Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of citations and abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I CONTEXTS
- PART II THE COURT
- 5 Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets
- 6 Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
- 7 The corruption of Hamlet
- 8 Unfolding ‘the properties of government’: the case of Measure for Measure and the history of political thought
- 9 Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship: Henry VIII
- PART III THE COMMONWEALTH
- Afterword: Shakespeare and humanist culture
- Index
5 - Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- List of citations and abbreviations
- Introduction
- PART I CONTEXTS
- PART II THE COURT
- 5 Counsel, succession and the politics of Shakespeare's Sonnets
- 6 Educating Hamlet and Prince Hal
- 7 The corruption of Hamlet
- 8 Unfolding ‘the properties of government’: the case of Measure for Measure and the history of political thought
- 9 Shakespeare and the politics of co-authorship: Henry VIII
- PART III THE COMMONWEALTH
- Afterword: Shakespeare and humanist culture
- Index
Summary
REPOLITICISING RENAISSANCE SONNETS
At the end of Act 1 of Love's Labour's Lost, the pretentious Spaniard Armado declares his love for the country wench Jaquenetta: ‘Adieu, valor! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for, I am sure, I shall turn sonnet. Devise wit; write pen; for I am for whole volumes in Folio’ (1. 2. 160–4). As he turns his back on ‘manly’ qualities and pursuits (valour and warfare) and embraces the new role of sonneteer, Armado typifies the recurrent presentation of sonneteering as an inconsequential activity, divorced from what early moderns saw as the proper vocation of the educated man, namely ‘to serve abrode [i.e. outside the home] in publik functions of the common weal’. The marginalisation of sonnets is certainly found in The Arte of English Poesie, which lists the functions of poetry in descending order of importance:
the chief and principall [subject] is: the laud honour & glory of the immortall gods … Secondly the worthy gests of noble Princes: the memoriall and registry of all great fortunes, the praise of vertue & reproofe of vice, the instruction of morall doctrines, the revealing of sciences naturall & other profitable Arts, the redresse of boistrous & sturdie courages by perswasion, the consolation and repose of temperate myndes.
The final, lowliest category is ‘the common solace of mankind in all his travails and cares of this transitorie life’, which ‘may allowably beare matter not alwayes of the gravest, or of any great commoditie or profit, but rather in some sort, vaine, dissolute, or wanton, so it be not very scandalous & of evill example’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought , pp. 101 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
- 1
- Cited by