Shakespearean Readings E-Book

Luisa Conti Camaiora

• Herausgeber: EDUCatt
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This volume contains a series of papers we delivered at the annual Shakespeare conference held at the Università Cattolica of Milan over three years. During this period our research interests ran on more or less parallel lines, moving from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Bard’s influence on Keats and Shelley. If this was probably due to a similar way of interpreting the conference titles, it was just a coincidence that both of us devoted particular attention to King Lear. This play, we discovered, was particularly relevant to the work we were autonomously carrying out, Luisa Camaiora being then engaged in writing her book on Keats’s Odes, and Carlo Bajetta editing Shelley’s Peter Bell. As a consequence, we started mentioning articles, discussed recent research, and there was much swapping of books – which created more than a little confusion in our bookshelves, and much irritation in some University librarians.When we looked back at these essays, we were surprised to note that a fil rouge seemed to run through them. From the ambiguities of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, number 116, they move on to describe the allusive structure of the sonnet-chorus of Romeo and Juliet, hence to the complexities of the initial scene of King Lear and the uses to which this play was put by Keats and Shelley; they eventually come back to Keats’s relationship with the works of the Bard, and finally to yet another sonnet, which constitutes in many ways an original re-reading of Shakespeare. ‘Shakespearean Readings’, alluding to both textual variants, critical analysis, and a writer’s understanding of a literary work, seems to be a fitting title to describe this red thread.‘'Passage' and 'Traffic' in Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Textual Madness: King Lear’s peregrinations’ were first published in To go or not to go? Catching the moving Shakespeare (ed. L. Camaiora, Milan, I.S.U. Università Cattolica, 2004), ‘John Keats and his Presider Shakespeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12 and Keats’s “When I have fears”’ appeared in a different form in L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 7:1, 1999, while ‘Shelley’s Shakespearean Mockery of Wordsworth’, which was read at the Shakespeare Days conference in April 2003, both relies on and integrates some sections of the introduction to Peter Bell: the 1819 Texts which appeared in December of the same year (Mursia, Milan).Milan, June 2004Luisa Conti Camaiora – Carlo M. BajettaDalla Prfazione degli Autori

Leseprobe

© 2004I.S.U. Università Cattolica – Largo Gemelli, 1 – Milano

http://www.unicatt.it/librario

ISBN edizione cartacea: 978-88-8311-298-9

ISBN edizione digitale: 978-88-6780-502-0

CONTENTS

Foreword

C.M. Bajetta

Hunting for ‘Sources’: the Case of Sonnet 116

1.Searching for Sources

2.Hunting for Definitions of Love

3.Something Wrong with Love and Numbers

Luisa Conti Camaiora

‘Passage’ and ‘Traffic’ in Romeo and Juliet

Luisa Conti Camaiora

The Tragedy of Errors: King Lear, Act I, Scene I

1.Prologue: As You Like It [ll. 1-28]

2.Act I: Measure for Measure [ll. 29-77]

3.Act II: Much Ado about Nothing [ll. 77-133]

4.Act III: The Tempest [ll. 133-181]

5.Act IV: Love’s Labour’s Lost [ll. 182- 202]

6.Act V: A Midwinter Day’s Dream [ll. 202-276]

7.Epilogue: The Worried Wives of the Dukes [ll. 277-298].

C.M. Bajetta

Textual Madness: King Lear’s Peregrinations

1.Sane but for the Letter: Lear’s Journey to Gloucester

2.The King in the Letter

3.King Lear, Sources, Politics and Textual Instability

Luisa Conti Camaiora

Keats’s Reflections on Shakespeare Culminating in his On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

C.M. Bajetta

Shelley’s Shakespearean Mockery of Wordsworth

1.Peter Bell (‘one, two, three’) and a Shakespearean Textual Crux

2.Playing (with) ‘King Lear’

3.Wordsworth and ‘Lear’s Passion’

4.Epilogue – Peter Bell the Tory

Luisa Conti Camaiora

John Keats and his Presider Shakespeare

Luisa Conti Camaiora

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12 and Keats’s When I Have Fears

Foreword

This volume contains a series of papers we delivered at the annual Shakespeare conference held at the Università Cattolica of Milan over three years. During this period our research interests ran on more or less parallel lines, moving from Shakespeare’s sonnets to the Bard’s influence on Keats and Shelley. If this was probably due to a similar way of interpreting the conference titles, it was just a coincidence that both of us devoted particular attention to King Lear. This play, we discovered, was particularly relevant to the work we were autonomously carrying out, Luisa Camaiora being then engaged in writing her book on Keats’s Odes, and Carlo Bajetta editing Shelley’s Peter Bell. As a consequence, we started mentioning articles, discussed recent research, and there was much swapping of books – which created more than a little confusion in our bookshelves, and much irritation in some University librarians.

When we looked back at these essays, we were surprised to note that a fil rougeseemed to run through them. From the ambiguities of one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, number 116, they move on to describe the allusive structure of the sonnet-chorus of Romeo and Juliet, hence to the complexities of the initial scene of King Lear and the uses to which this play was put by Keats and Shelley; they eventually come back to Keats’s relationship with the works of the Bard, and finally to yet another sonnet, which constitutes in many ways an original re-reading of Shakespeare. ‘Shakespearean Readings’, alluding to both textual variants, critical analysis, and a writer’s understanding of a literary work, seems to be a fitting title to describe this red thread.

‘'Passage' and 'Traffic' in Romeo and Juliet’and ‘Textual Madness: King Lear’s peregrinations’ were first published in To go or not to go? Catching the moving Shakespeare (ed. L. Camaiora, Milan, I.S.U. Università Cattolica, 2004), ‘John Keats and his Presider Shakespeare’ and ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12 and Keats’s “When I have fears”’ appeared in a different form in L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 7:1, 1999, while ‘Shelley’s Shakespearean Mockery of Wordsworth’, which was read at the Shakespeare Days conference in April 2003, both relies on and integrates some sections of the introduction to Peter Bell: the 1819 Texts which appeared in December of the same year (Mursia, Milan).

Milan, June 2004

Luisa Conti Camaiora – Carlo M. Bajetta

C.M. Bajetta Hunting for ‘Sources’: the Case of Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.

Love’s not Time fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved[1].

1.Searching for Sources

It is remarkable that, while most Shakespearean plays have been proved to have connections with pre-existing literary texts (Geoffrey Bullough’s eight-volume collection is perhaps the lasting monument to this)[2] the hunt for the sources of Shakespeare’s sonnets has baffled critics for centuries[3]. This is no doubt related to the very genre and nature of these compositions: clearly identifiable ‘parallel texts’, as in the case of Spenser’s reworking of Petrarch’s allegorical tale of the Hind (Amoretti 67), are not to be found. Instead of precise loci we are left with the identification of literary topoi: sonnet 99, for example, while suggesting Petrarch’s Canzoniere 127, Spenser’s Amoretti 64, Campion’s lyric ‘There is a garden in her face’, and most closely Constable’s Diana 1.9, could merely be intended as yet another treatment of a popular theme[4]. In sonnet 60, to quote another instance, Shakespeare echoes the final book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (possibly via Golding’s translation); yet, as Colin Burrow has correctly pointed out, it would be misleading to state that Ovid is simply a ‘source’ for this poem, given the transformation that the theme undergoes here[5].

The difficulty of identifying evident parallels with pre-existing literary texts has sometimes prompted critics to look for ‘real’ sources in single events in Shakespeare’s life. Finding clear links between the sonnets and the poet’s own personal experience has, however, proved a hazardous enterprise. Pace Wordsworth’s statement that ‘with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart’[6] and similar assertions by convinced ‘biographical’ critics[7], the overt recounting of personal incidents is generally avoided in the Sonnets. The same is true of narratives of the events which befall the lovers, which are typical of other collections such as Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella,with its description of the tournament (41) and of the uncomprehending or disapproving friends (e.g. 20, 21, 23). As Heather Dubrow has noted, in the Sonnets the narrative element is often reduced to a minimum, delimited or displaced into ‘syntactical formulas such as when/then, Anacreontic stories, and accounts of the future’[8]. John Kerrigan has observed that ‘the text is neither fictive nor confessional, Shakespeare stands behind the first person of his sequence as Sidney stood behind Astrophil – sometimes near the poetic 'I', sometimes farther off, but never without some degree of rhetorical projection. The Sonnets are not autobiographical in a psychological mode’[9].

Faced with the problems created by topical and possible biographical allusion, modern critics seem to have often assumed an over-cautious attitude to Shakespeare sources. The anxiety of influence seems to have been transferred to textual editors: a plethora of passages in the sonnets have been glossed by mentioning some rather elusive ‘time-worn idea’, or ‘well-known conceit’, and frequently by calling in a series of proverbs rather than literary witnesses of one given theme. On the other hand, it is no use pointing out an almost infinite series of literary analogues without ever being able to identify which of these can be concretely relevant (if at all) to the poem under analysis.