Shakespeare's Greening: The Privacy, Passion and Difficulty of the Sonnets | Barbara Everett, Somerville College, Oxford
Shakespeare's Greening: The Privacy, Passion and Difficulty of the Sonnets
Barbara Everett, Somerville College, Oxford
A friend whose mind I respect said not long ago that whenever he saw an essay on theSonnets he knew he wasn't going to believe it. I want to suggest here that Shakespeare's poems breed in readers a special incredulity-factor. Whatever we do with them and their criticism, we don't precisely believe either. The writer (probably the publisher) of that esoteric Dedication to the first edition of theSonnets, about onlie begetting, was merely toeing the line, was their first actively sympathetic professional reader. Ever since then we have read with fascination and admiration, but have been afflicted too by a version of that "good dulness" Prospero read in or into the somnolent Miranda.
Shakespeare has, of course, been described before now as failing to abide our question. But on this matter a distinction may need to be...
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