Speech and Performance in Shakespeare's Sonnets and Plays by david schalkwyk

Author:david schalkwyk [schalkwyk, david]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Drama, Literary Criticism, European, History and criticism, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Performing Arts, Shakespeare, Sonnets; English, Theater, English drama, Speech in literature, Autobiography in literature
ISBN: 9780521811156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2002-04-15T06:27:07+00:00

Ophelia, Polonius, Hamlet, Gertrude, Horatio, the players and Laertes. Though apparently trivial and tangential, Polonius's pretensions to literary criticism, combining both paternal and aesthetic disapproval in the case of Hamlet's own 'sonnet' to Ophelia and the players' performance, and Hamlet's counter-criticism, should not be overlooked. Poetry and theatre are not merely pleasant adjuncts to this world of erotic and political machination, but parts of it.

The oppressive, intrigue-ridden court of Denmark, which seems so like a prison to Hamlet but not to his school friends, is not unlike the world of the sonnets. These poems present not merely lyrical personae, but a social world glimpsed both in peripheral and focused vision. I have already explored ways in which one may glean both the sonnet's power and weakness as a form of social action via plays in which sonneteering is an integral part of the action, such as Love's Labour's Lost and Twelfth Night. The sonnets' relation to Hamlet opens oureyes to the dark world in which they are so self-consciously situated and to the equally dark lord that inhabits it so luminously, 'like a iewell (hunge in gastly night)' (sonnet 27). The sonnets' relationship to Hamlet does not reside in their shared invention of an essentially private modern interiority, or even in the irundoubted demonst rations that such in war dnesshas aninext ricable stake in the public world. It lies ratherin the irrepresentations of the debilitating effects of a world in which the personal or the private can find no space foritself within the public orsocial world. This relationship allows us to review both formalist ideas of the lyric as an essentially private rehearsal of 'solitary speech', which 'deliberately strips away most social specifications', 26 and the historicist conviction that the private simply is the social. What Vendler regards as the essence of the lyric in general is in fact merely a strategy that the poems entertain but ultimately cannot sustain. Farfrom endorsing the opposing, materialist position, however, that failure demonstrates the debilitating consequences of the reduction of the personal to the social.

I have suggested that sonnet 23 seeks to remove itself from the public gaze by moving away from the theatrical space of open address: away, precisely, from a public world. It seeks to persuade the beloved to retreat to the safer, more secluded world of writing where, it is hoped, a relationship might be established that is untrammelled by social distance or vulnerable display. The poems that follow sonnet 23 both seek to establish this removed but shared space where a 'mutuall render, onely me

____________________ 26 Helen Vendler,The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 2.

-130-

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.