ENGL 315 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Courtship Display, Petrarch, Concision
29 Nov 2016
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Early 1590s, theatre closes down for a season because of plague. Shakespeare has to find other things to do as well - so he"s writing sonnets. Sonnets are really popular at this particular moment. In a culture where language art of poetry is the most important art. Now it may be film or music, but in this period it was poetry. Concision is interesting: iambic pentameter, particular rhyme & meter. Form is popularized by petrarch, and gets picked up by a couple traveling. Catches on, and pretty soon everyone"s writing sonnets. So conventionalized by this point that it becomes increasingly difficult to say something authoritative. Difficult to say something authentic in the form because so much convention. Sonnet typically speaks of a love relationship between a poet and a beloved. The situation is the poet is at court, or access to court, fallen in love for a woman who"s spoken for or out of his sphere somehow.
