KRG – The Kochi Reading Group: May 2022

The dedication by Thomas Thorpe's of Shakespeare's Sonnets

The reading started with plays from Shakespeare, Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew. Macbeth is one of the shortest and most intense plays of Shakespeare with everything to make it a dramatic thriller, from blood and murder, to ambition, insanity and war. The metaphors in the blank verse are startling and one wonders that ordinary mortals could speak in such forceful tones, that elevate into pathos and poetry. There are many throwaway lines of bird lore like this from Act 1, Scene 6:

Banquo:
This guest of summer,
The temple-haunting martlet, does approve,
By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath
Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,
Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird
Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle.
Where they most breed and haunt, I have observed,
The air is delicate.

But the scene staged by Priya and Arundhaty has Macbeth gaping in horror at the bloody ghost of the murdered Banquo during a feast at his manor. You can see enacted at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiSISGY8Yy8

Macbeth – ‘I have a strange infirmity, which is nothing To those that know me.’ – Act 3 Scene 4

Devika took up an old favourite, The Taming of the Shrew. Recapping the final speech when Katharina the shrew has turned into Katharina the obedient wife, Devika observed that for once Shakespeare goes against the grain of his known penchant for strong independent women. In the scene Devika chose, Katharina is instructing the other ladies on the duties of a wife in Act 5, Scene 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnd2lpe-rW4

Katharina – ‘Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper.’

Zefirelli’s 1967 film version has yet to be surpassed. It has Richard Burton as Petruchio, Elizabeth Taylor as Katharina, Michael Hordern as Baptista, and Michael York as Lucentio.

“The world’s most celebrated movie couple in the motion picture they are made for!” was how this film was advertised. This version shows the play as funny and entertaining, the way WS probably intended. The gorgeous colour in the sets and costumes is characteristic of Zefirelli, and is seen again in his production of Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespearean verse sounds quite believable as daily conversation in the actors’ mouths. This film is a great introduction to Shakespeare for anyone who hasn't seen his plays before. It is the perfect antidote for those who have been intimidated into thinking that Shakespeare is only for experts and scholars.

The Plays are central to the legend of Shakespeare’s universality. The Sonnets, however, can vie with the Plays in their smaller compass, for they are so compressed in thought and filled with vigorous speech that they merit reading several times – not just by lovers, but all who want to learn the variety of torments a human goes through in life, quite apart from the anguish of love. The Plays are wonderful. But once you get into the Sonnets it takes on the ageless quality that Shakespeare himself attested to in Sonnet 18 when he said.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The sentiments expressed are entirely contemporary and the language too. With a little familiarity that comes from frequent reading, the language also becomes contemporary — gender, sexuality, love, self-loathing, anguish, hate and everything else find their truest chronicler in WS.

Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are concerned with ‘love’, of course, but they also reflect upon time, change, ageing, lust, absence, infidelity and the yawning gap between the ideal and reality when it comes to love.

Sonnets 1 to 126 seem to be addressed to a young man, and the first 17 encourage the youth to marry and father children. Then the subjects diversify. Some are erotic, while others reflect upon the anguish caused by love.

Sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to a woman, the so-called ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespearean legend. This woman is elusive, often tyrannous, and causes the speaker great pain and shame. The two final sonnets (Sonnets 153 and 154) focus on the classical god Cupid, and playfully detail desire and longing.

The Sonnets were probably written, and perhaps revised, between the early 1590s and about 1605. Sonnets 128 and 144 were printed in the poetry collection called The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599. They were first printed as a sequence in 1609, with a mysterious dedication to ‘Mr. W.H.’

The dedication has led to intense speculation: who is ‘W.H.’? Is he the young man of the sonnets? Various candidates have been proposed, such as William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. No conclusive identification has been made, and it may never be, because the poet may not even have been writing about historical individuals, but giving free rein to his imagination, founded on his lived experience. We don’t know if Shakespeare was involved in the 1609 printing of his Sonnets, because the dedication was written by the printer, not by Shakespeare.

Shakespearean sonnets are composed of 14 lines of iambic pentameters:
da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM

and most are divided into three quatrains and a concluding couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg. This sonnet form and rhyme scheme, taken together, are known as the ‘Elizabethan’ sonnet.

Sonnets arrived in England from Italy where they had a slightly different form called Petrarchan (after Francesco Petrarca 1304 – 1374). Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516/17–1547), translated Italian sonnets into English as well as composed some of his own. Many later English writers used this sonnet form, and Shakespeare seemed to have revelled in its potential for invention. The final couplet always provides a forceful and memorable conclusion to the argument. It is strange to think of a poetic form as an argument, but that is what the sonnet is in English. For it lays out a thesis and then suddenly inverts it or subverts it in what the Italians call a volta (a change in direction or reversal) after the eighth line. Sonnet 130, for instance, builds up a picture of the speaker’s mistress as defective in all the conventional standards of beauty, but the concluding couplet remarks that, while all this is true:

And yet by heaven I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

For further reference see: https://www.bl.uk/works/shakespeares-sonnets

Also see: https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/an-introduction-to-shakespeares-sonnets

One of the standard references for Shakespeare’s sonnets has been written by Helen Vendler, Professor Emerita at Harvard University:
The Art of Shakespeare′s Sonnets

https://www.amazon.in/Art-Shakespeare%E2%80%B2s-Sonnets-Paper-Belknap/dp/0674637127/

Another commentary is by Don Paterson:
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets: A New Commentary

https://www.amazon.in/Reading-Shakespeares-Sonnets-New-Commentary/dp/0571245056/

Here below is the link to the transcript of a short lecture on what the Sonnets tell us about Shakespeare himself. It is by the distinguished Sir Stanley Wells, general editor of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare, honorary president of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and former director of The Shakespeare Institute:

https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/podcasts/what-was-shakespeare-really/what-sonnets-tell-about-shakespeare/

The Sonnets have been set to music by many singers and composers. Paul Kelly has set seven of them to contemporary pop song rhythms. According to him the sonnets work naturally as lyrics. The fact that they are composed of metrical lines (each with 10 syllables), and rhymed, has many parallels with modern songs. Here he is singing Sonnet 18:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj0kGzuL-cA