The end of week 1

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your posts this week--if you have any last thoughts on the first sonnet, by all means throw them up. It certainly looks like we have some diversity in our approaches! I enjoyed Jacob's interest in the religious context of the poem and Amber's connections to Shakespeare's life. If we're staking out ground, I'm probably going to be most concerned with language, and particularly the possibilities and resonances of individual words. But I also look forward to developing what Randall calls 'prismatic thinking,' or the capacity to question one's own conceptual commitments and to try out different critical approaches.

This week's conversation was centered around the relationship between worldly things and their transcendent significance. Jacob did some interesting work with the rose and the bud, suggesting that instead of allowing one's beauty to signify the eternal, the subject of the poem becomes self-referential, selfishly meaning nothing more than himself. (What does this look like in real life? Falstaff?) Amber echoed the theme, comparing individual procreation with the larger structure of the family and family honor, symbolized in a coat of arms. In a sense, this is a mapping of the linear segment of a human life onto the ongoing spiral of the transcendent. It will be interesting to follow this theme in sonnets to come.

One procedural note: I think it will work better if we try to put our thoughts into posts instead of comments. That way we can more easily refer back to these conversations in the archive. It will also be easier to respond to specific posts instead of just jumping into the comments fray. Randall's hosting the second sonnet; talk to you on Tuesday!

Sonnet 1

Hi friends! I haven't read many of Shakespeare's sonnets before, and those I have read I haven't read closely. So it took me a long time to parse this poem at even a literal level. Here's the first sonnet:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be--
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

I'm interested in the strands of imagery running through this poem. We have the rose of course, but also images of heraldic coats of arms ('bear his memory,' 'only herald,' 'ornament'?) , economic transactions ('desire increase,' 'contracted,' 'the world's due), and eating ('famine,' 'abundance,' 'glutton'). Apparently, this sonnet is usually taken to be an older man encouraging a younger man to marry and have children--do these work together toward this interpretation? They seem oddly gendered.

Some related issues came up when I looked into the meanings of 'churl' offered by the OED:

• A male human being, a man; esp. ‘man’ as correlative to ‘wife’, husband.
• A man simply, without rank; a member of the third or lowest rank of freemen
• A countryman, peasant, rustic, boor.
• One who is sordid, ‘hard’, or stingy in money-matters; a niggard; a miser.

Is this a poem about social status? What it means to be a man? Or proper balance between spending and saving?

Finally, I'm trying to work out the motion I feel in this sonnet. The first quatrain feels like an orderly progression, with each generation succeeding the last (almost like the line of kings in Macbeth). The second quatrain is circular and disrupts this order. The third quatrain seems to center on the image of a bud (closing in on itself?), a tightening, perhaps impotent crumbling.

Can you push my thinking further in any of these directions? What else occurred to you as you read?

-Chris

Proposal: Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets

This summer I attended the Teaching Shakespeare Workshop, a month of studying, performing, and teaching Shakespeare. The idea for this project took shape during the last week of the workshop. I propose a group reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, using this blog as a forum for discussion.

Structure
We will read one sonnet each week, going in order from 1 to 154. Every Tuesday an active member, on a rotating basis, will 'host' the discussion, posting the sonnet and some framing questions or observations.  (Update: Every time we finish a rotation, we'll take a week off.)  Perhaps a host will pair the week's sonnet with another text. It's up to you. The following weekend the host will [may optionally] post some concluding remarks.

Participation
Active members will co-author this blog and should commit to being part of the conversation each week through posts and comments. To keep things manageable, active membership will be limited to six or so. (We can arbitrarily change that.) If you need to scale back your participation at any point, you may become an inactive member, hovering at the sidelines and posting comments from time to time. I expect membership to change over the course of this project; it will be fun to bring in new voices along the way.

Critical approach
There's room here for both close attention to the text and for personal reflection. It would be interesting to occasionally bring in secondary criticism, so long as we keep the atmosphere unstuffy and unthreatening. As our different approaches become recognizable, the conversation will take on some of the richness of Slate's TV Club, in which several commentators write to each other as they watch a season of a TV show. I'll be reading from Stephen Booth's edition, which was highly recommended at the summer Workshop.

Let's make it happen
If this sounds like fun, let me know--leave a comment or send me an email at chris.proctor@gmail.com. If you want to start as an inactive member, that's fine too. We'll start up as soon as five or six are on board. And if you know an interesting person who might be interested in joining, by all means invite him or her. I'm looking forward to hearing from you!

-Chris Proctor