The period of Renaissance in English literature content s

CHAPTER II. SHAKESPEARE’S LITERARY CAREER AS A SONNETEER
This chapter dedicate to Shakspeare’s literary career as a sonneteer and analysis, theme of his sonnets. We know his sonnets are deducated to “the young man” and “the dark lady”. The muses are used to break down the sonnets into three sequances, as follows.
1.The Fair Youth Sonnets
Sonnets 1-126 of his sonnets are adressed to the fair youth with whom the poet has a deep and loving friendship.
2.The Dark Lady Sonnets
Sonnets 127-152 are addressed to the dark lady .The speaker introduces the woman by explaining that her beauty is unconventional.
3. The Greek Sonnets
Final two sonnets are very different and draw upon the Roman myth of Cypid, to whom the poet has already compared his muses. Scholars and critics have made many attempts to discover all the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets, as they may shed light on his life, but generally to no avail. It is important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were written at a time when such sequences were fashionable, and thus the sonnets may be more an exercise in literary convention than in autobiography.
2.1. Shakespeare and the Essence of Verse
An artist usually presents a given object or idea in one relationship to other objects and ideas; if he opens his reader’s consciousness to more than one frame of reference, he focuses on the object in one of its relationships and subordinates all other relationships to it. The essential action of the artist in creating the experience of an audience is the one that in grammar is made by indicators of relationship like «although”, «but”, «after”, «because”, «however”. In literature such indicators of relationship tell the reader that he is not in the borderless world outside art where he himself has always to work upon what he perceives, to arrange it around a focal point chosen and maintained by himself.
Syntactic organization tells the reader that he is dealing with what we are likely to label «truth”, experience sorted, classed, and rated, rather than with «what is true”, the still to be sorted data of «real» experience.⁶
When an artist focuses his audience’s mind and distorts what is true into a recognizable, graspable shape to fit that mind, he not only does what his audience asks but what cannot long satisfy audience or artist just because the desired distortion is a distortion. Art must distort; if it is to justify its existence, it must be other than the reality whose difficulty necessitates artistic mediation. It must seem as little a distortion as possible, because its audience wants comprehension of incomprehensible reality itself. We do not want so much to live in a world organized on human principles as to live in the world so organized. Art must seem to reveal a humanly ordered reality rather than replace a random one.
There are as many ways of trying for the contradictory effects of art as there are artists. All of them aim at replacing the complexities of reality with controlled complexities that will make the experience of the orderly work of art sufficiently similar to the experience of random nature, so that the comfort of artistic coherence will not be immediately dismissed as irrelevant to the intellectual discomfort of the human condition.
Of all literary artists, Shakespeare has been most admired. The reason may be that he comes closest to success in giving us the sense both that we know what cannot be known and that what we know is the unknowable thing we want to know and not something else. I have tried to demonstrate that in the sonnets Shakespeare copes with the problem of the conflicting obligations of a work of art by multiplying the number of ordering principles, systems of organization, and frames of reference in the individual sonnets.
Shakespeare’s multiplication of ordering systems is typically Shakespearean in being unusual not in itself but in its degree. The principle of multiple orders is a defining principle of verse in general. Although «verse» and «prose» are not really precise terms, verse is ordinarily distinguishable from prose in that it presents its materials organized in at least two self-assertive systems at once: at least one of meaning and at least one of sound.
The sonnets are almost all constructed from three quatrians which are four-line stanzas, and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter. This also the meter used extensively in Shakespeare’s plays. The rhyme scheme is also the meter abab cdcd efef gg. Sonnets using this scheme are known as Shakespearean sonnets, often the beginning of the third quatrain marks the volta («turn») or the line in which the mood of the poem shifts, and the poet expresses a revelation or epiphany. There are a few exceptions: sonnet 99,126 and 145. Number 99 has fifteen lines, number 126 consists of six couplets and two blank lines marked with italic bracets; 145 is an iambic tetrameters, not pentameters. Thereis one other variation on the standard structure, found for example in sonnet 29.
The normal rhyme scheme is changed by repeating the «b» of quatrain one in quatrain three, where the «f» should be. When analysed as characters, the subject of the sonnets are usually referred to as the Fair Youth, The Rival Poet and the Dark Lady. The speaker expresses admiration for the Fair Youth’s beauty and and has an affair with the Dark Lady. It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical, notably A.L.Rowse have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals. Fair youth is the unnamed young man to whom sonnets 1-126 are addressed. Some commentators, nothing the romantic and loving language used in this sequence of sonnets, have suggested a sexual relationship between them; others have read the relationship as platonic love.
The earliest poems in the sequence recommended the benefits of marriage and children. With the famous sonnet 18 (“shall I compare thee to a summer’s day»)the tone changes dramatically towards romantic intimacy. Sonnet 20 explicity laments that the young man is not woman. Most of the subsquent sonnets describe the ups and downs of the relationship, culminating with an affair between the poet and the Dark Lady. The relationship seems to end when The Fair Youth succumbs to the Lady’s charms. There have been many attempts to identify the young man. Shakespeare’s one-time patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3^rd Earl of Southampton is commonly suggested, although Shakespeare’s later patron, William Herbert,3^rd Earl of Pembroke, has recently become popular. Both claims begin with the dedication of the sonnets to «Mr,W.H., «The only beggeter of these ensuing sonnets»; the initials could apply to either earl. However, while Shakespeare’s language often seems to imply that the subject is of higher social status than himself, the apparent references to the poet’s inferiority may simply be part of the rhetoric of romantic submission.
An alternative theory, most famously espoused by Oscar Wilde’s short story «The Portrait of Mr.W.H.» Wild’s story acknowledges that there is no evidence for such a person’s existance. Samuel Butler believed that the friend was a seaman. Joseph Pequigney argued in his book Such is My Love that the Fair Youth was an unknown commoner. The Dark Lady sequence distinguishes itself from the Fair Youth sequence by being overtly sexual in its passion. Among these, sonnet 151 has been characterised as «bawdy» and is used to illustrate the difference between the spiritual love for the fair youth and the sexual love for the Dark Lady.
The distinction is commonly made in the introduction to modern editions of the sonnets. The Dark Lady is so called because the poems make it clear that she has back black hair and dun coloured skin. As with the Fair Youth, there have been many attempts to identify her with a real historicalindividual. Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier and others have been suggested. The Rival Poet’s identity remains a mystery; among the varied candidates are Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, or, an amalgamation of several contemporaries.⁷ However, there is no hard evidence that the character had a rel life counterpart. The speaker sees the Rival as competition for fame, coin and patronage.
The sonnets most commonly identified as the Rival Poet group exist within the Fair Youth sequence in sonnets 78-86.Shakespeare’s sonnets can be seen as a prototype,or even the beginning of new kind of modern love poetry. The sonnets have great cross-cultural importance and influence. The sonnet of Petrarch and Shakespeare represent,in the history of this major poetic developments in terms of technical consolidation-by renovating the inherited material -and artistic expressiveness-by covering a wide range of subject in an equally wide range of tones. Both writers cemented the sonnet’s enduring appeal by demonsrating its flexibility and lyrical potency through the exceptionalquality of their poems.
The sonnet is a type of poem finding its origins in Italy around 1235 AD.While the early sonneteers experimented with patterns, Francesco Petrarch was one of the first to significantly solidify sonnet structure.The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet consists of two parts; an octave and a sestet. The octave can be broken down into two quatrains; likewise, the sestet is made up of two tercets . The octave presents an idea to be contrasted by the ending sestet. The particulr quatrains and the tercets are divided by change in rhyme. Petrarchtypically used an ABBA ABBA pattern for the octave, followed by either CDE CDE or CDC DCD rhymes in the sestet. ( the symmetries (ABBA CDC) of these rhyme schemes have also been rendered in musical structure in the late Xxth century composition Scrivo in Vento inspired by Petrarch’s sonnets work together to emphasize the idea of the poem: the quatrain presents the theme and the second expands on it.
The repeated rhyme scheme within the octave strenghtens the idea. The sestet, with either two or three different rhymes,uses its first tercet to reflect on the theme and the last to conclude. William Shakespeare utilized the sonnet in love poetry of his own, employing the sonnet structure conventionalized by English poets Wyatt and Surrey. This structure, known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet, consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. The rhyme scheme is a simple ABAB,CDCD,EFEF, GG format. The effect is» like going for a short drive with a very fast driver: the first lines even the first quatrain,are in low gear;then thesecond and the third accelerate sharply, and ideas and metaphors flash past;and then there is a sudden throttling-back,and one glides to a stop in the couplet» Like Petrarch, Shakespeare used structure to explofe the multiple facets of a theme in a short piece.