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A Doll's House | Act Summaries 19/04/2022

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A Doll's House | Act Summaries 19/04/2022

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p4b7caYOc38oJSS4d2vm6Z_DkIFq04We4RswZkPnqvk/edit?usp=sharing

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1. B
2. D
3. A
4. D

Researchers must not only measure the costs and benefits that come with unethical acts, but also weigh the emotional responses that come along with them. Ruedy’s research suggests that the aftermath of emotions play a major part in an individual’s drive to do and unethical act — this includes the ‘cheater’s high.’ This supports the author’s argument in unpacking this ‘high’ and its significant contribution to the reason why people cheat.

1. I was never the most well behaved student in elementary school. Back in Grade 2, I used to cheat in my Mandarin tests (terrible, I know). I think I did this to feel in control — to feel secure. In a test, I am faced with a myriad of unpredictable possibilities, and through cheating, it offered me something to hold on to, for stability, which certainly contributed to my calm. Cheating also offered me a feeling of power, coupled with the fact that I am hiding something from my teacher. In a sense, I felt like I was disrupting the very system of my teacher — perhaps, a sort of undermining of power. I was proud, somehow, when I cheated. I was proud of not only my bravery, but the fact that I manipulated the system of examination to serve my favor — all under the radar. However, eventually, my teacher discovered that I cheated (no, I wasn’t as ‘clever’ as I thought I was. It really wasn’t hard for her to notice). After she confronted me about my unethical behavior, I felt guilty, ashamed, and not in control any longer. I stopped since.

2. Guilt is a powerful emotion capable of significantly manipulating and disrupting one’s string of thinking. With guilt, one is dealing with a matter of the past. Thus they must live with the fact that the past is simply unchangeable.

3. I think it is normal to feel positive emotions after cheating. However, that does say something about our morality. But on the other hand, morality is such a vague, indiscriminate topic.

4. What makes a person ‘good’? What makes the thing they do ‘bad’? As previously stated, the line between the good, the bad, and morality in general are blurred. They are entirely subjective. But, to simply answer, it is the emotional effect or ‘high’ one receives after doing a ‘bad’ thing that motivates ‘good’ people to do such.

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1) The story explores the theme of sacrificing materialism for a love to be reciprocated — the lengths one would do for this, as well as its rewards. The first complication was the fact that Monna Giovanna was married, and thus, was not allowed to reciprocate the love based on society’s rules. Morally, Monna was virtuous, so she followed this, said, rule. Nonetheless, Federigo kept sacrificing his wealth for her — until it ran dry. He knew that his love would never be taken into account, but regardless, he tried even though the chances were so minuscule. This reflects a dilemma of sacrificing for love. However, in the end, Fedrigo’s final sacrifice paid off.

2) C.
3) D.

1. In the context of this passage, it is not money that buys happiness, but sacrifice that buys love, which then becomes the source of one’s happiness. This is shown through how Fedrigo’s contant sacrifices had paid off.

2. Fedrigo fell in love with Monna because of her beauty, while Monna fell in love with Fedrigo because of how willing he is to sacrifice for her happiness.

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Keeping Up with the Joneses - 20/11/2021

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Keeping Up with the Joneses - 20/11/2021

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1. The Joneses would host elaborate parties and make a list of four-hundred elite members of society to invite, hence, the 'Four-Hundred List.' This made the wider society of New York increasingly competitive with one another in hopes to earn a place in the list. In a way, the list has become a benchmark for reaching economic success.

2. A
3. B
4. A
5. C

6. Keeping up with the Joneses is an idiom that is used to express the pressure to measure up with one's neighbour social status through the accumulation of wealth and material goods.

7. It was a competitive mindset for achieving high social status that drove the citizens of New York to rush to build overly extravagant mansions.

8. People follow the crowd as a means to fit into society.

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8 Ways 'The Great Gatsby' Captured the Roaring Twenties — and Its Dark Side - 13/11/2021

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8 Ways 'The Great Gatsby' Captured the Roaring Twenties — and Its Dark Side - 13/11/2021

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F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts the Roaring Twenties better than any other author. In his novel, The Great Gatsby, the Jazz Age in America is portrayed with accuracy, showing its bright side, and dark side. Given that it was written post-WWI, Fitzgerald, amongst many other authors of the lost generation, viewed America through the cynical lens of its loss of moral compass, as well as its focus on materialism and consumer culture. The author touches on pivotal aspects of the Roaring Twenties in America, including the notion that prohibition creating a ‘new money’ class, showed through Gatsby’s illicit affairs; the rise of the flapper and the ‘new woman’, embodied by Jordan Baker; the decay beneath decadence, portrayed through the excess of consumer goods; the automobile, which brought about Gatsby’s destruction; and above all, Fitzgerald predicted the Great Depression that lay ahead.

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8 Ways ‘The Great Gatsby’ Captured the Roaring Twenties—and Its Dark Side | HISTORY

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel reflects the heyday of the Roaring 20s—and foreshadows the dark period that would fo…

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1. C, E
2. E, F
3. A
4. A
5. The lost generation carried a defiant quality, of sorts — of them rejecting modern American culture and materialism. They were even known to drink heavily and have love affairs. But it was this rebellion that drove authors of the lost generation to achieve greatness. They had a thirst to find the meaning of life, and they found that the, said, 'European political ideologies' lended them an eye opening, radicle perspective on the world. The article discusses the rebellious nature of the generation. Thus, especially given that they defied all Americanness and the fact that they supported these European school of thoughts, per se, feeds into the main idea of the passage.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. It seems as if the 'lost generation' had a grim view on the world, given the war, and felt sick of the capitalist, consumerist society that the Roaring Twenties was the epitome of. Perhaps, they turned their heads away from goodness and hope. So, in a sense, the notion of the 'lost generation' was logically and inevitably born out of the shadows of all these variables combined. Moreover, the excess and carelessness of Roaring Twenties made the period of 'disenchantment and insufficiency' inevitable.

2. Reconciliation is hard to achieve with context in mind, because few can justify the authors' support for Hitler. This leads one to the question of divorcing the 'art' from the 'artist'. Should we appreciate a work of art, or literature for that matter, with the lives of the creator in mind? Or rather, should we appreciate a work of art for it on its own? While separating the art from the artist will lend the audience a more authentic view of how the creator wants it to be perceived by the public, one can get a more in-depth analysis with context in mind. This comes a tricky scenario of if we should ignore the fact that authors supported Hitler, or if we should take it into account. It won't be possible to make peace with the fact that they supported such a cruel, ruthless, inhumane dictator, however, one can learn from this fact and use it to obtain a deeper analysis or appreciation of their works. In that case, reconciliation is difficult to achieve — but nonetheless, one can gain new perspectives on the situation with this context in mind. We do not have to agree with the artist to admit the greatness of a work of art.

3. This article leans a lot of weight on one's ideological or political beliefs. It also suggests that your creative output significantly defines you as an individual. Location is also taken into consideration when it is mentioned that many authors of the lost generation moved to Paris.

4. -

5. The experience of living through a war, without a doubt, places an emotional strain on individuals. Perhaps it is that individuals struggle to find safety and security not only in physical terms, but in political terms. This would explain Hemingway's tendencies to shift political allegiances.

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The Great Gatsby - Book Cover - 02/11/2021

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The Great Gatsby - Book Cover - 02/11/2021

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1. C
2. A
3. A

4. After the First World War, there was a boom in economic prosperity — that of which Americans have used to their advantage. The Roaring Twenties was an explosion of jazz, automobiles, Hollywood, baseball, parties, and above all, spending. As the article states, 'In no mood to worry whether the good times would last, Americans were happily spending money they had had to save because of wartime shortages, and there was a plethora of new marvelous products to buy.' This carefree attitude didn't only blind the people, but also the presidents. In the late 1920s, however, Hoover stepped into the role and took steps to 'cool the market.' At this point, the Roaring Twenties calmed down — so down that it morphed into what we know today as the Great Depression.

5. Paragraph 14 marks a change in the direction of the text, in which it states that there was a person in power aiming to subside the economic overheating of the '20s. This, therefore, led directly to a note on the beginning of the Great Depression. Without mentioning Hoover's stance, it will be hard to develop the author's ideas and reach that point.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. This statement suggests that a government that isn't involved in the doings of the people or there to interject any action is a 'good' government in the eyes of the people. In this respect, it is because the people are free to do whatever they wish, without worrying about the eyes of those in power. I do not think that a government that 'sleeps' or does nothing makes the lives of citizens better, per se. As seen in the time of Marie Antoinette, the French monarchy failed to take serious action in anything at all, which directly resulted in the negative situation of their citizens (leading to the French revolution). At the time of the Roaring Twenties, people may have felt that it was the best time of their lives, however in a broader prospect, the government's inactivity led to the Great Depression.

2. The statement is true in some respects, but I would argue that it is not capitalism that produces greed, but greed that produces capitalism. Greed is not so much an outcome of capitalism, instead a driving force for the system.

3. America went through a series of economic ups and downs in the relatively short span of a decade. The 1930s began as a tough year for the country and they needed some time to recover. Today, the US is a financially prosperous country.

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Love — an emotion that is, at once, human and alien. It is a feeling that so often gets lost in the translation from thoughts to words — a feeling so near, transcribed into the DNA of us humans, yet so nuanced, delicate, and transient that it is simply difficult to express in words. Despite it being seemingly impossible to paint an accurate picture of love on paper, poets have been experimenting, expressing, and trying to articulate it through language — from here, the genre of love poetry emerged. Two poems in particular do this incredibly well, yet still manage to share different interpretations. Written around a century apart, ‘How Do I Love Thee’ and ‘Syntax’, written by, respectively, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Carol Ann Duffy, journey into what it means to love. However, the two women, who led very different lives, have contrasting ideas on the expression of love, leading one to the question of the difficulty of expressing love into words — Browning does this through action, whilst Duffy stresses its linguistic complexity. In light of this, the following essay will compare and contrast ‘How Do I Love Thee’ and ‘Syntax’, through its structure, language, and imagery, in their quest to convey the difficulty of expressing love in words.

‘How Do I Love Thee’ illustrates the many ways in which the speaker loves her partner. Whilst it doesn’t use the Shakespearean Sonnet, the Petrarchan Sonnet offers much more space for a sort of sporadic, passionate xpression, given that the former’s structure is quite divided in the aspects of rhyme. In the first line, Browning poses the question ‘how do I love thee?’ with an answer, ‘let me count the ways’ following after it. This use of hypophora evokes a childlike curiosity that opens up into a sea of very much adult passion. A juxtaposition as such presents a dynamic of love, and will be used throughout her poem. But, it also suggests that it is, in fact, easy for the speaker to express love in words — so easy that she can ‘count the ways.’ In the following line, Browning brings in a spatial metaphor by stating that she loves her lover ‘to the depth and breadth and height…’ She is trying to physicalise the abundance of her love for him — trying to force the emotion of love to be tangible to the touch and eye. Her repetition of ‘and’ suggests an outpour, which is further enhanced in the enjambment that follows. This polysyndeton goes against the notion that love is difficult to express in words because it gives the reader the sense that she can keep going without effort, thus implying that she finds it easy to pour her love out into words.

‘Syntax’ takes a much more playful look at loving through the use of wordplay. Duffy uses the sonnet form loosely, deviating from it greatly, albeit that be through metre or rhyme. This contrasts to Browning’s much more traditional approach, but works because her way of loving is far from traditional. She want stocall her lover ‘thou’, which carries archaic undertones, and suggests that she wants to love through language. On the other hand, Browning loves much more through her actions. It is ‘the shape of the start of a kiss’ and in line 3, she invites the reader to almost say it — repeat it after her. This translation and invitation of the reader acting is similar to how Browning does so in her poem’s 12th line, in which a caesura invites the reader to take a pause — an end of a string of thoughts. She ‘loves thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life.’ After ‘breath’, there is a comma and the text continues in the next line. This invites the reader to literally take a breath as Browning’s thoughts flow — to pause, and process just how much she loves. In this aspect, the poets share a penchant for making the reader physicalise the words in their poems, stressing that love can’t only be expressed through language, but also through actions.

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Review of Duffy's 'Rapture' Collection - 01/10/2021

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Review of Duffy's 'Rapture' Collection - 01/10/2021

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Whilst reading 'Rapture,' a collection of poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Reynolds found herself loosing touch of time — as if slipping away from reality and into the world of Duffy's words. The lives of love poets usually follow a sad tale, and while Duffy acknowledges this, Reynolds says that she 'knows what will survive.' Rapture, she suggests, is sad, yet not bleak. She further says that the poet is witty, often using humour in her pieces. In fact, Duffy has a penchant for wordplay, at times using language of the past and present to bend time for the reader. She has the incredible ability to transform ordinary words into words packed with extraordinary meaning. As Reynolds put, Duffy adopts a 'distinctively intellectual attention to repetition and wordplay.'
In some ways, the styles in Rapture may come across as old-fashioned and simple, but the poet bravely subverts these preconceived ideas. Her words never let the reader sit still. Though simple on the exterior, they have many layers that leave the reader deep in thought. Her reader's minds are never static. Above all, Reynolds praises Duffy's lyrical voice that runs through each of her poems.

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Rapture
by Carol Ann Duffy 62pp, Picador, £12.99

I read it on the tube, and missed my station. I read it in bed, and couldn't sleep. I read it at my desk, and started to cry. Affairs are notoriously disruptive. You get parking tickets, cancel meetings, forget to feed the cat. Reading about an affair is not supposed to have the same effect. But it does in the case of Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture

There is a tradition for the sequence of love poems. It runs from Shakespeare's sonnets or John Donne's poems, through to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese and Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems. For the most part, the tale is sad. Only EBB actually got to marry her man . . . and maybe that happy ending was a bit sad too.

Towards the end of this collection, in "The Love Poem", Duffy acknowledges the debt. Weaving tags and quotations from well-known poems - "my mistress' eyes", "let me count the ways", "dear heart", "O my America" - she makes an epitaph for loss. She knows the end of the story, but she also knows what will survive. In the title poem she speaks of "this chain of words"; in "Give" the lover listens to "the shadowy story I told"; in "Art" love is left only in "the chiselled, chilling marble of our kiss; / locked into soundless stone, our promises, / or fizzled into poems . . ."

Rapture is sad, but not bleak. It draws on tradition, but is very up to date. Duffy is a poet who surprises with images that are precisely funny. In "Text" the speaker, anxiously looking for secret messages from the beloved, is described tending "the mobile now / like an injured bird". The image returns in "Wintering" where Duffy says "I clutch the small stiff body of my phone". In "Syntax" - one of the most brilliant poems in the collection - she plays with the languages of past and present:

"Because I so do -
as we say now - I want to say
thee, I adore, I adore thee . . ."

Some of Duffy's phrases will not let you be. Living our ordinary lives without passion, we are "queuing for death"; speaking ordinary phrases without telling the whole truth means that "words, / are the cauls of the unsaid". The grammar and the thematic structures of Duffy's poems can seem compacted, as in the opening line of "Rapture": "Thought of by you all day, I think of you." But if you sometimes have to work hard to unknot Duffy's sense, the unravelling rewards.

These poems are almost old-fashioned in their commitment to rhyme, assonance and metre. In several poems there is a fairytale vocabulary, and ballad forms appear in "Betrothal" and in "Give":

"Give me, you said, on our very first
night,
the forest. I rose from the bed and
went out,
and when I returned, you listened,
enthralled,
to the shadowy story I told."

Duffy is a very brave poet. Only pop songs are braver in their use of repetition, and in "Finding the Words" she succeeds in making an ordinary "I love you" into something extraordinary. Only gameshow hosts are braver in their use of puns, and in "Fall" she rushes headlong through at least five meanings of the word, to end with another pun in "your passionate gravity".

Born in 1955 in Glasgow, Duffy was brought up in Staffordshire. As a student in Liverpool she wrote poems and plays, became involved with "the scene" and Adrian Henry. With the collection Standing Female Nude (1985) she established her name. Three other important collections followed: Selling Manhattan (1987), The Other Country (1990) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread poetry award and the Forward prize. For someone who has made a comparatively quiet career, away from the public eye and the literary celebrity round, she has a loyal following and a high profile. When the appointment of a new poet laureate was last in the news, it was she who commanded the popular vote. She was made a CBE in 2001.

To my mind, Duffy's most persuasive gifts are her unashamedly lyrical voice and her distinctively intellectual attention to repetition and wordplay. It is these talents that have made her much-anthologised poem "Prayer" - based on the names recited in the radio shipping forecast - so well-known. But it is her dramatic monologues, giving voice to the alienated and the dispossessed, that form the backbone of the two collections now much-read in schools, The World's Wife (1999) and Feminine Gospels (2002).

Rapture is much riskier than any of Duffy's earlier works. It maintains an attention to detail even while shaping the larger arc of the story across 51 poems. Its tone ranges from the jokey "Quickdraw" - "I wear the two, the mobile and the landline phones, / like guns, slung from the pockets on my hips" - to one of the most scathingly private poems that I have ever read, "Presents":

snipped and stitched my soul
to a little black dress,

hung my heart on a necklace,
tears for its pearls,

my mouth went for a bracelet,
gracing your arm,

all my lover's words
for its dangling charms,

and my mind was new hat,
sexy and chic,

for a hair of your head on my sleeve
like a scrawled receipt.

The final poem in the collection takes lines from Robert Browning as its epigraph: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!" The quotation gives Duffy both the title of her collection and the title for this poem - "Over". The affair may be "over", but in her verse she can sing it "over" and the effect is uplifting and thrilling.

Buy it. Keep it. Give it away. Just don't try reading it on the tube.

· Margaret Reynolds's The Sappho History is published by Palgrave.

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Rapture by Carol Ann Duffy 62pp, Picador, £12.99 I read it on the tube, and missed my station. I read it in bed, and couldn't sleep. I read it at my desk, and started to cry. Affairs are notoriously disruptive. You get parking tickets, cancel meetings, forget to feed the cat.

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Carol Ann Duffy is one of the most important figures in contemporary British poetry. Her work includes playwrights, dramatic monologues, children's books, and of course, poetry. A notable quality of her creative output is that they are adored by all — literary critics, academics, and regular readers of poetry. The poet deals with themes ranging from that of identity, gender, and the self; to the representation of reality, contemporary culture, and oppression. She often explores different voices and identities in her works, stepping in to different personas and characters. Moreover, Duffy openly identifies as a lesbian — something that significantly influences the subject matter of her work. However, the receiver of her love poems are always ambiguous, whose gender is never specified.

Though her writing may come across as demotic, colloquial, and simple, the subject matter she deals with are the complete opposite of such. Duffy even uses traditional forms of poetry, such as the sonnet, and infuses a new, modern life to them. Moreover, there is a certain wit and dry humour inhibiting most of her poems that readers find charming. With feminist undercurrents, her works have been linked to postmodernism and poststructuralism.

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An introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets - by Hannah Crawforth - 12/09/2021

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An introduction to Shakespeare’s Sonnets - by Hannah Crawforth - 12/09/2021

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Invented by Petrarch, the sonnet was originated in 13th century Italy, only finding itself being imported to England by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard in the early 16th century. When the sonnet fell into the hands of Shakespeare, it flowered into a radical, unforgettable artform that is closely associated with his work today. Within his poems, he opened up new horizons for metaphorical and linguistic possibilities. But, not only did he write beautifully, but he actively responded to the ever changing socio-political climate in the Renaissance. He even wrote about the art of poetry itself, perhaps an ars poetica of sorts — meditating on its frustrations, rewards, and creative liberations. There is so much variety in the language of Shakespeare’s Sonnets — a combination of tradition and experimentation, emulation and innovation, flirtatiousness and romance, passion and cynic, bitterness and mournfulness. He didn’t let the walls of the sonnet form confine him from freely expressing himself.

Though it is true that he wasn’t the first English poet to use the sonnet form, Shakespeare turned it on its head — reinvented it. In a sense, it is this reinvention that made his sonnets differ from his counterparts. In fact, his style was so distinctive that it became known as the ‘Shakespearean Sonnet.’ For instance, where other poets would have closely followed the Petrarchan way of utilising a very strong volta, Shakespeare altered it in hopes of making it more subtle. In this way, he had more space to articulate a vast array of ideas. Another distinctive quality entailed in the Shakespearean sonnet is the resounding final couplet. I like to see it as the culmination of the contents of the poem — the final point, the conclusion, the string that ties it all together.

It’s interesting how the persona that so often narrates the Sonnets is not Shakespeare himself — not in the literal sense at least. The poet steps into the vantage point of these characters, as to, in a sense, try to understand their inner workings. A love triangle is prevalent between the speaker and two elusive figures called the ‘Young Man’ and the ‘Dark Lady.’ But what intrigues readers the most is that the ‘poet’ doesn’t fall prey to the allure of these figures, instead writes about how they don’t live up to society’s standards. Speaking of which, many turn to the Sonnets as a reference point for unpacking Shakespeare’s sexuality. The receiver of his love poems are both male and female. He subverts the conventions of love in the 16th century, presenting not a predictable heterosexual romance, but a complex and even forbidden one. (Oscar Wilde used Shakespeare’s Sonnets to defend his love for a man in trial in 1895.)

While one may be tempted to merge the narrator’s first-person perspective to that of Shakespeare’s, there is a difference between ‘emotional authenticity and literal truth,’ as said in the article. As a result of that, it leads me to my questions: should Shakespeare’s Sonnets be used to search for auto biographical clues on his sexuality? And, how can one tell the difference between the true voice of the poet and that of a persona the poet had created?

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Hannah Crawforth explores how Shakespeare used and radically changed the conventions of love poetry, and how modern poets have reinvented his Sonnets for themselves.

Shakespeare's are some of the most fascinating and influential poems written in English. First published in 1609, in a small quarto edition (roughly the size of a modern paperback), almost nothing is known about the poems' composition. But the Sonnets have been read, recited, reprinted and written about ever since their first appearance. They have inspired many creative works, including music and dance pieces as well as other poems. And they continue to intrigue those of us who watch, read and study Shakespeare's plays, for the insight they might offer into the mind of the man who wrote our most beloved dramatic works. This piece will explore why the Sonnets are so important to the history of English poetry and why they continue to be enjoyed - and imitated - today.

First edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609

The earliest printed edition of the Sonnets was roughly the size of a modern paperback.

Part of the reason Shakespeare's Sonnets speak to us so directly is that they are written with their own afterlife in mind. These are poems designed to commemorate the poet's beloved for all eternity. In the famous lines of Sonnet 18 Shakespeare suggests that his poem confers immortality: 'So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee' (ll. 11.13-14). Long after his lover's death, Shakespeare's poem will continue to keep his lover alive. The Sonnets look to their own future, imagining the readers who will come to them hundreds of years after Shakespeare's death. We continue to read the poems partly because of this sense of contact with Shakespeare as he reaches out into the future, a sense of presence as well as a reminder of his absence (a theme that will return later in this piece).

But we need to be careful about reading the poems autobiographically, or seeing them as a key to the themes of love, jealousy, anger and lust that pervade Shakespeare's plays. The poetic persona who speaks through the sequence is not Shakespeare himself. While many readers of the poems have traced a love triangle between the 'poet' and two figures often called the ' Young Man' and the ' Dark Lady', the Sonnets themselves resist straightforward narrative. The poems seem to play with the reader in this regard, tempting us with hints of the kind of love story that underpinned other popular poetic sequences of the time, or the plot of a Shakespearean comedy. At the same time, the poems constantly frustrate our attempts to trace the exact moment at which the poet loses - or gains - the affection of his lovers, or to map the precise relationship between the two enigmatic figures that so preoccupy his attentions. It is also significant that one of the lovers is male; Shakespeare's Sonnets do not give us a predictably heterosexual romance but rather a complex and intricate exploration of gender and sexuality that encourages ambiguity rather than resolution. Shakespeare likewise subverts the conventional imagery of early modern erotic verse; 'My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun', begins Sonnet 130.

This toying with the idea of narrative and the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry is one way in which the Sonnets are both highly traditional and also highly experimental. Shakespeare's Sonnets are aware of their own place within poetic history and unafraid to rewrite this history in startlingly modern terms. This aspect of the Sonnets partly derives from the fact that Shakespeare is writing them somewhat after-the-fact. The sonnet form had been imported into English from Petrarch's Italian poems by Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, earlier in the 16th century. The Elizabethan vogue for sonneteering reached its height in the 1590s with volumes by Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel, but was already on the wane by the time Shakespeare's Sonnets were published. There is in his poems a strong component of nostalgia for the form as well as a desire to reinvent it.

While Shakespeare was not the first English poet to use the sonnet form, he did succeed in making it his own, changing its rhyme scheme and developing a distinctive structure that quickly became known as the 'Shakespearean Sonnet'. Shakespeare's predecessors had stuck closely to the Italian sonnet form used by Petrarch, which divides the poems into two sections, an octave (the first eight lines) and a sestet (the final six). The Petrarchan sonnet often has a very strong turn, or 'volta', as the verse shifts from the first section to the second, making it the ideal form for expressing two different ideas or contrasting points of view. Shakespeare altered this structure, interweaving the first twelve lines of the poem and abolishing the two-part division of his poetic precursors. This allows his poems to express much more subtle, varied ideas, with each sonnet articulating a variety of different positions relative to its subject. Shakespearean sonnets also culminate in a resounding final couplet that can sound conclusive, offering a pithily memorable restatement of what has gone before: 'If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved' (Sonnet 116, ll. 13-14). Alternatively, the effect of the final couplet can appear inadequate, a deliberately ironic response to the rest of the poem: 'Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be' (Sonnet 138, ll. 13-14). In this way Shakespeare is able to utilise the final couplet to create quite differing effects.

Shakespeare was evidently a very innovative writer of sonnets, releasing new potential within this very old poetic form by modifying its structure to allow new expressive possibilities. But some poems in the 1609 sequence hint at yet further innovation. Sonnet 99 contains an extra line, for instance, while Sonnet 126 is incomplete at only 12 lines. Shakespeare also likes to experiment with metre and rhyme scheme; Sonnet 145 ('Those lips that love's own hand did make') contains only four beats or stresses in each line (tetrameter), unlike the usual five (pentameter), for instance. And Sonnet 87 ('Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing') is a virtuosic display of skill, pivoting around a single rhyme sound for the first dozen lines. Even Shakespeare did not always write 'Shakespearean' sonnets, then.

Shakespeare's adaptation and modernisation of the sonnet did not stop at reshaping its form. He also radically reimagined its linguistic possibilities, opening up whole new metaphorical landscapes within his poems. At times, the register of his poems seems tantalisingly close to the realities of Shakespeare's own life. His dramatic career is teasingly suggested in Sonnet 23, 'As an unperfect actor on the stage', in which the poet's nervousness about his abilities to capture his lover in verse is figured as a kind of stage fright (l. 1). Similarly, several of the Sonnets depict the poet in the act of writing itself, evoking the challenges and frustrations - as well as the rewards - of literary creativity. Sonnet 59 labours (in a deliberate echo of the struggles of childbirth) to produce an apt image of the elusive lover, asking how to find the words to describe 'this composed wonder of your frame' (l. 10). The beloved even seems to become a sonnet momentarily here, as the 'frame' of the poem struggles to contain this poet's awed wonder.

If such moments of apparent self-consciousness suggest introspection, elsewhere the Sonnets look outwards. Shakespeare's sequence responds to the rapidly changing political and economic climate of his own times, using financial and legal imagery (as in Sonnet 4, which ends with a rather threatening evocation of wills and the executors who will inherit responsibility for his beloved's 'unused beauty' after his death (ll. 13-14)). The religious upheavals that traumatised many throughout early modern Europe are evident too, in Sonnet 73's haunting depiction of the 'Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' (l. 4). The poems also capture some of the more mundane aspects of life in Shakespeare's England; Sonnet 143 imagines a 'housewife' who puts down her baby to chase after the chickens that have escaped in her garden; the lover is asked to 'play the mother's part' towards the poet: 'kiss me, be kind' (ll. 1, 12). Such shifts in the sequence between issues of national or even international importance and those relating to the domestic sphere give a sense of the sheer variety of Shakespeare's Sonnets as well as of their interest in unsettling the reader's sense of scale. The sonnet is one of the smallest, most compact poetic forms, just 14 lines of tightly rhymed verse, but Shakespeare shows that it is capable of encompassing the most profound range of human experience and emotion.

Paintings of London in the friendship album of Michael van Meer, c. 1614-1615

A woman breastfeeds her baby in this early modern watercolour painting. Shakespeare moves between the domestic sphere and the wider political arena.

It is these particular expressive qualities, this particular combination of tradition and innovation that continues to draw artists to Shakespeare's Sonnets today. Describing her own recent poem '2014/15', written after Sonnet 73 ('That time of year thou mayst in me behold'), Jo Shapcott says that 'My poem bows to the original somewhere in every line and spins round it in grateful celebration'. The idea that Shakespeare's Sonnets hold a gravitational force, around which today's writers orbit, is a powerful image for their continuing influence and centrality within the English poetic tradition. And Shapcott's sense of acknowledging the original poem in a series of 'bows' embodies both the sense of gratitude she describes but also an accompanying freedom; poets are not enslaved by the form, intimidated by the long shadow Shakespeare casts, but rather can be liberated and even exhilarated by the possibilities his verse offers. Imtiaz Dharker strikes a similarly elegant balance between emulation and innovation, indebtedness and resistance, proximity and distance, in her own 'The Trick', written in response to Sonnet 43 ('When most I wink, then do my eyes best see'). Sonnet 43 'is such a perfect sonnet of absence and presence, presence in absence', Dharker says of Shakespeare's verse; 'The poem plays tricks on the mind with light and shade, with words that look and sound the same but make cunning grammatical shifts.'

The Trick
In a wasted time, it's only when I sleep
that all my senses come awake. In the wake
of you, let day not break. Let me keep
the scent, the weight, the bright of you, take
the countless hours and count them all night through
till that time comes when you come to the door
of dreams, carrying oranges that cast a glow
up into your face. Greedy for more
than the gift of seeing you, I lean in to taste
the colour, kiss it off your offered mouth.
For this, for this, I fall asleep in haste,
willing to fall for the trick that tells the truth
that even your shade makes darkest absence bright,
that shadows live wherever there is light.

Dharker's evocative description of Sonnet 43 and poetic recreation of the 'tricks' Shakespeare's Sonnets play at once identifies something entirely distinctive about these poems, and also offers a way forward for poets writing 'in the wake | of' Shakespeare's awe-inspiring command of the sonnet form. The 'cunning ... shifts' Dharker describes are present in Shakespeare's original poems, endlessly reforming the work of his predecessors and endlessly resisting critical interpretation, ever elusive. But they also license ongoing poetic experimentation and innovation in the form today, remaking Shakespeare as he himself remade the sonnet.

[1] Jo Shapcott, On Shakespeare's Sonnets - A Poets' Celebration, ed. by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 89.

[2] Imtiaz Dharker, On Shakespeare's Sonnets - A Poets' Celebration, ed. by Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 78.

Written by Hannah Crawforth

Hannah Crawforth is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College, London. She is the author of Etymology and the Invention of English in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge, 2013) and co-author of Shakespeare in London (Arden, 2015). With Elizabeth Scott-Baumann she has edited a collection of essays on Shakespeare's Sonnets and a volume of responses to these poems by contemporary writers.

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An introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Hannah Crawforth explores how Shakespeare used and radically changed the conventions of love poetry, and how modern poets have reinvented his Sonnets for themselves. Shakespeare's are some of the most fascinating and influential poems written in English. First published in 1609, in a small quarto edition (roughly the size of a modern paperback), almost nothing is known about the poems' composition.

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Love Poetry in Renaissance England - by Emily Mayne - 09/05/2021

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Love Poetry in Renaissance England - by Emily Mayne - 09/05/2021

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Whilst the notion of ‘Renaissance Love Poetry’ surfaces thoughts of an artform filled with expressions of romantic and sexual passion, this article by Emily Mayne, written in 2017, subverts the simplistic view on the genre and lends the reader a thought-provoking narrative on the ‘how,’ ‘what,’ and ‘why’ that entails love poetry in the Renaissance. She begins by stating that the genre explores much more than an one’s heterosexual romantic and/or erotic passion towards a significant other — an object of desire. Rather, this expression of feelings and longings transcend the mere boundaries of ‘love’ and into the field of society, religion, and politics.

Mayne writes that, “To modern eyes some of these love poems seem to depict private and personal emotional experience, but in the Renaissance people did not only write poetry to express their ‘true’ feelings about love to a ‘real’ love-object. Love poems could have social and political intentions as much as ‘romantic’ ones, and express desire not only for a person but for personal and financial advancement, or even political discontent or aspiration.”

Invented in 13th-century Sicily, the sonnet has become the most popular way of writing love poetry. Petrarch, a 14th-century Italian poet, popularized the sonnet — he writes about the “speaker-lover’s experience of desire and inner struggle also made them amenable to articulating other aspects of courtiers’ social and political experiences and frustrations,” as seen in his expressions of love for Laura (who may or may not have truly existed). The sonnet was introduced to England in the 1530s, catching the eye of a certain Shakespeare. Mayne gives the reader a clue as to the existence of homoerotic poetry, as seen in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. In her words, it “challenges and subverts these [society’s] conventions.”

Speaking of which, there is a strong socio-political undercurrent in the writings of Renaissance love poetry. While at times, as earlier stated, sexuality is challenged, poems were also used as a tool, almost, to attract the attention of queen Elizabeth I. It is this “desire for social advancement and political influence than it is about any modern notion of ‘romantic’ feeling.” Through the medium of poetry, people are able to woo the queen — to gently persuade her — into doing certain things of interest to the poet.

Mayne eloquently summarizes that, “For modern readers… Renaissance love poetry is at once familiar and surprising – for the variety of loves and desires, romantic and otherwise, celebrated and lamented in the poems, as well as for the diversity of their forms and settings.’

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Love poetry in the Renaissance often expressed sexual or romantic passion, but it could also serve a variety of political, social and religious ends. Emily Mayne explores the origins and development of Renaissance love poetry and the many forms it took.

What is love poetry?

I am two fools, I know,
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry [...]

The speaker in John Donne's 'The Triple Fool' doesn't give either loving, or writing poetry about loving, much of a good press. Although this poem isn't actually so much a love poem as a lament about what happens to poetry when it escapes into the world at large, its idea of what a 'love poem' is still resonates with us today. Much of what Donne's speaker implies about the nature of love poetry is recognisable to modern understandings of the term. Like in 'The Triple Fool', when we talk now about 'love poetry', we most commonly mean poetry that is concerned with romantic or erotic love (or both), rather than other kinds of love - love for family, friends, or a god, for instance. Love poetry as described by Donne's speaker here is personal, giving voice to individual feelings and longings, formally intricate ('rhyme's vexation'), and heterosexual, with a male poet writing about a female object of attention and desire.

There is something in this, but love poetry in Renaissance England is in fact much more various and diverse than 'The Triple Fool' suggests. Renaissance poets and lovers produced love poetry in a huge variety of forms - ranging from sonnets and sonnet sequences, to lyrics, songs, ballads, elegies, and much more. Some of these forms were new to 16th-century England - such as sonnets, imported from Italy in the works of Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), and the numerous French and Italian poets influenced by him. Others, such as lyrics, formed an important part of English medieval literary and religious culture. Some love poems circulated in manuscript (i.e. a handwritten text) among small and exclusive groups of readers in particular social worlds, such as the royal court, the universities, or the London legal establishments known as the Inns of Court, while other poems appeared in print to a wider, popular audience. Increasingly, love poetry appeared in both.

Works by John Donne and Ben Jonson in the Newcastle Manuscript

John Donne's famous seduction poem, 'The Flea', in a manuscript volume of poetry compiled for Sir William Cavendish, later the Duke of Newcastle.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

To modern eyes some of these love poems seem to depict private and personal emotional experience, but in the Renaissance people did not only write poetry to express their 'true' feelings about love to a 'real' love-object. Love poems could have social and political intentions as much as 'romantic' ones, and express desire not only for a person but for personal and financial advancement, or even political discontent or aspiration. Renaissance love poetry both uses conventions still familiar to us - the poet-lover writing to his idealized and (naturally) unattainable mistress, for instance - and also challenges and subverts these conventions: sometimes the beloved is also male, as in the homoerotic poetry of Richard Barnfield; or the mistress who is apparently physically undesirable, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. And while it is easy - perhaps too easy - to interpret well-known love poems such as the courtier Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, or Shakespeare's Sonnets, as autobiographical documents which record the feelings and events of Sidney's or Shakespeare's lived experience, these love poems are carefully crafted pieces of writing that have no simple or readily accessible relationship to their authors' historical realities. These poems play with the ideas of love and personal confession as much as depicting them.

First edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, the first line of which reads 'My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne'.

Where did Renaissance love poetry come from?

Aspiring love poets in Renaissance England had a variety of traditions, and a growing number of texts, to draw upon. New arrivals on the literary scene in this period included poetry produced on the European mainland in contemporary European languages, as well as an increasing range and number of classical texts which depicted and celebrated a wide variety of love. English poets could also access medieval poetry celebrating the cult of courtly love, and its betrayal and failure, such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, alongside medieval prose romances and poems set at the court of the legendary British king, Arthur Pendragon.

In his erotic poem 'The choice of Valentines', the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe claimed that contemporary poetry was no good for writing about 'love's pleasures': for that, poets should turn to ancient classical poets. Classical poems concerned with 'love' of various descriptions, such as the Roman poet Ovid's erotic Ars Amatoria ( The Art of Love) and the playful Amores ( The Loves), were increasingly accessible thanks to the arrival of printing and the international trade in printed books. Sometimes these works were even translated into English. The playwright and poet Christopher Marlowe, for instance, produced a translation of the Amores in the 1580s or early 1590s (though it was not printed in full until 1602). Ovid's poems deal frankly with sex and love as extra-marital realities. In the Amores, the male speaker, enslaved to love, adopts many different lover-personae to tell and complain about his wilful and disdainful mistress Corinna; while the Ars Amatoria instructs both male and female readers in turn how to be good lovers in a physical as well as emotional sense. These sorts of texts were controversial in a culture which valued poetry for its power to teach: the Portuguese humanist Juan Luis Vives, for example, was scandalized by the popularity of the Ars Amatoria, which he claimed literate people 'read, carry about with us, wear out with use, and learn by heart'. Certainly the playwright Thomas Heywood's English translation of the Ars Amatoria, printed in about 1606-08, was wildly popular, and was printed at least twelve times before 1700.

Continental influences: Petrarch, Laura and the sonnet

The sonnet is likely to be the first poetic form that comes to mind for many people when they think about Renaissance love poetry. Invented in Sicily in the 13th century, the sonnet rapidly became widely-used for describing love both erotic and spiritually-elevated (though not necessarily at the same time). Most influential among the Italian sonneteers was the 14th-century poet Petrarch, who composed several hundred sonnets and other lyrics, many of which he collected in sequence as the Rime Sparse ('Scattered Rhymes'). These poems describe the poet's love for Laura, whom Petrarch tells us he encountered at church in his youth, although she may not have 'really' existed. The sonnets do not chronicle the realities of a 'historical', lived relationship, but reflect upon the poet's experience of love, fame, mortality and immortality (poetic and otherwise), and above all, poetry, for which Laura is in many respects a figure. The sonnets use situations, images and motifs that were lastingly influential upon the conventions of Renaissance love poetry: an idealised notion of the lady as perfectly beautiful and virtuous, yet absent and aloof; a paradoxical portrayal of love itself as virtuous, even religious, and yet also potentially sensual and idolatrous; a lover burning with icy fires ('[I] burn and am of ice'); a sadomasochistic cupid with brands, and arrow, whips and chains; and Laura's single and yet eternally transfixing gaze. Drawing upon the medieval tradition of courtly love, in which men, principally knights, perform ritualised courtly activities for an idealised and probably inaccessible lady, Petrarch's poems present love as another type of feudal service.

The Book of Sir Thomas Wyatt

This poem, 'To his Unkind Love', written here in Wyatt's own hand, demonstrates the influence of Petrarch's love poetry on early 16th century English verse.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

Sonnets, love poetry and the Renaissance court

In the Renaissance, Petrarchan sonnets became popular in European courts partly because their focus on the speaker-lover's experience of desire and inner struggle also made them amenable to articulating other aspects of courtiers' social and political experiences and frustrations. Sonnets were introduced into England and English in the 1530s, by the courtier and ambassador Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), and the aristocrat Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547). Wyatt and Surrey translated and imitated many Petrarchan sonnets, as well as producing sonnets and other lyrics of their own. Wyatt's poems about loving take Petrarch in a more cynical, and perhaps misogynistic direction, and are preoccupied with the status of the beloved(s), who is both sometimes virtuous, and sometimes malevolent and untrue. Slightly like Donne's speaker in 'The Triple Fool', poetry becomes the way to express Wyatt's speakers' grief at rejection, but also to publicize, not very kindly, the 'continual change' of the beloved ('They flee from me that sometime did me seek'). The poems allude darkly to contemporary political events at the turbulent court of Henry VIII, and perhaps to Wyatt's own close relationship with Henry's second queen Anne Boleyn. Wyatt and Howard were noble writers writing for a limited courtly audience, and their poetry circulated in manuscript among select groups of readers rather than in print. Manuscripts such as the Devonshire Manuscript, which is also the source for many poems attributed to Wyatt, show how aristocrats and their friends would collect and circulate poems together as an enjoyable social activity.

The Devonshire Manuscript

This poem, 'O happy dames', was composed by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and is the only example of his sister Mary Fitzroy's handwriting in the manuscript.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

Although literary texts were increasingly published in print later in the 16th century, poetry in manuscript continued to play a role in court life. Composing skilful and accomplished poems on love and other subjects was one way that aspirational (and mostly male) would-be courtiers could demonstrate their wit, learning and worthiness - not so much for service as lovers, but for positions of favour and influence. During the reign of Elizabeth I, male courtiers could also use love poems to attract the queen's attention. The 'love' expressed in these poems is as much the desire for social advancement and political influence than it is about any modern notion of 'romantic' feeling. The courtier and adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) was particularly adept at engaging Elizabeth through poetry, praising and 'wooing' the Queen through poems such as the now-fragmentary 'Book of the Ocean to Cynthia', which position Walter or 'Water' Raleigh as the 'ocean' subject to the power of the moon or 'Cynthia', another name for the Graeco-Roman chaste goddess of the hunt Diana. As a self-identified unmarried ' Virgin Queen ', Elizabeth was commonly associated with Diana and Cynthia.

Sir Walter Raleigh's Notebook for his History of the World

The fifth poem in the Cynthia series, 'Now we have present made', is written here in Raleigh's handwriting on the final page of a notebook he used while imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Usage terms

Public Domain in most countries other than the UK.

Beyond the court: Tottell's miscellany and Elizabethan sonnet sequences

Eventually, the poetry of Wyatt and other 'courtly' poets moved outside the court. In 1557, the printer and bookseller Richard Tottell printed some of their poems in his innovative verse anthology Songs and Sonnets. This bestselling book introduced new verse forms, genres and courtly lyrics to a much wider readership. Subsequently Tottell's miscellany inspired numerous other collections of verse and prose, such as George Gascoigne's A Hundreth Sundry Flowers (1573, rev. 1575). The love poetry in these collections is often in the form of single poems, rather than in longer arrangements or sequences.

Sonnet sequences dramatically increased in popularity with the pirated printing of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella in 1591. The 108 sonnets and 11 songs of Astrophil and Stella were composed around 1581-82, and detail, often ironically, Astrophil's unrequited love and desire for Stella.

Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, 1591

The pirated first edition of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, containing many misreadings and errors.

Sidney's sequence is often said to have inaugurated a 'craze' for sonnet sequences, and after 1591 numerous sequences were printed, including, of course, Shakespeare's own in 1609. Many of these sequences depict male poet-lovers pining after unavailable and under-described ladies, and focusing on their own pain and subjectivity, but poets also subverted these conventions. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed not to a woman but to a young man, and Edmund Spenser's sonnet sequence Amoretti (1595) charts the poet-speaker's wooing not of an ideal or unattainable woman, but of his future wife Elizabeth Boyle. Innovatively, and certainly surprisingly for contemporary readers, Spenser's sequence concludes not with frustration and stasis, but with another poem celebrating their marriage, the Epithalamion.

For modern readers, too, Renaissance love poetry is at once familiar and surprising - for the variety of loves and desires, romantic and otherwise, celebrated and lamented in the poems, as well as for the diversity of their forms and settings.
Footnotes
[1] In The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509-1659, ed. by David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen (London: Penguin, 1993), no. 95.

[2] Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman, trans. by Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 77. Vives, Education of a Christian Woman, trans. by Fantazzi, p. 77.

[3] 'ardo et son un ghiaccio': Petrarch, Sonnet 134, in Petrarch's Lyric Poems, ed. by and trans. by Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

[4] In Sir Thomas Wyatt, Collected Poems, ed. by Joost Daalder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 32.

Dr Emily Mayne is a Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests are in classical mythology in Renaissance English writing, occasional drama and entertainments, material culture, and the poet Edmund Spenser. She is currently completing a book on Hercules in sixteenth-century English writing.

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Love poetry in the Renaissance often expressed sexual or romantic passion, but it could also serve a variety of political, social and religious ends. Emily Mayne explores the origins and development of Renaissance love poetry and the many forms it took.