Sugred

[poliphilo]

Here's heresy.

I don't  like Mr Wm Shakespeare's sugred Sonnets. 

First thing is they're just so damn poetical.

Second thing is they're just so damn mechanical. 

Third thing is they're just so damn clever. 

Sometimes I think they're as much a work of fiction as any of the plays.  Is there real emotion in them? Perhaps, but it's hidden under so much conceit and ornament that you can never be sure.

Shakespeare's plays are my religion but the Sonnets? You can keep 'em.

Comments

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

I don't share your POV, but i definitely understand it.

[hardrada.livejournal.com]

Like all of Shakey's work, they benefit a lot more from being read aloud than being read off the page. Doing some of the sonnets in my voice class was a bit of an eye-opener.

I've got a mate who swears blind that the sonnets, read from start to finish, tell a deeply personal story about Shakespeare himself. He's written a play about it, which is in the process of being taken up by the Criterion, so watch this space!

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

Shakespeare's plays are my religion

I waiver between feeling as you do and thinking that he was probably the Andrew Lloyd-Webber of the Renaissance

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can see they're wonderful poems. They're just not to my taste.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The sonnets tell us enough for us to be able to construct a story, but not enough for us to be certain we've got it right. I find the lack of detail frustrating.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Fletcher was the Andrew Lloyd-Webber of the Renaissance. Shakespeare was the Lerner and Loewe.

[hardrada.livejournal.com]

It's just so difficult not to adore his work. Believe me, I've tried to like Marlowe/Middleton/Webster more than Shakespeare, but ultimately I just can't do it.

However cool it is to prefer other Jacobean or Elizabethan playwrights, and as dark and extreme as some of their plays could get, it's always Shakespeare that pulls out the one-line phrases or soliloquies that knock me back like a juggernaut.

Lloyd-Webber never quite managed that...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There have been times, like you, when I've wanted to like one of the other guys more. But none of them has anything like Shakespeare's range.

Marlowe, Middleton, Webster, Jonson are all of them great writers. If Shakespeare didn't exist we'd value them all a whole lot more. But since he does, they're condemned to be in his shadow.