http://www.ils.unc.edu/~beaud/inls181/index.html
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1564 Shakespeare born in Stratford-upon-Avon
Father is a local businessman
Attends local grammar school, no university education
1582 Shakespeare Married to Anne Hathaway
1583 Birth of daughter Susanna
The Queen's Company is formed in London
1585 Birth of twins, Judith and Hamnet
1587(?)-1592 Departure from Stratford
Establishment in London as an actor/playwright
1587 Mary Queen of Scots executed
1588 Defeat of the Armada
1590 Spenser's Faerie Queen (1-3)
1591 Sidney's Astrophil and Stella
1593 Preferment sought through aristocratic connections - dedicates
Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) to Henry
Wriothsley, Earl of Southampton - possibly the youth of the Sonnets
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Begins writing the Sonnets, probably completed by c.1597 or earlier
1594-1596 The Lyrical masterpieces; Prosperity and recognition as the
leading London playwright.
1596 Hamnet Shakespeare dies at age 11
1596 Spenser's Faerie Queen (4-6)
1597-1599 Artistic Maturity Purchases New Place, Stratford with other
significant investments
1599 The Globe Theater built on Bankside from the timbers of The
Theatre. Shakespeare is a shareholder and receives about 10% of the
profits
1603 Death of Elizabeth I; successor: James the First, son of Mary of
Scotland
1607 Susanna Shakespeare married Dr. John Hall
1608 Shakespeare's mother dies
1609 Publication of the Sonnets
1612-1616 Shakespeare probably retires from London life to Stratford
Judith Shakespeare married Thomas Quiney
March 1616 Shakespeare, apparently ill, revises his will
April 23, 1616 Shakespeare dies and is burried at Holy trinity Church,
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Stratford
„Rival“ Poets
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
William Shakespeare (1564 -1616)
John Donne (1572-1631)
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Work
38 plays
154 Sonnets
(written between 1592-1598; publ. 1609)
two long poems:
Venus and Adonis (1593)
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
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The Sonnet
Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet
English Sonnet
Spenserian Sonnet
Shakespearean Sonnet
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The Structure of Shakepeare‘s Sonnet Cycle
Sonnets 1-126 = "young man"
Sonnets 127-154 = "dark lady"
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Dedication
The printer's dedication at the start of the 1609 edition:
To the onlie begetter of
these insuing sonnets
Mr W. H. all happinesse
and that eternitie
promised
by
our ever-living Poet
wisheth
the well-wishing
adventurer in
setting
forth
T. T.
[= Thomas Thorpe]
[misprint for W.S. or William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke or Henry
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Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (W. H. reversed).]
I. The "young man" sonnets
sonnets 1-17: poet encourages the young man to marry and have
children.
Sonnets 18-42: variations on traditional love poetry
Sonnets 40-42: the young man has betrayed the poet
Sonnets 78-86: "rival poet"
Sonnets 110-111: young man resents the poet’s "public displays"
Sonnets 112-126: reconciliation
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II.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
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XVIII.
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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
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Who is the “young man”?
"his friend, Mr. W. H."
William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke?
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (W. H. reversed)?
Hamnet Shakespeare (his son)?
Earl of Essex?
Queen Elizabeth I?
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Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (1573–1624).
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton
Lord Burghley's Ward of Court
Shakespeare's patron
name alluded to in acronyms, e.g. “Hew”, or:
“Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting”
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First group of sonnets: the "Dark Lady“ or
"Vituperative Sonnets," Sonnets 127-154
"Dark Lady“: dark eyes, dark complexion, doubtful morals
Shakespeare's mistress?
betrays the poet
poet suffers from unrequited love and preaches against the dark lady
and love in general .
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Sonnet 130:
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
Æ Anti-Petrarchan tradition
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Blazon
representing a woman’s
beauty in the Petrarchan
tradition
more generally:
description in terms of a
normative taxonomy
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Who was the dark lady?
Mary Fitton
Emilia Lanier
Penelope Rich
Lucy Morgan
William Davenant's mother
the same woman who inspired the two
Rosaline's of Romeo and Juliet and Love's
Labour Lost ?
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XX.
A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,
Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure.
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The sexual allusions in Sonnet XX
„Whatever the logic of the argument, the speaker's mind runs to
bawdy puns, not just phallic double meanings such as "prick'd"
and "addition," but also "controlling," "acquainted," "nothing,"
and "treasure," all of which refer to the female genitalia. The
final couplet seems to invoke the financial imagery that is used in
many other poems-the speaker, as Kerrigan (201) notes, is asking
for the capital for himself ("Mine be thy love"), leaving the
interest ("thy love's use") to the women. Once the reader begins
to unpick such double and multiple senses, the elusiveness of
language becomes itself part of the argument, as the experience
of polysemy mimics the experience of androgyny (Arden, 1501)“. [Kay 1998: 124]
Cont. 22
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CXXVII.
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' brows are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
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Undefinable Gender borders: unifies the beauty
of Adonis and Helena
LIII.
What is your substance*, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows* on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade*,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend.
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new:
Speak of the spring and foison of the year;
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear;
And you in every blessed shape we know.
In all external grace you have some part,
But you like none, none you, for constant heart.
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Homosexuality
„Its legal codes and religious discourses Gould not accommodate
the vice they abhorred. The age was, to that extent, neither
sympathetic nor antagonistic towards inversion, but prehomosexual. As a consequence, one finds a curious lacuna in
most contemporary accounts. The popular and biblical
characterisations of the condition were so extreme that few
people inclined to homoeroticism felt able to imagine that their
own emotions and actions were of the kind condemned.“ (John
Kerrigan, 47)
„Plato's praise of love between men was in marked contrast to
the establishment of capital punishment as the penalty for
sodomy in 1533.“ (Kay 1998: 123)
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Gender Divisions
„At the core of some of the anxiety such issues aroused in a
few writers was the belief-or fear-that the self was
originally anatomically feminine and that the alarming
possibility of a return to it could not be altogether
discounted.
Laura Levine argues that many antitheatrical texts "exhibit
the fear that femininity is neither constructed nor a
superficial condition susceptible to giving way to a `real'
masculinity, but rather the underlying or default position
that masculinity is always in danger of slipping into.„
(Kay 1998: 121)
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Androgyny
Philip Stubbes, Anatomie of Abuses (1583): cross-dressing
produces "Hermaphroditi, that is, Monsters of both kindes,
half woman, half men,„
"to weare the Apparel of another sex, is to ... adulterate the
veritie of his owne kinde,"
after the plays, "every one bringes another homeward ... very
friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play
the Sodomits, or worse. And these be the fruits of Playes
and Interluds, for the most part" (Sig. F5v, L8v: cited in
Levine, 22; here Kay 1998: 122).
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CXXXVII.
Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
Be anchor'd in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes' falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world's common place?
Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferr'd.
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CXLIV.
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd [brunette] ill
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul [= ugly] pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, but not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel [man] in another's hell: [woman]
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
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Venus and Adonis Paolo Veronese
Ovid Metamorphoses (Book X)
We hear that Venus hunts a bit. She is accidentally grazed by
one of Cupid's arrows and falls in love with Adonis. Venus
warns Adonis of hunting, especially lions. But Adonis doesn't
listen and one day is gored in the groin by a wild boar. He dies
and turns into the anemone flower, which blooms early and
fades fast.
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Shakespeare Venus and Adonis (1592; publ.1593)
'Fair queen,' quoth he, 'if any love you owe me,
Measure my strangeness with my unripe years:
Before I know myself, seek not to know me;
No fisher but the ungrown fry forbears:
The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast,
Or being early pluck'd is sour to taste.
'Look, the world's comforter, with weary gait,
His day's hot task hath ended in the west;
The owl, night's herald, shrieks, ''Tis very late;'
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest,
And coal-black clouds that shadow heaven's light
Do summon us to part and bid good night.
'Now let me say 'Good night,' and so say you;
If you will say so, you shall have a kiss.'
'Good night,' quoth she, and, ere he says 'Adieu,'
The honey fee of parting tender'd is:
Her arms do lend his neck a sweet embrace;
Incorporate then they seem; face grows to face.
Till, breathless, he disjoin'd, and backward drew
The heavenly moisture, that sweet coral mouth,
Whose precious taste her thirsty lips well knew,
Whereon they surfeit, yet complain on drouth:
He with her plenty press'd, she faint with dearth
Their lips together glued, fall to the earth.
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Sources
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Boyce, Charles. Shakespeare A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Plays, His
Poems, His Life and Times, and More. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1990.
Cousins, A.D. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Narrative Poems. Harlow: Longman, 2000.
(41 HI 3540 LH 9107)
Dubrow, Heather. Echoes of Desire. English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses.
Ithaca and London 1995.
Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion. New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company,
1952.
Kay, Dennis. William Shakespeare. Sonnets and Poems. London: Twayne Publishers,
1998. (41 HI 3540 LH 4086)
Leishman, J.B. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. London 1961.
Lever, J.W. The Elizabethan Love Sonnet. London 1956.
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979. (41
HI 3540 FE 8838)
Wells, S. (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986. (Robert Ellrodt, “Shakespeare the non-dramatic
Poet” pp. 35-48.)
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