Shakespeare's sonnets

[kev67]

I have been reading Shakespeare's sonnets. I have always had a problem with Shakespeare, like most people I expect, but I thought maybe I could get into him via his poems. I did like a couple of his sonnets. There was Let Me to the Marriage of True Minds, which I remember we did at school, and When in Disgrace in Fortune and Men's Eyes that Rufus Wainwright set to music (I like the version sung by Florence Welch). Thing is, I remember the meaning of of the first one because we did it in English class, and I was motivated to study the second one because I liked it as a song. As for the others, even though I understand most the words, I feel I'm missing the point. Perhaps I shouldn't be reading them ten at a time.

[Pompey Bum]

Hey, Kev. Listen, this question isn't motivated by anything but curiosity, but what problem is it you think most people have with Shakespeare?

[kev67]

Basically that they don't really understand it.

[Pompey Bum]

Do you mean they don't understand his language or they don't process his plays on a personal/intellectual level? If its the latter, I would suggest approaching the plays as poems themselves, and as an immersive sort of poetry at that. I suspect (having read your very insightful analyses of Victorian literature) that you are approaching the plays hyper rationally. You can do that with Shakespeare. There is much to analyze. But try approaching the language--the sound of the language--as a kind of music. Lately I've been listening to a recording of A Midsummer Night's Dream in before I go to sleep. I know the story of course, but what I listen to is the comical piping of the lovelorn teenagers and it's spooky echo in the fairies' banter--resolving itself by the end into this haunting, sensuous, Christo-pagan...I was going to say vision but you here it. Try knowing the play that way and then seeing (over time) what ideas come to you about Shakespeare's themes and ideas. But let them come to you. I'll leave the link for the version of A Midsummer Night's Dream I've been listening to, but you could do the same for most/all of his plays. Well, maybe not Titus Andronicus. :)

Here's the link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SRZ2SmmyMC4

[kev67]

I think it's more the language than the concepts that are difficult for most modern people. For example, the Let Me No to the Marriage of True Minds sonnet I was taught in class at school:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love [impediments, slightly unusual word]
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove. [what does this mean?]
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken; [tempests, slightly unusual word for storm]
It is the star to every wand'ring bark, [what's a bark]
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. [Why would they take the height of a star]
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come; [What does this mean? What does compass mean here? Why is the sickle bending?]
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd. [Writ presumably means wrote. Loved does not rhyme with proved]

It's a nice poem when you find out what it means. It strikes me as a suitable poem for second marriages. I think human minds can fill for odd words in speech they don't understand, but if there are too many, the message breaks down.

[Pompey Bum]

I know what you mean where the sonnets are concerned. They are less intuitive than the plays (or perhaps the plays simply provide more context). But other poetry is the same: it requires a process of decoding and ownership by the reader. Is Dylan Thomas any easier? Not to me. In Shakespeare's case, the intricacy of language is part of its beauty and the complexity of Shakespeare's thought part of his genius. But as I tried to say above, I prefer direct immersion in the poetry of the plays to plucking at the petals of the sonnets.

Here, I'll address your questions as best I can. If I miss something, maybe someone else can help.

Q. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove. [what does this mean?]

A. "Bends" and "alters" here mean the same thing: changes. So love is not love if it changes when it finds changes in a lover. That includes withdrawing (removing) one's love when one's beloved seems to withdraw his or hers (and so becomes "the remover").

Q. It is the star to every wand'ring bark, [what's a bark]

A. A bark is a ship. So love is a fixed point to (figuratively) storm-tossed lovers.

Q. Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. [Why would they take the height of a star]

A. To navigate the uncertain way--as with a sextant.

Q. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come; [What does this mean? What does compass mean here? Why is the sickle bending?]

A. The trick is to understand that the sickle belongs to Time, that is, to Chronos, a nasty Grim-Reaper-like figure. Youthful beauty comes within the sweep (compass) of his sickle: it fails with age. But real love is not beguiled by such transient things: it lasts "even to the edge of doom"--that is in old age as far as death. And the sickle is bending because sickles bend. It's just an epithet.

Q. I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd. [Writ presumably means wrote. Loved does not rhyme with proved]

A. It doesn't now but it did then.

This was fun. I'd be interested to hear other interpretations. Post more if you want.

[Danik 2016]

Nice reading, PB. It seems to me that the changeability of love is one of the themes of this play.
Elisabethan English is difficult anyway for us today, but in the shakesperian baroque wordplays is appears in its most complex form I think.

Kev, to get used to it one has to read, read, read, read Shakespeare until the language becomes familiar, for it is like learning a new language, even if one is native in modern English. And I would also start with the plays, as PB suggests because one usually knows the story and that helps considerably with the language.

If you don´t have the time to reread a play or a sonnet three, fouror five times I recommend the use of a good Shakesperian glossary/ dictionary. I found this one. I don´t know if it is good. I tested it with the word "bark", but didn´t find it.
https://archive.org/details/shakespearegloss00oniouoft/page/n3

Another thing that may help is occasionally to change the order of the words (exclusively for a better understanding) so that you get a prose sentence.
Compare: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds = "Let me not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds"

Admit impediments."

Of course the first example is the poetic one. But the second helps one to get at the meaning.

[Pompey Bum]

Thank you, Danik. The changability of young love/infatuation is certainly a theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream (if that's what you meant by "this play"). Cupid is described as incompetent, blind, or just mischevious. "Cupid is a knavish lad/Thus to make poor females mad", as the Puck says. It's just the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, in which puppy love is constant unto death. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is the anti-Romeo and Juliet in some ways. And for all its fantasy, it is (paradoxically) the more realistic of the two--at least about that kind of love.

It's interesting to me that neither one of you knew a bark was a ship. "Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest tossed" and all that. I don't think it's all that archaic a usage. Anyway, as Danik says, picking up the lingo just takes practice. And as someone or other said, the labor we delight in physics pain.

[Danik 2016]

Yes, that's exactly the play I mean (it's the one under discussion) and I think the word infatuation you used best describes this kind of love. I also agree that this play is much more realistic than Romeo and Juliet. The fairies are just there to make the truth more palatable und to provide wonderful staging scenarios, I guess ( though in Shakespeare's time one used the imagination more than actual scenery.
As for the word "bark", its meaning should have occurred to me because in Portuguese we have the word "barca", which is a larger kind of boat.

[Danik 2016]

Sorry! Double post

[kev67]

Thank you, Danik. The changability of young love/infatuation is certainly a theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream (if that's what you meant by "this play"). Cupid is described as incompetent, blind, or just mischevious. "Cupid is a knavish lad/Thus to make poor females mad", as the Puck says. It's just the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, in which puppy love is constant unto death. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is the anti-Romeo and Juliet in some ways. And for all its fantasy, it is (paradoxically) the more realistic of the two--at least about that kind of love.

It's interesting to me that neither one of you knew a bark was a ship. "Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest tossed" and all that. I don't think it's all that archaic a usage. Anyway, as Danik says, picking up the lingo just takes practice. And as someone or other said, the labor we delight in physics pain.

I did know a bark was a ship, but only because I remember it from English class 30 odd years ago. I used that sonnet because it was one of only two I actually understood properly. I am surprised Danik understands Shakespeare at all since English is not her first language.

[Pompey Bum]

Yes, that's exactly the play I mean (it's the one under discussion)

Okay, but just to be clear, the text Kev posted wasn't from A Midsummer Night's Dream.



The fairies are just there to make the truth more palatable und to provide wonderful staging scenarios, I guess ( though in Shakespeare's time one used the imagination more than actual scenery.

I think the fairies are (among other things) mirrors of the humans characters. There's a great old stage tradition of having the same actors who play Theseus and Hypolyta, former enemies now engaged, also play Oberon and Titania, now quarreling but harmoniously reunited when Theseus and Hippolyta marry at the end. And Oberon's attendant Philostrate sometimes also plays Puck. But I think the fairies mostly represent the beguiling sexual feelings that are driving the lovelorn teenagers. In fact, the whole play is more or less about adolescence. All run away to this haunted realm where they are pulled this way and that by forces they can't control. They emerge as mature and (given their comments during the internal play) somewhat less likable adults. That's a pretty good synopsis.

Lately I've been considering the theme of paradox in the play. Bottom and the mechanicals are always saying dumb things like "I see a voice!" or talking about how they are going to perform their play on Theseus and Hypolita's wedding day at night. After Bottom's trippy sexual adventure with Titania is over, there is a scene, usually played for laughs, which I think Shakespeare may have intended philosophically. Trying to make sense of his experience, Bottom confronts the problem of expressing the inexpressible:

"I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an *** if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom."

These are jokes, of course, but they have a certain Zen to them, too. What is the sound of one hand tasting? That is what Bottom is asking. What happens when the rules stop making sense? What happens to Bottom when the bottom drops out?

[Pompey Bum]

I did know a bark was a ship, but only because I remember it from English class 30 odd years ago.

Well, in that case, I'm sure Shakespeare's language will come back to you. Your bark is worse than your plight. :)

[JCamilo]

Yes, that's exactly the play I mean (it's the one under discussion) and I think the word infatuation you used best describes this kind of love. I also agree that this play is much more realistic than Romeo and Juliet. The fairies are just there to make the truth more palatable und to provide wonderful staging scenarios, I guess ( though in Shakespeare's time one used the imagination more than actual scenery.
As for the word "bark", its meaning should have occurred to me because in Portuguese we have the word "barca", which is a larger kind of boat.

Sure you should :D

Notice how the 3 words Kev singled are latin words, Tempest, impediment, bark, and should give us no problem at all. Unlike england, Shakespeare is not an island.

[Pompey Bum]

True, and a little classical flexibility with word order will help with the other issues Danik mentioned. Before Yoda the Romans that way talked.

[kev67]

Sure you should :D

Notice how the 3 words Kev singled are latin words, Tempest, impediment, bark, and should give us no problem at all. Unlike england, Shakespeare is not an island.

I expect I understood impediments and tempest when I was 14 or 15. I know I made a model kit of Hawker Tempest. I've never heard a boat referred to as a bark anywhere other than in this poem. The other word I'd have had trouble with is compass. To me a compass was either a navigation device, a device for drawing circles, or, more exotically, a device for estimating distances on sea charts back in the days of sail.I've never heard the word compass to mean sweep except in this poem. To fully understand Shakespeare, you have to learn a lot of vocabulary that is only used in Shakespeare.

Even when you know what all the words mean, it can be quite difficult to get what Shakespeare's driving at. You have to read an explanation of each poem or play to fully understand what they mean, at least most people would. That's why I suspect most British people at least have a problem with Shakespeare. We're constantly told he's our national playwright and our greatest ever writer, but most of us have a difficult time understanding his work.

[JCamilo]

Compass, another word from Latin.

Like Pompey said, Shakespeare wording follows poetic device he took from continental poets (no surprise, many of his themes too), so you must turn your ear to the french and italian poets once or while. He is certainly the english national writer, but for a good while it was Milton (this one more English, less european than Shakespeare, if we can say such thing). Many of the "national" writers are like this: Goethe was much less "german" than many of his peers, Borges a lot more european than Argie, Camões is heavily european with his petrachisms, Cervantes dialogue with italians was imense, etc. Mostly because they are often trying to deal not with the need to be a "national" poet, no such formula, but rather with the competition with other peers. Those who try hard to be "the guy" of the nation end stuck in time with that nation. I wonder how many outside the english world can dwell with Spencer Faerie Queen, which is a great effort, full of ingenous moments, good poetry and very interesting, but smells Elizabethan England far far away...

[Danik 2016]

I like your intelectual honesty, Kev, and your persistence with literary themes.

I think Shakespeare´s poetic language is purposely elaborate. It is not easily to access, maybe because the elaborate images and wordplays hide truths that are not so easy to swallow. For example, as we discussed above A Midsummer´s Dreams presents love stories, that, with some help of the faries, all end well. But in fact, to use the word "infatuation" PB used, it is a play that shows how easily love change its object.

I guess for the no fairies and eye drops would be necessary for the youths of today to understand that. In Portuguese we have the word "ficar"(to stay) and also "ficante"(the stayer) to designate a uncompromising love relationship.

I think Shakespeare and other contemporaries, like Cervantes for example, had to face a new vision of the world, where man and not more religion like in the middle-ages occupies the center of the stage. For man this is an unsettling experience, he doesn´t trust his own senses any more, he has lost his solid references, his feet have been pushed off the ground. One represents life indirectly, madness and dreams become grand themes in this period.
So I think the language used to express all this is also an indirect language which plays hide and seek with its readers, which veils and reveals at the same time. Every methapher has to be examined and understood, also every turn of the phrase/or the verse. But if one has the time and the patience to do it one will gain a lot of insight by it.

[Danik 2016]

Sure you should :D

Notice how the 3 words Kev singled are latin words, Tempest, impediment, bark, and should give us no problem at all. Unlike england, Shakespeare is not an island.

Yes, and "barco" and "barcaça" and so on. But I probably was looking for the English associations to "bark".

[Pompey Bum]

I've never heard a boat referred to as a bark anywhere other than in this poem.

You have if you've read Macbeth:

First Witch:
A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch'd, and munch'd, and munch'd:--
'Give me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

Second Witch
I'll give thee a wind.

First Witch
Thou'rt kind.

Third Witch
And I another.

First Witch
I myself have all the other.
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I' the shipman's card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.

This is an example of what I was trying to say above. If you immerse yourself in a play (where you have context on your side) you get the vocabulary without even trying. I know most of the witches lines by heart. How? I don't know. They're just kind of cool and I've heard them a million times. So when I read the Sonnets (which I don't know nearly as well), I already have an intuitive grasp of their language. Read the plays. Know the plays. Love the plays. Then try the hard stuff.

Your problem with bark, by the way, is probably only a matter of spelling. There is still a kind of ship called a barque. Do the English really not know what a barque is anymore? Drake must be turning over in his watery grave. :)


The other word I'd have had trouble with is compass. To me a compass was either a navigation device, a device for drawing circles, or, more exotically, a device for estimating distances on sea charts back in the days of sail.I've never heard the word compass to mean sweep except in this poem.

See, you know what it means. It's not sweep like a broom sweeps, it's the sweep of a sickle and all it encompasses. That's what circles do, right? They encompass an area on a plain. That's why the drawing tool is called a compass. Time's sickle compasses youthful beauty but not true love. You don't need a dictionary to tell you what that means. You just need to think like an Elizabethan poet.


Even when you know what all the words mean, it can be quite difficult to get what Shakespeare's driving at. You have to read an explanation of each poem or play to fully understand what they mean, at least most people would. That's why I suspect most British people at least have a problem with Shakespeare. We're constantly told he's our national playwright and our greatest ever writer, but most of us have a difficult time understanding his work.

Well, no one knows the Victorians like you do, Kev. Maybe Shakespeare's not your thing. I hope I'm wrong for your sake. There is just so much there for a reader like you. But hey, Joyce is SO not my thing, and I'm from the Irish colony of Boston. :) Still I cannot imagine the English people as a whole not having a better sense of Shakespearean language and thought than I do. As Hermia says (or was it Helena?): "I am amazed and know not what to say."

[Danik 2016]

I did know a bark was a ship, but only because I remember it from English class 30 odd years ago. I used that sonnet because it was one of only two I actually understood properly. I am surprised Danik understands Shakespeare at all since English is not her first language.
Kev, my relationship with Shakespeare is a very curious one. I first read him in German, because my father had the famous translation of Schlegel and Tieck. The effect of this translation on the German reader was that Shakespeare became a classic of the Germans too with an obligatory place in the bookcase besides Goethe and the other classics. The effect on me was, that I was a bit disappointed, when I finally was in condition to read the original.

[Danik 2016]

Okay, but just to be clear, the text Kev posted wasn't from A Midsummer Night's Dream.




I think the fairies are (among other things) mirrors of the humans characters. There's a great old stage tradition of having the same a

Lately I've been considering the theme of paradox in the play. Bottom and the mechanicals are always saying dumb things like "I see a voice!" or talking about how they are going to perform their play on Theseus and Hypolita's wedding day at night. After Bottom's trippy sexual adventure with Titania is over, there is a scene, usually played for laughs, which I think Shakespeare may have intended philosophically. Trying to make sense of his experience, Bottom confronts the problem of expressing the inexpressible:

"I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an *** if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom."

These are jokes, of course, but they have a certain Zen to them, too. What is the sound of one hand tasting? That is what Bottom is asking. What happens when the rules stop making sense? What happens to Bottom when the bottom drops out?

Without wanting to make a pun, but not discarding it either, I think there you went to the bottom of the matter. Shakespeare so very often puts his favorite truths in the mouths of the fools and the lunatics. I only would not use the word Zen, which to me suggests serenity, although I think I understand what you mean. But for Bottom it is an unsettling experience and he is in a hurry to transform it in something more familiar, a ballad, which is again a parody of the play.

[kev67]

You have if you've read Macbeth:

First Witch:
A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,
And munch'd, and munch'd, and munch'd:--
'Give me,' quoth I:
'Aroint thee, witch!' the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:
But in a sieve I'll thither sail,
And, like a rat without a tail,
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

Second Witch
I'll give thee a wind.

First Witch
Thou'rt kind.

Third Witch
And I another.

First Witch
I myself have all the other.
And the very ports they blow,
All the quarters that they know
I' the shipman's card.
I will drain him dry as hay:
Sleep shall neither night nor day
Hang upon his pent-house lid;
He shall live a man forbid:
Weary se'nnights nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine:
Though his bark cannot be lost,
Yet it shall be tempest-tost.

This is an example of what I was trying to say above. If you immerse yourself in a play (where you have context on your side) you get the vocabulary without even trying. I know most of the witches lines by heart. How? I don't know. They're just kind of cool and I've heard them a million times. So when I read the Sonnets (which I don't know nearly as well), I already have an intuitive grasp of their language. Read the plays. Know the plays. Love the plays. Then try the hard stuff.

Your problem with bark, by the way, is probably only a matter of spelling. There is still a kind of ship called a barque. Do the English really not know what a barque is anymore? Drake must be turning over in his watery grave. :)


True, I have read 'bark' in Macbeth, only I think I misunderstood its meaning as 'life'. Macbeth was the Shakespeare play I studied for my English O level exam. I got a C, which actually wasn't bad for back then. I can still remember the opening lines of that play. I can't remember coming across the word barque, and I have read all the Captain Aubrey/Maturin books, Moby Dick, The Sea Wolf, Lord Jim, Robinson Crusoe and one Horatio Hornblower book. The spelling 'bark' makes it look more a Germanic word than old French. No doubt that's where the word embark derives from.

[kev67]

Kev, my relationship with Shakespeare is a very curious one. I first read him in German, because my father had the famous translation of Schlegel and Tieck. The effect of this translation on the German reader was that Shakespeare became a classic of the Germans too with an obligatory place in the bookcase besides Goethe and the other classics. The effect on me was, that I was a bit disappointed, when I finally was in condition to read the original.

Disappointed with the translation or disappointed with the original?

[Danik 2016]

With the original. Probably because I understood the translation better.

[Pompey Bum]

Without wanting to make a pun, but not discarding it either, I think there you went to the bottom of the matter. Shakespeare so very often puts his favorite truths in the mouths of the fools and the lunatics. I only would not use the word Zen, which to me suggests serenity, although I think I understand what you mean. But for Bottom it is an unsettling experience and he is in a hurry to transform it in something more familiar, a ballad, which is again a parody of the play.

Ah, pun proudly, Danik. :)

What I meant by Zen was a riddle in which one contemplates irreconcilable conditions. When the known breaks down, one is subject to the power of the unknown (which is what the fairy wood is all about). Shakespeare may be hinting at mysticism (or even occultism), but I think he's also anticipating something like Kant's epistemology. At least Bottom experiences something of the kind when he finds himself unable to speak about what is real. I think the ballad Bottom wants Peter Quince to write, Bottom's Dream, is Shakespeare's assertion that art/drama can at least try to cross the line. The ballad may even refer to A Midsummer Night's Dream itself; especially if Peter Quince is taken as Shakespeare's own self-parody with Bottom & Co. the various actors he has to endure. The play within a play seems like an excercize in self-parody as well.

[Pompey Bum]

True, I have read 'bark' in Macbeth, only I think I misunderstood its meaning as 'life'. Macbeth was the Shakespeare play I studied for my English O level exam. I got a C, which actually wasn't bad for back then. I can still remember the opening lines of that play. I can't remember coming across the word barque, and I have read all the Captain Aubrey/Maturin books, Moby Dick, The Sea Wolf, Lord Jim, Robinson Crusoe and one Horatio Hornblower book. The spelling 'bark' makes it look more a Germanic word than old French. No doubt that's where the word embark derives from.

Oh, frigate! I mean, what the hull? Let's go back to talking about the ferries.

[kev67]

Regarding the average Briton's understanding of Shakespeare, I think I heard on the radio that people used to understand him better because they were used to reading the King James Bible. Not sure how true that is. Britons have not been particularly church-going for a very long time. I often wonder why there are so many churches here. Now if we read a bible at all, it's more likely to be a Good News Bible or one of the many other modern English bibles.

I read an interesting bit in a war memoir called Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, in which the writer says his sergeant borrowed his copy of one of the Henrys. He returned it a couple days later, having read it and enjoyed it. He thought Shakespeare must have been a soldier by the way he portrayed the soldiers in the play. Fraser said it was fascinating, because the sergeant would have left school at fifteen with a pretty basic education. He assumed his reading would be limited to The Racing Post.

[Pompey Bum]

Regarding the average Briton's understanding of Shakespeare, I think I heard on the radio that people used to understand him better because they were used to reading the King James Bible. Not sure how true that is. Britons have not been particularly church-going for a very long time. I often wonder why there are so many churches here. Now if we read a bible at all, it's more likely to be a Good News Bible or one of the many other modern English bibles.

Ah, the Good News Bible. Yes, no wonder you're not religious anymore.

Anyway, the suggestion about the King James Bible is an interesting one, but I suspect that is only part of the problem. The abandonment of western humanities and philology has led to little dark age. Western literature may or may not survive the authoritarian wrath to come. But I editorialize. For now I will merely observe that Biblical illiteracy is the gift that keeps on giving. The Good News Bible begat No Fear Shakespeare dumbdowns, which continue to beget fear of Fielding, Thackeray, Dickens, etc. etc. etc. On the bright side, the radical devaluation of literature in our times means that the great authors (including Shakespeare) can now be acquired for free. I was an unhappy man until my wife taught me the Tao of the cheapskate.

[Danik 2016]

Ah, pun proudly, Danik. :)

What I meant by Zen was a riddle in which one contemplates irreconcilable conditions. When the known breaks down, one is subject to the power of the unknown (which is what the fairy wood is all about). Shakespeare may be hinting at mysticism (or even occultism), but I think he's also anticipating something like Kant's epistemology. At least Bottom experiences something of the kind when he finds himself unable to speak about what is real. The ballad, I think, is Shakespeare's assertion that art/drama can at least try to cross the line. And the ballad Bottom wants Peter Quince to write, Bottom's Dream, seems to me to have more than a little to do with A Midsummer Night's Dream; especially if Peter Quince is taken as a Shakespeare's own self-parody with Bottom & Co. the vain and foolish various actors he has to endure. The play within a play seems like an excercize in self-parody as well.
Yes, I see it's another conception of Zen.
Peter Qince is a self-parody of Shakespeare himself ,yes. And the part of Pyramus and Thisbe is one of the most funniest things Shakespeare' has ever written.
But Oberon's generosity with the young lovers takes the attention away from his cruelty to his wife.

[Pompey Bum]

Yes, I see it's another conception of Zen.
Peter Qince is a self-parody of Shakespeare himself ,yes. And the part of Pyramus and Thisbe is one of the most funniest things Shakespeare' has ever written.
But Oberon's generosity with the young lovers takes the attention away from his cruelty to his wife.

Yes, Pyramus and Thisbe is hilarious.

But about Oberon's supposed cruelty: in my opinion, Titania's jokey humiliation with Bottom (which is Oberon's doing) is no more cruel than the more politically acceptable (in these days) jokey humiliation of Malvolio the Puritan in Twelfth Night or the politically neutral (but humiliating) practical joke Prince Hal pulls on Falstaff in Henry IV part one. Falstaff takes it in sport, and although I am a Protestant, I think the scene with Malvolio is funny. I respect your opinion, Danik, but if you will listen to an alternative one, mine is that it is possible to be a bit too much like Malvolio in applying our own standards to harmless fun like A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Now, that said, the rough treatment Titania (and queens in general) receive in the play is real and rather interesting. There is a view that it may have been political in its own times. A Midsummer Night's Dream was written when Queen Elizabeth was getting older but would neither marry nor name an heir. This was troubling to many at the time; the lack of an heir could have led to civil war on Elizabeth's death. Some were also troubled by the "faerie queen" cult of personality Elizabeth seemed to be building around herself. They saw it as proudly feminine (in a bad way) and ultimately unnatural and likely to end badly.

Now, some feminist scholars will tell you (correctly, I think) that one of the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream is that queens need to be governed by kings. This is why Theseus is engaged to Hypolyta, who is the queen of the Amazons--fierce women warriors devoted to chastity. But Hypolyta is even more than that. Until recently she has been Theseus' mortal enemy (as Elizabeth was with many princes who sought her hand). This has to be put to right through marriage.

Note also that nature itself is becoming corrupt because of Titania and Oberon's estrangement:

Titania
These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which:
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

Damn, that's beautiful.

Anyway, per Shakespeare, the solution to the malady of the times is for the fairy queen (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) to put away her feminine pride and accept her husband in accordance with nature. If not, nature itself--and Oberon is a force of nature--will show her up for the fool she is being. In fact, I wonder if on some level Bottom is a kind of satire on the braying courtiers and lyric poets who played up to Elizabeth's love fantasies--she who should be a queen with a king for a husband instead dallies with *sses.

[kev67]

Picked a sonnet at random (used my stopwatch), which was 138, which I have not studied before. So what does any of it mean, and is it any good?

SONNET 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor'd youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress'd.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter'd be

[Actually, I reckon I understand this one]

[Pompey Bum]

[Actually, I reckon I understand this one]

Good, because it is your turn. :)

[Pompey Bum]

Good, because it is your turn. :)

Or not. Anyone else want to try?

[Ecurb]

Perhaps Fleetwood Mac was familiar with this sonnet when they sang, "Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies..."

[Pompey Bum]

Perhaps Fleetwood Mac was familiar with this sonnet when they sang, "Tell me lies
Tell me sweet little lies..."

Possibly. He doesn't seem to be at the "damn your love, damn your lies" point just yet.

The second to last line is hilarious with its pun on lie as an untruth and lie as sexual intercourse. The whole poem is funny in a bittersweet way. It's quite moving, really.

[kev67]

I have been trying to remember the name of that old billionaire who married a young porn star. Well she looked like a porn star, but maybe she wasn't.

[Pompey Bum]

Donald Trump.

[kev67]

He wasn't the one I was thinking of. There was an old business mogul who looked like the elder of Benny Hill's dirty old man cronies. The small one with the bald head. This business mogul married a vapid, but buxom blonde. She used to spend fortunes in department stores. If she was faithful, that would have been a surprise. If she wasn't planning of what she'd do with the money after he died, that would have been a surprise too. Neither could have been so stupid not to realise that she was mostly interested in his money and he was mostly interested in her body, and that that was the way the public perceived them. They were still happy with the arrangement.

[Ecurb]

Anna Nicole Smith. The couple had 14 blissful months before Anna's husband died, and she inherited $400 mil, or something like that.

[Pompey Bum]

And back in the day there was Charo (of the coochi-coochi schtick) who was married to the goaty old bandleader Xaviar Cugat. But, you know, like Beauty and the Beast, it's a song as old as time.

Obviously though Shakespeare is talking about something slightly different. Here neither lover is a prize, or at least both are too old and worldly (in a bad way) for love to be a sweet or faithful thing. But both take consolation in mutually recognized lies to the contrary. However false, says Shakespeare, the illusion of a better intimacy is one of love's best tricks.

The poem's sophisticated, candid tone reminds me of Catullus. Its structure (not its form, which is obviously a sonnet) reminds me of Martial (who was highly influenced by Catullus). Martial would introduce an irony or contradiction (sometimes a shocking one), ask how it could be, and respond with an urbane, often cynical resolution. I think Shakespeare knew both of these Latin poets.

[kev67]

You have if you've read Macbeth:

Well, no one knows the Victorians like you do, Kev. Maybe Shakespeare's not your thing. I hope I'm wrong for your sake. There is just so much there for a reader like you. But hey, Joyce is SO not my thing, and I'm from the Irish colony of Boston. :) Still I cannot imagine the English people as a whole not having a better sense of Shakespearean language and thought than I do. As Hermia says (or was it Helena?): "I am amazed and know not what to say."

You're from Boston then. Did you go to see The Pixies and The Throwing Muses in your youth? If not, why not? I am thinking of reading Ullyses, but I think I'll keep it for next year's homework.

[Pompey Bum]

You're from Boston then. Did you go to see The Pixies and The Throwing Muses in your youth? If not, why not? I am thinking of reading Ullyses, but I think I'll keep it for next year's homework.

I'm pretty sure someone dragged me out to see the Throwing Muses at the old Paradise back in the day, but I think they were a Rhode Island band. I remember them around in any case. The Pixies were a little later (I left town in the mid-eighties). There was an avant-gard-ish Boston band in the early 80s called Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. They were like the Throwing Muses but more but instrumental. I think I saw them, too. But in those days (regrettably) it was more about the sex and drugs than the rock and roll. Music was just for the vibe. Tis gone, tis gone.

[kev67]

Try another pseudo-randomly selected sonnet: 52.
What does any of this mean?


So am I as the rich whose blessèd key
Can bring him to his sweet up-lockèd treasure,
The which he will not every hour survey,
For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.
Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,
Since seldom coming in the long year set,
Like stones of worth they thinly placèd are,
Or captain jewels in the carcanet.
So is the time that keeps you as my chest,
Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,
To make some special instant special blest
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride.
  Blessèd are you whose worthiness gives scope,
  Being had, to triumph; being lacked, to hope.

[Pompey Bum]

Okay, I guess I go first. The speaker of the sonnet is a participant in a discreet, possibly illicit sexual affair: one that is rarely consummated but all the more pleasureful for that reason. So he's a rich miser who seldom wields the ol' key (nudge nudge, wink wink) to unlock his hoarded treasure. The other metaphors are about things that are value because of their relative rarity (jewels, holidays) or things that are kept concealed (almost imprisoned) in--a wardrobe, a chest. The closing couplet means something like: well, I can't have you as often as I like, but just desiring you is part of it.

I don't like this sonnet very much. It has a sort of B&D quality to it--keys, chests, locked rooms. I think a carcanet is something like a jeweled choker, so that's creepy, too. And it's all about lust as far as I can tell: I keep you locked up because it's more pleasureful for me that way. Not my bag, baby, as we used to say.

Anyone know what "captain jewels" are?

[kev67]

It sounds like it's about illicit, probably gay, sex. I have read that the first 120 sonnets were addressed to a fair youth and the other 20 odd to a dark lady. I would have to take that on trust. IIRC, the more romantic or risque poems in the first 120 poems do not mention the gender of the subject. However the subject of other sonnets in the sequence is male. In some of the early ones, Shakespeare recommends his friend to father some children in order to reproduce himself, which sounds both gay and not gay.

[Pompey Bum]

Yes, some are homoerotic and some aren't. The fair youth poems weren't necessarily all written about the same relationship (or the same kind of love/friendship). "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" (which in my youth was--rather hilariously--a popular one for giving to girls on Valentine's Day) may actually be about someone who dies--possibly Shakespeare's son. Or maybe it's another homoerotic poem for the fair youth. The intensity of the feeling makes it hard to tell.

I think there was supposed to be a third persona, too.

[stanley2]

Well, in Sonnet 80 we find both "bark" and the rival poet that we are told is in there somewhere. In 134,135 and 136 one finds that Shakespeare may have had in mind more than one meaning in a single word. In 126 we find personified Time(again) and Nature. P.B.'s comment regarding the second to last line of 138 is interesting as we find the same double meaning again in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.: "For that same scrubbed boy, the Doctor's clerk, / In lieu of this[showing Gratiano the ring] last night did lie with me"(MV5.1.261-2). If, as some say, the "lovely boy" was the noble patron of the arts who helped support Shakespeare's work, one might interpret 52 also quite literally: The financial support was a serious matter. As we find a horse in Sonnets 50 and 51, we might also suggest that 52 is a fantasy composed during the long trip to Stratford. "Now will he sit under a medlar tree, / And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit...…….."

[Pompey Bum]

Well, in Sonnet 80 we find both "bark" and the rival poet that we are told is in there somewhere. In 134,135 and 136 one finds that Shakespeare may have had in mind more than one meaning in a single word. In 126 we find personified Time(again) and Nature. P.B.'s comment regarding the second to last line of 138 is interesting as we find the same double meaning again in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.: "For that same scrubbed boy, the Doctor's clerk, / In lieu of this[showing Gratiano the ring] last night did lie with me"(MV5.1.261-2). If, as some say, the "lovely boy" was the noble patron of the arts who helped support Shakespeare's work, one might interpret 52 also quite literally: The financial support was a serious matter. As we find a horse in Sonnets 50 and 51, we might also suggest that 52 is a fantasy composed during the long trip to Stratford. "Now will he sit under a medlar tree, / And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit...…….."

Thank you, Stanley, for these references, which have given me an excellent morning's read.

Sonnet 80

O! how I faint when I of you do write,
Knowing a better spirit doth use your name,
And in the praise thereof spends all his might,
To make me tongue-tied speaking of your fame.
But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark, inferior far to his,
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride;
Or, being wracked, I am a worthless boat,
He of tall building, and of goodly pride:
Then if he thrive and I be cast away,
The worst was this, my love was my decay.

I understand most of this one. The speaker is flattering his patron, who has been favoring another poet and may transfer his support to the rival. He (the speaker) is being excessively modest, but there is a degree of irony in:

Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride;

On the face of it, this sounds like more modesty--I'm shallow, but my rival, he's deep. But it could also be read as: I don't take much from you as a client (I can live for less, or maybe I control a degree of my own means), but my rival is going to require a bottomless ocean of your wealth to support.

That's clever and amusing, but I'm not sure about the couplet:

Then if he thrive and I be cast away,
The worst was this, my love was my decay.

This could imply a number of things. If I'm correct about the irony, then it could be a way of saying: if you choose him over me, the hardest part will be knowing that I loved you enough to warn you. But if this is Shakespeare talking to the fair youth, it could mean something like: I would know I lost my patron because I "loved not wisely but too well." Or it could mean both--or something else.

I loved Sonnet 50 (about the horse), by the way, but I want to think about the others before I comment more.

[stanley2]

And perhaps 87 was written on the way back to London. Professor Parrott recommended memorizing a few Sonnets, something I've yet to do(too hard). After reading 135, anytime the word "will" occurs in a play recalls the sonnet. So, in the court scene in MV Antonio's speech that begins "I pray you, think you question," ends with "Let me have judgement, and the Jew his will." This and sonnet 42 invite one to compare Antonio, Leah and Shylock with "our poet," the "lovely boy" and the mistress(see my "Brief" thread under MV).

[Pompey Bum]

Sonnet 50

How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,
'Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!'
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider lov'd not speed being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.

This is the "horse poem" I mentioned liking before. It's self-explanatory, I think. Things get especially interesting in lines 7-12 when Shakespeare draws parallels (sad but also bitterly comical in a way) between himself and his horse. The bloody spur is thrust into the horse's hide in anger, but the anger's object is more likely the poet than his friend (much less his poor horse). In short, the poet acknowledges that he is torturing himself. The pain he feels at his horse's groan is not humane sentiment. He merely recognizes the echo of his inner anguish.

The last line of the couplet sounds like a reversed version of Kent's (seeming) farewell to Lear at the end of the first act.

Fare thee well, king, sith thus thou wilt appear,
Freedom lives hence and banishment is here.

[stanley2]

In due course, there is a nice horse poem by Robert Frost. It's more than a little interesting to compare 52 and 87. In the first line of 52, we also might note the word "key." In MV, Morocco and Aragon ask for a "key" when choosing among the three caskets, while Bassanio says only "And here choose I"(3.2.107).

[JCamilo]

Yes, some are homoerotic and some aren't. The fair youth poems weren't necessarily all written about the same relationship (or the same kind of love/friendship). "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" (which in my youth was--rather hilariously--a popular one for giving to girls on Valentine's Day) may actually be about someone who dies--possibly Shakespeare's son. Or maybe it's another homoerotic poem for the fair youth. The intensity of the feeling makes it hard to tell.

I think there was supposed to be a third persona, too.

That brings me to memory, a long ago, I saw a guy reciting to a girl a poem in french. The girl in clouds and all. The thing, it was Baudelaire La Muse Malade...

[stanley2]

"Marry well remembered, / I reasoned with a Frenchman yesterday"(MV2.8.26-7). "Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth / than those old nine which rimers invocate"(Sonnet 38). Or, Shakespeare plainly seconds your suggestion regarding French and Italian poets.

[kev67]

Going back to the subject of the word 'bark' for a moment, I have noticed it once or twice in The Count of Monte Cristo. The publisher of my copy is Barnes and Noble. I wonder if 'bark' is a word that survived in American English, but not British English.

[Danik 2016]

Kev

Most on line dictionaries don´t mention "bark" as a ship at all. One exeption I found is Merrian-Webster (noun3), I don´t remember though if it is from UK or US.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bark

[Pompey Bum]

That brings me to memory, a long ago, I saw a guy reciting to a girl a poem in french. The girl in clouds and all. The thing, it was Baudelaire La Muse Malade...

Well, people use art as they find meaningful. It's like in our old Melville thread when one or two LitNetters really needed Moby Dick to be an environmentalist revenge fantasy. Okay, you could build meaning from that--even if the author didn't. GO GET 'EM, MOBY!

[Pompey Bum]

In due course, there is a nice horse poem by Robert Frost.

I was thinking of the same poem, although obviously the themes are very different. Frost was talking about transcendental apprehension of the absent God. Shakespeare sounds more like he'd just had a nasty breakup.


Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

[Pompey Bum]

I wonder if 'bark' is a word that survived in American English, but not British English.


It's an interesting suggestion but I am not finding it born out. I just did word searches on bark for Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick (our two best stories afloat). Bark as watercraft did not appear in either. Melville loves the word embark but that's as far as he takes it. Twain is usually talking about hickory bark and sometimes about dogs woofing. You may want to check Walt Whitman's poetry.

[stanley2]

I think Professor Shapiro reminded us that in Huck Finn there are two clownish characters who quote(or misquote) Shakespeare. I recall on TV the memorial service for a Supreme Court justice where the speaker recited the "goodnight sweet prince" line. Therefore, Shakespeare is to some extent part of American English. The word "bark" is also found in Romeo and Juliet(Capulet, 3.5 and Romeo, 5.3).

[Pompey Bum]

I'm getting really tired of being let down by LitNet technology.

[Pompey Bum]

Okay, let's try that again.


I think Professor Shapiro reminded us that in Huck Finn there are two clownish characters who quote(or misquote) Shakespeare. I recall on TV the memorial service for a Supreme Court justice where the speaker recited the "goodnight sweet prince" line. Therefore, Shakespeare is to some extent part of American English. The word "bark" is also found in Romeo and Juliet(Capulet, 3.5 and Romeo, 5.3).[/I think Professor Shapiro reminded us that in Huck Finn there are two clownish characters who quote(or misquote) Shakespeare.

Here is Twain's answer to Shakespeare. It's pretty funny.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There’s the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The law’s delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage,
Is sicklied o’er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o’er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery—go!


I recall on TV the memorial service for a Supreme Court justice where the speaker recited the "goodnight sweet prince" line. Therefore, Shakespeare is to some extent part of American English.

And there was Henry Kissinger's eulogy at Nixon's funeral: "He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again." Everybody wants to get into the act. I remember Philip Roth losing his offal over that in one of his books.

[QUOTE=stanley2;1365615]The word "bark" is also found in Romeo and Juliet(Capulet, 3.5 and Romeo, 5.3).

It's in The Tempes, too.

Well demanded, wench:
My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,
So dear the love my people bore me, nor set
A mark so bloody on the business, but
With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sigh
To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.

[stanley2]

Thanks, Pompey Bum. I've not read Huck Finn in a while. Twain may have been inspired, in part, by the First Quarto version of the "To be" speech. I guess he was also responding to the subject of this thread. Therefore, is "waste" a pun on "waist" in HAMLET, Act 2, scene 2 line 231 or so? I'm also reminded of Tom Stoppard's, I don't have it in front of me," We are dealing with a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style."

[stanley2]

And the New York Yankees played the Boston Red Sox in London last weekend. So, as Twain's piece seems to be all HAMLET and MACBETH except the second to the last line(Romeo's "Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open"(ROM5.3.47 or so), one might recall the comedy bit SHAKESPEAREAN BASEBALL from the 1950's. It is broadcast regularly by Chicago radio station WFMT(once a year, anyway). They tell us that there are two sonnets within R&J.

[Pompey Bum]

"And all the clouds that lowered o’er our house[tops]" is easy to miss, but of course it is (mostly) from Richard III. The Duke says housetops instead of house because he is an ignoramus and a fraud. He and the King are small time grifters who fall in with Huck and Jim for a while They turn out to be dirty rats indeed, but the Shakespearean soliloquy comes earlier on when it looks like they may be nothing more than fops. I don't know the Shakespearean Baseball routine you mention, but it sounds clever.

[stanley2]

Holy cow! A Shakespearean Weather Report(P.B. noted that Twain referred to the first lines of R3). Twain, then, may have also had in mind "The devil can site Scripture for his purpose"(MV1.3.96 or so), and the subject of this thread: The 1964 Signet edition reads "loured" rather than " lowered." "Grim-visaged War hath smoothed his wrinkled front" is not out in left field, yet what season is it? The introduction to R3 in the Signet edition reads: "RICHARD III is above all a play for the stage. It was Shakespeare's first great success." I haven't read the play. I suppose I could fetch the BBC video from a library.

[Pompey Bum]

Yes, of course, lour'd. I'm as bad as the Duke. The poetry in Richard III is gorgeous to read or listen to. It was the first Shakespeare play I read as a college student. I still remember the odd beauty of the verses that won me over, thick-headed Phillistine though I was.

Lord, Lord! methought, what pain it was to drown!
What dreadful noise of waters in mine ears!
What ugly sights of death within mine eyes!
Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks;
Ten thousand men that fishes gnaw'd upon;
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scatter'd in the bottom of the sea:
Some lay in dead men's skulls; and, in those holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept,
As 'twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems,
Which woo'd the slimy bottom of the deep,
And mock'd the dead bones that lay scatter'd by.

[stanley2]

A quote from Professor Bate is in order: "As Shakespeare stitched together multiple sources to make his plays, so the collection called Shakespeare's Sonnets stitches together multiple poems with very different origins and styles to make a single narrative. But this narrative should no more be read back literally into Shakespeare's life than should the narrative of that other lovely boy, Viola/Cesario."

[Pompey Bum]

He's probably right. As Catullus angrily observed (and in verse), it's a mistake to try to infer a poet from his poems. It's mighty tempting, though, with both of them--and any other bard about whom we know little else.

[stanley2]

Professor Bate goes on: "TWELFTH NIGHT is highly relevant here. Of all Shakespeare's plays, it is closest to the sonnets in it's anatomy of what Meres called 'the perplexities of love'...........If Orsino is the conventional Elizebethan sonneteer, Olivia is the parodist of the genre." He also seems to like the possibility that many of the sonnets were addressed to Southhampton and some written later with another young aristocrat in mind.

[stanley2]

The excerpt from R3(posted by P.B.) and the "wand'ring bark"(posted by kev67) might recall John Barth's Short Story NIGHT-SEA JOURNEY. There is a nice critique online noting several allusions in the story. The critic notes references to C. G. Jung and Voltaire for example. The critic leaves the Shakespearean references to us. The title is certainly intended to recall Juliet's "Gallop apace" speech(R&J3.2) and Lady Macbeth's "thick night"(MAC1.5.51). Early in the story, "I rehearse as to a stranger," may recall Hamlet's "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome"(HAM1.5.165). The conclusion of the story is interesting to compare to Romeo's last lines. After such stuff it is refreshing, as P.B. suggested, to return to a A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Scholars note that in Bottom's speech(quoted by P.B.), we also find an allusion to 1 Corinthians 2:9-10. The fantasy of a queen doting on a commoner was surely one that his audience enjoyed in that historical moment. As P.B. noted, there are other implications.

[stanley2]

On reading back the narrative, or as Professor Greenblatt put it: "Is it the truth or a piece of flattering rhetoric?" Online is a nice commentary( the one with the white flowers) where we find on Sonnet 33: "How serious or real this was we have no means of knowing..........Most readers, however, take it as having autobiographical content." Michael Wood suggested that this poem refers to the loss of the poet's son in 1596. We then might say that the Sonnets are very near to autobiographical, yet not quite. The ending of 87 supports this opinion: "Thus have I had thee. as a dream doth flatter, / In sleep a king, but waking, no such matter."

[stanley2]

And one might quote Professor Greenblatt again: "the sonnets are a thrilling, deeply convincing staging of the poet;s inner life, an intimate performance.........and the sonnets are a cunning sequence of beautiful locked boxes to which there are no keys, an exquisitely constructed screen behind which it is virtually impossible to venture with any confidence." Therefore kev67 is on course in comparing the sonnets and the plays. Alas, the Shakespearean Baseball season is winding down.

[stanley2]

Along with his or her comments on Sonnet 50, G.R. Ledger(the one with the flowers) included Sonnet 49 from Sir Philip Sidney's series, another fine horse poem! He or she noted that the first line of Sonnet 43, "When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see," recalls a line from MACBETH, Act 1, scene 4, line 52-3. If we follow Pompey's suggestions(study the plays before the poems), one must first think of Juliet's "Gallop apace" speech(ROM3.2.1-30) from ROMEO AND JULIET. Another critic(at interestingliterature.com), noted that Sonnet 43 recalls another Sonnet from Sidney, "Come sleep, O sleep." If we follow Professor Bate's suggestion and return to TWELFTH NIGHT, we might note Olivia's question to Viola/Cesario: "Are you a comedian?"(TN1.5.194), a question one might ask Shakespeare himself.

[stanley2]

And Shakespeare, I think, allows the reader to cautiously infer the poet. The epilogue at the end of THE TEMPEST may be regarded both as the character Prospero's entreaty and the author himself asking the audience to regard all of his work to that point as a single "project." And thus, it is reasonable to say that Antonio in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE may be gay or bisexual. Yet when we compare the play to ROMEO AND JULIET(and MND) one might conclude that he more likely is heterosexual. The same may be inferred regarding the author.