Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Callaghan, Dympna

• ISBN13: 9781405113977
• ISBN10: 1405113979
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-16
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

This introduction provides a concise overview of the central issues and critical responses to Shakespeare's sonnets, looking at the themes, images, and structure of his work, as well as the social and historical circumstances surrounding their creation. Explores the biographical mystery of the identities of the characters addressed. Examines the intangible aspects of each sonnet, such as eroticism and imagination. A helpful appendix offers a summary of each poem with descriptions of key literary figures.

Author Biography

Dympna Callaghan holds the Dean’s Chair in the Humanities at Syracuse University. She has been awarded major fellowships at the Newberry and Folger Libraries and at the Getty Research Institute, and she is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her publications include The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Culture (2006), Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts (2003), “The Duchess of Malfi:” Contemporary Critical Essays (2000), Shakespeare Without Women (2000), A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2000) - winner of Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Book, Feminist Readings in Early Modern Culture (edited with E. Lindsay Kaplan and Valerie Traub 1996), The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (with Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh, 1994), and Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (1989). She is currently editing The Oxford Anthology of Early Modern English Verse.

Table of Contents

Introduction Outlines the critical approach taken here, examines all known facts about the sonnets and their composition, and explains the source of interpretive controversies

places the sonnets in the context of the rest of Shakespeare's work and traces images from them through his plays

This chapter also explains why the sonnets are being treated in isolation from Shakespeare's other poems, especially A Lover's Complaint, with which they were published

In this way, the author hopes to demonstrate that the sonnets are singular aesthetic objects, worthy of isolation for the purposes of critical analysis, even as they are connected with the rest of Shakespeare's oeuvre

places Shakespeare's sonnets within the lyrical tradition of which they are a part

Describes the development of the English sequence (especially in relation to the French and Italian traditions), and looks at the development of the sonnet from it's French and pre-European roots

This chapter also addresses overarching structural concerns such as the sense of narrative continuity and sequence in the sonnet, as well as the compression and miniaturization of the individual sonnets

This chapter examines in detail the poems addressed to the young man, picking up and elaborating questions of identity and homoerotic sonnets, such as those of Michelangelo and Richard Barnfield, which have been alluded to earlier in the book

This chapter also takes up new issues, namely the related questions of economic imagery and circulation (that of money and of poems)

deals with the black mistress and the way in which certain forms of heterosexuality constituted a threat to the social and conceptual order in early modern culture

Topics covered here include identity, misogyny, and the ways in which neo-platonic thought informed English poetry

Conclusion Returns to the issue of "substance" in relation to materialist reading practices

By way of a final context for the sonnets, this chapter also examines the early modern debate about the relation between matter and spirit in post-Reformation polemic

Preface

Introduction: Shakespeare's "Perfectly Wild" Sonnets

Identity

Beauty

Love

Numbers

Time

Appendix: The Matter of the Sonnets

Notes

Works

Cited Index

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