SHAKESPEARE AS SONNETEER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21598, 19 March 1932, Page 4

SHAKESPEARE AS SONNETEER

A NEW ZEALANDER’S SUCCESS For the Daily Times. News that a New Zealand lady has been awarded the prize of £IOO offered to women' throughout the Empire for the beet thesis on any literary subject will be received with satisfaction by those who would contravert the heresy that no good thing in the way of letters can come out of this country. The subject of the thesis was “ Shakespeare as Sonneteer.” It is to be hoped that this work will be available to the student both of Shakespeare and the sonnet. It is difficult for some to include the sonnets in the Shakespearian canon for the simple reason that it is not easy to conceive how he found time to write them. He may have turned to the sonnet for two reasons —for relaxation after the writing, and possibly the producing, of a play, or for consolation in some affair of the affections. No doubt the successful writer of the thesis will enlighten us on this matter. It remains to be seen whether she will treat the legend of Mary 1? itton in the Shavian manner or no. It is the trait of the modern student of Shakespeare’s personal history to emphasise the mundane motives that actuated the writing of the plays. They were written to catch a public that would be prepared to pay for the privilege of seeing them. They were, in short, transcendental potboilers. Unless we happen, like Bernard Shaw, to be equipped with a finelytempered blade, compounded of wit and common sense, with an alloy of levity, we are very apt to become docile, if not sheepish, disciples of Shakespeare. So many lecturers and commentators have waxed pontifical over the marvels ot “Hamlet” or “Lear” that we are sometimes inclined to chant a not_ altogether intelligent Amen. We inherit a tradition which is represented by a bust with a high-domed forehead and a petrified Elizabethan ruff. From that high forehead emanated a series of plays replete with erudition, vibrant with word music, sonorous with the tragedy of life or rippling with its comedy, instinct with the magic of Fairyland. They all sprang forth from that cerebral dome as Minerva from the bosom of Jove. Such an attitude towards Shakespeare may be very decorous, but there is just a possibility that we may find ourselves so effectually swathed in our reverential robes that we are hampered in our enjoyment ot him. Then there comeg that epoch in our intellectual history when we discover that Shakespeare was not a bust, but a man, a striving, wriggling man, beset by competition, worrying ana worried by contracts and title-deeds, making the best of the compromise that hie is for all of us, with one eye on the clock that will not let him tarry for the apt word to come, for the one and only phrase that would express his mood aright, to define itself.

The Reality cf Shakespeare It may require a visit to Stratford-on-Avon itself to awaken us to a knowledge of Shakespeare’s actuality. Overlaid as the shrine may be with meretricious detail, the pilgrim will find the essential Shakespeare in spite of the postcards, the subservient achitecture of the modern hotels and tearooms, the glib cicerones, with their tags from Shakespeare’s text ready for any contingency. The wonder _of Shakespeare is that he somehow persists in spite of the persistency of those who exploit him. Though one has been so drilled and dragooned into an appreciation of his genius, therewould hardly seem to be any occasion for independent apprehension. Yet one comes upon a passage or speech, sooner or later, which would appear to be virgin treasure. It so chances that we have not consciously been forestalled. It is one’s own discovery. “Hamlet" has been so_ thoroughly raked over that there is nothing one may hope to find there for oneself. bo one would think! But is it so. It may be regarded by some as a species of Lenten penance to assist at a performance of “Hamlet” in its entirety, as it is presented at the Old Vic in London every year about Easter time. This, if we think of it, is not because of the unconscionable length of the play, but because of the accretions of sententious commentary the performance gathers with the years. Yet even in attending such a seance one may make fresh discoveries. With the sonnets it is not as with the plays. Here there is room for a commentary such as we may expect from the winner of the prize already mentioned. We have yet to see whether the essayist supports the Shavian view of Mary Fitton as set forth in “The Dark Lady of the Sonnets.” There are other matters upon which she will set us right. She may point out that the Shakesperian sonnets conform to the true definition. According to Petrarch the sonnet should be concerned wholly with the matter of love. This limitation would rule out some of the greatest poems in this measure, to be found in the English language. Wordsworth is concerned with the view from Westminster bridge, not with the relations of the sexes, in what is, perhaps, his greatest sonnet. Keats forgot about Fanny when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer. A glance through William Sharp’s famous anthology “ Sonnets of this Century ” will reveal the fact that the English sonneteer is inclined, on the whole, to ignore the Italian restriction. Blanco White, for instance, whose reputation in literature would seem to rest bn one sonnet only, does not write of love, but of the analogy that the hopeful may find between life and death,, day and night. Shakespeare, on the other hand, is almost entirely in accord with the Italian tradition. If his sonnets are not concerned with love in so many words, they are concerned with the inter-play of human relationships. Love is as nearly akin to hate as laughter to tears, and we do not suppose that the Italians ruled out that darker passion, which is the concomitant of love. The Modern Sonnet Shakespeare, so far as I can recall, was entirely preoccupied with a human story when he wrote the sonnets. No doubt in the course of her analysis the winner of this women’s prize has noted whether the division between the octave and the sestet has been duly observed. It is the aim of the modern sonneteer to marshall bis facts in the octave, and to draw his conclusion in the sestet. He would have the sonnet present you with one truth attended by a subsidiary thought of his own. So much for the sense. As for the sound,. it has been said that the octave should represent the incoming wave, and the sestet the returning wash back into the acquiescent silence of the deep. Of these refinements Shakespeare was, one would suppose, totally unaware. It will be the business of the thesis, no doubt, to relate how he came upon this form of verse which so admirably suited his mood. It was certainly not evolved out of the inner consciousness at the back of the dome-like brow which dominates the Shakespearian bust. Its discovery may have been the outcome of a raid upon the foreigners with a view to “ copy.” The thesis will also point out that Shakespeare was not the only Elizabethan sonneteer,' and therein may be found the solution of the question just propounded. Everyone was doing it, or at least the best people were, and Shakespeare, if we are to accept the Stratford tradition, had some regard for the best people, as he had for the best bed. The thesis may also essay a comparison between the Elizabethan and the modern sonnet. That will be a delicate task. It does not consist merely in the fact that the Elizabethan sonnet is closed' with a rhyming couplet, whereas the modern sonnet rhymes alternately throughout the sestet. As a matter of fact, the modern sonnet does nothing of the kind. It is not only the modern soneteer with a craving after the Elizabethan who closes his sestet with a rhyming couplet. Wordsworth does not shrink from doing so when the exigencies of his vocabulary demand it. No, a hundred pounds is no extravagant reward for a true definition of the difference between the Elizabethan and the neo-Georgian sonnet. We are all sensible of it, but our attempt to define it might not bring us in so much as a guinea. C.*R. A. Lord Asquith’s Biography “The Life of Lord Oxford” will probably be published this summer (states the News-Chronicle). In the work Mr J. A. Spender and Mr Cyril Asquith, the fourth son of the late statesman, a brilliant scholar and barrister, are collaborating. The book, which will be in two volumes, is nearly completed. In wriG ing of Lord Oxford’s period of office as Prime Minister, the authors are dealing with nine of the most difficult years of England’s recent history—from 1908 to 1916 inclusive. This section of the work will deal with the war from an entirely new angle—the only angle from which it has not yet been written about —that from the Cabinet point of view. Here they have had at their disposal new documentary material of considerable importance. We are also promised some remarkable letters of the late earl.