Well yes and no. There’s also a growing body of
work which suggests that Katherine Duncan-Jones may present rather too positive
a view of Thorpe’s career, and that the 1609 volume gives off a variety
of bibliographical cues, not all of which suggest that it was ‘authorized’.
And if one gave credence to Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare, 'A Lover's Complaint', and John Davies of Hereford
(Cambridge, 2007) then one might end up wondering how that strange and strangely
Spenserian (off topic, me?) poem came to be printed along with the Sonnets. The
RSC editors take his arguments seriously enough to leave A Lover’s Complaint out of their
printed volume… Where does that leave our sense of the 1609 volume, or
for that matter the relationship between Spenser and Shakespeare, I wonder?
Colin Burrow
Senior Research Fellow
All
High Street
01865 279341 (direct)
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From:
Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter C. Herman
Sent: 06 June 2007 17:35
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Amoretti and Sonnets
since we have no knowledge of how far Shakespeare planned or approved the form in which his poems found their way into print.
This oint was mentioned earlier, but given Charlie's statement above, I thought
it might bear repeating: there's now a substantial body of scholarship arguing
that Shakespeare was much more involved with the publication of the Sonnets
than previously assumed, and there is a corollary point: that Shakespeare
wrote, or revised, the Sonnets close to their publication, and not earlier in
his career. See, for example, these two articles:
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. "Was the 1609 Shake-Speares
Sonnets Really Unauthorized?"
Review of English Studies n.s. 34
(1983): 151-71.
Hieatt, A. Kent, Charles W. Hieatt, and
Write Sonnets 1609?" Studies in Philology 88 (1991): 69-109.
For the Sonnets generally, see also James Schiffer's 2000 anthology, Shakespeare's
Sonnets: Critical Essays.
pch
At level of the sequence, the appearance of realism may therefore be
partly accidental - with the messiness (for want of a better word) of real
subjective experience being 'imitated' not through any authorial intention but
rather as a consequence of the real-word messiness of the circumstances of
publication.
Charlie
--
Website: www.charlesbutler.co.uk