I’m going to do this review pretty informally because I don’t read a whole lot of poetry and so don’t have a very good standard for comparison. However, as we’re getting down to the wire for finishing 2012 challenges, I needed to read some poetry for the Around the Stack in How Many Ways genre challenge. I’ve always loved Shakespeare and the sonnets were free for kindle, so here we are

At the beginning especially, I found the sonnets harder to follow than the plays. They have less of a plot and there’s less time to get into them, although they do often connect to one another and they weren’t too tough to get through. There was a lot of variety in the sonnets so I think everyone will have some they like and some they don’t. Personally, I found some a little wordy, since the first 12 lines are often used to set up a point that is only touched on in the last 2 lines. I realize this is part of the style, with the quatrains somewhat separate from the couplet, but I like the ones where they’re more connected best. The majority of the sonnets, written to a young man the author loves, were particularly hit or miss for me. Some were extremely romantic, like the one describing the author’s heart and eye fighting over where his love’s image resides. Others describing how Shakespeare didn’t feel worthy of the young man’s love were over-the-top and melodramatic.

Finally, at the end we reach the sonnets to Shakespeare’s dark lady. I loved nearly all of these. My favorite was Sonnet 130 (they’re only numbered, not named), which you can find here. But to give you an idea, it starts “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;”. It goes on to make fun of the other literary cliches so often used to describe beautiful women, but then concludes that Shakespeare’s love is still special even if he doesn’t praise her in an unrealistic way. To me, that’s Shakespeare at his best – witty in a way that can still resonate with people reading his works hundreds of years later.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.

Možda ne najkvalitetniji sa stanovišta teorije književnosti, ali svakako najlepši i najupečatljiviji njegovi stihovi.

Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit.
(Sonnet No. 26)

 

How to do justice to the legacy of literary history's greatest mind – moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe's "universal genius" and his rebel contemporary Schiller; forget the 19th century masters; forget contemporary literature: with the possible (!) exception of three Greek gentlemen named Aischylos, Sophocles and Euripides, a certain Frenchman called Poquelin (a/k/a Molière), and that infamous Irishman Oscar Wilde, there's more wit in a single line of Shakespeare's than in an entire page of most other, even great, authors' works. And I'm not saying this in ignorance of, or in order to slight any other writer: it's precisely my admiration of the world's literary giants, past and present, that makes me appreciate Shakespeare even more – and that although I'm aware that he repeatedly borrowed from pre-existing material, and that, all conspiracy theories regarding his identity aside, even the precise extent of his body of work(s) isn't conclusively established (yet?), either. For ultimately, the only thing that matters to me is the brilliance of those works themselves.

 

The precise dating of Shakespeare's sonnets – like other poets', a response to the 1591 publication of Sir Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" – is an even greater guessing game than that of his plays: although Nos. 138 and 144 (slightly modified) appeared in 1599's "Passionate Pilgrim," most were probably circulated privately, and written years before their first – unauthorized, though still authoritative – 1609 publication; possibly beginning in 1592-1593.

 

Format-wise, they adopt the Elizabethan fourteen-line-structure of three quatrains of iambic pentameters expressing a series of increasingly intense ideas, resolved in a closing couplet; with an abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme form. (Sole exceptions: No. 99 – first quatrain amplified by one line – No. 126 – six couplets & only twelve lines total – No. 145 – written in tetrameter – and No. 146 – omission of the second line's beginning; the subject of a lasting debate.) Their order is thematic rather than chronological ...

 

Read more on my own website, ThemisAthena.info.

 

Preview also cross-posted on Leafmarks.