Shakespeare's Global Philosophy

exploring Shakespeare's nature-based philosophy in his sonnets, plays and Globe

Roger Michael Peters

• Publisher: Quaternary Imprint
• eBook ISBN: 9780473386412
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

The three parts of Shakespeare’s Global Philosophy present evidence and argument that Shakespeare's Sonnets of 1609 articulate the philosophy behind all his plays and longer poems and that the Globe Theatre symbolises the global significance of the philosophy.

Part 1 examines the 1609 edition of the sonnets to demonstrate the presence of a comprehensive and consistent nature-based philosophy.

Part 2 shows how Shakespeare uses the sonnet philosophy to structure and vivify all his poems and plays.

Part 3 reflects on the relationship between the Globe Theatre and the current global fascination with Shakespeare’s works.

Part 1

Mapping the 1609 Sonnets

taking nature to the sonnets

Preliminary to an inquiry into Shakespeare’s Sonnets

The experience of reading the 1609 edition of Shake-speares Sonnets (original punctuation) for the first time, or any subsequent time, is not unlike encountering tell-tale signs of a long-lost civilisation on the shores of a precipitous landmass.

However, unlike the rediscovered wonders of a civilisation such as Angkor Wat, which lay hidden under tropical verdure and a warp of history until 1861, the interior rationale of the original 154-sonnet set has proved impenetrable and inscrutable for even the most ardent adventurer.

We could compare previous explorations of Q (the commonly used epithet for the 1609 quarto) with Christopher Columbus’ hopes when he crosses the Atlantic in 1492 on his first voyage of discovery. When Columbus makes landfall in the islands of the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola, he believes he has pioneered a Western sea route to an Asian continent already mapped from the East during the adventures of his predecessors such as Marco Polo.

However, what we now know as the American continent, interposed between Europe and Asia, is in Columbus’ day beyond the celestial calculations of seafarers. The schism in their data should prepare us for the possibility of discovering a deliberate pattern in Shakespeare’s Sonnets kept from us by our preconceptions.

Because many sense untold organisation within Shakespeare’s 154 love sonnets, our investigation will be less a survey of virgin territory than a diligent penetration of the obscuring foliage to find the interior logic of Shakespeare’s purpose. Our inquiry, then, into the heart of unmapped territory, will be a search for intelligible structures within the emotional tide-line staked out by the 1609 edition of the Sonnets.

Considering the current global fascination with Shakespeare’s works, we will keep watch throughout Q for contours of the human mind and love commensurate with the increasingly populated globe he wrote for. If, as many suspect, Shakespeare intellectually and emotionally out-manoeuvres lost-at-sea Christophers, then encountering Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings could inspire modern adventurers to out-Columbus Columbus by mapping for themselves the long-sought philosophy in the global enigma that is Q.

Chapter 1: Penetrating Q

If William Shakespeare intends his complete set of 154 sonnets to be meaningful, what will we discover if we examine them in the original setting of Q? By surveying the 1609 edition, can we locate points of entry for our investigation and hope to map some of the salient features?

1: Rediscovering the sonnets of 1609

We begin our scrutiny of Q aware it contains by reputation the greatest love poems in English literature. Yet when we read the literature, it seems Shakespeare’s sonnets are no ordinary love poems. There is division, confusion and outright admission of failure regarding their meaning and purpose. Are they autobiographical or deeply philosophic? Our mission would be successful if we could identify the type of inter-related love and philosophy they embody.

The impenetrability of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to a barrage of research over the last 400 years leads us to review the status of the 1609 edition. By returning to Q we will see how the original responds to systematic investigation and how previous attempts to understand the 154 sonnets may have been constrained by traditional preconceptions as to Q’s meaning and purpose.

We are fortunate on two accounts. There was only ever one edition of Q published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and there are still thirteen copies of the original edition of 1609 in existence. Since there are only eight minor variations of spelling, punctuation and typesetting between the thirteen copies, for our purposes it can be assumed they were last-minute corrections made during the original print run.

For the present we can also leave aside issues as to when before 1609 Shakespeare wrote and arranged the sonnets in Q and about the level of his participation during the publishing and printing process. If we find evidence of a substantial structuring in the set and a clear relation between the ideas and emotions embedded in them and the rest of Shakespeare’s works, then we could assert he is responsible for the final state of Q and has a controlling hand in its publication.

Because we identify Q as the site for investigation, a facsimile of the 1609 edition is appended so an evaluation can be made as to how faithfully the analysis remains to the evidence and when it slips into preconception or speculation.

Part 1 of the investigation, then, will detail features of the 154 sonnets in Q ready to view. Only after describing the many irregular and regular aspects of the set will we draw conclusions about their relevance and significance.

The method we will use is somewhat analogous to Darwin’s approach to the evidence for pre-human evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin’s stroke of genius is to look inductively for evolutionary change in the readily available cases of artificial selection and then extrapolate these verifiable facts to the broader tracts of time to deduce consistencies beyond the reach of empirical investigation.

Further, Darwin uses the same method in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex to reveal that, besides natural selection, ‘love’ and ‘morality’ are significant players in human evolution. By searching for recurring evidence of Shakespeare’s thoughts and feelings about human nature within nature, it might be possible to grasp how he famously inter-connects the natural world with deep human love and understanding.

By identifying significant patterns in the Sonnets in this Part and by exploring similar features in the poems and plays in Part 2, we will be looking for a coherent philosophy that corresponds to the evidence and accounts for the depth of intellectual and emotional maturity readers experience in the 154 sonnets. It would be a bonus if that philosophy is distinctly Shakespeare’s.

2: Investigating the scope of Q

In Q, the first words appear on the title page. <snt_titlepage> It asserts the ‘SONNETS’ are ‘SHAKE-SPEARES’, that they are published in ‘1609’, and are ‘Never before Imprinted’. ‘G. Eld’ does the printing for ‘T.T.’, with the copies sold by one of two London booksellers, John Wright or William Aspley (who are named on one or other title page). External evidence identifies the initials ‘T. T.’ as those of Thomas Thorpe, a well-known publisher of the day.

While the information on the title page can be taken largely at face value, the same cannot be said of the dedication on the following page. <snt_dedication> From first sight, both the overall meaning of the dedication and the significance of some of its elements is mysterious.

They are baffling enough for some to call the dedication in Q the greatest mystery in English literature. We hear words such as ‘BEGETTER’, ‘POET’, ‘ADVENTURER’, we see dots after every word or letter and take particular note of the two sets of initials ‘M^r. W. H.’ and ‘T. T.’

The relevance of the unusual wording and letters to the 154-sonnet set is not immediately apparent. For the time being, we will treat the unique configuration of the dedication as an indecipherable key that might reveal its purpose as we examine the 154 sonnets.

At the end of the sonnet set there is a divide in Q between sonnet 154 and the long poem A Lover’s Complaint. < snt_154tolc> The juncture between the 154 sonnets and the poem is indicated by the blank space under sonnet 154 (containing the word ‘FINIS’ and the letters ‘K A’) and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Prologue
• Part 1 Mapping the 1609 Sonnets - taking nature to the sonnets
• Part 2 The European theatre - taking the sonnets to the plays
• Part 3 The wooden Globe - taking the plays to the world
• Notes
• Facsimile of the 1609 Sonnets
• Index