Chapter 2 William Shakespeare
Although Shakespeare devoted his genius primarily to the stage, he was the foremost lyric poet of his age. His authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems and his sequence of 154 sonnets. They are rich in images, conceit, metaphors and symbols. He excels both in writing lyrical verse and poetry of great passion and agony. His style varies with different moods he expresses. It can be lyrical, poetical, ecstatic, pathetic, cynical, sarcastic, and ironic. Apart from his sonnets and long poems, his dramas are also poetry.
Critical Perspectives
1.New Criticism
Lina Perkins Wilder, in “Reserved Character: Shorthand and the Immortality Topos in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets lay claim to a quality of liveliness as both an effect of reading and an intrinsic feature of the verse that parallels the physical life of the human body; the term “character” provides one way to conceptualize both the sonnets’ internal aspirations to immortality and the ways in which successive generations of readers participate in perpetuating their and their addressee’s life, allowing the poems to create a temporal and physical present for themselves. The sonnets’ treatment of the term “character”—and particularly their implicit allusions to the fashionable new skill of shorthand transcription of “taking by charactery”—highlights the practical and ethical challenges of locating poetic immortality between the engagement of readers and the liveness of verse. As recording technology and as a method of writing that combines idiosyncrasy and, paradoxically, both secrecy and openness, shorthand provides a theoretical model for reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. Understanding Shakespeare’s use of the term character has broad implications not only for our understanding of the immortality topos but also for theories of reading and writing.[1]
2.Structuralism
Liliya R. Sakaeva and Liya A. Kornilova, in “Structural Analysis of the Oxymoron in the Sonnets of William Shakespeare”, studies the structural groups of oxymoron in the Russian and English languages. It is also relevant to study oppositional lexical units represented in heterogeneous system languages from the standpoint of linguistic and extra linguistic meanings, since the figures of contrast are inconceivable without the associative-emotional and evaluative qualifications of the objects of opposition. They give the analysis of the oxymoron’s nature and its functions in two different-structured languages. The article has carried out lexical and semantic characteristics of oxymoron. In the linguistic literature there is no generalized, concrete and universal structural and semantic classification of this stylistic device. This study attempts to create a structural and semantic classification, combining all the existing varieties of this figure of contrast. The analysis is applied in the linguistic examination of the sonnets written by William Shakespeare. When studying, systemizing and analyzing the opposite units, it is extremely important to study their structural features. The main objective of this study is to identify and describe the types of oxymoron in the language of Shakespeare’s sonnets.[2]
Reuven Tsur, in “Delivery Style and Listener Response in the Rhythmical Performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, inquires into the aesthetic event of the rhythmical performance of poetry. This event typically contains a reciter, a poetic text, and a listener (though the reciter himself may be the listener, too). Poetic rhythm is accessible only through some kind of performance, vocalized or silent. Rhythmical performance is not a unitary phenomenon; one must distinguish between various delivery styles. The article aspires to give a fairly comprehensive description of the aesthetic event under the discussion. A pilot experiment suggests that apparently incompatible responses to the same delivery instance may result from the listeners’ realization of different subsets of aspects of the same event. They may, therefore, be meaningfully discussed and compared. Reuven’s assumption is that rhythmical performance and delivery style are determined by the poem’s metric structure, the performer’s aesthetic conceptions and vocal resources, and the constraints of the cognitive system. He concentrates on small-scale computer-aided analyses and comparisons of performances by leading British actors. Consequently, he focuses on recordings of only one line, the last line of Sonnet 129, from commercially—available recordings.[3]
3.Cultural Studies
Manfred Pfister, in “‘Love Merchandized’: Money in Shakespeare’s Sonnets” argues that although analysing Shakespeare’s sonnets in the context of “Shakespeare and Money” is not an obvious choice, he believes that Karl Marx’s “The Power of Money” in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts are as relevant to the sonnets as they are to plays such as Timon of Athens. Manfred’s reading of them foregrounds their dialogue with terms and developments in early modern banking and focus on metaphors of economic transaction that run through the whole cycle; indeed, a third of them figure love, its wealth and truth, use and abuse, in terms of investment in order to project an alternative economy beyond the selfalienating world of banking/financial gain. This imbrication of the erotic with the economic comprises also the writing of love sonnets, a competitive game-like economic transaction. Soneteering is a way of “merchandizing love” that inevitably casts a capitalist shadow across the supposedly most sincere expression of love.[4]
4.Reader-Oriented Criticism
Matthew Zarnowiecki, in “Responses to Responses to Shakespeare’s Sonnets: More Sonnets”, argues that Shakespeare’s sonnets have been subject to myriad creative and critical responses from the first instances of their partial publication in 1599 (two sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim), in 1609 (the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which included A Lover’s Complaint), and in 1640 (the first edition of John Benson’s Poems. Written by Wil. Shakespeare. Gent.). Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, editors and commentators felt comfortable manipulating the order of sonnets as printed in the 1609 Quarto, often in order to arrive at a presumed authorial intention, or to demonstrate more clearly the ways in which the sonnets tell the story of Shakespeare’s life and times. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a different, but related phenomenon: a set of creative reimaginings, adaptations, and appropriations that attempt not only to bring Shakespeare’s sonnets into new contexts, but also to respond to the sonnets while still remaining in their purview. This article explores these responses, especially instances in which poets, directors, dramatists, and film-makers seem to want to create something of their own but still remain faithful to Shakespeare in one way or another. Matthew’s interest is in exploring that dual desire, and it seems only fair, after exploring several versions of it, to offer one of his own.[5]
5.Canonization Study
Alan Forrest Hickman, in “‘Subject to Invent’: Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into other Media”argues that adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays has been part of his legacy from the beginning, as works by artists such as Nahum Tate, Henry Purcell, and John Dryden can attest. Shakespeare’s sonnets, too, have been put to many uses over the years. They have been set to music, they have been quoted by politicians, they have been used as wedding vows, and they have appeared on greeting cards. For many, they represent the ultimate statement on love. In the four hundred years since Shakespeare’s death, they have found their way into a variety of media, including music, drama, books, television, and film. Whereas the plays have long been acknowledged as a rich source of inspiration—both serious and parodic—by artists and auteurs, ranging in kind from novelist James Joyce to dramatist Tom Stoppard to comedian Ben Elton, the poems have received less scrutiny in this regard. However, they represent a gold mine of untold riches, especially in terms of biography, which has yet to be sufficiently tapped. In this paper Alan takes a look at the various uses the sonnets have been put to, primarily in books, television, and film, and come to some conclusions regarding their success in remediation.[6]
Carl D. Atkins, in “The Importance of Compositorial Error and Variation to the Emendation of Shakespeare’s Texts: A Bibliographic Analysis of Benson’s 1640 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, discusses the 1640 edition of poet William Shakespeare’s “Sonnets” edited by John Benson and the significance of the editorial decisions Benson made in relation to previous publications. Carl contends that analysis of the Benson text is important because several later editions of “Sonnets” were based upon his work, and because we can compare them to previous publications of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in various sources.[7]
Carl D. Atkins, in “The Application of Bibliographical Principles to the Editing of Punctuation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, discusses the application of biographical principles to the editing of punctuation in dramatist William Shakespeare’s sonnets; absence of English spelling standardization in the 16th century; repunctuation of the sonnet according to the understanding of the editors; implication of the absence of no system to Shakespearean punctuation.[8]
6.New Historicism
David A. Harper, in “Revising Obsession in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153 and 154”reevaluates Shakespeare’s sonnets 153 and 154 within the context of the 1609 Quarto, suggesting that only one of these anacreontics properly belongs to the sequence. The article first considers other moments of unintentional repetition in Shakespeare’s corpus to provide evidence that Shakespeare’s manuscript cancellations may have been overlooked by printers. Using the bibliographic features of the Quarto; Sonnet 153’s thematic and formal linkages to the preceding sequence, and the aptness of 153 rather than 154 as a bridge to A Lover’s Complaint, the article argues that Shakespeare’s likely cancellation of 154 was ignored in Eld’s print shop for convenience or aesthetic concerns. While we may never know what shape Shakespeare’s Sonnets took in manuscript, this article reclaims 153 as an important conclusion to the sequence, challenging a tradition of criticism in which the curious doubling of these two sonnets has often removed them from serious consideration .[9]
Reiko Oya, in “‘Talk to Him’: Wilde, his Friends, and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’”, discusses the interrelationships between Oscar Wilde, his lover Alfred Douglas, his editor Frank Harris, and George Bernard Shaw. It notes the drama created in all of their lives by Wilde’s trial for obscenity in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. It discusses the role of the sonnets of William Shakespeare in helping them all probe the depths of their feelings towards Wilde, as evidenced in letters they wrote to each other and to others.[10]
MacDonald P. Jackson, in “Shakespeare’s Sonnet CⅪ and John Davies of Hereford’s Microcosmos (1603)”, argues that lines in Shakespeare’s Sonnet CⅪ bear a strong resemblance to lines in John Davies of Hereford’s Microcosmos (1603). In the sonnet Shakespeare’s Poet persona blames Fortune for making him reliant on “public means which public manners breeds”. It has been widely supposed that Shakespeare is alluding to his career as player and playwright. Davies pays a backhanded compliment to Shakespeare as a poet of noble accomplishments, even though the stage “doth taint pure gentle blood”. Davies’s remarks, with their reminder of the social stigma attached to acting, were probably the stimulus for Shakespeare’s sonnet, rather than a response to it, as editors have suggested. Contexts for both poems are examined, including Davies’s further comments on actors.[11]
7.Translation Study
Olivia Landry, in “Verbal Performance in Dorothea Tieck’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, studies the translation of William Shakespeare’s sonnets by Dorothea Tieck. It says that the theory of double voicing by Mikhail Bakhtin is adopted to create an impetus for thinking about Tieck’s sonnet translations as moments of verbal performance that engage the Shakespearean texts in a dialogue. It adds that the translation by Tieck yields an affirmation of her creative authorship as an essential translator.[12]
Sara Guyer, in “Breath, Today: Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71”, analyzes the translation of William Shakespeare’s sonnet 71 into German language by Paul Celan. The invitation given to Celan to translate the sonnets returned him to a style of poetry that seemed to him no longer a legitimate means of expression in the present. His translation of sonnet 71 reflects the extent to which translation can translate poetry and its tropes. In this translation, he remembers and repeats the sonnet’s command: Forget the dead. Sonnet 71 is a poem that works by way of a series of turns and reversals implemented in the movement of each line.[13]
8.Reader-Oriented Criticism
Mario Aquilina, in “‘Let me (not) read you’: Countersigning Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116”, carries out a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) by following the complex movement of the “pas”(step/stop) that both invites and limits interpretation. Not only does Shakespeare’s sonnet demand such a reading, thus prospectively and retroactively entering a dialogue with Blanchot and Derrida’s writing, but the sonnet also enacts the iterable logic of the signature and countersignature by reading itself in terms of the (im)possibility of reading. Exploring the possibility of defining love through various forms of negation and slippery metaphors, Sonnet 116 is always already implicated in a discourse on singularity and the general law, the proper and the common, the mark and the re-mark that invites further countersignatures despite the impression that the numerous commentaries on the sonnet through the ages might have exhausted the poem’s openness to new readings.[14]
9.Narratology Study
Stephen X. Mead, in “Shakespeare’s Play with Perspective: Sonnet 24, Hamlet, Lear”, argues that indebted to Shakespeare’s understanding of perspective in the visual arts as much as to the tradition of ut pictura poesis, Sonnet 24 uses poetry’s capacity for ambiguity and references drama’s ability to create slippage between character and actor to demonstrate that manipulated surfaces—to wit, the perspectival paintings in vogue since the early fifteenth century—cannot delve into the interior but only discover, or create, more surfaces. By understanding and to some degree exploiting the techniques of perspectival artists, Shakespeare is gradually able to create a play space at once deeply physical and insistently metaphysical. The chamber scene in Hamlet, with its mirror and thrust-through arras, and the final scene in King Lear, with its stage-versioned vanishing point at the silent mouth of the dead Cordelia, suggest that Shakespeare uses his knowledge of perspective and its limitations in part to explore the dramatic possibilities for character interiority.[15]
Danijela Kambaskovi
-Sawyers, in “Three Themes in One, which Wondrows Scope Affords: Ambiguous Speaker and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, presents a criticism on the ambiguous speaker and storytelling in the sonnet sequences of William Shakespeare in referencing to other works of some poets. It argues that ambiguous speakers appear and perform their integrating functions in Petrarch’s sonnet sequences as well as all the major sonnet sequences of the Elizabethan period. However, the difference between Shakespeare’s and other great Elizabethan sonnet sequences lies in the degree and complexity of his main character’s ambiguity, as well as in the skill with which this complexity is managed.[16]
10.Feminist Criticism
Regula Hohl Trillini, in “ The Gaze of the Listener: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128 and Early Modern Discourses of Music and Gender”, argues that from the Tudor period on, keyboard skills were a staple in the education of girls of “quality”. However, theoretical admiration of music and musical skill always co-existed with wariness of actual performers and performances. The hyperbolic musical metaphors for love and marriage contrast with a near-complete absence of harmony and edification in representations of actual music-making. Those two main literary uses of music represent the period’s acutely ambivalent discourse on music as well as women, both of which may be perceived as divinely admirable or hellishly tempting. Literary references, to keyboard playing favour the latter: the virginals are regularly associated with lewdness and sexual availability. This general discursive and historical background, as well as the literary tropes associated with the virginals inform a new reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128, whose much-deprecated cruxes and mixed metaphors are read not as authorial oversights but as a significant elaboration of contradictions in the English course on musical performance, particularly when undertaken by women.[17](https://www.daowen.com)
M. L. Stapleton, in “Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare’s Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady”, presents the gender and sexuality content of the “Man Right Fair” sonnet by William Shakespeare; discussion on the homoeroticism content of the sonnet; analysis of each line of the sonnet; characteristics of the characters portrayed in the sonnet”.[18]
11.Gender Study
Amanda Rudd, in “A Fair Youth in the Forest of Arden: Reading Gender and Desire in As You Like It and Shakespeare’s Sonnets”, highlights a challenge to orthodox constructions of gender posed by the play. It explains the absence of homosexual characters in the play. The link between the development of ideal country love and the introduction of the fair youth to the Forest of Arden in England is also discussed.[19]
Casey Charles, in “Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy”, discusses questions the sexual identity of William Shakespeare; how pedagogical method is implicated in the controversy over the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20; role of a teacher in imparting knowledge to students; how can Sonnet 20 provide a clue to the nature of the poet’s purpose.[20]
12. Historiography
Dean Keith Simonton, in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Case of and for Single-Case Historiometry”, argues that the two oldest forms of psychohistory, as generically defined, are psychobiography (idiographic, qualitative, and singlecase) and historiometry (nomothetic, quantitative, and multiple-case) .In practice this distinction gets blurred, both because psychobiography is often nomothetic (e g, psychoanalytic) and after outlining the assets of single-case historiometry, a specific case is given in an analysis of the 154 sonnets of William Shakespeare. These sonnets were first reliably differentiated on aesthetic success according to an archival popularity measure, and then this relative merit was predicted using content analytical measures suggested by research on artistic creativity. The superior sonnets treat specific themes, display considerable thematic richness in the number of issues discussed, exhibit greater linguistic complexity as gauged by such objective measures as the type-token ratio and adjective-verb quotient, and feature more primary process imagery (using Martindale’s Regressive Imagery Dictionary). After discussing how these results can enlarge our general understanding of artistic creativity as well as our specific appreciation of Shakespeare’s creativity, the potential application of single-case historiometry to intrinsically psychobiographical problems is examined.[21]
【注释】
[1]Wilder L P. “Reserved Character: Shorthand and the Immortality Topos in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Studies in Philology,2019,116(3):478-505.
[2]Sakaeva L R, Kornilova L A.“Structural Analysis of the Oxymoron in the Sonnets of William Shakespeare”. Journal of History, Culture and Art Research, 2017, Special Issue, 6(5):409-414.
[3]Tsur R. “Delivery Style and Listener Response in the Rhythmical Performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. College Literature, 2006, 33(1):170-196.
[4]Pfister M.“‘Love Merchandized’: Money in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Critical Survey, 2018, 30(3):57-66.
[5]Zarnowiecki M. “Responses to Responses to Shakespeare’s Sonnets: More Sonnets”. Critical Survey, 2016, 28(2):10-26.
[6]Hickman A F. “‘Subject to Invent’: Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into other Media”. Linguaculture, 2017(1):83-93.
[7]Atkins C D. “The Importance of Compositorial Error and Variation to the Emendation of Shakespeare’s Texts: A Bibliographic Analysis of Benson’s 1640 Text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Studies in Philology, 2007,104(3):306-339.
[8]Atkins C D. “The Application of Bibliographical Principles to the Editing of Punctuation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Studies in Philology, 2003, 100(4):493-513.
[9]Harper D A. “Revising Obsession in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153 and 154”. Studies in Philology, 2015,112(1):114-138.
[10]Oya R. “‘Talk to Him’: Wilde, his Friends, and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’”. Critical Survey, 2009, 21(3):22-40.
[11]Jackson M D P. “Shakespeare’s Sonnet CⅪ and John Davies of Hereford’s Microcosmos (1603)”. The Modern Language Review, 2007, 102(1):1-10.
[12]Landry O. “Verbal Performance in Dorothea Tieck’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Women in German Yearbook, 2012, 28:1-22.
[13]Guyer S. “Breath, Today: Celan’s Translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71”. Comparative Literature, 2005, 57(4):328-351.
[14]Aquilina M. “‘Let me (not) read you’: Countersigning Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116”. Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2011,1(2):79-90.
[15]Mead S X.“Shakespeare’s Play with Perspective: Sonnet 24, Hamlet, Lear”. Studies in Philology, 2012, 109(3):225-257.
[16]Kambaskovic′-Sawyers D. “Three Themes in One, which Wondrows Scope Affords: Ambiguous Speaker and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. Criticism, 2007, 49(3):285-305.
[17]Trillini R H. “The Gaze of the Listener: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 128 and Early Modern Discourses of Music and Gender”. Music ＆ Letters,2008, 89(1):1-17.
[18]Stapleton M L. “Making the Woman of Him: Shakespeare’s Man Right Fair as Sonnet Lady”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 2004, 46(3):271-295.
[19]Rudd A. “A Fair Youth in the Forest of Arden: Reading Gender and Desire in As You Like It and Shakespeare’s Sonnets”. The Wooden O Symposium, 2009, 9:106-117.
[20]Charles C. “Was Shakespeare Gay? Sonnet 20 and the Politics of Pedagogy”. College Literature,1998, 25(3):35.
[21]Simonton D K. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Case of and for Single-Case Historiometry”. Journal of Personality, 1989, 57(3):695-721.