Spring Quarter

The Blackboard

I will be posting supplemental material to this site during the quarter. I don't expect to leave things up here indefinitely--so if you need it, read it or download it soon.

Contents:

The Skills of Active Reading (10/18/06)

Bridging the Gap:

Solving the Riddle of The Winter’s Tale

Understanding The Winter’s Tale depends upon our ability to read riddles. The play depends upon a real riddle: the oracular “riddle” from Delphi is something like the central fact of at least the second half of the play. But that is only an explicit, obvious riddle. We actually watch Leontes “riddle” things out from the opening bell. He sees Hermione and Polixenes flirting; he “reads” the riddle their behavior sets him, “solves” it—or so he thinks. Hermione claims he is wrong—whatever she did, it did not have the meaning he ascribed to it, and from the gap between these two understandings the whole of this play’s action derives. But though this misreading sets the plot in motion, it’s by no means the only misreading in the play. Language and behavior in this play regularly result in “riddles.” They have meanings that don’t quite get through to the surface, and so must be read, puzzled over, solved. In this way the play makes “reading” a theme, as the text repeatedly offers scenes of people reading (and misreading) other people, other words, fortune, nature, whatever, in order to find guidelines for their actions.

The play’s opening riddle also invokes (and replays) the Fall. Leontes and Polixenes have been having a long visit, have re-experienced the deep and easy friendship of their youth. Polixenes describes that time: “We were as twinned lambs, that did frisk i’ th’ sun…. we knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed/ That any did….” But that, it turns out, was then. Now they know more about the world—about desire and deception—and as Leontes watches Hermione wooing Polixenes to stay longer in Sicilia this knowledge of what human beings can do suddenly throws him into a jealous rage. He interprets what he sees as betrayal, and it’s pretty much downhill from there.

Now. One could play Leontes as a moral idiot, or a psychopath, but that would miss the point of the cosmic situating of the play: its premise has to be that Leontes only engages in a hyperbolic form of the same sort of misreadings we all commit. We can’t help it: as human beings we cannot escape the fact that what we see and hear must always be “read”—be interpreted in one way or another. There is, one could say, a “gap” between us and everything around us, a gap in the midst of which our entire adult lives are led, and this in turn means that life is also a matter of a kind of double-thinking. There is always what we see, and parallel to what we see is what we think we see. And similarly with language there is always what we hear, and then there is what we think what we hear means. We do learn to read—to interpret what we see and what we hear. And we are usually pretty good at it. But not always—and that’s the rub.

So this play opens with a little example of a very big truth: the texts of our lives really are double—we live in this sense at a distance from reality. Christians call this the effect of the Fall; I will call this the problem of the Gap—the way that there is between us and the world, and even between us and ourselves, a gap we must negotiate if we are to make meaning of what we see and hear. Once we have discovered the world’s gap and the distance it puts between expression and meaning, surface and depth, what seems and what is, we must in our adulthood learn to see things in a doubled sense, and to learn to remember with humility our own fallen and thus limited capacity for right-reading. Of course, we don’t all or always succeed in this. Leontes forgets (if he ever knew) that humility before the Gap.

So the play begins with fracture, that of the social order before the misreading of Leontes, and we can also see the way the resultant set of events represents his willful denial of what as adults we increasingly realize is a world chock full of gaps, where things split all around us, where (it can often seem) there is no continuity or truth or wholeness, only discontinuity, disappointment, and death, and where melancholy and despair (like that into which Leontes falls as Act 3 ends, and which has not changed even 16 years later when we see him in Act 5) may feel like the only reasonable response.

But of course despair is not the only possible response, since the play also offers the possibility of regeneration, of which Perdita and Florizel are the instantiation, a regeneration that is at once physical (they are the new generation, replacing, revivifying, the old) and spiritual (their union proceeds from a reconceiving, a reconfiguring, of the [apparently natural, but in fact artificial] boundaries of the world around them). For the union of Perdita with Florizel represents a wholeness and integrity that counters the decay of the world around them—even when in 4.4 the anger, violence, envy and resentment of that world bursts in upon them, threatening them with torture and death. Against that pressure—the visible sign of the gapped nature of the world—they do not fold. Florizel in particular retains his ideal, his faith both in his own vow and in the possibility of changing the conditions of the life they have found themselves in. Even without a plan, with nowhere to go, he still resolutely refuses to abandon his vision.

Or so one might claim. For we can take that sense from this play only by taking it as the moral to an old (winter’s) tale, by “reading,” construing its riddling structure allegorically, interpreting one thing in terms of another. And in doing that we are doing what we of the fallen world not just learn to do (as we come to “know”), but also are condemned to do, and can (in the world of the play, anyway) be saved by doing: reading figuratively the things and experiences of our existence.

But why, in all this, is there so much an air of contrivance? of the artificial? How could Hermione have been hidden for 16 years! How could Florizel just happen to light upon Perdita? (The flight of his falcon indeed!) One could ask a dozen such questions. Shakespeare even does the geographically impossible: he gives Bohemia a seacoast! Did he know Bohemia had none? Is this falsifying of nature itself a part of his contrivance? Don’t all these artificial contrivances make for a terrible piece of drama? I don’t think so. For the artificial is OK here. It really only emphasizes the essentially undramatic nature of the play: the way to approach The Winter’s Tale’s plot isn’t through realism, but through thinking in symbolic terms about when—in what relation to other events of the play—any given event happened. Like each of the four late “Romances,” this is a play which is unlike most of the rest of Shakespeare, for its coherence is not characterological, but narrative and structural. It offers mythic patterns and themes to be read for their capacity to structure human experience, not problems of what a character built on such and such a premise would or wouldn’t do. Its force is thus allegorical, not dramatic. It is a play in which tragic loss and comic regeneration each stand in a subordinate relation to natural cycles of far greater scope than any single dramatic action. Each is but a slice of the longer term rhythm/ dynamic of human life, that which encompasses birth as well as death, both tragic and comic moments (“Thou meet’st with things dying, I with things new-born” [3.3]).

If, then, the first fact of the world is decay, the inevitability and constant foreshadowing of death (the last and greatest gap!), the challenge this gives us is to learn to see the patterns into which that process of separation, alienation, descent—even “fall”—fits. And, to repeat, in this play that in turn is only possible through a capacity to read the phenomena of the world as representations of a larger “reality”—that of God and “great creating nature” (4.4). There is no way the ability to read can prevent the gap, nor any way it can avoid its pain and loss. But it can offer consolation, and a sense of explanation. In short, we can live in Hope and (thereby) Faith that there is a larger picture into which particular disasters fit as plotted moments. In Pericles Shakespeare gives his romance hero the motto "in hac spe vivo: In this faith I live,” and perhaps the final sentiment here is not far from that. Leontes manages to keep on living (“Because I have this hope/faith, I can live”—another way to read Pericles’ motto) because he has a capacity for “faith” in the possibility of Apollo’s oracle’s coming true—that sense that, contrary to what happens to us, something more than we know is at work. It is precisely the absence of this hope that is key to the ending of King Lear. Lear may have it in his “reading” of Cordelia’s corpse. But no one else seems to. They do not end the play in the faith of anything, since their experience seems to have destroyed any further basis for faith of any kind.

In The Winter’s Tale, however, the faith lives on, despite experience; its world is finally a world of stories and interpretations which owes its saving grace to reading (and, of course, artful writing)—and has done so from the very moment at which the first gap opened. A central conversational line of this play, then, centers on the power of narrative, of art and story-telling, as human kind’s antidote to the Gap. What is it, if not art, that confers upon the random and seemingly uncaring experience of our lives an order, a meaning, a sense that depression and despair are only parts of a larger pattern, something to work through, to endure until we can sense that larger whole?

Consider the contrastive parallel of Troilus and Cressida. That play shows the same degenerating world, the same gap between ideal and real, between what language can conjure up (“honor”!) and what life can deliver (the ignominious murder of Hector, the abandonment of Cressida, the impotent wrath of Troilus). But the only response to that bleakness there is Thersites’ grimey cynicism. Here the response is Perdita and Florizel, figures of hope and rebirth. Would that someone could only supply such a tale for our current world! Of course, our political rhetoric shows a great competition to do just that. All the talk of “renewal” and “reform” partakes of such a thing; Perdita in our world is a balanced budget or a way out of Iraq. Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem quite as much like renewal as Perdita or Florizel does. One can imagine that every culture deeply needs an idea of someone who has the power to provide a positive regenerative vision opposed to the evident corruptions of any society’s political institutions. Indeed, without belief in that possibility, democratic politics may be impossible. Infected with terminal cynicism, citizens would sit like Leontes as Act 5 opens, split off, alone, isolated in dejection and despair. Can the Democrats find for us a new Perdita? Only time and the future’s political tempests will tell.

Student Papers Written for the Sonnet Assignment.

I've posted three of the more successful papers from the class. I invite you to read them both for interest's sake, and to try your own hand at applying the paper criteria to them and considering their strengths. To see the papers, click here.

On Rewriting your draft. A How To Do It Manual

So all of you now have developed elements of your paper, but for most, your thinking isn’t yet fully integrated. Indeed, some of you haven’t quite seen yet that you ARE making an argument. How can you fix that? In a word, “revise.”

Between now and next Tuesday you have a whole week-end to revise—rewrite— your work. And let’s be clear: “revise” does not mean “reprint,” or “fix some commas and run the spell checker more carefully.” That is editing, not revising. Revising means taking a clear cold look at the stuff you’ve assembled (the word comes from the Latin “to see again”), evaluating what you’ve done and what you still need to do to make it all “work,” and then writing again. Yes, you will be able to use some of what you’ve already written. But for many of you, a lot of what you’ve written needs significant change. Most classes don’t give you a chance to do that. This one does. This is your chance to reconceptualize your work, get it clearer, get it straighter. This is what REAL good writing—and thinking—requires.

So what does that mean for you here and now? First, it means that you should reread the assignment, and re-establish your sense of your purpose in writing at all. In doing so, ask yourself:

Have I really included all the elements necessary to explaining how I understand the drama of this sonnet? Do I have:

• a clearly articulated claim about who your speaker is, what he seeks to achieve via this speech, and whatever ironies do or do not accompany his effort?

• an argument to support that claim that explains How Do You Know what you say is true?

• explanations of HDYK anchored in “whats”—choices you see the author to have made— that you have sufficiently explored that your readers can follow why you think what you do about their functions in the poem?

Ask yourself too: have I been concise? Do I begin the paper with throat clearing that could be simplified into a more direct beginning? Do I get to the point?

Remember (at the risk of being really redundant) what I want: a strong claim explaining the drama of this sonnet: who is speaking, and to whom, for what purpose—and with what irony? Followed by evidence you’ve developed by paying close attention to choices Shakespeare has made, exploring their implications.

A Note on reading your readers’ comments. Be careful! Some comments are terrific, and others are not. We are not as a group a highly skilled bunch of paper readers, and reading papers is difficult in any case. I asked you to be observers, not correctors or evaluators. Not all of you succeeded. So as you read the comment, ignore those that are too general, or too nice, or those that try to tell you how to rewrite the paper. Think of what you read in these comments as potential symptoms to indicate the general health of your paper, and remember that they can only be prods to your rethinking what you are trying to do and your effectiveness in doing so. The fact is that you probably learned more from reading other folks’ papers and not being able to follow, or finding them unconvincing, or without an argument, than you will learn from what someone has been able to write in just a few minutes at the back of yours.

As for the number you see on your paper (it may be circled). That’s an index indicating how close I think you are to a final draft. I want well connected, specific and full papers, and thus the question is: Where are you, over all, in the pursuit of such a paper?

Index to Rewrite-ability Index Scores

1: You need to talk with me.
2: You’ve made progress, but not yet much argument or explication of the sonnet.
3: Good progress towards a paper, but still very much in the gestation phase (see questions above!).
4: An argument structure is there, along with progress on the major supporting elements, but not yet clearly or fully articulated or organized for best effect and clarity.
5: If you are this far along, you really DO only have to edit and reprint!

How to get Help:

From me. Either email a question

OR: From writing centers (English or OUGL). Be sure to call or email for appointment. See Webpages: http://faculty.washington.edu/jwholmes/uwwrite.html or: http://depts.washington.edu/wcenter/info.html

More on The October 26 Assignment

. (What follows is an excerpt from the journal I keep for this class--I'm writing about the assignment for Oct 26, and what we talked about in class to illustrate how to do that assignment well.)

I outlined the assignment for Thursday: I assigned act numbers, and told them to locate a sonnet-sized segment of verse that they saw as doing particularly effective work towards one or more of the play’s “projects.” I told them we would read these passages aloud on Thursday evening—a reader’s theatre of the play.

Then, to help with their selecting of passages that “do work” towards one or more of the play’s projects, I explained again how one can understand literature in terms of a given work’s “project” (or set of projects), and, with that understood, how to see any element in the play as something that is working towards achieving one or more of those projects. Thus KL takes as one of its projects the enacting of a cultural conversation about what is it that constitutes our essential humanity. As one follows Lear through the play we see him strip off his conventional identifiers and adopt others in their stead, and at each stage Shakespeare gives us speech and action that move that conversation along. One moment we pointed to last night involved his act 3.4 speech that ends with “Off, off you lendings!” wherewith he removes his cloak to give to Tom.

So: What work does that speech do? Answer: it constitutes a step in the conversation about what is it that constitutes our essential humanity, defining one more step towards what the play will render as the representation of our true human essence. Just a line or two above the “off, off” line Lear defines what he at that point sees in Tom: “Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.” And with that we reach both a nadir (a low spot!)—“Man” with all stripped away, cut back to the essentials—and an acme (a high spot!): a recognition in Lear of humility, a man without pride, without pretension, recognizing what links us all as human beings at some level beneath the clothing and social roles and pretensions of “civilized life.” Here he and Tom, the “highest” and the “lowest” are brought together to share a single image and a single description. We are from this point of view all equal—neither rich nor poor, smart or dumb, respected or despised. And (by the way) Shakespeare offers us the notion that the sense of oneself that is then revealed over the next two acts is richer and more human for having accepted a common humanity, a link between yourself and all other human beings, even those Bedlam beggars you pass by on the corner of Denny and Aurora, or up and down University Ave. There but for the grace of God and the disguisings of ourselves to emphasize our distance, our lack of connection to and (therefore) lack of responsibility for, these other human beings (one reading of these lines would suggest), goes any one of us.

So (leaving aside that last thought about connections to Denny Way, which Shakespeare himself obviously never had) one way to talk about lines like this is to locate them in the larger project of the play’s conversation about “What IS a human being?” They define a kind of metaphysical end point (the result of the stripping away of roles and pretensions that has occurred in Acts 1, 2, and early 3) and a metaphysical starting point (the bare thing which can now be built back into a fuller sense of humanity in the rest of act 3 and in acts 4 and 5).

Paper Assignment: Shakespeare's Dramatic Miniatures

Dramatic Miniatures: Working with Shakespeare’s Sonnets

I have described Shakespeare’s sonnets as each like a miniature play where readers act as audience to one side of a dramatic confrontation whose exact nature is often both complicated, and only implicitly rendered. The task that reading each sonnet presents, then, is that of working out the plot—the characters, motives, and actions—of a very short play. We begin by unpacking the play’s language in order that we can extrapolate from the single speech Shakespeare gives us to the larger situation within which that speech could possibly occur; then, having defined the sonnet’s dramatic situation, we go on to explain how what the sonnet’s speaker is trying to accomplish with his/her lines.

For this midterm, pick either sonnet 95 or 120, and write an analysis of it as a miniature play. Begin by formulating as precise a notion as the sonnet allows of its dramatic situation, and particularly of what you see as the speaker’s motive for speaking. Go on to explain the sequential process of the speech, exploring the language choices Shakespeare has made to further his dramatic purpose. As you think about your sonnet, remember that the speaker of a sonnet is not necessarily “Shakespeare.” He is merely a character—the main character, to be sure—in the play we’re reading. We’ve worked in class to show how diction, metaphors, sound patterns, and meter create emphasis, irony, or even contradiction, and it’s in your fully exploring the implications of specific choices you see Shakespeare making that the real challenge of this midterm lies.

Think, too, of what other possibilities there might be for interpreting this sonnet. To make the argument you are making, you will in effect be opposing other possible readings. You don’t have to address those in this paper (it’s pretty short, after all), but you should be aware as you write that other hypotheses have been advanced.

To help you focus on specific choices Shakespeare has made, I have underlined (italicized in the on-line version) several important “whats.” You may find choices other than those I identify, and even if you limit yourself solely to what I’ve noticed you still aren’t likely to have space enough to explain all of them fully. That’s fine. You aren’t confined to, or by, the things I underline. My noticings are only to make sure that you DO focus on specific language choices Shakespeare has made, and on how those choices further his dramatic ends.

Be sure to read “Criteria for Interpretive Essays in this Class” [pp. 51-2 of Reading and Writing Shakespeare,], and be sure to follow the Presentation Guidelines [pp. 53-4]. Be sure, too, to review the StyleWatch section of RWS—each of the issues covered there just happens to be a bête-noire for me.

Due: Tuesday, October 24th, at 7:00pm.
NO MORE THAN 4 pages (1200 words).

Shakespeare’s Ways of Making Love

I promised you I'd put up a paper I wrote on Shakespeare's Sonnets, and here it is. It is from a talk first given at the UW’s Summer Arts Festival in the Summer of 2000. Read it if you'd like; especially in its reading of Sonnet 63 it offers you an idea of the sort of reading I'll be looking for in your Sonnet paper.

People tend to think of Shakespeare’s sonnets as idyllic, romantic paeans to love sweet love. They read them at weddings, or, on some occasions, in movies—as Gwineth Paltrow did in Shakespeare in Love. But Shakespeare’s sonnets, though very much about love, are also in almost every case not about sweet love but about one or another kind of love in trouble: love deceived, love revenged, love that terrifies, love that imprisons, love that hurts, love that frustrates and disappoints. So even though the sonnets are all love poems, and even though their writing is dominated by the idea that to write poetry is to make love, the love they make reflects a range of different emotions—most of them far from sweet. Let me focus on that phrase, too: “Making love.” We have our sense for it of course, but I want to broaden it a bit for the purposes of this discussion—for I want to use it to describe what Shakespeare does in all of these sonnets: he makes, creates, enacts, represents, love. Many of these sonnets are, either directly or indirectly, efforts to make love happen—as in “love me, please love me!” But others make love by making us understand better more about love. These poems work to make up our understanding of love; and so it is in that sense, too, that I see them as ways of “making love.”

In this essay I will explore some of these sonnets’ ways of making love, but I’d like first to suggest two reasons that so many people don’t usually see the far-from-ideal nature of love that fairly seethes in these poems. The first is that people often go off into the sonnets as on a fishing expedition. They have an idea of what “love poetry” is supposed to be, and so it is with something like a set of blinders that they do their reading. As a result they see, I think, what they want to see, and that (I might even add) is the love they wish the world held for them, and not always the love their lives has known.

And the second—allied to the first—is that people don’t usually see that these sonnets are deeply engaged in what (adapting a wonderful phrase from the philosopher H.P. Grice) we can call “dramatic (as opposed to “conversational”) implicature.” Shakespeare is dramatic from his head to his toes; I doubt he could have bought bread from the corner bakery without imagining a plot to go with it, and surely these sonnets reflect that talent. For they are not just love sentiments that rhyme. Rather they are each something like a crucial speech in a tiny drama, complete with characters, a dramatic situation, and a plot. But for readers the difficulty is that that plot is rarely made explicit, and that its characters must be inferred from very slight evidence. We only have 14 lines to work with after all—something in the average sonnet of just about 100 words. That’s why the phrase “dramatic implicature.” These are performances that are highly charged with implicature: the implying, and not stating, of dramatic elements and complications. But that, in turn, makes them less obvious, harder to read—even, Shakespeare’s (ill-informed, in this case, I’d say) detractors have said, simply obscure and confused.

Let us see. I want to begin with a sonnet that has been given a rather prominent place in the set. This is Sonnet 116, the one Gwineth Paltrow reads so beautifully in Shakespeare in Love.

That is, of course, a lovely sentiment. Not perhaps in all cases a true one—does “true love” in fact never change? Can one tell only after the fact that that was what it was? How then WOULD one ever know?! Still, were we able to set aside the drama of this sonnet—its dramatic implicature—then we could simply value it for that. But these are speakings, not disembodied pronouncements. This is a speaker conceived in a particular way and in a particular set of circumstances, and we can begin to get at that by asking a set of three questions designed to elicit its dramatic quality:

For the first question I think we could say that this speaker is emphatic, he’s concentrating on being resolute. He’s melodramatic—“even to the edge of doom…”! He’s passionate, but not explicitly sexual. He’s intellectual, and in these lines he talks of love in high-minded terms: not just a marriage, but a marriage of “true minds”; he sees his lover not just as a companion, but as a hedge against time and even death itself. It’s difficult to describe him exactly, but it’s easy to say a few things he is not: he’s not passive, he’s not ironic, he’s not amusing or cynical. He does seem a little forlorn, maybe even (given how many times he says the same thing over and over) a little desperate. A man, then, resolute in desperation?

As for the second question—to whom does he speak?—the answer is in line one: “Let me not…” It’s himself. This whole poem is a form of self address. Moreover it’s a form of Negative self address—and we might even start asking before we get too far: when do we find ourselves having these little self-instruction sessions? For this line really is a self-instruction—it even has the urgency of an imperative: “Let me not…”—or more colloquially: Don’t let me!

And now how about the third question: on what occasion does the speaker speak? When do we give ourselves pep talks like this? This isn’t explicit here—again, it’s only implicit, our understanding dependent upon indirect clues the speaker gives us about a larger situation. So what does Shakespeare give us to work with? Well, from the first line we can first infer that the speaker is actually tempted to do exactly the thing he instructs himself NOT to do! Indeed, this whole poem is (like its first line) developed with a distinctly negative cast. Some negatives are explicit: Not, O, No, Never, Not, Not, never, nor, no man. Others are a little less identifiable, but no less there: The “Un” in unknown, the “re” in “remover” and “remove.” Don’t he tells himself, don’t—no it’s not, no, never, it’s not!

But what’s not? “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds.” And what’s that mean? Love isn’t really love, isn’t “true love,” we’d have to supply, if it changes in response to change—to “alteration.” So we can see a situation emerging here: there once was love, and now there has been alteration in that love, and in response this lover finds himself imploring himself not to alter in response.

Two further questions now arise. First, what exactly has changed? And second, why does the speaker seem to be tempted to change too—so tempted that he needs to give himself a talking to in order to make sure he doesn’t change?

I’m sure you are all working out the semantic calculus of all this—it is in fact something of a logic puzzle. And it’s important to note that the speaker isn’t very specific about what has changed. We can make a couple guesses though. One, since he soon starts talking about the grim reaper, is death. His love may well have died, and he finds himself for whatever reason one has in such situations fighting either his tendency to forget his lover, or maybe an anger at whatever would lead to his own betraying of his feelings. That may be a bit of a reach, though, because “alteration” doesn’t seem strong enough for death. “What happened to your friend?” “Well, he underwent an alteration….” True, we have an image of death at mid-poem, but that occurs in a concessive clause modifying the statement: “Love’s not time’s fool….” Love is not subject to time even if our bodies can be reaped in the course of time. This seems a general sentiment, and imagines a harvest moment, human lovers taken in the fullness of their time, and not, as would make more sense in these sonnets, in mid or even early life.

So perhaps the alteration is not death, but the more likely one, the more common one, the one more consistent with a whole lot of these sonnets—the one where the speaker’s lover simply stops loving him. That happens in love affairs all over the world, every day. Sorry dear, but I think we ought to start seeing other people. What does one do in response to that? We have a range of response available—anger, grief, scorn, denial. But another mode of response is something very close to what this speaker does—take the high road: “you may be weak, you may never have felt true love, and you may seem to be scorning me now. But I am the nobler of us two. I truly loved you before you changed, and I will love you as true lovers do, forever and ever—even to the edge of time!” It may not be the best of consolations, but in situations like this you go with what you’ve got.

So maybe this poem isn’t about death, but about desertion. How, finally, can we decide? Maybe we can’t—there is often in poetry as in life an ambiguity we cannot escape. But before we take that way out, let me bring in a sonnet that makes a good pair to this one, one that has a very similar dramatic situation but a very different tone:

Here we have a sonnet that is also a self-address, and is also confronting a less-than-perfect love. But unlike the stoic, high-minded tone of 116’s speaker, here the speaker’s tone is bemused, ironic, and vulnerable. Could we also say it is realistic and accepting? To be sure, the lover in this sonnet hasn’t abandoned him altogether. But it’s hard to imagine this speaker ever declaring that true love lasts forever. This speaker and his love are far too pragmatic for that. Similar situation, different character—but a different way of “making love,” and a different kind of love emerging from the making.

Two poems, two ways of making love, but as yet we’ve only scratched the surface of Shakespeare’s invention. Consider now another way these sonnets make love. In Sonnet 63 the lovers are not parting, but that still doesn’t mean that all is sweetness and light.