I think this is a better ebook version: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1745

Comparing the ToCs, it seems to have the 1645 poems in order, followed by the 1673 edition additions and then... everything else. I just wish the producers hadn't put all of the poems in italics!

I just got back from singing at a funeral in a packed church, for a friend I made ten years ago in the San Diego Master Chorale. (He had sung with us and also had been our Board president.) About 20 members of the Chorale volunteered to form a small choir to provide the service music for the ceremony.

Today I learned that the deceased had been the captain of a nuclear submarine before retiring from the Navy, earning a master's degree at Harvard, and then having a successful second career in industry as an engineer. His wife, four children, 15 grandchildren, and 5 great-grandchildren, and those of us who had known him from the Chorale or various church or volunteer activities agreed that he was a very lively, fun, sweet, humble person, who always put service to others before his own ego. (Although a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Sam had been a longtime member and supporter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He was also an avid environmentalist. And he often went out of his way to help random homeless people get fed and cleaned up)

I hadn't known anything about Sam's illustrious pre-retirement career before hearing the eulogies by his sister, daughter, and a retired admiral. Sam never mentioned that stuff. I just knew he was a great singer and a very eager volunteer. If we needed someone to help clean up after a post-concert reception, Sam usually signed up and then did a stellar job at whatever menial task he'd taken on.

I looked out at all the people smiling fondly through their tears at his funeral, and thought, "That was a life well lived." He wasn't famous, but he meant an awful lot to those of us who knew him, and presumably also to those who had met him only briefly when he came to their aid in a time of need.

Funny, but no one mentioned in their eulogies what a shame it was that, since Sam wasn't as good of a poet as Shakespeare, he'd had no justification for even existing. So either their priorities are badly out of whack, or yours could use some adjustment, N.

[Edited to say that I don't mean that last comment as a zinger. I'm serious. The notion that the only way to justify one's existence is by attaining the impossible goal of becoming the Greatest of All Time at something is pretty damn depressing. And I also reject the notion that there is something wrong with enjoying poems that weren't written by the Greatest English-Speaking Poet of All Time. If you are determined not to enjoy anything else but Shakespeare, that's your choice, but I'm not going to let you tell me I can't.]

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Yes.


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Shakespeare
 

Some of you may groan to see another comment on this topic now. So--first I'd like to thank all the writers, especially Shaun, who know so much about Shakespeare and other writers of his time. It was educational to read through this thread.

Second, now that Shakespeare's greatness has been established (not that there was any question), I'm wondering if anyone would like to talk about it on a craft level. Since this is a "Musing on Mastery" board, I'd really like to hear those who know Shakespeare's work so well quote some lines and explain how the language techniques he uses create certain effects. Rhetorical techniques? Syntax? Sound effects?

I'm looking for techniques I can learn from and practice in my own work.

Any takers? Or perhaps someone should choose another poet whose craft we can illuminate and discuss?

(I can't make a choice and start a thread because I don't have the necessary expertise. I'm here to learn.)

Barbara

I'd be interested in similar. There's got to be some decent books out there that analyze Shakespeare's qualities as a poet. Does anyone know of any?

There are many, though one of the real challenges of academic books that get into anything about Shakespeare's poetry is that there are many baked-in assumptions, based on those scholars' academic biases. For instance, whether a scholar believes that Shakespeare's expressed feelings toward the young man of the first 126 sonnets are fraternal, romantic, fictional, biographical, or [insert perspective here] will inevitably shape how that scholar talks about the sonnets overall. Likewise, for the so-called "dark lady sonnets" (which is a horribly reductive term that should be kicked to the curb), there was stodgy academic resistance against considering the woman appearing throughout sonnets 127-152 might have been Black. Naturally, a distinction like that can make a huge impact on how the poems are read (and discussed). There are many similar caveats that govern why I teach with a reader-response approach. I have my own set of entrenched scholarly opinions, but I never want to impose them on another person's fresh reading.

Those important disclaimers aside, I think Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is one of the better academic texts out there that truly gets into the form and function of the sonnets, with a lot of time spent exploring concatenation, consistent thematics, meter, and other like concerns. I can be quite critical of Vendler's readings, but I also acknowledge that she was one of the best in the past couple generations at actually looking closely at each poem both individually and as part of a broader collection.

I also bristle a bit at a lot of their baked-in assumptions and baseless claims, but in general, I think Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells's Oxford Shakespeare Topics: Shakespeare's Sonnets is a decent enough (and accessible) overview of everything related to the sonnets. Again, don't take everything there at face value, but it manages to be reasonably thorough, compact, and readable, which is a pretty good feat for that sort of text.

How do you feel, Shaun, about “Shakespeare’s Metrical Art” by George Wright? It has a narrower focus, but it was an eye-opener for me, and I need to read it again (and again).

Would you consider these books to be relevant to his poetic style in his plays as well? I guess in an ideal world the perfect book would analyze his writing style across all of his texts, not just his sonnets, but we have to take what we can get.

Although the sense that I'm getting from this thread is that a lot his status comes from an intersection between his ability both as a poet and playwright. So maybe when we look at his poetic style alone the divergence between him and other writers isn't as great. In other words, there maybe isn't some kind of secret sauce to be found beyond him being a masterful writer who reached high acclaim with his plays.

I always stagger to conceive how many people have denied that Shakespeare didn't, in some sense, want to fuck men.

Reddit dug up this Wikipedia article for me:

Shakespeare's Writing Style

Differences from Contemporaries

Maybe it's not really his poetic skill that's the strength, but rather the poetic skill has to be a given. It was his ability as a poet AND storyteller, his understanding of the human condition being what set him apart.

Barbara Baig if you check out the link above there is also a list of books that the article references at the bottom of the page. Some of them could be helpful.