I sonetti di Shakespeare

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Categoria:	Lingue
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Data:	01.05.2000
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets have aroused more controversy than any other collection of poetry in the English language. The date of composition, whether or not they are autobiographical, the question of if they were mere literary exercises or not, have provoked more comment than critical evaluations of them as poems. They belong to the decade from 1590 to 1600 if we accept the evidence of Francis Meres, who in 1598 referred to Shakespeare's “sugred Sonnets among his private friends”.
The whole collection, a hundred and fifty-four in number, was not published until 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, with Shakespeare's name, but without any sign of recognition from him; we do not know whether he authorised or approved the publication.
The sonnets seem to tell a story. Sonnets I to XVII form a series addressed to a beautiful youth invoking him to marry and so preserve his type in a child. From Sonnet XVIII to sonnet CXXVI the poet addresses the youth on different topics and occasions, and in changing moods. There are two moments of crisis in their relationship when the friend steals the poet's mistress, but is forgiven (XL-XLII); and when the friend arouses Shakespeare's jealousy by seeming to give his patronage to another poet (LXXVIII-LXXXVI). The young man was most probably the Earl of Southampton. Sonnets CXXVII to CLII are addressed to a “Dark Lady”, or, as the poet more bluntly calls her, a Black Woman, who is skilled in playing on the virginals, who is faithless, wanton, physically unattractive, false to her bed-vow and yet irresistibly desirable. She has never been identified. The collection ends with two conventional love-sonnets on Cupid (CLIII, CLIV).
Shakespeare's sonnets have an intensity of actually endured emotion that makes most others seem tepid exercises in comparison, and this is the first reason for their superlative greatness as sheer lyric poetry.
Moreover, Shakespeare is the only writer of sonnets to analyse the distinct elements in emotions. As a dramatist, he is more aware of the possible range of human feelings, of the existence of complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion. Shakespeare's sonnets are more varied than those of any other sonneteer; in some, he accepts the convention; in others, he rejects it entirely, and in others again, his attitude is of a highly ambiguous irony.
All Shakespeare's sonnets show in varying degree signs of the way in which the sonnet form, by the very strictness of its formal limits, imposes upon language a distinctive economy and intensity; the best of them develop these qualities to a degree unequalled by other writers. Yet richness of descriptive language is also within Shakespeare's range, as many of his sonnets illustrate. Certainly, he is the only sonneteer with a sure enough hand for objective and rueful analysis to introduce humour into the form, as in Sonnet CXLIII, with its charming picture of the careful housewife striving to catch a runaway chicken.
Shakespeare's sonnets are of the English form, now generally called "Shakespearean"; they are built up of three quatrains, with the clinching conclusion in the shape of a rhyming couplet. Shakespeare does not use the Italian octave and sestet form; nevertheless many of the sonnets have the real "two-poem" character of the Italian form, in that there is a break in thought at the end of the second quatrain.
Verbal immediacy, the moulding of stress to the movement of living emotion, added to his skill in variation of the "caesura" and his sure use of rhyme, all these make Shakespeare the master of the form on its technical side, as he is indisputably also in the width of human experience expressed in exquisite imagery which he compresses into “The sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”.