Riassunti letteratura inglese: Shakespeare - Sonnets

SHAKESPEARE

Philosophical way to investigate: philosophical kind of mind + flexible mind

Need to rely on the critical that lead to multiple interpretations. interpretation and not on translation

A poet and not only a playwriter his sonnets are very famous in English literature.

A sort of microcosm of what he does in his plays. He means to say something very complex in a few words. Romeo and Juliet, Sonnets also in his plays (ex. the beginning of in which he anticipates what is going to happen to the two lovers)

Some sonnets are difficult to read and understand: they're not reducible to a particular interpretation because poetry plays with multiple suggestions and meanings. Petrarchan sonnet

Origins of English sonnet: (octave and sestet=14 units), posing a problem – volta between the two sections – resolving a problem

This structure is always there even if it's not seen explicitly... but then introduced into English literature and so modified: 3 quatrains + a rhyming couplet

That ends the poem and use of the pentameter (play with stressed and unstressed syllables). Shakespeare plays with the rhythm (even if it seems to be on the background) and it gives a musical tone to the composition.

Sonnets: very common poetic writing and they tell a story. Astrophil and Stella Ex. by Philip Sidney: 1531, a popular circle of stories that tells his love for Penelope, but she's inaccessible because she's already married.

And then some people started writing stories of love and passions in series. 1592/1594: theatres were closed to prevent the spreading of the plague and S may have written now his poems because he's got no job at that moment he worked very hard (this is signalled by Two narrative poems on which Venus and Adonis Lucrece, the fact that there are only a few errors): and both dedicated to a man of Southampton, who lend him some money in this period.

Sonnets His were published by T. Ford in 1609: - 154 poems and some of them were already circulating before.

Disguise himself in the story and consequently it's difficult to consider everything obvious

However: one hint year (1609, his mother dies in 1608) and dedication (“To Mr W. H.”: he may be his patron, the heir of Southampton and his friend even though their social role (deeper and deeper and very warm feeling between them))

Procreation sonnets: all encourage the man to get married … but not out of love or to only satisfy his needs. He’s growing old and his beauty’s going to disappear, and his future children would be his only way to perpetuate his beauty. Duty of marriage in order to have children but then he changes idea: there’s another way to make his beauty last: his poetry, becoming a character in his poetry and being immortalised by words. (as it was for Romeo and Juliet)

REFLECTION ON ART

** Some critics tried to reconstruct the story. there are very little biographical basis to believe completely in that reconstruction

Man of Southampton: very

attractive man (portraits), bisexual, arrogant, aristocrat, in age of marriage for dynastic reasons but he didn’t want to. Shakespeare writes these poems to persuade him to get married and he does basically… but he falls in love with Southampton and at this point the poet starts saying that poetry can make his beauty immortal + conflict between Shakespeare (The Poet) and another arrival poet.

Dark lady arrives and Shakespeare is attracted by her, too! (consummated passion) light and dark][opposition Shakespeare feels disgusted for his own sexuality and feels guilty because he’s married (betrayal for Anne Hathaway) What happen? Relation between the fair youth and the dark lady and he feels betrayed too! No prove the man and the woman really existed and we do not have the need they really existed because they’re literary conventions [in love with someone he could never have – Petrarchan love – it’s a pose.]

Astrophil and Stella: Stella = stars / Astro = star

Phil = loveStar: The own name of the author. He started writing poetry only when the woman he loved married another man and become inaccessible for him. He needs a woman as a justification for his poetry (woman as a pretext). That's almost the same thing that happens to Shakespeare and the young man. Someone of your own sex was inaccessible and this love was punished by society. fair youth as a poetic convention necessary to the writing of some poetry!

Sonnets published in 1609: Why?- his mother died in 1608 and so his homosexuality could freely emerge (sexuality and different conception of sex among the society)- order imposed by Thomas Ford and didn't follow the chronological order of writing I

Who speaks?: we do not know whether it's Shakespeare or not but he shows us he's different mentalities and points of view because he enters the mind of his characters. try to explain what's

Try to reconstruct the story: simplify, but also happening and identify the

doesn’t respect unity of time

iambic pentameter,

Form of the sonnet: very common and easy to use,

maybe.

SONNET N° 12

Time

Shakespeare is interested in chronological time as a cause to other modality of the time (subjective modality) and so he ignores unity of time consciously

Time destroys everything, it kills us and makes us ugly and old because it destroys also beauty. Nothing can escape it.

1st part: the general effects of time

2nd part: the young man also is going to die and needs children

Formal properties: end-stopped lines (each line corresponds to a unity of meaning) and so, there’s no enjambment.

I do count: count the clock that tells the time (tick-tocks), but also count the ticks always in the same way (something scientifically regular) and counting to tell that time is passing.

time/passing: you’ll die and you need children to survive + attention on how S says this!

1st/2nd quatrains: lots of alliterations in so little time, expressing the concept of time

passing regularly (c, l, t, s, p) past-prime sable-silver green-girded

everything now decays and is cut down by time

Ex. Line 8: multiple alliteration to describe a crop on the field that in the end is cut down and taken away for the winter

Time's scythe: whatever violent that breaks our life

scythe: it's "falce" in Italian, and it's the emblem of death and of time in medieval iconography

funeral procession bear: (feretro) because the farmer is taking away the grass and the crops

3 quatrain: no alliteration

the poet's thinking now of one precise person: the young man

so he's not thinking of general death, but of the death of the person he loves

(Is he going to die? No, but after that he'll become something else, as Christianity says.)

It's a propaganda poem: the only thing you can do is to resist through procreating and having children

procreate is deliberate and conscious and doesn't refer to procreation as animals do.

b, r:

Alliterations Shakespeare's telling us something about nature (general truth) when then Structure based on and underline that everything is subjected to time Final couplet: resumes and seems to resolve the poem: the only possible solution is to reproduce Resume in the form of syllogism (Aristoteles's example: all men must die, Socrates is a man, Socrates must die) When... Then... And... : you're a particular example of what happens to everyone in the world, but there's a possible solution, in the last two lines. Man = mirror man is a narcissist S uses this narcissism to persuade the man to reproduce and to persuade the man that women exist only to produce children. SONNET N° 15 when... then... and... Same verbal markers Metaphorical image of life as teatro mundi, as a stage (something temporary that then goes away), influenced by the fact that he's an actor: the whole world is a stage Nature's growing: he's from a

farmer family and he's famous for his garden

imagery (inspired from his real garden) taken from his country life

something difficult to transform and something perfect only for awhile.

hold in: contain, be suspended = an ambiguous phrase, it means it contains beauty and it is contained by beauty.

Beauty is transcendent by God or anything superior: it's subjected to astral influence (as in Romeo and Juliet)

Men as plants: just as the plants grow and decay, so does human life that develops and then ends, because what destroys plants will destroy men.

cheered, checked: same things