So who is this Shakespeare guy anyway?
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon
, the son of a reasonably successful merchant (John) and a daughter of
a well-off landowner (Mary). When Shakespeare was in his early adolescence
(starting around 1576), the family fell on hard times: his father fell into
debts, lost his social standing, and the family was forced to mortgage Mary's
farm. In November 1582, at the age of 18 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway,
a local woman eight years his senior. Their first daughter was baptized in
May 1583. (You do the math...) They later had twins: Hamnet (who died in childhood)
and Judith. We don't know much about Shakespeare's life between 1585 and 1592,
when he turns up as a successful actor and playwright in London. (But we all
do know how that turned out... If not, go rent Shakespeare in Love,
for Pete's sake! Or at least see a short
biography, or perhaps a longer
one.)
His sonnets were published for the first time in 1609, but we know they existed at least 10 years earlier, as they circulated in manuscript. In other words, a handwritten copy of them was passed around from reader to reader; this was a fairly common way of "publishing" in the Renaissance. Texts "published" this way had a limited audience, to be sure, and probably didn't travel far from the city. However, anyone of note in England at the time lived in London, anyway, so the important people would be likely to see them. Scholars estimate that the sonnets were written between 1592 and 1598, when Shakespeare was between the ages of 28 and 34.
At the time, the sonnet was a fantastically popular form of poetry, much like the 3 1 /2 minute pop song today. One source estimates that during the 1500's, over 300,000 sonnets were written in Western Europe. Most of these were crap [look in the fourth paragraph of the essay]. It's important to realize this fact: most of the sonnets we read today in classes are the better ones, or ones by people who, for various reasons, have stood the test of time.
So where did the sonnet come from?
Italy. Next question? Seriously, this capsule history of the early sonnet does it as well as I could. The same site also has a good introduction to the sonnet in the English Renaissance The first three essays listed on the right hand side of the page are valuable sources of information on sonnets and their Elizabethan context.
Why was the sonnet so dang popular?
Who knows? Lots of people have theories. For one thing, literacy
was on the rise with a revolution in information technology that makes the
internet look like a badly-copied fanzine: printing.
So there were a lot more people interested in reading and writing. Ergo, you've
got poets and an audience, ready to go.
So why sonnets in particular? It might have something to do with the fact that England in the 1500's had a jones for everything Greek or Roman. It was part of this whole Renaissance thing you keep hearing about. So where do you get Greek or Roman stuff in the 1500's? Italy: home, after all, of Rome. Italy, for the past hundred years or so, had been doing really cool things, it seemed to the English, like dominating trade and culture in Europe and the Mediterranean. So they wanted to be like Mike(elangelo). The sonnet was an Italian form (see the previous question) and took off like a cat with its butt on fire when it got to England. It quickly became a way to get recognized in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and so sonnet-writing had a lot to do with social climbing, for some people. It became the norm for people to write long sequences of sonnets devoted to the object of their affection, whether that object was an actual woman (or man) whom one actually wanted to get with, a noblewoman (or man) whom one wanted to get on the good side of, or the Queen herself (whom various people wanted to sleep with and/or get on the good side of). The analogy to pop songs today still holds: people write songs for lots of reasons: to impress members of the opposite (or same) sex, to protest injustice, to hit the big time, or to make dat money, get paid. Shakespeare wasn't really involved in court, and made a good living as an actor/playwright; it's pretty likely he wrote for love.
But who did he love? And why all those parentheses in the previous answer?
You go read Sonnet 20 and we'll talk. (Here's a hint: "prick" hasn't changed meanings much in 400 years...) There are two people Shakespeare's sonnets seem written to: a young man and the dark lady. We have no idea who either of them were, or what Shakespeare's particular relations to either of them were, beyond what's in the poems. Lots of people have guesses. In a certain sense, it doesn't matter, really. What's interesting is the tenor of his relationships with each of them, and the way he expresses it.
What's so interesting about the way he expresses it? I mean, "a star to ev'ry wandering bark"? What th' --?
Elements of Shakespeare's style and diction may be hard to understand: after all, the language has changed quite a bit in the past 400-odd years. Spend some time reading the poems–you might look in the Oxford English Dictionary (available online through our library's web site) for obscure words. (And "bark," by the way, means "boat.")
In a larger sense, and this is harder to see if you haven't read a lot of the other sonnets of the time, is that Shakespeare is, overall, a much better sonnet writer than most of his contemporaries. In several sonnets (notably 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"), he's playing with (if not actively mocking) some of the conventional figures of speech in other sonnets. You'll get some sense of this from the Sidney sonnets we're reading in class, which are also good, but more conventional in many respects.
So how does a sonnet work?
If you've read the links above (and surely you have), particularly the pages on the early sonnet and the Elizabethan sonnet, you'll have run across mention of the Petrarchan (or Italian) and Shakespearean (or English) sonnets. (Ironically, the Shakespearean sonnet was invented by Surrey, but the big names always get the credit...) There are good definitions at the Sonnet Central site (from which the two above links came) of them. What you need to know about the Shakespearean sonnet structure:
