For
Teachers
Helping
student
understand the sonnets:
I'm a believer in the value of having students read sonnets
aloud. For an assignment, have each student pick a sonnet to
recite to the class. (I do not allow students to pick
familiar
sonnets, such as "Shall I compare thee.") In order to recite
the
sonnet successfully, the student will need to understand the
syntax, vocabulary and overall meaning of the sonnet, as well as
develop an interpretation of the sonnet's tone, which can often be
changing or ambiguous. By reciting the sonnets, students can
also
get a sense of how the form of the sonnets, especially its three
quatrain and couplet structure, works with the sonnet's content.
I also like this assignment because students have fun
listening
to one another read (I always make sure there's clapping after each
recitation). A lot of people have posted readings of the
sonnets
on YouTube. The class could watch some of these, or even post
its
own. There are professional recordings of readings
of the
sonnets, including by Sir
John Gielgud and by Helen
Vendler (selected sonnets were included with the hardcover
edition of her book; I'm not sure about the paperback edition).
Helping students
engage with the sonnets:
The sonnets deserve their fame, but they are also a victim of their own
success. Because they are now so celebrated it is hard for
students to hear how uncertain the feelings expressed in the sonnets
often are, or to imagine how risky many of the feelings expressed could
be. As a result, students sometimes find the sonnets romantic
but
not relevant (just "flowery poetry"). So have the students pretend that
the sonnets they are reading have been sent by a not very
well
known admirer (situation: a not well known "friend" sends you the
sonnet over Facebook) . How would your students feel
about
the sonnet? Would they like it? Feel complimented?
Pursued? Flattered? Lied to?
What impression
would they form of the sonnets' writer?
Helping students
appreciate the poetry of the sonnets:
Consider having students focus on the language rather than moving
directly to a discussion of the sonnet's meaning. Students
could
pick one sonnet and list the following:
· The rhymed words and their division into quatrains and couplet.
· Patterns of repetition including sound patterns (alliteration, assonance, consonance) and word patterns (kinds of repetition such as parallelism or antithesis)
· Wordplay such as puns
· Metonymy and ellipses: these are two figures of speech that make for the compressed language of the sonnets (and often make their reading difficult for students). Metonymy involves the substitution of part for whole (as in "crown" to mean "king"), ellipses the omission of words (e.g. as in the colloquial phrase "see you" for "I will see you later.")
· Sources of comparison: identify the metaphors or similes in the sonnet and describe what other language (sight, sea voyages, law, music, etc.) they are taken from. How many languages in one sonnet can the students find? Then describe what the comparison is to, and (if you want students to start thinking further about meaning) why Shakespeare picks--or moves between--various languages.
I recommend the website Silva
Rhetoricae,
with its fantastic lists and
categorization or Renaissance and classical rhetoric, to help guide
students through this kind of analysis. The benefit here is
that
when students do discuss the meaning of the sonnet, they will have a
much better idea of what they are discussing if they have done this
formal analysis first. And at least as important: students
will
develop a sense of the great artistry of the sonnets.
Helping students
understand the sonnets in historical terms.
While we don't know a lot about why or to whom Shakespeare wrote his
sonnets (if anyone), we do know some things, such as the motives
writers had for composing sonnets in the Renaissance. And
there
is broad agreement on other matters, such as the division of the
sonnets into a larger group (1-126) written to or about a man, and a
smaller group (128-154) written about or to a woman. Students
might explore the differences between how Shakespeare writes sonnets
for the man versus how he writes sonnets for the woman--you could also
consider the "love triangle" sonnets 40-42. Why might there
be
these differences? What do they tell us about
ideas of men
or women in the Renaissance? How might these ideas be
connected
to what we see in Shakespeare's plays (if you're reading any: Taming of the Shrew, Romeo
and Juliet, The Merchant of
Venice, Twelfth
Night or Othello
would work well). Do we share any of these ideas?
Depending
on your situation and inclination you could also discuss the sexuality
of the sonnets. (For reasons I set out in my book, I think no
one
who reads the sonnets should be unaware of the likely male recipient of
many, and the explicitly male recipient of some). The
attitude
toward the male recipient is often described as platonic or spiritual.
Does this claim seem persuasive?
Helping students
appreciate the importance of reception. I think that it is
important to reflect on how the framing of a work of
literature affects how
we read. And the sonnets are especially
interesting in this regard because of the variety of ways they have
been framed. Have students go to a bookstore and look at the
covers of various editions of the sonnets. What do the
different
illustrations communicate about the sonnets or how do they shape a
reader's
expectations for them? How many different ways of framing can
the
student find? Does the visual framing go well with the
content?
What other kinds of framing are there, such as in the
editor's
introduction?. This assignment is also useful in helping
students
think of literature as something human and shaped, not descended out
of
nowhere as "classics" (the idea of the "classic," I believe, creates
student/reader passivity toward the literary text).
Sonnet
Secrets
Stuff you probably
never knew about Shakespeare's Sonnets:
Five outlandish proposals for
the identity of the young man
of the sonnets:
1. Wine personified (expressing Shakespeare's drinking
problem)
2. Shakespeare himself (love poems to his creative
muse)
3. Queen Elizabeth
4. The Protestant Church
5. An imagined illegitimate son, or Shakespeare's real son
Hamnet
Five proposed alternative authors of the sonnets and their corollary
identifications of the young man (I do not subscribe to any alternative
authorship theories
for either the plays or the sonnets).
1. Philip Sidney to Sir Edward Dyer
2. Walter Raleigh to King James' eldest son Prince Henry
3. Francis Bacon to himself
4. The Earl of Oxford to his illegitimate son by Queen Elizabeth
5. Anne Whately to William Shakespeare (Anne Whately, whom
Shakespeare is supposed to have betrothed but not married, is
a personage
created out of thin air--from a clerical error in a church register of
marriage licenses).
Five sonnets that I believe deserve more attention than they usually
receive: 15, 76, 115, 122, 135.
Five of the most risquè sonnets: 20, 42, 135, 136, 137.
The sonnet with the most dramatic rise in popularity, as
measured by rates of selection for anthologies: sonnet 130 ("My
mistress's
eyes are nothing like the sun"). The sonnet experiences a
whopping 1200% increase in the rate of anthologization pre- and
post-1900,
almost all of the increase coming post-1950.
The only sonnet with any likelihood of having been written for Anne
Hathaway: sonnet 145 (written in tetrameter rather than pentameter, it
has never been a popular sonnet).
Interpretation--some grace notes in popular sonnets:
· Sonnet 18
("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day").
The
sonnet repeats the word "eternal" twice. The first time it
refers
to the recipient of the sonnet, but the second time to the sonnet
itself. What
is Shakespeare really praising
in this sonnet?
· Sonnet 29 ("When in disgrace with fortune and men's
eyes").
The line "Like to the lark at break of day arising" provides
a
nice example of the musicality of Shakespeare's sonnets. Note
the
echoes of the letters l, i, k, and a, and especially
how Shakespeare opens and closes the line with the long i.
· Sonnet 55 ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments"). The sonnet begins with things that are strong but dead and that mark the dead (these "monuments" are specifically tombstones). It ends with the living: "you live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes."
· Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"). Shakespeare reverses the comparison and the thing compared in his metaphor. He doesn't say I am like the autumn, but the autumn is like me! The speaker of the sonnet may be aging, but he sure is important.
· Sonnet 116: ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"). The idea of a strong bond between a pair of lovers is emphasized by the echoing words of the first quatrain: "love"/"love,"; "alters"/alteration"; "remover"/remove." Even word sounds can't separate themselves.
· Sonnet 130 ("My
mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun").
This sonnets suggests that poets' figures of speech
dis-figure the beloved as much as they figure her,
since no one really has eyes like the sun, etc. There is a wonderful visual
equivalent of this idea in a picture from a 1654 book The Extravagant
Shepherd-- you can view it here.
Recommended Websites
The Amazing Website of Shakespeare's Sonnets Text and interpretation of Shakespeare's Sonnets, along with the text of other Renaissance sonneteers
Luminarium An excellent site devoted to medieval, Renaissance and Restoration literature. Has online texts, brief author biographies, and criticism.
Open Source Shakespeare A great online Shakespeare concordance and search engine.
Renascence Editions A large collection of online Renaissance texts.
Silva Rhetoricae A wonderful compendium of Renaissance rhetoric, this site both provides a sense of the rhetorical knowledge Shakespeare would have had, as well as a guide to particular figures of speech in the sonnets. To most easily find particular figures of speech, view "the Flowers" of rhetoric by groupings.
Sonnet Central Contains collections of sonnets from various times and places, including Elizabethan and early seventeenth-century sonnets.
Recommend
Books and Articles 
Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Bray, Alan. "Homosexuality and The Signs Of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England." In Queering the Renaissance, Ed. Jonathan Goldberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.
-----. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Callaghan, Dympna. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Duncan-Jones,
Katherine, ed. Shakespeare's
Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare.
London:
Edmondson, Paul and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Greene,
Thomas. "Pitiful Thrivers: Failed Husbandry
in the
Sonnets."
In Shakespeare
and the Question of
Theory.
Ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. New
York:
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Fuller, John. The Sonnet.
Marotti, Arthur F. "'Love Is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order." ELH 49 (1982): 396-428 .
Henderson, Katherine and Barbara McManus. Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy About Women in England, 1540-1640. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare; The Sonnets. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1944.
Schiffer, James, ed.. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1999.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Schoenbaum, Samuel.
Shakespeare's
Lives.
New ed.
Smith, Bruce R. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.