I have been re-thinking my way through Spenser’s
Amoretti and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. My interest at
this time is not with FQ. I wonder how scholars on the List react
to issues like these:
(a) Amoretti can be interpreted as a game
played between Elizabeth Boyle and the persona of the poet; the sequence
remains strictly within the bounds of convention while promoting transcendence;
it accepts a Platonist philosophy. Spenser is an abstractionist, an
idealist, a Platonist.
(b) Shakespeare’s Sonnets promote an effect of reality
(concreteness, materialism), are anti-convention, reject transcendence, and are
anti-Platonist because Shakespeare likes the world as it is; he isn’t an
idealist. His Sonnets do not demonstrate that he has any idea of
Platonism.
(c) Is there any agreement that Shakespeare’s Sonnets
display a grasp of reality that we find in the mature dramas i.e. a sense of
human drama, a representation of the action of thought, feeling, the same
concrete grasp of human complexity that many of the plays (soliloquies in
particular) do? Does this make him more realistic than Spenser?
I’d welcome your thoughts and specific
references if you have them to mind. I’ve been amazed at the in-depth
knowledge you have about the FQ, Milton, and so on.
Ian Lipke (