The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.534  Wednesday, 11 November 2015

 

From:        Peter T Hadorn <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         November 10, 2015 at 5:00:00 PM EST

Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER: Sonnets


Although our university library subscribes to Shakespeare Survey, the latest issue has not yet come in so I appreciate Mr. Steere’s summary of Professor Wells’ article.  I would like to address the notion of the poems as a miscellany—a collection—rather than as a sequence.  Although I am sympathetic to that view, I too, disagree.  As I have indicated before, much of my approach to the sonnets is indebted to Stephen Booth’s “An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” especially his first chapter.  He points out that whether it’s an image, a word, an idea, etc., these “threads” seem to weave their way in and out of the sonnets, connecting them together in subtle ways.  And I agree with this.  Since last January (when I taught an independent study on Shakespeare’s poetry), I have been slowly memorizing the sonnets—not in order, but randomly, though I do an equal number in each of the “tens.”  I now have 78 memorized—half plus 1.  But my point is, that as I do, I keep having “aha!” moments, seeing connections.  Are these seeing things there because I want to seem them there?  It is a constant danger. 

Here are two examples.  Recently I learned 125 and I was instantly reminded of 7: “pitiful thrivers in their gazing spent” and “each under eye doth homage to his new appearing sight.”  Should I make this connection?  And if there is a connection, then clearly the bloom is off the rose (so to speak).  Does that mean, then, that there is narrative progress of a sort?

 

I firmly believe that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets in such a way that the reader feels compelled to make connections.  Even the way they are printed on the page in the Quarto—in parts—compels us to go on to the next one and “try to make sense” of the whole.  I wish that there were evidence that Shakespeare knew Petrarch’s poems because as I get to know them I think they do the same thing: compel us to hear “echoes” throughout the collection and to try to make sense of the whole.

 

Here’s my second example.  We all know 116.  But this line: “or bends with the remover to remove.”  What does that mean, exactly?  It is like one of those many lines that seem slightly out of focus, as it were.  We sort of know what it means, but not exactly (see also 5.12 and 15.4).  But then I read 25.13 & 14: “Then happy I that love and am beloved/ Where I may not remove nor be removed.”  And now I understand the line: the speaker-poet is firmly within the beloved’s heart as the surrounding sonnets suggest.  But now my antennae are sensitive to the word “remove.”  Surely in 44.6, it only refers to physical distance: “No matter then although my foot did stand/ Upon the farthest earth removed from thee.”  But what about 97.5: “And yet this time removed was summer’s time.”  I have to wonder does it refer exclusively to physical distance?  Or is there also emotional distance?  After all, this occurs in a batch of sonnets in which the speaker-poet is dallying with other flowers.

 

Best,
Peter

 

 

 

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