Overview

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, almost anyone in England who knew anything about Shakespeare knew that he had written his famous love sonnets to a beautiful adolescent male who was fifteen when the first sonnet was written. The debate was not about what gender the poems addressed but what specific young man had been the object of Shakespeare's affection. Read in sequence, the sonnets tell a story. Shakespeare was instructed by his patron to try to get the patron's son to marry and pass along his lineage and beauty. The first seventeen sonnets are therefore called the procreation sonnets because this is precisely Shakespeare's message to the boy. Beginning with Sonnet 18, however, we see an abrupt turn: Shakespeare has clearly fallen in love with the fifteen-year-old. Furthermore-and this cannot have pleased his patron-Shakespeare suggests there is really no need for the boy to marry and procreate in order to live beyond his time, for Shakespeare is immortalizing him for eternity through the sonnets.

Full Product Details

9781494389123

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Keith Hale is editor of Friends & Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914, published by Yale University Press, and author of the novels Cody and Letters to a Shooting Star, both available from Watersgreen House. He is also editor of a Brooke biography simply titled Rupert Brooke, a two-volume gay anthology titled Ode to Boy, a volume titled Edleston: Lord Byron's Boy Poems, and other works. Hale, a professor of English, lives in Arkansas.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available