Multiplicity In Shakespeare's Sonnets

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. Shakespeare's language leaves us with enduring charm and mystery since long time ago. The present thesis, from the perspective of poetry's three kinds of multiplicities, which are linguistic multiplicity, cultural multiplicity and aesthetic multiplicity, attempts to interpret the multiple meanings of the words and expressions in the Sonnets and to re-examine the amazing artistic states and to promote readers' understanding and appreciation of the Sonnets.Chapter One makes an analysis of the influence from Shakespeare and his age. This chapter introduces the definition of linguistic multiplicity and cites examples to detail in various aspects. In the Sonnets, Shakespeare has introduced many kinds of figures, among which pun is a conspicuous one. That words or phrases have several meanings, which is one of the distinct linguistic characteristics of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which endows readers With rich source for imagination and interpretations. The different interpretations of the multi-meaning words enhance the artistic conception of the poetry, thus great charm of literary works are produced.Chapter Two analyses the influence of Roman and Greek mythology upon Shakespeare and tries to explain that he has widely employed literary quotations from Greek and Roman mythology which has enriched the sonnets with profound meanings. The present thesis believes that, from the perspective of cultural multiplicity, the following analyzed sonnets, on the surface level, have multiple meanings in words and expressions; while in the deep structure, they are supported by the classical mythology. Consequently, the sonnets possess deep cultural contents. Shakespeare's use of Greek and Roman mythology in the sonnets creates layers of poetic meanings. That mythological-allusions' corresponding to narrative elements appropriately only shape textual synchronological space, when the poet's intention are fused into poems and then they are possessed deep significance by means of mythological quotations, which lead to connotation's emergence and their elucidation's infinity. The sonnets' multiplicity and tension have, which are produced by the employment of mythological allusions, enchantment for readers and commentators, which also reflects that Shakespeare's lofty mastery in literature.Chapter Three, by way of looking into the aesthetic multiplicity, interprets how the images in the Sonnets constitute multi-layered meanings. The image whose essence consists not only in a fusion of affection with scenes, but more in creating "image beyond image", "ideas beyond speech", is the soul of poetry. They are adopted to display the poet's subjective feelings and thoughts to transform the abstract and intangible ideas into concrete and graphic pictures for rich implications and strong artistic appeal. The present thesis argues that the beauty of image comes from its fuzziness and indeterminacies, which leave enough space for readers to imagine, different readers may have different interpretations and concretizations with regard to the same image. The richness of imagery is generally embodied in various interpretations, significances of "idea" and uncertainty, fuzziness of"image", which is also represented the richness of poetry's connotations.To sum up, the present thesis has found that Shakespeare's Sonnets do possess three types of language situations which have cherished three equivalent sorts of multiplicity in combining their parageneous cultural and aesthetical connotations and suggestions. Shakespeare, a great master player of words, plays with such linguistic technology to enrich the multisided beauty of the sonnet. In reading the sonnet sequence, we may also find the other parts of the story, like the metaphysical feature of the poem's craftsmanship and so on, may suggest further studies, which can only be possibly carries out in elsewhere other than in this short-spanned thesis.