| Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist and poet of the Renaissance, created 154 sonnets during the period of 1592-1598,in which he eulogized beauty, friendship, and love, and declared war against devastating time. His sonnets have become literary treasures and they enjoy ever-reviving vitality since nobody else has ever written a more profound and sustained body of poetry about various aspects of love with so high artistic techniques. Shakespeare also bared his soul to the world as to how he felt about the loss of his ideal, weakness of human nature and the withering power of time. Remarkably, his talents for structuring poems have conquered the literary world for centuries and his dramatic qualities in sonnet writing have contributed to readers' renewed interest.Elizabethan England witnessed sonnet writing and reading as a fashion of the upper-class society, and the 1590s were a period of sonneteering vogue. Shakespeare made unmatched contributions to this genre in that he created the Sonnets-a masterpiece of sonnet sequence, which perfectly interweaves the charm of drama with that of poetry in the light of the theme, poetry structuring and art of language.The theme of the Sonnets is a poet's persistent search for the communion with his beloved and the process of that search. They tell of the relationship of three people: a poet of inferior social class, a fair young aristocrat and a woman of dark skin. In the first 126 sonnets the poet expresses his love and commitment to his young friend, and his determination to fight against devastating time-the enemy of friendship and beauty. The rest of sonnets are addressed to his lover-the Dark Lady. They are full of contrasting feelings-passion and desolation, devotion and betrayal, depression and forgiveness. The Sonnets manifest a plot of story but the web of relations between two men and a woman depicted by Shakespeare proves more intricate. Recent historical and psychological critics have paid excessive attention to prototypes for the Young Man and the Dark Lady characterized in the Sonnets. The reason is that they attempt to identify the poet in the Sonnets with Shakespeare and then establish the theme of the eternal triangle as well as Shakespeare's homosexuality. Such attempts are, at best, an oversimplification and distortion of the Sonnets; at worst, complete misinterpretation of them. Therefore with regard to the research on the Sonnets' theme, the approach proposed in this thesis is just to distinguish whether it is more dramatic or lyric.The structuring of the Sonnets was occasionally criticized because some of the sonnets appear monotonous. The organization of one sonnet usually follows an invariable pattern of three quatrains, with the first 12 lines developing a situation and the couplet arriving at the solution. However, more evidence can be found in this thesis to reveal that Shakespearean sonnets are cleverly structured so as to achieve a dramatic effect. The thought progression is the essential element of the Sonnets' structure, both collectively or respectively. With the way Shakespeare's mind works in the development of sonnets, readers experience a dramatic thrill of joy.The art of language of the Sonnets has received more favorable appraisal, yet too much of the attention has been put to the richness of language and imagery, the range of registers and tropes, complexity of verbal and conceptual association, and more remarkably, the metrical art. However the thesis has to leave out all these fruitful studies so as to focus on the dramatic character of the Sonnets' language.In other words, this thesis tries to analyze Shakespearean characteristics of the theme, poetry structuring, and dramatic character in language in order to restore the Sonnets a well-deserved fame and full appreciation. In short, it tries to reveal why Shakespeare's sonnets are dramatic. The thesis maintains that three factors contribute to dramatic character of the Sonnets: First, the theme is more dramatic than lyric and full of dramatic conflicts. Second, the s... |
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