The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

"It does, with a virtuoso commentary on each one. A caution to first-time readers: her minutely technical interpretations might overwhelm your initial encounter — so maybe this volume is better suited as a kind of “deep dive,” after you’ve already worked through the sonnets on your own. Even when (or maybe: especially when) you don’t concur with her approach, Vendler invariably sparks new insights along the way. She does something else that’s helpful: she modernizes each poem’s punctuation and spelling (like Duncan-Jones does), but she also reproduces a corresponding facsimile image from the 1609 quarto. Again, your eye can scan back and forth between the different versions, evaluating her editorial decisions yourself. That’s followed by a three to five-page short essay, where she speculates about the conception of the poem — which is really what she’s best at doing. As she cites T. S. Eliot: “as a good deal of thinking has gone to the making of poetry, so a good deal may well go to the study of it.” It’s fairly late in his career; he stops writing plays a few years after that. It also feels belated in the sense that, again, this is a genre that was popular decades ago . . . We do know that some of the poems were written in the 1590s, in part because a couple of them are published in a 1598 volume called The Passionate Pilgrim. “Across his career, Shakespeare was meditating upon this particular form: sometimes mocking it, sometimes praising it” Duncan-Jones’s introduction walks through a number of hypotheses that have been posited about what might have induced the book’s appearance in 1609. Why was it published with that particular printer? What does the title page indicate? What does the dedication imply? These kinds of questions animate the history of the book: reconstructing the social networks, as it were, that transmit words across different media, for different audiences, at different moments. A great example of her investigating a sonnet’s conceptual gymnastics would be 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”). In both 29 and 30, the speaker wallows in despair; yet thinking on the friend eventually lifts his spirits. In sonnet 29, the depressive descent occupies the first eight lines (an “octave”); then, “Haply I think on thee” — and across the last six lines (“sestet”), my “state” improves. Sonnet 30 enacts the same dynamic, but stretched out to different proportions: thirteen lines of depressive descent, with only one line of recovery. In her reading of 30, Vendler unfolds the presumed time schemes that must have happened before the fiction of that poem’s “now.” What happened in “the past” of 30? Well, there was once a time when I had no friends; then, happily, I enjoyed the company of those I loved. Tragically, they died. For some time, I mourned their loss. Eventually, I got over that mourning. Now, in a kind of perverse way, I’m reanimating my mourning — as if I had never overcome it. Even though I have already worked through the psychological stages of grieving, I find myself once more stuck in that phase. It seems like there’s no exit. But suddenly, at the very last moment, “I think on thee, dear friend” — and “All losses are restored, and sorrows end.” Some seven different time frames are compressed into the framework of a 14-line poem. Helpfully, Vendler often breaks down a sonnet into what she perceives to be its component parts, which she’ll then reconstruct in a kind of “chart.” To some, this ends up being too schematic. But I find it clarifying to view punctuation, parts of speech, sonic effects, and the like exfoliated in this manner."