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Sometimes, my brother and I can bond:
Brother: I love Metallica, but I don't actually respect anyone who says their favorite Metallica song is "Enter: Sandman." It shows a lack of knowledge about their songs.
Me: I know what you mean. I don't respect anyone who says their favorite Shakespeare sonnet is Sonnet 18.
And from there ... the review. Or something like it.
This is a really huge accomplishment for me. I bought a book of sonnets when I was a teenager but never sat down to read them straight through until this year. I got one that was pretty stripped down -- no annotations, no essays, updated spelling, pretty looking. I like the idea of reading something first and THEN go back and analyzing it. (Which has its pluses and minuses. I have a mostly-unannotated Tanakh and while that's worked out pretty well, the major prophets have been driving me crazy.) But for the sonnets, it worked well, and if I was ever really stuck I just checked out this site.
The sonnets follow a basic structure, which can be broken down even further. But on the simplest level 1 to 126 are addressed to "The Fair Young Man" (and YES, it's his boyfriend, I HIGHLY doubt this was a platonic man-crush and it is TOTALLY not his son, that doesn't even make sense), 127 to 154 are addressed to the Dark Lady. You can take this down into distinguishing the poems telling the Fair Young Man to Have a child and the last two poems which are basically fables about love -- those are common ways to mark out the structure of the poems. But I think if you really wanted to get into it you could break it down and mark a trajectory of each relationship, or at least the speaker's feelings at the time.
It took me a few months to read this book -- I would read a handful of poems here and there while reading other works. This could occasionally get depressing. In the beginning of both sequences -- which tend to have the poems that everyone quotes, like 18, 29, 30 and 130, the speaker is rapturous over his lover. Perhaps ironic, perhaps not blind to their faults, but rapturous nonetheless. You clearly get the sense of new love blooming. Over time, though, the rot and disillusionment sets in. And then the break-ups -- in particular 152. You can practically hear the speaker spitting out the words. It would have been a powerful but harsh way to end the sonnets, and luckily he wrote 153 and 154, which are very sweet in an "I will always love this person, even though we can't be together" type way. Anyway, it's very lovely but sometimes I felt like I was going along with his break-up for weeks, which was a bit of a bummer. "Come on, Will ..." I would whine. "You try too hard ... move on ..."
I read the essay on the sonnets in The Friendly Shakespeare and the little joke essay in Reduced Shakespeare in advance (I R TOTALLY SERIUS SHAXBEARD SCOLAR, YO). Both of them said that some poems are better than others, Reduced Shakespeare even implied only a few are really great. I suppose that's true. Although it's odd because the gems in the sequence seem to be scattered, not some sort of slow maturation. The difficulty in reading also seems to vary wildly, at least for me. Some I understood nearly immediately while others I had to read multiple times. It gives a weirdly inconsistent feel, which sometimes makes not want to say the whole sequence is better than the sum of its parts -- some of those parts outshine everything.
Nevertheless, I do think reading the entire sequence is worth it. Even not-as-popular Shakespeare has a degree of uniqueness to it. One of the sonnets I really like, 17, the poet speaks about how if he talks up The Fair Young Man too much, nobody would believe him. Or 112, where the poet seems to be on his knees, begging the Fair Young Man to forgive him. Or 145, where the poet breathes a sigh of relief when The Dark Lady stops herself from saying she hates him. They're not the best poems, but I'm glad I read them.
Anyway, I do like Sonnet 18, but I get frustrated because most of the people who quote don't seem to realize that 1.) it is to a guy and 2.) the speaker is not actually comparing his love to a summer's day. But what is my favorite? I'm not sure yet. I'm tempted to say 71, because I can mostly recite it from memory, but it doesn't have the ambiguity that I like about much of the sonnet sequence. So right now ... I don't know.
Maybe the ending. I really think it ended well.
Brother: I love Metallica, but I don't actually respect anyone who says their favorite Metallica song is "Enter: Sandman." It shows a lack of knowledge about their songs.
Me: I know what you mean. I don't respect anyone who says their favorite Shakespeare sonnet is Sonnet 18.
And from there ... the review. Or something like it.
This is a really huge accomplishment for me. I bought a book of sonnets when I was a teenager but never sat down to read them straight through until this year. I got one that was pretty stripped down -- no annotations, no essays, updated spelling, pretty looking. I like the idea of reading something first and THEN go back and analyzing it. (Which has its pluses and minuses. I have a mostly-unannotated Tanakh and while that's worked out pretty well, the major prophets have been driving me crazy.) But for the sonnets, it worked well, and if I was ever really stuck I just checked out this site.
The sonnets follow a basic structure, which can be broken down even further. But on the simplest level 1 to 126 are addressed to "The Fair Young Man" (and YES, it's his boyfriend, I HIGHLY doubt this was a platonic man-crush and it is TOTALLY not his son, that doesn't even make sense), 127 to 154 are addressed to the Dark Lady. You can take this down into distinguishing the poems telling the Fair Young Man to Have a child and the last two poems which are basically fables about love -- those are common ways to mark out the structure of the poems. But I think if you really wanted to get into it you could break it down and mark a trajectory of each relationship, or at least the speaker's feelings at the time.
It took me a few months to read this book -- I would read a handful of poems here and there while reading other works. This could occasionally get depressing. In the beginning of both sequences -- which tend to have the poems that everyone quotes, like 18, 29, 30 and 130, the speaker is rapturous over his lover. Perhaps ironic, perhaps not blind to their faults, but rapturous nonetheless. You clearly get the sense of new love blooming. Over time, though, the rot and disillusionment sets in. And then the break-ups -- in particular 152. You can practically hear the speaker spitting out the words. It would have been a powerful but harsh way to end the sonnets, and luckily he wrote 153 and 154, which are very sweet in an "I will always love this person, even though we can't be together" type way. Anyway, it's very lovely but sometimes I felt like I was going along with his break-up for weeks, which was a bit of a bummer. "Come on, Will ..." I would whine. "You try too hard ... move on ..."
I read the essay on the sonnets in The Friendly Shakespeare and the little joke essay in Reduced Shakespeare in advance (I R TOTALLY SERIUS SHAXBEARD SCOLAR, YO). Both of them said that some poems are better than others, Reduced Shakespeare even implied only a few are really great. I suppose that's true. Although it's odd because the gems in the sequence seem to be scattered, not some sort of slow maturation. The difficulty in reading also seems to vary wildly, at least for me. Some I understood nearly immediately while others I had to read multiple times. It gives a weirdly inconsistent feel, which sometimes makes not want to say the whole sequence is better than the sum of its parts -- some of those parts outshine everything.
Nevertheless, I do think reading the entire sequence is worth it. Even not-as-popular Shakespeare has a degree of uniqueness to it. One of the sonnets I really like, 17, the poet speaks about how if he talks up The Fair Young Man too much, nobody would believe him. Or 112, where the poet seems to be on his knees, begging the Fair Young Man to forgive him. Or 145, where the poet breathes a sigh of relief when The Dark Lady stops herself from saying she hates him. They're not the best poems, but I'm glad I read them.
Anyway, I do like Sonnet 18, but I get frustrated because most of the people who quote don't seem to realize that 1.) it is to a guy and 2.) the speaker is not actually comparing his love to a summer's day. But what is my favorite? I'm not sure yet. I'm tempted to say 71, because I can mostly recite it from memory, but it doesn't have the ambiguity that I like about much of the sonnet sequence. So right now ... I don't know.
Maybe the ending. I really think it ended well.
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That one is awesome. Although I forgot its effect on first readers. I read it to Chris the other day, and 2/3rds of the way through he started laughing and was like, "I'm sorry. I didn't know if I was supposed to be laughing or not."
I must admit I'm partial to 27.
[re-reads quickly] Oh yeah, that one is very good.
Even the ones that go unquoted show love, humor, and beauty.
And DEATH!!! But yes. :)
And now Sting is in my head, paraphrasing Shakespeare... in Sister Moon.
Huh. I'd never heard that one before. ... It's OK.