Start thinking about your Short Paper #2 assignment (posted below) and read through Greenblatt's chapter if you're interested in the idea of "cultural poetics," since it might give you some ideas for your play.
For Monday, read Sonnets 111-126, a very short selection, and especially consider nos. 111, 112, 113, 116, 119, 120, 121, and 126. We'll have an in-class writing response over some of these on Monday.
Things to consider...
* Why does Sonnet 126 lack a concluding couplet? What is the effect of reading a sonnet that doesn't end, especially after a series of 125 sonnets?
* The word "evil" crops up several times in this sequence, notably in Sonnets 119 and 121. If the relationship with the "young man" is ending, is it with considerable rancor on the poet's part? Has he encountered the ultimate betrayal? Or is it a more casual, mundane mendacity?
* Sonnet 116 is one of the most famous and beautiful in the entire cycle, and seems almost out of place here, as the relationship winds to a painful close. Why might the poet include this sonnet so late in the sequence, particularly with its familiar decrees about love and lines that defy time's "bending sickle"?
* How do Sonnet 111 and 112 develop the theme of 110, which states, "I have gone here and there /And made myself a motley to the view"?
* Bouncing off Greeblatt's idea that the theater "is manifestly the product of collective intentions," how might Shakespeare be expressing conventional (and theatrical) notions of love in these sonnets? While we tend to write stories that celebrates the triumph of love, were Elizabethans more pessimistic in their portrayal of amore? Do the sonnets reflect the theatrical notion that love is an idealized state that cannot be realized in the flesh?
* What final word of warning does the poet offer the "lovely boy" in Sonnet 126? Does this ultimately echo, like a mirror, the warning of Sonnet 1? Or has it been transformed?
No comments:
Post a Comment