en1112lecture1

EN1112: Introducing English Poetry: 

EN1112: Introducing English Poetry 2006 lecture 1: Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 Dr Roy Booth

Web-posted version at: 

Web-posted version at http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/index.html http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhle/001/ShallIcompareversion3.htm

‘sonneto’, a little sound: 

‘sonneto’, a little sound Dante, 1265-1521 ‘rime petrose’ Vita Nuova: with prose narrative links

Francesco Petrarch, the poet with two R’s: 

Francesco Petrarch, the poet with two R’s 1304-74 ‘Canzoniere’ – 366 poems, 317 sonnets ‘rime sparse’, his ‘scattered rhymes’

“Tell Laura I love her…”: 

“Tell Laura I love her…” 1327: ‘It was on the morning of the blessed Good Friday that I, unknowingly, fell captive to the sway of your swift eyes….’ IN VITO Good Friday 1348: ‘the light of her life was withdrawn from the light of day’ IN MORTE

Bruce Smith’s critical quip: 

Bruce Smith’s critical quip “If Paradise Lost celebrates the fortunate fall, Petrarchan sonnets celebrate the fortunate refusal.”

‘Petrarchisti’ : 

‘Petrarchisti’ Jean Clouet: Man reading Petrarch Royal Collection, Windsor Andrea del Sarto: Woman with the ‘Petrarchino’. Uffizi, Florence

Slide8: 

Bronzino: Portrait of the poet Laura Battiferri.

Du Bellay, Wyatt, Sidney: 

Du Bellay, Wyatt, Sidney Sequence, France, 1549 Wyatt – sonnets in English from 1530’s Sidney, first English sequence, early 1580’s, ‘Astrophel and Stella’

Italian Sonnet: 

Italian Sonnet A B B A ~ A B B A ~ C D C ~ D C D OCTAVE SESTET (OR: CDE, CDE) – five rhymes ‘volta’ Four rhyme sounds Ten syllable lines Italian form only rarely ends with a couplet.

Shakespearean or English sonnet: 

Shakespearean or English sonnet A B A B C D C D E F E F G G Wyatt kept an ABBA ABBA octave, but introduced the final rhymed couplet 7 rhyme sounds in 3 quatrains and a couplet Volta? Semi-volta? Formal division here (though Sidney avoids one)

Barbara Smith’s views (Poetic Closure): 

Barbara Smith’s views (Poetic Closure) English form pushes towards the epigram, the thing that doesn’t need to be said again. More analytical, intellectual, hard-edged? Problems with this form: loss of cantabile, danger that one of the quatrains will be restatement, padding. Couplet assumes life of its own, sometimes contradicting the main body of the sonnet.

Daniel and Watson strut their stuff: 

Daniel and Watson strut their stuff

Did Shakespeare know?: 

Did Shakespeare know?

Slide17: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Punctuation from Katherine Duncan-Jones’s edition – the Norton text is similar, using 1 sentence, lines 2-14.

Slide18: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Colin Burrows’ edition: punctuates with a stop at end of line 12

Petrarchan conceits (extended metaphors): 

Petrarchan conceits (extended metaphors) ‘Like an adventurous sea-voyager…’ ‘Like as a huntsman…’ ‘Like as a ship…’ ‘Like to the Indians scorched with the sun…’ Sidney writing sonnets critical of standard sonneteering: Astrophel and Stella, numbers 3, 6, 15, on standard comparisons and hyperboles.

John Donne on poetic suns: 

John Donne on poetic suns now your beauty shines, now when the sun Grown stale, is to so low a value run, That his disshevel’d beams and scattered fires Serve but for Ladies’ periwigs and tyres In lovers’ sonnets (John Donne, ‘To the Countess of Salisbury’ 1614)

Slide21: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (the comparison just might not do – not overtly because it is a cliché, but because it will prove inadequate) Sonnet 130: ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…’ (The Lady isn’t as brilliant, rose-smelling, or as musical as other poet’s ladies: but to the poet ‘as rare / As any she belied with false compare’)

Gerald Hammond, The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets (1981): 

Gerald Hammond, The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets (1981) ~ arguably prone to coercive readings; REDUCING the poems to ambiguity: “in the end, two kinds of poetry have been described: one idealises and immortalises the subject, the other tells the truth”

Quatrain 1: 

Quatrain 1 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Slide24: 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: Sometime: ‘from time to time’ OR ‘at some point, at last’

Slide25: 

But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, ‘traductio’

Slide26: 

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. My Ars longa Your Vita brevis

Temporal vocabulary: 

Temporal vocabulary ‘Summer’ (3 times), ‘May’, ‘sometime’ (twice), ‘nature’s changing course’, ‘eternal’ (twice), ‘fade’, ‘so long as … so long lives’ “Setting out to explain why the young man isn’t like a summer’s day, the sonnet ends up implying that he is, after all, exactly like a summer’s day: a transient beauty that needs an intervention from artifice to make it lasting” (RB)

Slide28: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. So long lives this, and this gives life to mee. Mechanical stress iambics here Tentative stress

Shakespeare in love?: 

Shakespeare in love?

Slide30: 

Randolph Trumbach on historical variations in male sexual behaviours: Sex and the Gender Revolution, 1998 Alistair Fowler on the Renaissance as an age when people were ‘categorized less by the deviation than the elevation of their sexuality’.

Slide31: 

The dear affection unto kindred sweet Or raging fire of love to womenkind Or zeal of friends combined with virtues meet… An ascending triad from Spenser, ‘The Faerie Queene’, 1596, IV ix, st 1.

Bruce Smith, Homosexual desire in Renaissance England: 

Bruce Smith, Homosexual desire in Renaissance England “In the sonnets, Shakespeare seeks to speak about homosexual desire with the same authority that Petrarch assumes in speaking about heterosexual desire” (Smith supports this by claiming that to do it, Shakespeare invokes three different modes of discourse: the Horatian erotic, courtly love, and the language of Christian marriage ~ forgetting that most of his discussion has focussed on Shakespeare’s self-undermining, authority-subverting puns)

Slide33: 

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Young Man (1525-6) ~ compare Shakespeare’s sonnet 77 about giving a note-book – or a text of the Sonnets themselves – to the young man Some ‘fair youths’ in Renaissance art

Slide34: 

Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Young Man, c.1525

Slide35: 

Sometimes I wish that I his pillow were, So might I steal a kiss, and yet not seene, So might I gaze upon his sleeping eyne, Although I did it with a panting feare: But when I well consider how vain my wish is,  Ah foolish Bees (think I) that doe not luck, His lips for honey; but poor flowers doe pluck Which have no sweet in them: when his sole kisses, Are able to revive a dying soul. Kiss him, but sting him not, for if you do, His angry voice your flying will pursue: But when they hear his tongue, what can control, Their back-return? for then they plain may see, How honey-combs from his lips dropping bee. Richard Barnfield writes a homoerotic sonnet, soppy style (Certain Sonnets, 1595)

Slide36: 

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, c1540

Slide37: 

17 year old Lodovico Capponi, by Bronzino, 1551

Slide38: 

George Pencz, Portrait of a Seated Youth, 1544

The Earl is a girl?: 

The Earl is a girl?

Sonnet 18 as an animated tribute to Scarlett Johansson: 

Sonnet 18 as an animated tribute to Scarlett Johansson http://www.vidangle.com/scarlett-johansson/shakespeares-18th-sonnet-vidangle-video/

Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd renders sonnet 18 in song: 

Dave Gilmour of Pink Floyd renders sonnet 18 in song http://ppkehl.multiply.com/music/item/110