Quote:
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Originally Posted by Carl Copeland
Can you write better Elizabethan verse than he did? Probably not, but it wouldn’t secure your legacy if you did.
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Actually, while I agree with the sentiment here and what you're going for, I believe many of us actually
could write better Elizabethan verse than Shakespeare. I mean that seriously. I still resist Susan's claim that the plays are poetry (it's a
valid claim, and defensible, but not one I agree with when trying to delineate genres), so if we restrict ourselves to actual poetic output (i.e. poems
qua poems), I would be shocked if many of us couldn't write a sonnet that could pass for Shakespeare.
One avenue that we haven't discussed is how limited Shakespeare's world was, and that relatively few people had the means to purchase books, and relatively few were able to even read and write. Shakespeare was active when there were maybe a few hundred people in his orbit capable of reading or writing poems. Sonnet-writing was often seen as a game -- one that emerged from court tradition dating back to Henry VIII, and continued through the end of Elizabeth's reign. She herself wrote sonnets, though they were unremarkable. Sonnets mostly circulated in manuscript form, often in coteries -- a group of friends (usually high-born) who would send their writings back and forth to one another. Importantly, they were rarely seen as serious endeavors. There was a long tradition of sprezzatura, dating back past Castiglione's
Book of the Courtier (which was popular in Elizabeth's court). Anyone who praised a poet's work would be met with the poet's ostensible humility - "Oh
this?
This little poem? No, it is but a trifle I jotted down before falling asleep!" This is precisely why Sidney never published his marvelous
Astrophil and Stella -- it was published posthumously in commemoration of his literary greatness (along with
Arcadia and others). Samuel Daniel's
Delia was only published because some of his poems were somehow mixed in with the first printing of
Astrophil and Stella, and he sought to amend the error (an offense to the Sidney family) by making his edition distinct. The key point is that even if there was a common conceit among poets to have their verses last the test of time (the legacy that N. is going on about), there was a related conceit that
their verses were meaningless scribblings.
But to bring this back around to my earlier point, when you have a limited number of people able to write poetry, and small groups that essentially egg each other on, the output is impressive for what it is...but is hardly representative of what is capable in the style and form itself. Nowadays, with high literacy and over a billion people on this planet who speak English, it is hard to imagine that some especially creative people could write Elizabethan sonnets as well as Shakespeare. Naturally, as Carl (and others) has said, there's not much reason to
want to write Elizabethan sonnets these days, because our language has evolved, as has the breadth of our preferred tropes. That doesn't mean that Shakespeare isn't a great sonneteer, but context is vital.
Hybrid Mode
