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Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Movies

Sonnet 18

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From the movie Venus, Jessie (Venus) talks about her past lover and her abortion. Maurice follows her statements with Shakespeare’s [[Sonnet 18]], ‘Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Day?’

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet 116

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One of the most romantic moments in movie history, from Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility. The dashing Willoughby rescues Marianne. She in turn falls hopelessly in love with him, especially when he quotes her favorite Shakespearean 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-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s 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.

Sonnet 141

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A scene from the movie, [[10 Things I Hate About You]].

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote;
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Dutch School, View of London from Southwark, c. 1630. Oil on oak panel, 57.7 x 85.7 cm. Museum of London. Based on previous prints (such as Norden, Visscher and Merian) showing the city as it was around 1600.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are a collection of poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare that deal with such themes as time, love, beauty and mortality. They were probably written over a period of several years. All 154 poems appeared in a 1609 collection, entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.

The Amazing Web Site of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Includes texts of all the sonnets, notes, commentary, and a picture gallery.

An Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
A good introduction to the sonnets, including detailed notes.

No Fear Shakespeare: Sonnets
Excellent paraphrases of all the sonnets, one of the best of the No Fear Shakespeare books. This site contains the entire text of the printed book.

In Search of Shakespeare: the Sonnets
A lesson plan based on the Michael Wood BBC production of In Search of Shakespeare. Contained here is a lesson plan based on three of the sonnets: 18, 29, 130. Requires playing portions of the video.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 – Love’s Compensation

Actor Matthew Macfadyen recites the Bard’s sonnet on BBC Two.

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SONNET 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
     For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
     That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The speaker in Sonnet 29 describes an “outcast state” — no doubt a sense of melancholy and worthlessness — and envies the talent and prosperity of others. His mood, however, quickly changes to joy when he thinks of his friend, whose love compensates him for everything. The thought of his friend fills him with so much joy and consolation that he wouldn’t change places with anyone, not even a king.

I have always been fascinated by a few mysteries of this poem. You might notice that it’s a single sentence, full of pauses yet maintaining a continuous flow of thought. There’s also much uncertainty about line 8. What did the speaker most enjoy that now gives him little pleasure? Finally, the exact gender of the friend remains ambiguous.

Shakespeare, Macbeth, and “The Story of English”

My sophomores began their Macbeth unit today. Whenever I begin a new [[Shakespeare]] unit, I like to show the episode “A Muse of Fire” from the 1986 BBC/PBS documentary The Story of English. What my students find the most fascinating is the sheer number of words coined by the Bard, words that are still in common use today. As for me, I find the narration of Robert MacNeil majestarial and commanding.

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Shakespeare: Thinking of Death

Shakespeare lost his ring at the 1616 wedding of his daughter Judith; it was found near Stratford Church in 1810.

Shakespeare died on this day in 1616, also his birthday. He’d drawn up his will earlier the new year although he wasn’t that old at fifty-one, but in those days people drew up their wills when they felt death approaching. That’s what Tudor people did, and there was an abundance of self-help books on the subject, one of which Shakespeare no doubt used for Claudio’s famous speech (”Ay, but to die, and go we know not where”) in Measure for Measure. The idea that you played your part on the stage and then promptly left was a commonplace.

What brought on his sense of impending death we may never know, although his younger brothers were already dead, and by most accounts his health was fading. There’s the supposition that he suffered from syphilis, which would not have been impossible since he had lived as a single man in London for several decades, and there is the reference to venereal disease at the end of the sonnets — the “strange maladies” contracted in the late 1590s during his “hell of time.” His signature certainly gives evidence of shakiness and perhaps illness. But the story I like most surrounding his death is the one of a fever brought on after a night of drinking with Warwickshire poet Michel Drayton and the Bard’s old friend Ben Jonson.

The illness that took Shakespeare’s life is unknown and is likely to remain so. We do know that he was tended by his son-in-law Dr. John Hall — only thirteen years Shakespeare’s junior. It is known that Dr. Hall kept a careful record of his patients’ illnesses, but sadly, of the two casebooks he left behind, the surviving one begins the year after Shakespeare’s death. About the man we know next to nothing before his marriage to Susanna Shakespeare in 1607. About all we know is that his medical practice was extensive, and he must have remained on friendly terms with his father-in-law because he and Susanna were executors of Shakespeare’s will. Dr. Hall proved the will in June, 1616, in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Registry in London.

A New Portrait of Shakespeare

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The old bladder-faced portrait plastered on every Shakespeare anthology ever published is soon to be replaced. But I think the Bard’s actual image is a modern-day version of Elizabethan navel-gazing, despite the musings of the august Stanley Wells. Maybe publishers should do a collage of portraits?