2011

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0123  Tuesday, 14 June 2011

[1]  From:        Ian Steere <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
      Date:        June 13, 2011 11:32:44 AM EDT
      Subj:         Singing in iambic pentameter and Sonnet 145

[2] From:         John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
     Date:         June 13, 2011 4:27:06 PM EDT
      Subj:         Re: A Discovery


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:         Ian Steere <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:         June 13, 2011 11:32:44 AM EDT
Subject:      Singing in iambic pentameter and Sonnet 145

I enjoyed Ward Elliott's analysis of Shakespearean lines that were intended to be sung (12 June 2011). And I found persuasive his conclusion that such lines are never, or almost never, written in iambic pentameter.

I have speculated elsewhere (in a challenge of the "Hathaway" pun hypothesis) that 145, the only one of Shakespeare's Sonnets not constructed in iambic pentameter, may have been so designed to facilitate singing.

Ian Steere.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:         John W Kennedy <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:          June 13, 2011 4:27:06 PM EDT
Subject:      Re: SHAKSPER: Monday, 13 June 2011

Ian Steere <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.> wrote,

>In his note of 10th June, Mark Fenton suggests that Sonnet 107
>was intended by Shakespeare to refer to events in 1588. However,
>he provides no evidence of this, other than a speculative association
>with Chettle's phrase "touching those accidents", which he takes to
>refer to the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada.
>
>This phrase occurs within a composition of 1603, which covers
>events during the whole of Elizabeth's reign and the word "accidents"
>then meant "occurrences", fortuitous or otherwise. Consequently,
>more evidence is needed to support the interpretation offered.
>Mark says he has other discoveries which link Sonnet 107 to the
>year 1588, and it would be interesting to hear the substance of these.

Indeed, the logic of

The words 'touching those accidents...' were referring to the accidental defeat of the Spanish Armada which occurred in 1588, and which consequently saved England.

in the current vernacular, "makez mai hedz asplode". I do not believe that Shakespeare ever uses "accident" in the modern sense, and I flat-out refuse to believe that anyone in England in 1603 would publicly refer to the defeat of the Armada as an "accident" in that sense, even if it were available. (That does not, strictly, rule out the possibility that "touching those accidents" might allude to the Armada, anyway, but I see no reason to think that it does.)


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