Shakespearean Sonnet

10 Key excerpts on "Shakespearean Sonnet"

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  The Portable Poetry Workshop

  • Nigel McLoughlin(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  PART I: FORM & STRUCTURE 2 1 Varieties of the Sonnet Nigel McLoughlin What is a sonnet? Traditionally, the sonnet is thought of as a poem of 14 lines which exists in two main variant forms: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean Sonnet. These two main forms take their names from Francesco Petrarca and William Shakespeare, but the sonnet evolved gradually. It is thought to have originated in Provence although the location is disputed. Originally, the Italian word sonetto meant ‘a little song’ or ‘short refrain’ and was recited to musical accompaniment, and it became fashion-able in English poetry after it was imported from Italy around the start of the 1500s. In the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, brought the sonnet form to England mainly through translations of Continental poets. Howard modified the form and began a process of evolution. He used a variant that became the Shakespearean Sonnet. Later, Sir Philip Sidney used Petrarch as a model, but with some varia-tion, when he composed his sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella . These various early acts of translation, modification and modelling offered flexibility and hybrid vigour, and resulted in a strong tradition of sonnets in English. The form has continued to evolve, and different parts of its struc-ture became more or less important. As it developed, there emerged unrhymed sonnets; tailed sonnets (15–20 lines); such as those by Milton, and curtal (or curtailed) sonnets (10–13 lines); perhaps most famously by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The various sonnet types have been put to good use by every major movement within poetry, from Donne and other metaphysical poets through to the eras of the Romantics and the Victorians.

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  Lyric forms in the sonnet sequences of Barnabe Barnes

  • Philip E. Blank(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  30 Catherine Ing states that the principal problem in metrics is how to make words, which are used in poetry for their meaning-reference, serve a l s o . . . to indicate a form independent of the meaning, though not con-tradictory of its emotional effect, a form which c a n . . . , at best, deepen the meaning. 31 Sonnet XVIII may be read as one of Barnes's solutions to this problem. The separation between patterns of rhyme and sense and the predicament of vowel sounds of rhyme words mirror in the form the conflict which is set forth by the theme of the poem. The sonnet records a debate between views of love; also it imparts to the reader in its dichotomies of form a measure of the lover's frustration; and it constitutes a dramatic mon-ologue in which the poet argues the terms of a conflict engendered by his plight in a manner made psychologically convincing not only by what he says but by how he says it. 2. ENGLISH SONNETS A sonnet is English according to qualifications given in this study if every line rhymes with another on the same side of the diesis, if crossed rhymes predominate in two quatrains, and if it has a sestet in which crossed rhymes predominate in a third quatrain and in which the concluding lines are a couplet. Sixty-nine sonnets in Parthenophil have an English octave, and fifty-two have an English sestet; among these poems forty contain both the octave and sestet by which they may be classified as English sonnets. 32 28 And in sweet (line 1), reason (line 4), remorsefull (line 6), she (line 7), be (line 7), eguali (line 7), release (line 8), be (line 10), pitie (line 11), crueltie (line 12), ceaselesse (line 13), and reuenge (line 14). 29 And in write (twice, line 1), I (line 3), my (line 3), my (line 4), sighes (line 5), my (line 6), espye (line 6), / (line 8), my (line 9), my (line 11), thy (line 12), my (line 13), and my (line 14).

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  A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets

  • Michael Schoenfeldt(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Stephen Booth. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shakespeare, William (1986). The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint , ed. John Kerrigan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. (The New Penguin Shakespeare.) Shakespeare, William (1996). The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Sonnets , ed. G. B. Evans. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William (1997). Shakespeare’s Sonnets , ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Thomas Nelson. (The Arden Shakespeare.) Introduction 11 Shakespeare, William (2002). The Complete Sonnets and Poems , ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Oxford World’s Classics.) Smith, Bruce (1991). Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spiller, Michael G. (1992). The Development of the Sonnet . London: Routledge. Vendler, Helen (1997). The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Wall, Wendy (1993). The Imprint of Gender: Author-ship and Publication in the English Renaissance . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wells, Stanley (2004). Looking for Sex in Shakespeare . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. PART I Sonnet Form and Sonnet Sequence Shakespeare and the Essence of Verse An artist usually presents a given object or idea in one relationship to other objects and ideas; if he opens his reader’s consciousness to more than one frame of reference, he focuses on the object in one of its relationships and subordinates all other relationships to it. The essential action of the artist in creating the experience of an audience is the one that in grammar is made by indicators of relationship like “although,” “but,” “after,” “because,” “however.” In literature such indicators of relationship tell the reader that he is not in the borderless world outside art where he himself has always to work upon what he perceives, to arrange it around a focal point chosen and maintained by himself.

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  How to Craft a Great Story

  Teach Yourself Creating Perfect Plot and Structure

  • Chris Sykes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  The rhyme pattern is different to the Petrarchan one we have just studied. The rhyme scheme here is a b a b / c d c d / e f e / f g g and it finishes on a rhyming couplet. It as an English, or Shakespearean Sonnet.

  Key idea

  It has been said that screenplays, with their short speeches and imagistic scene directions, are really composed of hundreds of haiku, a traditional, Japanese poem of 17 syllables. If that is so, then clearly writing a poem can be good training for writing in other forms.

  Write

  Take a break from the novel, screenplay, or story you are writing and write a sonnet: even if you are not a poet nor have ever wanted to be and have never written a line of poetry in your life, try it. The exercise will force you to look closely at the tools of your trade: language. It will sharpen up your sense of structure and help you consider anew the relationship between what you want to say and how you say it. You will see clearly that what you say and how you say it are two parts of the whole; that form and content are one.

  Think of a proposition; it could be anything. For example:

  Proposition: all love is betrayal.

  Resolution: but I am not betraying you. (Or you are not betraying me.)

  Or:

  Proposition: it never rains but it pours.

  Resolution: where we live there is a drought warning.

  Think of your own proposition and resolution. When you have done that write a classical sonnet, either English or Petrarchan; i.e. 14 lines, iambic pentameter. Remember the proposition, resolution and the volta, or turn. Have fun.

  All right, this is poetry. Sestinas and sonnets are old fashioned and not everybody wants to write poetry anyway. What relevance does all this have for story writing today? Is there a set of rules or a correct set of proportions for a story? Today, the answer to the question must be no and, yet, yes. In general there is as wide a variation in our understanding or agreement of what a short story is as to what makes a poem. As the world has changed so many of the traditionally accepted forms have collapsed.

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  Know All About William Shakespeare and his Works

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter-3 Shakespeare's Sonnets and Influence Shakespeare's sonnets Shakespeare's Sonnets Author William Shakespeare Country England Language Early Modern English Genre(s) Renaissance poetry Publisher Thomas Thorpe Publication date 1609 Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SON-NETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in a ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ 1599 miscellany entitled The Passionate Pilgrim . The quarto ends with A Lover's Complaint, a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal. The first 17 sonnets, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are ostensibly written to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalise his beauty by passing it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the little Love-god Cupid. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609: Tho. Thorpe. Entred for his copie under the handes of master Wilson and master Lownes Wardenes a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes vjd. Whether Thorpe used an authorized manuscript from Shakespeare or an unauthorized copy is unknown. George Eld printed the quarto, and the run was divided between the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright. Dedication Dedication page from The Sonnets The sonnets include a dedication to one Mr.

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  The Modern Irish Sonnet

  Revision and Rebellion

  • Tara Guissin-Stubbs(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  sonnet which is the legitimate form, for it alone recognizes that peculiar imbalance of parts which is its salient characteristic’; however, the English sonnet ‘does something rather different with the form which is not quite as interesting or as subtle’, while ‘[c]ertain other freak varieties […] pay tribute only to the powerful echoes of the form that perversions of it essentially deny’.

  According to Fuller’s definition of the sonnet, most of the poems discussed in the present study would likely be dismissed as examples of what he terms either ‘strokes of brilliant licence’ or ‘the drudgery of persistent misunderstanding’.3 Fuller also refers the reader to Ezra Pound who, writing in an essay first published in 1934, claims that the sonnet ‘marks an ending or at least a decline of metric invention’, and ‘the beginning of the divorce of words and music’; in Pound’s mind, ‘by A.D. 1290 the sonnet is already ceasing to be lyric, it is already the epistle without a tune’.4 Yet it is the written features of such an ‘epistle’ that continue to hold an appeal, both in relation and in contradistinction to its oral potential. Paul Oppenheimer suggests that the sonnet was not intended to be spoken at all, claiming that ‘it is the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended for silent reading’ and is ‘the first lyric of self-consciousness, or of the self in conflict’.5 We might also think of Helen Vendler’s response to Yeats’s use of the sonnet, where she suggests that what the form ‘meant to Yeats , historically speaking, was verse consciously aware of itself as written not oral’; this, when combined with its associations with the English lyric, ‘compelled from Yeats both his literary allegiance and his nationalist disobedience’.6 To read the sonnet form as Pound

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  A Little Book on Form

  An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

  • Robert Hass(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Ecco

    (Publisher)

              Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. a

  Note: Looked at in one way, this is the first English-style sonnet: quatrain-quatrain-quatrain-couplet. But the repetition of the singing “ing” rhyme and the basic list structure and the syntactic parallelism belong to an English style older than the couplet; they de-emphasize the quatrains. The reversal at the couplet is the one Shakespeare will use so often. It means that the poem needs a punch line. The pretty descriptive writing is like Chaucer’s and anticipates Spenser’s, but the reversal, the psychological moment, seems a rhetorical cuteness. Which is a problem with the couplet reversal generally.

  Note: Tottel’s Miscellany, or Book of Songs and Sonnettes was published in 1557 and went through seven editions by 1584.

  3.    The next generation:

  Gascoigne:

              You must not wonder, though you think it strange, a

              To see me hold my louring head so low, b

              And that mine eyes take no delight to range a

              About the gleams which on your face do grow. b

              The mouse which once hath broken out the trap c

              Is seldom ’ticed with the trustless bait, d

              But lies aloof for fear of more mishap, c

              And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit. d

              The scorched fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame, e

              Will hardly come to play again with fire, f

              Whereby I learn that grievous is the game e

              Which follows fancy dazzled by desire: f

              So that I wink or else hold down my head g

              Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred. g

  Note: This is the English sonnet. And the native tone: the speaking voice, the homely rather than grand metaphors, and this early Tudor love of alliteration. The alliteration is associated with desire, the Italianate or fancy style: “gleams which on your face do grow,” “grievous is the game,” “dazzled by desire,” “blazing eyes my bale.” The poem doesn’t end with a reversal but a restatement in line 13 and an intensification in line 14. Coming back and nailing down as a form of closure. Sure rhythms, sure enjambments: Gascoigne is a wonderful writer.

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  The Stanza

  • Ernst Häublein(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Its tripartite structure, which also constitutes the end of the Shakespeare sonnet, consists of two identical elements (abab, two Stollen as Aufgesang) and a conclusion (cc, Abgesang) and thus compares to canzone, Minnesinger and Meistersinger structures. Gunther Muller locates the same pattern in the Italian sonnet, which is thus related to the ababcc stanza (‘Die Grundformen der deutschen Lyrik’ (1941), in E. Muller (ed.), Morphologische Poetik (Darmstadt, 1968), p. 142). Many three-stanza poems written in this metre resemble the sonnet. Two such poems by Watson contained in Englands Helicon (nos 26 and 58 in Rollins’s edition) were transformed into sonnets by A. Nixon and A. Craig. Occasionally eighteen-line poems read like structural imitations of the stanza they are written in: two parallel or analogous stanzas are concluded by a third which departs from the structural analogy, e.g. Sidney’s Lady of May 3, Old Arcadia 36, 37, 46, and Certain Sonnets 19 (Ringler’s edition). If we compare the poems by Sidney and Shakespeare with Donne’s ‘The Expiration’, Dryden’s ‘Song to a Fair Lady’, Cowper’s ‘The Castaway’, Wordsworth’s Laodamia and ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Apollo’, Arnold’s ‘To Marguerite’, John Wain’s ‘Time was’, Theodore Roethke’s ‘Four for Sir John Davies’ and Thom Gunn’s ‘Mirror for Poets’, we can judge how differently this magnificent form has been handled in English verse. Like the aabab and abaab stanzas, the tail-rhyme stanza aabccb (or aabaab) could be an extension of ballad metres, especially in its heterometrical shape of aa 4 b 3 cc 4 b 3. It originated in medieval Latin versus caudati and French rime couee. English tail-rhyme stanzas first appeared in the thirteenth century and were employed in lyrics and romances, hence the name Romance Six. Chaucer parodied these in The Tail of Sir Thopas, from which it derives its third name

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  Shakespeare's Artists

  The Painters, Sculptors, Poets and Musicians in his Plays and Poems

  • B. J. Sokol(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • The Arden Shakespeare

    (Publisher)

  55 Applying this model, Kerrigan and other important critics assert that Shakespeare’s Sonnets of 1609 consists of 152 love sonnets, capped by two Anacreontic fables in Sonnets 153 and 154, and then the long poem ‘A Lovers Complaint’. 56 The mid-point of the section of 152 love sonnets would then lie in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 76: 57 Why is my verse so barren of new pride? So far from variation or quicke change? Why, with the time, do I not glance aside To new found methods and to compounds strange? Why write I still all one, ever the same, And keep invention in a noted weed, That every word doth almost fel my name, Shewing their birth, and where they did proceed? O know, sweet love, I alwaies write of you, And you and love are still my argument: So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending againe what is already spent; For as the Sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told. The central line (line 7) of this central sonnet almost certainly should read, ‘That every word doth almost tel my name’, because editors take ‘fel’ to be a typo for ‘tell’. So at the centre point of a central poem Shakespeare’s poet-speaker refers to words telling ‘my name’ – and this time, for once, the speaker may reveal that name. For the first and the last words of the very next line begin respectively with ‘Sh’ and ‘pr’. Being statistically unusual, 58 this suggests a concatenation reading ‘Sh . . . pr’, which does call to mind a familiar name. Apart from that, the theme of Shakespeare’s central Sonnet 76 is a poet taking a dubious view of their work. Stephen Booth thinks that pointless or awkward features were inserted into POETS IN SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS 135 this poem in order to indicate an inept poet, 59 and Helen Vendler thinks the poem dramatizes a poet’s scornful reply to a speech-act in the form of another person’s denigrating ‘anterior utterance’.

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  Why Lyrics Last

  Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

  • Brian Boyd(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Shake-speares Sonnets, 1609

  Passage contains an image 8 Lyric and Narrative Eliminating Story

  Most lyric poems incorporate—how could they not?—elements of human experience also found in narrative: situations, attitudes, emotions, memories, propositions, settings, characters. Some lyrics may also include simple events—like Wordsworth’s sighting “a host of golden daffodils” in “I wandered lonely as a cloud”—usually as subjects for reflection rather than as part of a sequence of events. To the degree that poems incorporate the singular sequences of events characteristic of story, and depend for their impact on these sequences, we regard them as verse narratives rather than lyrics.

  In his sonnets Shakespeare avoids narrative and drama, even as he exploits to the utmost the resources of lyrics, individually and in sequence, including the resources that tap, in especially charged ways, into the emotional power that both narrative and drama draw on. While he keeps his lyrics free of narrative he takes full advantage of the intensity of emotional engagement allowed by two love relationships—one more, indeed, than in other Elizabethan sonnet sequences. His focus on love, standard in sonnet sequences, and his cast of defined characters, loving Poet, beloved and idealized Fair Youth, and desired but demonized Mistress, lay the basis for the passionate feeling and thought that he maximizes throughout the sequence. The sustained focus on first the Youth then the Mistress also reduces the costs for us as readers: although Shakespeare may surprise us with shifts in emotion, ideas, and strategies from sonnet to sonnet, we do not have to grope anew for the subject as we do in a collection of a poet’s unrelated lyrics. Wordsworth describes this effect well, in introducing his own Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1822): “For the convenience of passing from one point of the subject to another without shocks of abruptness, this work has taken the shape of a series of Sonnets.”1

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