It is looking very much like I'll be starting with a sonnet!
Andrew Gurr suggested it some time ago - sonnet 145 is likely to have been written early on - possibly when Shakespeare was still in his teens.
There is the serious possibility it was written to Anne, his soon to be wife - which makes it sort of 'sweet' and "Ahhhhhhh"-able.
This would certainly be the earliest of his writings.
I am having not-much-fun trying to sort out the dates of the sonnets - they were collected together and published in 1609 - and arranged in an order that makes a sort of narrative - but they were written in a different order.
Possibly the first 17 were in fact written a little later than the next sequence; and the dark lady poems earlier than the ones before!
What a life!
I am also doing all my preparation with a little programme available from the OU called Compendium: If I ever find a way to do it I'll publish the 'map' I make to go with the journey.
(Just think all journeys should be mapped.)
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3 comments:
You are going to go barking mad if you try to untangle the Sonnets. And if that happens to you, you had just better hope that you're at least lucky enough never to have a book published "explaining" them (consider A.L. Rowse, who manages to sound like the print version of that shaggy fellow on the park bench telling you about how the mafia faked the moon landings). I think Shakespeare only wrote them to baffle us.
Worry-eth not - lalready there (was actually barking at a set of students last week: Report over on one of my other blogs).
I am not going to attempt a full unravel but i know there was some computer research recently that 'blocks' some and rearranges the dates a little - but there are a couple can be firmly dated(ish) - nothing too accademic.
Re: Barking.
http://akfarrar.blogspot.com/2008/03/barking.html
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