Sweet songs in delicate parody

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33869, 14 June 1975, Page 10

Sweet songs in delicate parody

Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets. By Katherine M. Wilson. George Allen and Unwin. 382 pp. N.Z. price $12.20. Had its author been more familiar with recent scholarship concering her subject, and had she commanded a less infelicitous prose style, this book could well have been a major contribution to Shakespeare studies. Although the critical literature on the sonnets is enormous, crankiness so frequently proves its dominant characteristic that a sensible commentary is hard to find, even among writers who are otherwise sane and trustworthy. A romantic supposition that these short, and generally slight, poems must carry the burden of intimate biographical confession habitually inspires extraordinary hypotheses in the brains of scholars who would never countenance the equally deranged theories of others that Bacon or Marlowe or Elizabeth I actually composed the works of Shakespeare. Dr Wilson’s account may be less entertaining than many, but then she may’ claim that in eschewing passion and melodrama she has avoided yet another work of fiction pretending to be criticism. Her basic premise is that the sonnets are intended not to reveal the poet, but to parody an absurd literary

convention. Though not entirely new, the suggestion has not previously been offered as an explanation for the entire body of poems, and the chief weakness of the book is that Dr Wilson is afraid to admit exceptions to the general rule for fear that her theory should founder. A closer acquaintance with recent studies of Renaissance rhetoric — to which she cautiously alludes — would have alayed the fear and enabled her to proceed more confidently with what is, it. fact, a very plausible speculation about Shakespeare's place in sonneteering tradition. She begins by analysing Shakespeare’s treatment of the sonnet, and of love-poetry conventions, in ‘Love's Labours Lost”, “The Two Gentlemen of Verona”, “Romeo and Juliet", and “As You Like It”, pointing out that they all depend upon a conflict between literary artifice and emotional realities; genuine love is expressed in the mockery or the abandonement of conventional poetic utterances Traditional sonnets, and sonneteers, are burlesqued. It is therefore, suggests. Dr Wilson to say the least, unlikely that Shakespeare could expect the conventional imagery of his own sonnets to be understood as the expression of personal experience. Some, like “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”, are obviouslv demonstrably parodies

And the tone of the collection as a whole suggests that the poet is making fun of the form by turning the conventions on their heads: his addresses .to his lady are intended mostly to revile her, and the commonplace flatteries are reversed for a young man. with the improbable intention. among other things, of persuading him to' marry and get a son. This is not the stuff of which love poetry is normally made, nor do the relationships described in the poems bear a very close resemblance, in the words of Oscar Wilde, to the actual facts of real life, as we know them. But they do represent an ironically distorted version of a great manyother poetic declarations of passion, and the greater part of Dr Wilson’s study is devoted to a careful examination of the background and sources of Shakepeare’s sonnets — from Ovid to. his contemporaries — and to showing how delicately and deliberately he contrived to parody them. She is often doctrinaire, particulary in her unwillingness to grant that a parody may also be a serious poetic statement and she will no doubt offend many who feel that the sonnets grant them intimate communion with a noble mind. But the clearing away of critical cobwebs achieved by her forthright’ and unsentimental attack on the poems can only do good; it is a stimulating and illuminating book.