The Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint
William Shakespeare
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B00282KCC4
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Edited by G. B. Harrison - Book number B18 - 128 pages. Printed in Great Britain 1949.
to make monstrous forms (probably animate) and shapeless things (presumably inanimate) resemble such angels as resemble lovely you. The suggestion is that cherubins are as inferior to the young man in grace and beauty as are monsters and things indigest to cherubins. 8 As fast as objects to his beams assemble as quickly as things seen take shape in its (the eye’s) gaze. Alluding, again, to the idea that the eye creates the beams by which it sees. 9 ’tis the first. The theory advanced in lines
doubleness). The tragic context illuminates the complaint further, in that Desdemona recalls that the ballad was sung by her mother’s maid called Barbary: She was in love: and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. IV.3.25–7 Here we have, first, the idea of plaining by a socially lowly maid, and, secondly, a connexion with Ophelia – who loved a prince that ‘proved mad’ and drowned herself in a brook flanked by a willow, and whose predicament is echoed directly at A Lover’s Complaint 39.
thee Were to import forgetfulness in me. Another poet – Wordsworth, for example, in Tintern Abbey and certain sonnets – would have meant that, finding a life in memory beyond the reach of art. But for Shakespeare recollection was weak and provisional, art fixed and ‘of great constancy’. For him, past, present, and indeed future, most fruitfully conspired in inscription, where memory finds its lasting memorial. Even in the most fluent, seemingly spontaneous of the sonnets to the friend there is
seventeenth century – doubtless employed for a put on ‘lease’; compare 13.5, that beauty which you hold in lease. show… substance. The phrase ‘More show than substance’ was proverbial. still (1) nevertheless; (2) always Sonnet 6 1 Then let not. The argument continues from Sonnet 5. ragged rough in appearance (and conduct), shaggy, clad in beggarly rags (compare ‘churlish winter’ at 2 Henry IVI.3. 62) deface. The loving attention paid to the young man’s face in Sonnets 1, 2, 3, and 5 lends
In the process, arguably, he uses live to glance at the proverb ‘The lover is not where he lives but where he loves’. Compare 109.3–4. 6 seemly becoming, decorous 9 be of thyself so wary look after yourself (involutedly expressed, so passing through a flicker of’hus’) 10 mill (be wary) 11 chary carefully 12 tender loving (with a trace, perhaps, of ‘she who tends’) 13 Presume not on do not count on recovering Sonnet 23 1 unperfect actor player who has not properly learned his lines,