Month: May 2007

I have heard many different interpretations of Sonnet 130. I’m wondering if one of them is “right”.  In case you don’t recall, Sonnet 130 is this one:

SONNET 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
 
Here are some of the intepretations I’ve heard:

1. “My love is really pretty ugly, but that doesn’t matter because I love her anyway.”
2. Shakespeare is making fun of the tradition of the time, all the comparing to this and that, and basically saying “No, my love does not make me want to compare her to anything, she’s unlike any of those things – but that has nothing to with my feelings for her, either.”
3. Shakespeare is referring to a woman that he knows he shouldn’t be with, and he’s trying to convince himself that she’s bad for him by finding everything he can imagine that is the antithesis of the typical love sonnet.  In the end he fails, and no matter how many negative things he can list, it doesn’t change how much he’s in love with her.
4. It’s a joke, the Shakespearean version of “Just kidding.”  “Hey babe, you’re old and ugly.  Just kiddin!  You know I love you, right?”

I think #2 is probably the closest.  That whole theme of “Comparing you to other things just isn’t working for me, because what we have is just on a whole different plane” seems to come through in many other sonnets (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’ day”, anyone?)  I appreciate #3 because it was so different from anything I’d heard before.  I think #1 and #4 are probably pretty unlikely.
Are there other interpretations I’ve missed?

For those that are interested in such things, there’s a great collection of audio peformances called “When Love Speaks” that I highly recommend. In it, Sonnet 130 is performed by Alan Rickman.

UPDATED OCTOBER 2010:  Sonnet 130 actually makes an appearance in my new book Hear My Soul Speak: Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare. One chapter is devoted entirely to sonnets that might make a good ceremonial reading, and I make the case that taken with the right frame of mind, sonnet 130 could well be the best of them all.

Ok, simple question.  When did you “get” it?  Hopefully you know what I’m talking about. Most of us were forced to read Shakespeare in school.  Very few probably saw it as a life changing moment.  We were too busy trying to flip back and forth to the glossary because we were going to be quizzed on every single word.  Not to mention the rote memorization.  I’m talking about the moment where Shakespeare clicked for you, and suddenly it went from being this strange Elizabethan code that you kinda sorta thought you got to, “Wow, there are *people* under these words, I understand what they’re saying to each other and…it’s beautiful.”  Know what I mean?  I thought of this question while reading Rosenbaum’s Shakespeare Wars.  Very early (I think I’m on page 8) he talks about teaching the sonnets and getting to Sonnet 45, trying to explain the line “These present-absent with swift motion slide” and actually feeling like he personally knew what it was like to be in two existences at once, himself and outside himself, sliding back and forth between the two.  I’m doing a lousy job of explaining it the way he did, go read his book. I can tell you mine, though it’s not quite on a par with Rosenbaum’s.  I was in college, doing a paper on Hamlet (specifically, the role of insanity as a defense mechanism).  I’d hit the line “Thrift Horatio, thrift!  The thricebaked meats did coldly furnish forth the wedding tables.”  I was talking to a friend and I said, “Wait…was that a joke?  Did I understand that right?  Did Hamlet just tell Horatio that his mom got remarried in a hurry so that they could use the leftovers from the funeral?”  And suddenly there it was.  Hamlet went from being this masterpiece that I would never be privy to, to…a kid that lost his dad.  There’s a person in there. Make sense?  Somebody else’s turn.

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/riba_rambles/944885.html Riba Rambles onto something cool, a Pokemon style (“gotta catch ’em all”) chart of all Shakespeare’s plays. Told yourself that you’ll see/read/act in every one?  Print it out, hang it up on your refrigerator and get started Xing them out! I think I like Much Ado the best, although The Tempest is cool.  I don’t fully understand why Timon of Athens looks like a pilgrim, though :).  

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/duncan/17606/# An interesting article that I’m not sure I understand about the KLK8 gene being responsible human ability to form language over the chimpanzees.  Kind of neat that we’re getting to the point in our science that we’re learning such things. The article’s got a lengthy Hamlet quote in the middle to back up the title :).

Seriously.  Students walked out of their exam at a Scottish school recently when they came to the question to compare Hamlet and King Lear.  The problem was that they’d never been taught King Lear.  I can sort of see the dilemma.  It’s not like you can get away with saying “Aw come on, you should have studied the entire complete works on your own.”  Especially King Lear, for pete’s sake.  You’ve picked the two greatest plays in the entire canon.