Eratosphere Forums - Metrical Poetry, Free Verse, Fiction, Art, Critique, Discussions Able Muse - a review of poetry, prose and art

Forum Left Top

Notices

Reply
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #141  
Unread 10-17-2024, 01:15 PM
Barbara Baig Barbara Baig is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2012
Location: USA
Posts: 187
Default Shakespeare

Thanks very much Nick, Shaun, and Carl.--Barbara
Reply With Quote
  #142  
Unread 10-17-2024, 08:07 PM
Shaun J. Russell Shaun J. Russell is offline
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Columbus, OH
Posts: 2,213
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Carl Copeland
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).

I have a copy of that at hand right now, but I must admit that I haven't done more than skim it for research purposes. It's been a busy semester, and I haven't been able to do much in the way of research, but I'll be looking into it more in the break. But I would say that if it was useful to you, then that's what matters! Robert Giroux's The Book Known as Q was my first thorough entree into the sonnets. I later realized that it's chock full of falsehoods, and probably did my later understanding of the sonnets more harm than good, but it was great at getting me in to them, and suggesting all sorts of curious possibilities.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick McRae
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.
So, this is definitely one of the problems with Shakespeare studies. They are very stratified. I feel pretty confident in my ability to talk/write about Shakespeare's plays (i.e. I'm trusted to teach courses on Shakespeare and Drama), but in terms of academic research, I'm known as a "poetry guy" rather than a "drama guy." And even though this is largely a false distinction, it does actually exist. And so you can typically look at a book on Shakespeare and it will mostly talk about either his plays or his poems. There are often further stratifications too, which says more about the nature of academic scholarship than it does about Shakespeare (obviously). Since I'm working on a monograph about Shakespeare's sonnets (which has been significantly slowed due to my high teaching load), I'm currently surrounded by around 100 books that are mostly about his poems (and most of those on the sonnets in particular). Few of them get into the plays, because the field sees them as generically distinct. For what it's worth this is largely why I pushed back a bit against Susan's comments earlier in this thread about how Shakespeare's plays are poems. In a sense, I 100% agree, but from a practical generic standpoint, they're simply different beasts.

Quote:
Originally Posted by W. T. Clark
I always stagger to conceive how many people have denied that Shakespeare didn't, in some sense, want to fuck men.
Right? And yet as recently as Stephen Booth's deservedly lauded 1977 critical edition, the editor hedges, claiming "William Shakespeare was almost certainly homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. The sonnets provide no evidence on the matter" (p. 548). What Booth is likely going for here is that the sonnets may or may not even be biographical (something mentioned earlier in this thread), though I agree that it would be awfully strange to have 126 sonnets expressing unrequited love to and for a young man if there was no personal stake.
Reply With Quote
  #143  
Unread 10-17-2024, 08:36 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2001
Location: New York
Posts: 16,641
Default

Shaun, if the sonnets are the main evidence that Shakespeare was gay, isn't it strange that Shakespeare published them and (as far as I know, I'm no Shakespeare scholar) that people back then did not seem to notice or care that he was outing himself? That doesn't seem likely to me. More likely, I think, is that he used extravagant language to kiss up to a vain moneybags. What am I missing? Did Shakespeare, in effect, publicly confess to being gay in his lifetime by publishing the sonnets?
Reply With Quote
  #144  
Unread 10-17-2024, 09:24 PM
Shaun J. Russell Shaun J. Russell is offline
Moderator
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Columbus, OH
Posts: 2,213
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater View Post
Shaun, if the sonnets are the main evidence that Shakespeare was gay, isn't it strange that Shakespeare published them and (as far as I know, I'm no Shakespeare scholar) that people back then did not seem to notice or care that he was outing himself? That doesn't seem likely to me. More likely, I think, is that he used extravagant language to kiss up to a vain moneybags. What am I missing? Did Shakespeare, in effect, publicly confess to being gay in his lifetime by publishing the sonnets?
No, the situation is that he wrote most of his sonnets in the 1590s in manuscript circulation. It was far more common for poets to write poems by hand to send to a few friends (and receive them in turn). This was generally considered to be "private" poetry, because they weren't published (think of the word origin there -- "made public"). As a result, lots of poets wrote things that they would never imagine being seen by the public. During the Elizabethan period (and even well afterward), there was a strong sense that many transgressions were tacitly okay so long as they weren't publicly known. This could range from being a Catholic (hence the term "crypto-Catholic") to having a mistress (or many) to having a proclivity toward the homoerotic. There have been a few good monographs written about early modern sexuality. Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns comes to mind, while a few others on Shakespeare in particular are great reads: Joseph Pequigney's Such is My Love is one of the earliest to delve into the homoeroticism of the sonnets.

But the key here is that early modern England had a lot of "don't ask, don't tell" sensibilities. Keeping things secret was ideal; open secrets were often tolerated. But the trick was always to avoid something becoming common knowledge, because that could be problematic.

As to the publication of the 1609 quarto, authors frequently had little say in their works getting published. There was no copyright at the time, and a bookseller/stationer could simply apply to publish something (truly almost anything) by registering it with the Stationer's Company. With the 1609 quarto, opinions vary widely on how much input Shakespeare had into its publication. My own feeling is that his involvement was minimal. It happened rather frequently during the early modern period that someone collected a poet's works and had them published on his/her behalf, often without their knowledge. This may have been the case for George Herbert (the so-called deathbed account of him asking an acquaintance to either "publish or burn it" is quite suspect), and also for Katherine Philips -- a couple of poets I've done a lot of work on. My guess is that the same is true for Shakespeare, and I even suspect that the oft-discussed inscription in Q (that begins "To the onlie begetter of these sonnets") actually refers to the person who brought Thomas Thorpe the manuscript.

Beyond all of these practical matters, there's not enough explicit evidence in Shakespeare's sonnets for his poems to have been scandalous. There's plausible deniability that they were homoerotic, and were instead simply homosocial...which was common, and accepted. And that's the line that scholars carried for a few centuries until some started loosening up about the matter in the 20th century.
Reply With Quote
  #145  
Unread 10-20-2024, 01:23 PM
Sarah-Jane Crowson's Avatar
Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
Moderator
 
Join Date: Oct 2018
Location: UK
Posts: 1,691
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaun J. Russell View Post
I think (and to be clear, this is just an informed critical opinion) that a lot of it has to do with exposure. One fact that is often forgotten is that Shakespeare was an actor. There were some non-actors who would write plays for hire for playing companies (Middleton is one), but often someone who was part of the playing company could and would write the plays they performed. In Shakespeare's case, he was a member of Lord Chamberlain's Men (later the King's Men), which was the preeminent company of the time. Shakespeare did indeed become the main writer of plays, though fellow actor Ben Jonson also wrote, and they also performed some works not written by company members. As a result, with Shakespeare writing most of the work by the most popular playing company, it makes sense that he would have more exposure than other playwrights writing for less prestigious companies (such as Thomas Heywood and John Webster writing for Worcester's Men).

Of course, this reality leads to a number of other questions. First, does "most popular" automatically equate to "best"? There's no good present-day analogue, but in modern film, a summer blockbuster might be seen by millions and win few awards, while a much more limited offering might nab Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay etc. Again, not a great analogue given that Shakespeare was indeed a great writer (which is more than we might say for most blockbuster scribes), but you catch my point: because he was a great writer and because he had the biggest platform, Shakespeare was well-positioned to have endurance. Other play writers weren't exactly toiling away in obscurity, but even if they were superior writers (by whatever metric we might come up with), limited exposure would have given them less notability.

I should also note that the very notion of authorship was far less rigid back then. We see more and more evidence of widespread collaboration among playwrights (which I've alluded to throughout this thread), and although Shakespeare's name might have been a draw, it was surely more about the quality and eminence of the playing company itself that maintained the perpetual success. The playing company couldn't have been so successful without great writing, but one could equally claim that it couldn't have been so successful without great acting or a great venue (the Theatre and the Globe) either. As usual, none of this detracts from Shakespeare's greatness, but it does highlight how it's largely inextricable from his circumstances.
I am so sorry to be so late to catch up on this discussion, but I just wanted to reply to Shaun's post with a link to what is (from my perspective) a potentially interesting contemporary scholarly book which explores that idea of Shakespeare (in this case from the perspective of publishing the folios) living within an ecosystem. Not a plug, just an interesting book which considers the professional networks surrounding Shakespeare (and again I think of the Pooh Perplex, the lampooning, and how 'who we are' as a society reflects on how we write about and understand literature).

I am so so sorry as I know the thread has moved on. Anyway, this is Dr Chris Laoutaris' 'Shakespeare's Book' which might be interesting?

https://harpercollins.co.uk/products...40283787558990
Reply With Quote
  #146  
Unread 10-28-2024, 12:09 PM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is online now
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2022
Location: St. Petersburg, Russia
Posts: 2,059
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by W T Clark View Post
I always stagger to conceive how many people have denied that Shakespeare didn't, in some sense, want to fuck men.
I first balked at the bluntness of this comment, but ultimately decided that the formulation is good. Shakespeare, of course, long predated any concept of homosexual/heterosexual, lasting same-sex relationships and even sexuality. There were men and women, maritally sanctioned intercourse, “passion” and fucking around. The latter was a sin, though probably more socially acceptable between men and women and for the active partner in any sex combination and for late Elizabethans more than for their grandchildren. Absolution was always available in any event, especially for a Catholic, as some think Shakespeare secretly was. Did Shakespeare feel “passion” for the fair youth? “The master-mistress of my passion”? Ok, but does that mean he wanted to fuck him? I don’t think it’s as obvious as it would be today, but Shakespeare’s general bawdiness inclines me to answer yes once again. I’d call him a bisexual if that term had any relevance for his time.

Last edited by Carl Copeland; 10-28-2024 at 12:16 PM.
Reply With Quote
  #147  
Unread 10-30-2024, 05:04 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Aug 2016
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 4,445
Default

.
I have it on hearsay through seventeen or so generations of conjecture that Shakespeare was a thespian. (No smoking sonnet.)

.
Reply With Quote
  #148  
Unread 10-31-2024, 09:49 AM
Carl Copeland Carl Copeland is online now
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2022
Location: St. Petersburg, Russia
Posts: 2,059
Default

Ha! I set you up well for that one. Guess it makes me your straight man.
Reply With Quote
  #149  
Unread 11-12-2024, 08:46 AM
Gail White's Avatar
Gail White Gail White is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Breaux Bridge, LA, USA
Posts: 3,505
Default

On the Shakespeare sexuality question, it has often struck me that the first 20 or so sonnets are weird on nonsexual grounds -- namely, that a man's interest in another man's having children is usually somewhat remote. WS seems quite passionate about it. The sonnets could almost have been commissioned by the young man's family in order to move him towards the altar.

Also noteworthy is that Shakespeare created a whole gallery of brilliant and sympathetic women characters (and some villains) which I believe could not have come from the pen of Marlowe, a more evidently gay guy.

These are not points in an argument, just observations.
Reply With Quote
  #150  
Unread 11-12-2024, 01:50 PM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
Member
 
Join Date: May 2020
Location: England
Posts: 1,440
Default

I for one have no idea what Marlowe's sexuality has to do with his inability to make "complex female characters", but I'll let the straights keep on be "straightin'". Anyway, if we desire to go down this path of "observation": then isn't it true that gay men are seen as closer to the feminine.

As for those first 20 sonnets. They are lovely commission work.
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump



Forum Right Top
Forum Left Bottom Forum Right Bottom
 
Right Left
Member Login
Forgot password?
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Statistics:
Forum Members: 8,461
Total Threads: 22,342
Total Posts: 275,996
There are 5332 users
currently browsing forums.
Forum LeftForum Right


Forum Sponsor:
Donate & Support Able Muse / Eratosphere
Forum LeftForum Right
Right Right
Right Bottom Left Right Bottom Right

Hosted by ApplauZ Online