Autoblography…

…i thought i’d made it up but no it exists in the urban dictionary. As does blography. Either way it exists!

If you can’t make the show tomorrow night here’s some content:

The purpose of this show is to see this Quarto of Sonnets by William Shakespeare as a whole, which is apparently MORE than the sum of its parts.

1-154 is what we have.

Now I work in numbers as each number corresponds to a sonnet and what it contains. I know very few other scholars or actors who can recognise them by number alone.

Just for that, this performance is unique!
BTW You can always nod sagely as if you know the sonnet
or screw up your face and shake your head as if suggesting you know and disagree.

Let’s get the obligatory stuff out of the way and have a good look at their ordering:

There are several beginnings, middles, and endings:

Namely sonnets
1 + 126.
127 + 152.
153 + 154

But even within the first set there is an ending in the middle:

Namely between sonnets
87 ‘Farewell! Thou art too dear for my possessing’
and
88 ‘When thou shalt be disposed to set me light’.

There are other breaks and pauses where it seems as if his muse departed him. But not that many of the sonnets are individual stand-alone pieces.

It appears he wrote them in the form of hang-together-in-groups, connected by some stylistic conceit or metrical feature.

The writer here is a Shakespeare, whose tale is not a pretty or virtuous or kind one if you ask me but. And he’s told us much better stories and sketched much better characters more life-like than are represented here.

Also in the sonnets there are three ( 3 in 1) that aren’t properly sonnets by way of structural or metrical deviation, namely sonnets
99 – 15 lines
126- 6 couplets ie 12 lines
145- Tetrameter verse not iambic

Finally the 2 sonnets that were printed in 1599 namely sonnets
138 + 144
And a variant manuscript version of sonnet 4 and 128 ? discovered after their imprinting in 1609.

Well it’s an opening into the whole conundrum…

will post again on saturday or sunday to crow like an upstart.

peace, love and shakespeare.