For Wednesday: "A Motley to the View" (Sonnets part 4)

For Wednesday: “A Motley to the View”

Sonnets 86, 87, 91, 94, 96, 100, 103, 106, 107, 110

Answer TWO of the following...

1. As we get to the 100’s in the sonnet sequence, we see certain themes repeated, some with almost frantic urgency, while others appear only fleetingly here and there.  Choose one of the sonnets from this group and compare it to an earlier one with which it shares a consistent theme or idea.  What makes this poem different?  Is it an improvement over the previous one?  An expansion?  A clarification?  A contradiction?

2. In many of these sonnets, the poet seems to take on a fatherly tone, hectoring the young man about his behavior in society and/or toward the poet himself.  Where do we see this in a specific sonnet?  In this sonnet, what is he trying to ‘teach’ the young man, and what might this say about the lover’s fault or transgression? 

3. Choose one of the sonnets in this group and imagine that it is a soliloquy in one of Shakespeare’s plays.  Forgetting about the characters in the Sonnets, who might speak these lines?  What might the dramatic situation be?  Is this a noble Henry—a drunken Falstaff—a plotting Iago—a raging Othello?   Or someone else entirely?  Use specific lines to support this characterization. 

4. Examine a poem where Shakespeare uses poetic devices to telling effect, such as antanaclasis (homonymic pun), polyptonon (repetition of words from the same root), paradoxes (cold fire, timid rage, etc.), or simply strange syntax (sentence structure—“and worse essays prov’d thee my best of love,” etc.).  How does he employ these devices to affect the very meaning of the poem?  If he had written these more straightforwardly (which he certainly could have done), what would we have lost?  How is the meaning in the technique itself?