Shakespeare's Sonnets - Prompts

1. Respond to one or more of Shakespeare's statements about love in Sonnet 116. Is it true that "Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds"? When the object of our love, or the circumstance in which we love, changes, is it true that love itself does not? Is it true that love doesn't "bend with the remover to remove"? In other words, when the one we love is not with us, is it true that our love for him/her is (or should be) unaffected? Is it true that time does not alter love even when it alters us? If you could prove Shakespeare wrong, you would take away the power of everything he wrote: "If this be error and upon me proved, ' I never writ, nor no man ever loved." So...is he right?

2. One of the most often-used tropes of love poetry in the western tradition is to compare the beloved to the poet's surroundings, to beautiful things in the world. (Think of Astrophil and Stella, which is full of such comparisons.) Sonnet 18 is very much in this tradition (though it does go beyond that tradition by asserting that nothing in nature can rival the beauty of the speaker's love), and it is probably Shakespeare's most famous sonnet. Read it, and then immediately read Sonnet 130. How does Shakespeare play on the same tradition in his Sonnet 130? And, could you argue that despite the atypical use of metaphor and simile, Sonnet 130 is ultimately a more realistic and more tender love poem than Sonnet 18? And just for fun, please watch this reading by our former Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. He plays on this same tradition in his poem "Litany," which I find utterly hilarious.

3. One of the recurring themes in Shakespeare's sonnets is time and its relationship to love, to age, to beauty, and to art. Read Sonnets 15 and 73, and then discuss how time is used similarly, or differently, in the two poems.

4. What do you make of Sonnet 138? Could it be argued that this is the most practical and realistic portrayal of a relationship in all of Shakespeare's sonnets? Unlike the intense affair with the speaker's other lover (of the first 126 sonnets), this love has gotten to a point where it is uncomplicated. The two lovers fulfill each other's emotional and physical needs. She lies to him and tells him he is not old and is still worthy of love. He believes her lies and ignores her unfaithfulness. They fulfill each others' needs sexually. No strings attached. What do you think? Can a relationship like this work?

5. What themes in Sonnets 29 and 144 resonate with Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. How is the speaker like Faustus? How is he unlike him?

Thanks. See you on Thursday.