Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Thou dost love her, because thou knowst I love her,

And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,

Suff’ring my friend for my sake to approve her;

-Narrator

Sonnet 42

And here were are, finally; Sonnets. Now if you thought reading A Lover’s Complaint was tough, well think again. You’re probably thinking ‘Wait a minute Pete, I’ve heard some of these sonnets, and they’re not so tough. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”’ Yeah, well that one’s not too bad, but unfortunately most of the other ones (there’s 154 of them in total) are not so simple. And it seems that they are mostly all connected and they keep following a theme, almost a story, and they can get pretty difficult to comprehend.

Now take this one here. I have (actually, it’s ‘had’; past tense—see the picture below) a really good book of Wills’ Sonnets with really good explanations. Keep in mind that these sonnets are all fourteen lines long. That’s pretty short. My book has footnotes for just about every line of every sonnet, and also a brief summary/explanation of each sonnet. Here’s the summary of Sonnet 42:

The poet grieves more for the loss of his young friend than for that of his mistress, but tries to persuade himself that the common ground between the young lovers is himself, and that, in loving the youth, the woman is manifesting her love for the poet with whom the youth, too, is united in love. An exercise in self-consolation, sonnet 42 explores what may be said in the manner of Sidney’s Astrophil’s attempts ‘to make myself believe that all is well’.

Got that? Yeah, that’s what I said.

Just for reference, and in case you're keeping score, that’s a quote from The Arden Shakespeare copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. That’s about as good as I’m going to get for citing here; I hope that’s enough for you.

Anyway, the point is that these sonnets are pretty tough. I wish they were all ‘Shall I compare thee…’ but they’re not. Let’s let this one go for now. The next time we hit the sonnets (they take of 19 of the 1,252 pages of my book) we’ll perhaps get into it a little more. In the meantime, I’m off to the Giant (see picture in yesterday’s post).

And this is my Arden Shakespeare's Sonnets. If you're wondering what happened to it, I'll tell you. I was sitting in the living room reading it, and one of the dogs walked in, looked at me, and proceeded to lift his leg and pee on the cabinet. Without taking his eyes off me! Well I threw the book at him, and of course it ended up landing in the puddle. I rinsed it off and put it outside to dry. But I'm afraid my Arden Shakespeare's Sonnets isn't ever going to be the same. Oh world, thy slippery turns!