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SoSe 21: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Context: Then & Now

Thomas Rommel

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The 154 sonnets by Shakespeare (not counting those incorporated into his plays) are by no means “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, figures pedantical”, as Biron would have it in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Neither are they “wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes should be full-fraught with serviceable vows”, as Proteus claims in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. They are meticulously crafted textual entities – certainly not simple poems that “please one and please all” (Malvolio in Twelfth Night; or, What You Will). Shakespeare’s sonnets were written for a specific audience, at a specific time in the history of poetic development, and in this seminar we will be analysing these “deep-brained” entities of fourteen lines (cf. A Lover’s Complaint) against the backdrop of Elizabethan culture. Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost states that “none but minstrels like of sonneting”, but to the present day Shakespeare’s sonnets are perceived as highly structured, well-crafted poems, to be found in anthologies and on the London Underground. In this seminar we will not follow Armado’s advice in Love’s Labour’s Lost to “assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for I am sure I shall turn sonnet. Devise, wit; write, pen”, but we will endeavour to analyse Shakespeare’s sonnets and put wit & pen into context then and now. “Thus far with rough and all-unbending pen our bending author has pursued the story” of Shakespeare’s sonnets – and with these words from Henry V you are invited to explore this very special form of poetic expression in our seminar. close