Sonnet Book We have a run of 750 sonnetbooks. Each book signed by William S
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…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.
Sonnet Show Hall’s Croft, Sh’s Son-in-Law’s House, Stratford on Avon, June 5th, 2009.Only two more days to go and praying for good weather and audience. Follow the link above for information. And I look forward to seeing you there.
…so many hours to go. Pray it rains not potatoes!
But the Shakespeare Centre abuts the Birthplace, which is nothing like what it was when he was born though. It beggars belief to think it stood alone. Prime real estate, so close to the market, never. But supposedly his birthplace, though that too would be scann’d.
I mean he could have been born in a field for all we really know and then registered resident of Henley street on the 26th as a citizen in the parish of Stratford legally encoded as baby Gulielmus. BTW ponder on the effect of knowing that was your official name as a little boy. Might spur an interest in Latin?
But the location is correct, his dad John, Chief Alderman of Stratford owned the property now known as the birthplace. Stratford as Shakespeare lived it, left long ago after Garrick had his knees up there (balls up some would say). Some of his townsmen are horrified at his fame and all of this heisa. I think always had and have been.
By the time Shakespeare retired, the Town Council had a predominantly Puritan tilt. Stratford Council had paid groups of actors NOT to play there from about 1607 onwards. And that date i have to check, as i think it’s earlier even still.
Shakespeare, the Stratty one, at that date would be busy (in Jacobean London or his home in Strat) with his romances and his mad old man strain of writing, culminating in his Lears and Leontes.
Unless these are lying-in-waiting, for them to be “created” by Shake-speare, whose corse was stinkin e’en but now, as I passed Oxford, with the manuscripts in me saddlebags to be fair copied and returned to that secret place Chris and Ed share. Conspiracydom!
BTW et tu Kenneth? You who played Hal? Have you been dining with Sir Guiles? Begorrah you’re beguiled lad. AN Oxfordian? A Baconian yes but an Oxfordian? Even Marlowe or a group theory, but The Blue Boar?
Seductive as the dark side Ken.
Song of the siren mate.
I can only weep you’re gone.
Splitter!
I can only base my judgement of Shakspeare on the world around him as he negotiated it. There was in London a literary and theatre scene which collided in productions first for outdoor theatre for everyone to a true indoor theatre for the massive in-crowd and the elite. The Stuarts loved to party and throw events. Witness the rise of the masques.
All this happened after Elizabeth’s death, and if i accept the Oxford argument, ie we back date the creation of his plays to be written before de Vere’s death in 1604, then he anticipated his own death and the cultural literary cycle that lead up to the later tragedies and their transmutation into the Romances.
Or could it be there was a one off cultural/literary/dramatic genius craftsman, which allowed this one lucky bastard to be Shakespeare. And to spawn an industry that spans the world, naming him as a cultural/literary/dramatic marker.
To want someone else is selfish and unkind to him that is and was. For its him I support here. Conspiracydom is populated by educated converts, who stop at nothing to declare, him false, who i think best.
Fie, fine actors and justices too. But other actors and justices, as fine and finer, lack their conspiracist finery. Now if they could convert Sir Anthony Sher and Greg Doran or Peter Brook and SIr Peter Hall to Oxfordianism the Stratford monument may crumble yet.
Yet even if all the actors and justices of the world deserted our Will, enough of us would find and love him for who he is and not who he was. And i have 2,155 lines of his I want to share for love of him or at the least his legacy. No one died and made me executor, i took on the role voluntarily, and to speak them is a must.
…asked to provide some info for the paper i sat down to enumerate the reasons.
Basically they appeal to my higher nature. I have become a more ethical and moral person by holding up the imperfect mirror the sonnets represent.
Ethics shape the personality and character. In my case as slutty as the Mistress and as arrogant as the fair young man and now feel for the poet. I abase myself for love in the same way through this blog.
They provide fodder for learning about Shakespeare: the man (biography) and his works (literary) and inevitably his social and cultural surroundings (history).
Impossible then not to mention Renaissance Europe with its political and religious turmoils. Extend that to the currents ebbing and flowing from established cultures and religions in the rest of the globe.
Through this all one must broach the psychology and philosophy of the above.
Moral and ethical responsibility conjoin with emotional responsibility.
Imagination carries me into the realms of mythology and archetypes.
They are a balance of scholarly discourse and amateur enthusiasm. Didactically i make Shakespeare accessible to a new generation in classes and workshops and performances.
They require an accounting of the continuum of theatrical history; both his, my own and all that’s intervened.
They are a method of voice development and memory training. Each sonnet is a blueprint for physical action/stasis, emotional repertoire and intellectual wit.
Criticism and theory hover round these poems from the early modern to the post-modern, like bees to pollen.
They made me appreciate and recognise artistry and craftsmanship in all applied forms. Plus they’ve enhanced the discipline of sitting and listening for hours at a time.
Above all i read and speak them for the sheer enjoyment and delight of making Shakespeare live, but with the proviso like Ben Jonson, this side of Bardolatry.
These poems emanated from one man’s breast. They are as quick and as slow as his thought. They are a continuous interplay between form and matter.
Verse and speech intertwined to where one is the other. Art and life appealing to the transcendental in us.
It doesn’t matter if you believe he wrote them or someone else did, whether the characters are real or feigned. They are written and it is a celebration of his passion and my own that i continue to repeat them.
I could have collected stamps and found it just as fascinating. There is something deeply human about focus on non-necessities.
These sonnets illustrate applied effort yielding concrete results for a stage (spoken) and simultaneously contain moments frozen in the silence of the page (written). This is their essential paradox.
I find myself agreeing with Harold Bloom and his deep-reading:
‘We read in search of a mind more original than our own”.
Follow this link for information on the show!!!
Sonnet Show Hall’s Croft, Sh’s Son-in-Law’s House, Stratford on Avon, June 5th, 2009.
Wednesday 20th May is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the sonnets. Assist me, ye gods of rhyme, for i am for quires of sonnets. I feel a marathon coming on.
This just in from Hannibal Hamlin on a recent Shaksper post concerning SHakespeare’s bible choices:
‘
Returning to more substantive scholarly matters, there has also been debate about which English Bibles Shakespeare used. Not the KJV, which appeared only in 1611 and didn’t displace the more popular Geneva Bible for another 40-50 years.
Most often, when it can be determined which translation he used (they are very similar in many instances, and some of Shakespeare’s allusions are not specific), he used the Geneva.
Second in frequency is the Bishops’. The Bishops’ was what was read in churches from about 1568.
The Geneva Bible remained more popular, however, and was more often (and cheaply) printed. Shaheen makes the reasonable suggestion that it was Bishops’ that Shakespeare most often heard, and Geneva that he read.
(Arguments have been made for the Catholic Rheims New Testament, but not convincingly, whatever Shakespeare’s personal faith.) Hannibal’
I love my craft of acting. Yesterday (sunday may 3rd 2009) on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Brighton I was reminded of why i pursue this craft. I and some 150 others were witness to a trilogy telling the life of Edmund Kean. His rise to fame, his fall to infamy, and his decline to legend.
This tour-de-force of focused concentration incorporated every aspect of theatre and as such this review is not about the actor, Alister O’Loughlin, who played it. No matter then you may never have heard of him.
His subject Edmund Kean you may have heard of, if not pursue the link above. His performance lasted some 3 and a half hours with breaks after 1 hour 20, 50 minutes, and a final 1 hour ten.
Fortunately the narrative supersedes discomfort and Kean’s fascinating life unveils like a turbulent rockstar’s biography in a sunday paper supplement.
Kean was above all a craftsman and did nothing on stage by chance. His training took form from a childhood doing tumbling acrobatics and reciting Shakespeare in taverns for pennies and gin to his years of touring in the provinces with his wife and 2 boys. His eldest and favourite, Howard died young as a result of the hardships of touring life.
His coming out at Drury Lane, London age 26 broke with the tradition portraying Shylock, discarding the Jew’s usual red wig and beard,
was a sensation. A star was born.
The story of his public rise and fall went hand-in-hand with his own failings; namely dependence on drink as bohemian fuel and insatiable adulterous and cuckolding womanising. The media of the time, which then as now thrived on scandal, hounded him. Society accepted and rejected him.
Escaping their calumnies Kean toured America to similar acclaim and disapproval. But all this is mere biography and what impressed me was the art and artifice on which his acting was built.
Sunday was remarkable in that the set was on the stage of the theatre royal, chairs in a quadrangle, above the ropes and flies of a much beloved landmark theatre, to my left the auditorium 3 tiered, plush red. A silent reminder and witness to what is essentially an actor’s tale happening fully contained onstage.
Kean plotted a physical, vocal and emotional score for his characters. Alister as Kean has done the same. He pushes an actor’s trunk filled with various props around the stage. He employs audience members in the front rows as characters Kean knew, loved, loathed or reviled. All done with a lightness of touch that offence, embarassment, or unwillingness couldn’t arise.
The loss of Kean’s son forms a touching leitmotif throughout the 3 parts. But as with the whole score nothing is dwelt upon merely passes by as in a dream, a fiction. Kean’s other son, Charles became a celebrated actor in his own right. Hanging in the dressing room backstage are original posters advertising his Shakespearean performances at this very theatre.
The appeal to me was the totality of this experience. An actor’s life steeped in the great roles of Shakespeare. The reminder that theatre is always rehearsed spontaneity. And that skillfully done, can touch the hearts and minds of an audience.
Especially when you are thinking 3 and half hours, one man, and are least prepared for it. Hours passed by in moments of rapt attention, which made it as the programme said, ‘immediate, truthful, and relevant’.
I started acting after working lights on a 30 day run of Krapp’s Last Tape in the Stalhouderij, then the smallest theatre in the Netherlands. A 50 year old english actor called Robert made that play live, to audiences from 5 to 15 in this converted old stable, which could hold no more.
The curtain barely kept out the wind and my light cues were simply on and off. Each night in the bar upstairs, actor and bohemian audience would pick apart the text and subtext and honour the reason we do it in the first place: the telling of a good story.
Robert is dead now, as is Kean. But we still live and the stars still shine. And Alister is the Bosola to the puppet master Cardinal. And tonight we get two more chances to improve our storytelling.
Your not-so-humble blogger is once again performing as the Cardinal in the following play in Brighton, UK. Dates and ticket info below.
As the Argus newspaper review:
‘Kill to get a ticket!’
TEN THOUSAND SEVERAL DOORS
The Nightingale Theatre Directly opposite the entrance to Brighton Train Station above the Grand Central Pub.
From the 6th – 15th MAY @ 7pm & 10pm
Tickets: 01273 709709
The Dome Box Office, New Road
Online Tickets
DON’T be one of those who missed this second chance to see the 2006 Best Show Award Winner
“If you’re after something tremendous, come to this. Beckoned from room to room of the space above the Grand Central pub, the awe-struck audience is physically maneuvered along with the action in this bold reworking of The Duchess of Malfi. As resident company at the Nightingale, Prodigal put every nook of the venue to innovative use. This is bespoke theatre, a sharply tailored piece that fits its surroundings as stylishly as the troop of roughnecks do their 1950s suits. It simultaneously evokes the vigour of Jacobean drama and the irresistible essence of old-world Brighton. A totally engrossing tragedy that combines flawless performances with a spot of boxing and a double bass. Brilliant.” 5 out of 5 – THREE WEEKS
…There is a great difference, whether any Booke choose his Patrones, or finde them: This hath done both. For, so much were your L.L. (= Lordships) likings of the severall parts, when they were acted, as before they were published, the Volume ask’d to be yours. We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his Orphanes, Guardians; without ambition either of selfe-profit, or fame: onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive, as was our
S H A K E S P E A R E , by humble offer of his playes…
Preface to the First Folio 1623
So today’s the day 445 years ago that Shakespeare was christened at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford on Avon. And 52 years later, the day after he was buried in that same church.
The brief quote above is from the dedicatory epistle to his First Folio collected by his friends and fellows John Heminge and Henry Condell.
Sitting outside a restaurant yesterday in Fitzrovia, London, Ben showed me his photos of the monument to Heminge and Condell in the City. This quote struck me as proof positive that the Shakespeare conspirators are deluded: as in spoiled of their game.
Why on earth would these men lie? Their motives for publishing the Folio could hardly have been to assist a long dead Oxford or a still living undead Marlowe. Who benefits?
I’m sure, despite their pleas to buy, buy, buy, that sales were not such that either man got rich from the profits.
Their altruism in this task was perhaps to honour the memory of a friend and fellow. No more, no less. These men knew and loved their friend and fellow, Will Shakespeare, however he spelt his name.
They had worked with him since the mid-1590’s. He left them money in his Will. Interlineated or not, it doesn’t matter.
‘Why what’s the matter? Nothing. A fair thought to lie between a lady’s legs’. Found in Hamlet toying with Ophelia before the play within the play within the play.
If indeed his friends were co-conspirators in some devious plot to dupe their past, present and future, the more treacherous those two worthy words, friend and fellow.
What sort of friend would willingly conspire against their fellow and friend?
Nothing in Stratford Shagsbirds biography suggests anything other than him being a writer and player.
Why and wherefore would Shakespeare seem that much better or worse than his peers? How many writers in his time did not feel himself the better than this upstart crow?
Sh’s influence on writers of the decade after him can be noted in stylistic terms. Suggesting they copied what they liked and made it their own. Just as Shakespeare did when he was learning to write for the stage.
I don’t doubt the influence that Marlowe and Kyd had on SHakespeare. Oxford’s poetry doesn’t twist and turn in thought and argument or roll off the tongue like SH’s does. Or Jonson or Marlowe or Dekker. It doesn’t promise that much for the rest of that writer’s oeuvre either.
To make things simpler, let’s just take Shakespeare out of the equation when we look at Elizabethan theatre. Where would Oxford or any of the conspirators have been then?
Would they have chosen other writers to succubus upon?
The genius must out: and in a cryptic manner be born for ages yet to be.
So there’s all the same writers: University trained or smart grammar school boys both there. There’s the poetry scene too, a much smarter set. And worldlier and more to the manor born.
Though many of these same Nobles were as illiterate as any country bumpkin. Like their illiterate contemporaries this didn’t mean they were stupid. (Snobbism this way lies)!
Admittedly enormous social gulfs existed between the two: but bridges are built when one entertains the other. Especially when one is portraying the inner lives of the other. Men feigning being Kings, Earls and other assorted Courtiers, as well as low life scum and servants.
I’m not trying to convince anyone here but myself. Self and the mirror of self in what one does and how one lives have nothing to do with creativity.
A work of Art can be like polishing or smashing that mirror of self.
If you commit to something creatively you commit from the heart. But a work of art becomes a commodity. Show-business it’s called, not show-Art.
After a while in any art, you realise it has all been told before. In other words. It is still telling what has been told.
The following words are from Robert Durling, recent English translator of Petrarch.
Petrach’s themes are traditional, his treatment of them profoundly original.
From Propertius, Ovid, the Troubadors, the Roman de la Rose, the Sicilians, the dolce style novo, Dante, Cino da Pistoia
there comes to him a repertoire of situations, technical vocabulary, images, structures.
Love at first sight, obsessive yearning and lovesickness, frustration, love as parallel to feudal service;
The lady as ideally beautiful, ideally virtuous, miraculous, beloved in heaven, and destined to early death;
Love as virtue, love as idolatry, love as sensuality;
The god of love with his arrows, fires, whips, chains;
War within the self- hope, fear, joy, sorrow.
Conceits, wit, urbane cleverness; disputations and scholastic precision;
Allegory, personification;
Wooing, exhortation, outcry;
Praise, blame; self-examination,
Self-accusation, self-defense;
Repentance, and the farewell to love.
Petrarch’s originality lies in the intensity with which he develops and explores them in the rich, profoundly personal synthesis of divergent poetic traditions, in the idea of the collection itself.
Now we reach the Author? Who i can’t identify but it’s from p. 15. If anyone knows who this author is please help me identify for credit.
It (the Sonnet form) is unique in demanding an especially complex interrelationship of structural units- single lines, groups of four, groups of eight and six, couplets- within the very strictly imposed limit of fourteen rhymed lines equal in length.
These demands taught Wyatt to use language in a new ways that distinguish his sonnets. To these possibilites the sonnet sequence, of which Sidney’s is the first in English, added other opportunities.
While retaining the effects of condensation or compression within the individual sonnet, the sequence allowed indefinitely expanded variations on it.
Its matter could be explored, complicated, modified, revised, questioned, criticized, ridiculed without loss of focus on the figure of the poet-lover presented throughout.
This made the sequence, as well as the sonnet form itself, a vehicle for some poets to complicate and expand the analyses of what is in the heart.
US: if the sonnet sequence is a vehicle, then it follows the workings of a sonnet could be compared to a combustion engine.
Suck Quatrain 1 a question or statement is posed.
Squeeze Quatrain 2 a riposte or development of same.
Bang Quatrain 3 jumps to its highest, deepest or most essential level
Blow C final couplet closes or opens the argument: leaving a salt, sweet, bitter, or sour taste.
Of course Petrarch was outmoded by the time Shakespeare worked his magic. Here’s his anti-Petrarchan sonnet 130:
Q130
MY Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the Sun,
Coral is far more red, than her lips’ red,
If snow be white why then her breasts are dun:
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head:
I have seen Roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such Roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my Mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
That Music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My Mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
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.
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