissing him too.

A rival poet is briefly conjured up half way through and our poet staggers at the affront, but rides the wave. Time is beaten and conquered. His verse, as the stick he beats time with, is alternately weak and strong.

Absence does not make his heart grow fonder over time and he consigns his creations to the landfill of the Elysian fields, another of Cupid’s conquests gone all too humanly wrong.

It is an artifice, whether there were one or 154, from the very start. So what we know about these sonnets is based on that given. The true hero is the tainted hero who wrote them in all their non-flattering truth.

Shakespeare for some reason we cannot know, despite the claims of many conspiracy theorists, wrote these 154 sonnets. To do that he had to do what thousands of other sonnetteers did. He did not work in isolation but was true to the form and content of his time.

This Sonnet form of 14 lines uses ten syllables to make a masculine line. They added another syllable to make the line feminine. They rhymed the lines by cross-metre.

The Sonnetteer added to this form an argument that turned at the 8th or 12th line to conclude with a summarising final couple of lines called a couplet. This marriage of argument and form is what makes these sonnets interesting to their writer.

The wonderful thing about classifying things is the scope. All current knowledge is contained in lists, which show Humanity’s persnickitiness out to the workings of the Universe.

Knowledge is of two kinds for everywhere and all. We can know by intelligence the whole gamut of our brain’s capacity through Science and the Arts down to stacking bricks or making dye.

And as importantly we can know our fellow humans by knowing ourselves, from our petty spites to our grandest gestures. The knowledge contained herein is of the second kind. How can you classify that?

FAIR, KIND, AND TRUE IS ALL MY ARGUMENT,
VARYING TO OTHER WORDS.