The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 26.513  Tuesday, 27 October 2015

 

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

Date:         October 26, 2015 at 7:17:04 PM EDT

Subject:    Re: SHAKSPER Sonnets

 

Peter T Hadorn, you wrote:

 

So far, the best that I can come up with is that Shakespeare is playing with his reader, showing us what language can do in whipping us back and forth in our attempts to interpret the poem.  Or, if we take the speaker as a created persona, perhaps the persona is unconsciously embedding language that reveals his most personal desires.

 

Peter, I have been trying to tell the group that the Sonnets were written by a teenager who acted as a new Narcissus in love with himself, his alter ego in his mirror, the “child” of sonnet 17.13 born in the couplet of the 18th sonnet.  This was the same young man who had not yet started to shave, who appeared in A Lover’s Complaint in lines 97-2, “Small show of man was yet upon his chin, / His phoenix down began but to appear.”  You MUST realize that the youth had yet to write his plays or his other major poetry, something that scholar, Sir Brian Vickers and many others who criticize ALC as “non Shakespearian, which displays a lack of awareness and respect for the bard’s immaturity when hi wrote the Sonnets. Some have denied that Shakespeare wrote ALC. 

 

Pity.

 

Peter, I suggest that you read what I have sent a few times to SHAKSPER, my take of the story of the Sonnets. Have your students study ALC and learn for themselves what has been said. It is your task to stimulate them, to add or detract from a thesis that ALC is the prologue of the Sonnets, a poem that appeared in back of the Sonnets in 1609 but was referred to a decade earlier by Francis Meres, as his “sugar’d sonnets”. 

 

You must realize that the Sonnets, a wet dream suggested by the bard himself in line 40 of ALC, who has seduced the ‘fickle maid’, a Muse who is in deep despair over her poignant fear of pregnancy, one she can hardly explain to Apollo when she, The Passionate Pilgrim, will tearfully return to Paradise. She tells us in ALC lines 300-1, “All meltling, though our drops this difference bore, / His poison’d me, and mine did him restore.”

 

She will, no doubt, explain it to Apollo that she was in his dream to have a “child.”

 

You are right, in this wet dream, Peter, “Shakespeare was playing with his reader.” 

 

I must add that Woody Allen was also right when he narcissistically, said,  “Don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.”

 

Sid Lubow

 

 

 

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