Summer’s here, and my wife took the kids to the library to start stocking up on reading material.  My 7yr old got her library card last year, my 5yr old excitedly got hers this year. Question : How’s the Shakespeare at your local library?  Do they have more than just the complete works?  In the last year or two look at all the Shakespeare related books that have crossed this one blog alone:

Bardisms, by Barry Edelstein

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

The Sourcebooks Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Wife, by Germaine Greer

FOOL, by Christopher Moore

Will, By Christopher Rush

Shakespeare Wars, by Ron Rosenbaum

Classical Comics

The Master of Verona

The Book Of Air And Shadows

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, The World As Stage

Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare

Interred With Their Bones

And I’ve missed a few!  I think this year I’ll get together much of what’s in my collection and donate them. How about you?  Your local library got any of the good stuff?  Carl reminded me that it’s not always about running out to buy your own personal copy of every book you think you might like.  That’s kinda sort what libraries are for!

Dr. Carl Atkins is the author of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary as well as a prolific commenter here at ShakespeareGeek, both while holding down a day job as a medical doctor. Instead of a typical author interview with press blurbs and bio questions we decided to do something different – Carl’s going to guest blog a series for us based on *your* questions. Question : Let’s start out with the big question – are the sonnets autobiographical, or what?  If they were, then who is the Dark Lady? Who is the “Fair Youth”?    Have these questions always been a mystery, or is it more like the authorship question, where it can all be traced back to one person who originally asked the question (I’m thinking of Delia Bacon, who first posed the idea that Sir Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s works). This is a good place to start. Let’s get this out of the way right in the beginning. The presence of some autobiographical elements in at least some of the sonnets were suggested by Shakespeare’s earliest commentators, including the most influential, Edmund Malone, in his edition of 1780. As more commentators found signs suggesting autobiography, the effect  snowballed, perhaps reaching a height with Wordsworth’s romantic outburst
“with this Key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.” However, Sidney Lee, a turn-of-the-century Shakespeare scholar and biographer cautions:

“autobiographical confessions are very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made….With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonneteers of his day….At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current conventions of Elizabethan sonneteering, as well as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention…the autobiographic element in his sonnets…is seen to shrink to slender proportions.”

The problem, I think, is that Sonnet commentary began almost 200 years after the sonnet convention peaked. Shakespeare’s Sonnets were published in 1609, at the tail end of the craze that was going out of fashion. By the late 1700’s when The Sonnets were starting to be taken seriously as part of Shakespeare’s important works, nobody understood what “sonnet cycles” were.
They looked at The Sonnets as 154 poems and not in the context of the Elizabethan sonnet cycles that were popular in Shakespeare’s day. Taken in that context, we must recognize that it was common for the poet to write “in propria persona”, i.e., as if he were speaking, without regard to whether the subject matter literally applied to himself. The themes were also common
and repeated from one cycle to another–themes that we find in one form or another in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Looked at from this angle, any initial suggestion of autobiography must be regarded skeptically.
An additional problem is that we know very little about Shakespeare himself, so it is very difficult to confirm or refute any autobiographical suggestions made on the basis of an implication in a sonnet. And, of course, The Sonnets themselves are maddeningly vague.  As to the identity of the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, much ink has been wasted in search of them. W. H. Auden did not mince words on the matter. He said: “It is…nonsensical, no matter how accurate your results may be, to waste time trying to identify characters. It is an idiot’s job, pointless ad uninteresting. It is just gossip.” Stephen Booth, somewhat less archly decries the “games of pin the tail on the Dark Lady.” Again, we have the problem of the vagueness of The Sonnets and the lack of biographical
information for confirmation that prevents any conclusions from being drawn, even if we were to assume that these individuals were anything more than fiction. I have found nothing in The Sonnets themselves, nor in the extensive commentary I have read, to lead me to believe that the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth were any more than dramatis personae required for the
purposes of poetry (whether or not they bore resemblance in part or whole to persons familiar to Shakespeare). About the Author This book brings together the scholarship of dozens of the most brilliant commentators who have written about Shakespeare’s Sonnets over the past three hundred years. This edition adds the significant work done by modern editors to the most important commentary culled from the two variorum editions of the last century. Atkins presents a straightforward edition without jargon with the simple goal of finding out how the poems work and how they may be interpreted. He is the first to collate the modern texts so that differences among them can be fully appreciated and compared. His discussion of meter and verse is more substantial than that of any other edition, adding particular dimension to this text. Those coming to “The Sonnets” for the first time and those seeking a fresh look at an old friend will equally find this edition scholastically rigorous and a pleasure to read. Carl D. Atkins is a practicing medical oncologist in New York. Got a question for the author? Send it in and we’ll see if we can get it in the queue!

Last night, while hanging out with the kids, my wife said, “Do you remember what anniversary tomorrow is?” I did not. I went through the whole list – first date?  first kiss?  first …? hope chest? Nope nope nope. She dangles her wrist.  “A year ago you gave me my bracelet!” She’s right.  The kids were even at the same circus this year. 🙂

Lot of people died last couple of weeks.  Big deal, lot of people die every week.  Maybe you’re upset over what you’re seeing on the evening news, maybe you don’t care.  Maybe it’s simply made you think about the passage of time, getting older, losing things that mean something to you… who knows.  In my usual cruising around for Shakespeare material I tripped across something that struck a chord, particularly this week, that I thought I’d share.

To me, fair Friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters’ cold
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride;
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,—
Ere you were born, was beauty’s summer dead.

I can’t even say I fully understand that one yet (it’s Sonnet 104, by the way).  It jumped at me entirely because it’s one of those opening lines that pops so well.  I like when Shakespeare goes head to head with Time, Death and immortality.  This is no Sonnet 18, but in a way it’s like Shakespeare gives us our own personal “So long lives this” moment.   These days we’d say something like “here’s how I’d like to remember this person.”  If you’re a fan of Michael Jackson, do you prefer video of him in his later crazy years, or at his peak? Only it’s got a whole different meaning because you’re saying it to the person while they’re still alive – to me you’ll never grow old, because you’re still as beautiful as the first time I saw you.  Sounds like the kind of thing you might tell your wife after 50 years of marriage.  (Although truthfully even after 50 years of marriage I don’t think I could pull it off without hearing “Are you saying I look old?” 🙂 ) It’s quite possible that this one goes on to say the exact opposite.  But I’m not in the mood to care.  I like the opening, and I will take it to mean what I want today. Know what I mean? [ Whoa, here’s something scary.  While looking up backing references I found this interpretation:

The speaker addresses his poem as “fair friend,” but then makes it clear immediately that this “fair friend” is not a human friend, by asserting “you never can be old.” Such a claim cannot be averred about a human being, and as the reader has seen many times, while this speaker often exaggerates, he never diverts his eye and hand from truth.
… The speaker is addressing a poem that he wrote three years ago, and he declares that the beauty of this poem is as evident as when he first “ey’d” it. Even after “three winters cold” which changed the “forests” that shone with “summer’s pride, the poem is fresh with the beauty of youth.

And this one:

Here the poet uses his fond memories of first meeting his lover as inspiration to write the poem. It is clear from Sonnet 104, and the other Sonnets as a whole, that the passion he feels for his male lover (possibly the Earl of Southampton), is the most intense experience the poet has ever encountered. Nothing is important but his lover; his lover is eternal, both in beauty and spirit.

Funny how different they can be, huh? ]

http://www.thedailydust.co.uk/2009/06/30/tube-drivers-to-read-out-shakespeare/

A new initiative will see tube drivers reading out classical quotes with their announcements. The drivers are to be given a book of quotations that will include Shakespeare, Goethe and Friedrich Engels and are expected to read out quotes with their daily announcements to passengers.

I like it.  The closest I ever saw to this in Boston was the overhead speaker guy in South Station who’d actually say “Good morning everyone … and have a nice day.”  Hey, it’s Boston, sometimes it’s harder than Shakespaere to get good manners out of people! 🙂 [ I particularly like this story because I can post it on my other blog, too. ]