Shakespeare's Muse: An Introductory Overview (original) (raw)
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The Personae of the Muse in the Fair Youth Sonnets
The Anachronist 18.2, 2019
The figure of the Muse in Shakespeare’s sonnets, seemingly inconstant in its depiction, on a closer inspection, is revealed to be the signifier of a number of different entities, ones that are somewhat removed from concepts usually associated with the nine mythical Muses of Classical antiquity. These “personae,” or in other words, various manifestations or appearances of the Muse function in markedly different ways from each other and reveal the workings or the modus operandi of the Poet with regard to his endeavour of eternalising the Fair Youth’s beauty. The words of the Muse in sonnet 101 raise questions about the representational powers of pen vs. pencil, invoking the Renaissance paragone of poetry and painting, which leads to a number of enquiries concerning mimesis, invention, style, and Platonic realism. In my paper, I shall examine the forces and circumstances that shape the figure of the Muse, as well as what those forms could represent, in hopes of illuminating the poetic process of eternalisation in verse.
Sexing Shakespeare's Sonnets: Reading Beyond Sonnet 20
English Literary Renaissance, 2009
Critics of Shakespeare's Sonnets typically accept the premise that Sonnets 1–126 are addressed to a young man, and Sonnets 127–52 to a woman. Two main schools of analysis, by no means mutually exclusive, have dominated the discussion of these groups: either the Young Man and Dark Lady sonnets are read as belonging to sustained, and usually interlaced, narrative sequences, or the sonnets are seen as a series of n number of contiguous mini-sequences connected by themes and images; we might call these the strong and weak sequence theories. Despite the widespread acceptance of these two approaches, serious weaknesses and inconsistencies underlie the arguments offered in support of both theories. A review and rebuttal of these dubious arguments may help to reestablish the burden of logical proof where it belongs, at the door of those critics who want to make sweeping interpretive claims about the sequence of the sonnets.
UNDERSTANDING THE ESSENCE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE 1 st , 18 th , 116 th , AND 127 th SONNETS OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 2019
One of the most prominent poem sequences of all times, sonnets of William Shakespeare show us that poetry can be a great way to express feelings from diverse aspects and points of focus that range from frustration to lust. We can find a physical aspect of love and spiritual side of it while reading the sonnets. Shakespeare used more than one character in his sonnets to make the sequence more comprehensive and piquant. Through four characters, the sonnets capture the attention of readers. In this paper, the 1 st , 18 th , 116 th and 127 th sonnets of Shakespeare will be analyzed and interpreted from the aspect of meaning, theme, and structure in order to comprehend the essence of the sequence better. These four sonnets are selected and analyzed on purpose; they are the four pillars of the sonnets through which the flow of the whole sequence is changed. There are 154 sonnets in the sequence. As a whole, sonnets tell us a love journey between four characters: a speaker, a blonde young man, a dark lady, and a rival speaker. Even though love is the main foci in the sequence, other sentiments that foster love will be elaborated in this paper.
Renaissance Quarterly
Nothing and Twelfth Night (Daniel Derrin); its capacity to serve as a vehicle for historical thought (David Bevington); and-in an especially thoughtful essay by Kate Aughterson-the interruptive, unsettling effects of the hypermetrical soliloquies of Shakespeare's late plays, which cut against those narratives' reconciliatory endings. The soliloquy's accommodation of self-deception is a recurring theme. A. D. Cousins reads Hamlet's soliloquies as seductive fictions resonant with Bacon's essays; Patrick Gray argues that Shakespeare's tragic heroes, torn between irreconcilable value systems, employ faulty reasoning in their pursuit of aristocratic forms of honor; and James Hirsh, charting the increase in the late 1580s and early 1590s of soliloquies that contain markers of self-address, shows that (contra a common critical assertion) characters frequently lie to themselves while soliloquizing. Brian Woolland, discussing Jonson's comic soliloquies, argues for the theatrical audience's implication in these kinds of deceptions. If, as Hirsh suggests in his empirical study of early modern dramatic soliloquies, the vast majority of soliloquists never acknowledge the presence of the theatrical audience or other human witnesses to their speech, the aloneness they court nevertheless remains elusive. This is the collective conclusion of a group of essays that demonstrate that the soliloquy-its conventional associations with solitude, privacy, and interiority notwithstanding-underscores its speaker's immersion in a social world. L. E. Semler describes Marlowe's soliloquies as vehicles for self-assertion against hostile external forces. Andrew Hiscock suggests that in the fast-paced and crowded plays of Middleton, soliloquies reveal their speakers' imbrication in a turbulent and polyphonic social world. Huw Griffiths elegantly links Ford's invariably interrupted soliloquies to the impossibility of solitude or self-sufficiency in his "claustrophobic" tragic play worlds (186). In the sole contribution on Restoration drama, A. D. Cousins and Dani Napton suggest that the soliloquies in William Davenant's Macbeth are representative of the play's shift from Shakespeare's concern with private motives for rebellion to a Hobbesian framework that focalizes the effects of rebellion on the sociopolitical community. Although some essays cover familiar ground, scholars and teachers of early modern drama will find Shakespeare and the Soliloquy in Early Modern English Drama a valuable resource that furthers our understanding of the uses of this important rhetorical device.
Form and Content: A Critical Appreciation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 104
International Journal of English and Studies, 2022
Undoubtedly, William Shakespeare's Sonnets have achieved enduring popularity through several generations for several reasons. Arguably, one of the factors that accounts for this achievement may be traced to the architecture-content and form-of the poetry. Studies have revealed that the sonnets is a pathfinder in the forging of the Elizabethan sonnets and that Shakespeare, through the poems, is able to hint on several issues relevant to the existence of man. The intention of this paper is, therefore, to carry out a critical assessment of "Sonnet 104" by examining its form and content.
Shakespeare's sonnets and literary conventions of friendship in the English Renaissance
1974
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