Review: The Sonnets - Warwick Collins

*** - I love Shakespeare, and the sonnets are some of my favorites - heartfelt and beautiful, caught up in emotional turmoil. We once used certain sonnets as monologues in an acting class - there's just so much to them. Unfortunately here, I never got swept up in the emotions Shakespeare was writing about - the narration seemed detached.

Warwick Collins' The Sonnets explores Shakespeare's life while he was writing his beautiful sonnets. The sonnets are often cited as the most autobiographical of Shakespeare's work, and here Collins rearranges and weaves them together to form a narrative about Shakespeare's love triangle with his patron the Earl of Southampton and the mysterious dark lady.

I loved the premise - using the sonnets as a basis for a historical novel about Shakespeare's life and loves is a brilliant idea and could really serve to infuse him with emotional life rather than the focus on the playhouse that most Shakespearean novels take. That said, I'm not sure the format wholly works here. In trying to let the sonnets speak for themselves by including so many of them, Collins doesn't give us much of his own interpretation of Shakespeare's emotions - which is problematic in a novel told in the first person. His Shakespeare seems overly detached from the world he inhabits - a characteristic often remarked upon by his patron, but which doesn't seem quite right given the deep conflicting emotions shown in his sonnets.

The method of incorporating the sonnets is also a bit awkward - even jarring. Often times they are introduced with a quick statement that Shakespeare has spent the night 'at his board'. Then the first two quartets (or so) are quoted, then the poem is taken over by one of his patrons reading aloud. This is very effective as a scene transition on film, but on the page it seemed strange and affected - particularly since it happened over and over again.

Writing about Shakespeare is difficult. Writing from Shakespeare's point of view is even more so. There are sections where I thought Collins succeeded admirably. On p. 72, a snippet of conversation:


"Thou art a flatterer."
"No better and no worse."

sounds just like the sort of rejoinder the playwright would come up with - it even scans. And further on that page there are sentences that flow in (almost) iambic pentameter:


"Inside the sullen gloom, his rooms were a scholar's den, with manuscripts piled high on chests and chairs."


Sections like this just sound RIGHT. They sound like something that could come from Shakespeare's quick mind. But all too often, I found myself as detached as Shakespeare was depicted. Partially this was due to differences in interpretation - Collins depicts Shakespeare's love for Southampton as ironic and chaste. I'm not sure I agree with either assessment. But mostly I think it was because Collins' reimagining in The Sonnets didn't offer enough emotional context to bring the poems to life in a new and different way.

Shakespeare's Face - Book Review

Shakespeare's Face
By Stephanie Nolen
Alfred Knopf Canada
2002
Stephanie's website
LARGE Sanders Portrait on the right

I thought it timely to read this book after the most recent portrait was discovered. (see the large Sanders Portrait link above. The Cobbes portrait is on the left).


But since the Cobbes Portrait has now been identified as actually being Sir Thomas Overbury, then the Sanders Portrait may still be in the running.

This was an excellent book to read. There are some chapters written by Stephanie Nolen and others by other experts who have written about this portrait and why it may or may not be Shakespeare. Stephanie writes about how she discovered the portrait, and she tells the story of the Sanders family who owned the portrait and how it came to be in Canada. Stephanie describes all the testing that was done. Most of it was done by the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa.

The Sanders portrait was painted in 1603 - the year 1603 is painted at the top right hand corner. The wood, and the paint are all dated to the Elizbethan era or before so it is from the right time. The label on the back is the big questions. Since the painting was done in 1603 (Shakespeare would have been 39 that year) there is alabel affixed to the back that states year of birth and year of death, so the label at least was not attached at the time the painting was done. It was attached sometime after Shakespeare died in 1616. This alone is suspicous and may mean that the painting was NOT painted in 1603.

Some of the chapters in this book are written by the experts. Some of them are a little dry, as only experts can be. Other experts chapters are interesting.

The last chapter has summaries by the experts on who they think the portrait may be of. All of them say that this is NOT a portrait of William Shakepeare, because it is so different from the Droeshout print from the first Folio. Only one expert offers a plausible guess as to who the man in the portrait may be.

In 1603, William Shakespeare was aged 39. In that same year, his future writing partner John Fletcher, was just 24. He does have light coloured hair and a receding hairline. This portrait does look more like a young man of 24, and not so much of a man about to turn 40.

Here is another recent review of this same book.

So do YOU think this portrait is of a 39 year old or a 24 years old??

Will - Book Review

Will
By Grace Tiffany
Berkeley Publishing 2004

For those of you reading this blog, you should know by now, that I do not accept the premise that William, the man from Stratford, actually wrote the plays.

But this novel is written in a very believeable way that explains how William got to know all about those European places that are mentioned in the plays, without having lived there himself.


This novel covers William from the time he got Anne Hathaway pregnant and was forced to marry her, to the time he left London and retired back to Stratford. Roughly between 30 and 40 years.

It explains how William was educated. Mostly by the local school masters in Latin, but William learnt his greek from reading greek books at his great-uncle's library. Remember, William's mother Mary Arden was of a minor noble family. Mary's uncle Edward Arden was beheaded for suspicion of being a Papist (or a Catholic - which he was) before William was 20. Arden's head was stuck on a pole in London for a few years.

After William and Anne Hathaway were married, because she was in the family way, William took off for London.

One of the first people William met in London was Kit Marlowe. There was competition between them. Originally William began writing conversations in a new manner - quick repartee between characters rather than long monologues. Kit stole the concept from William and used it for one of his plays. William was most upset. They didn't speak for a number of years, until Kit was killed in a Deptford tavern.

Then William was taken to the Earl of Southampton's house, where Henry Wriothesley (the Earl) took a fancy to him. The word is never mentioned but the book implies that Henry was either homosexual or trans-sexual. He liked to dress up in women's clothing. He was eventually married off to a woman he didnt particularly like, but he did want to seem to look normal. Henry commanded William to write him some poems, so William wrote his sonnets praising Henry. Henry promised to keep them safe and to not publish them.

While he was at Henry's house, William met Emilia, a young and unhappy Italian noblewoman who was married to an English nobleman. William pumped this women for information about life in the Italian nobility, and they slept together as well. This is supposedly how William learnt so much about Italy.

William had originally had been working for Kit's group of players, but after they fell out, William moved to a new group where he got a job as a bit part actor and started seriously writing plays. Henry Wriothesley had plenty of money which he loaned to William to enable to William to write his plays. Eventually the players began producing and performing Will's plays.

Some years later Emilia published the sonnets. She told William she had found them amongst Henry's books and had copied them.

The novel mentions Henslow, Babbage, Cuminge, and Ben Jonson and all those other names associated with William Shakespeare. William also gets to meet Queen Elizabeth, the Scottish King James, the poet John Donne and even Pocahantas. (Did Pocahantas really go to England?)

If you did not know about the controversy over whether or not William actually wrote the plays, you would actually beleive this story entirely, and be convinced that William Shakespeare from Stratford did write those plays.

I enjoyed this story much more than I thought I would. I had tried to read Tiffany's earlier book, My Father had a Daughter some time ago, but for some reason, I just couldnt get into that one.

This is my first book for the Shakespeare challenge.

John's First Play Down! (The Winter's Tale)

I was really enjoying the first part of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale with its emphasis on jealousy. Leontes, King of Sicilia, tries to convince his friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, to visit a little longer. When Leontes is unsuccessful in his plea, he casually asks his wife Hermione to try. Without much effort, she convinces Polixenes to stay, sparking suspicions from Leontes. Quickly his suspicions deteriorate into a rage, leading Polixenes to flea and Leontes to throw his pregnant wife (whom he now believes to be carrying Polixenes baby) in prison. Meanwhile, practically everyone tries to convince him of his wife's innocence.

Up to this point it's an intense piece of psychodrama. As Shakespeare goes, it's probably one of his more accessible plays, plus it's a theme as relevant today as it was then no matter in what class or country one lives. What made Leontes suddenly snap? Did he always have jealous tendencies but they just now awakened? Was there some festering issue between him and Polixenes that finally came to the fore? The play could have explored this angle but Shakespeare chose not to delve into the past. How low would Leontes sink? It could have been fun, in a morbid sense, to watch his demise. However, his realization that he's erred comes quite early in the play, at which point the play takes a 90 degree turn in a different direction.

The latter half of the play, 16 years later, becomes a love story between Perdita (the daughter of Leontes and Hermione) and Florizel (Polixenes' son). It's not that I couldn't have enjoyed a love story, but I found the earlier jealousy story much more compelling. Plus, I found some of the characters in the second half (particularly Autolycus) quite annoying.

Compared with the other Shakespeare plays that I've read, the first three acts of The Winter's Tale ranks up there with my favourites. However, with the sudden switch in tone and plot, leaving a latter half that was just mediocre, I felt disappointed overall.

(Cross posted at The Book Mine Set)