|
Thanks for Noticing: The Interpretation of Desire A
prosimetrum of 154 sonnets, glosses, and other commentary,
in
which the sacred beauty of friendship and sexual love are explored.
ADVISEMENT Lovers of all kinds turn to
Shakespeare’s 154
Sonnets for his depth of emotion with richness of thought. Most of the
poems were written to a beautiful young man and some to a mysterious
dark lady. These new sonnets, similarly, range through many moods from
youthful folly (today causing me profound embarrassment) to perhaps a
hint of maturity, arraying insights from the world’s religions in the
sonnets and in the sonnet glosses, protesting against the Cartesian
disenchantment of the world. Because the sonnets are arranged by parts
of the Mass, and many sonnets identify the erotic with the divine, some
may consider the book blasphemous.
|
|
About Shakespeare’s Sonnets Did Shakespeare (1564-1616) authorize the 1609 publication of his sonnets? The Elizabethan sonnet-writing vogue was over. The Bard's reputation as a dramatist was well established; he retired in 1611. Thomas Thorpe, a marginal publisher, perhaps to make a buck — I mean a guinea — issued them, perhaps without Shakespeare’s permission. Nonetheless, bless Thorpe for them. In 1640, as if the sonnets had never been in print, another publisher rearranged and issued them. Two of the “dark lady” sonnets appeared in an anthology of 1599, and a year earlier a critic praised Shakespeare’s “sugared sonnets among his private friends,” but we don’t know what the selection might have been. The first seventeen may have been commissioned by a third party. What we have today may have been written well before 1600. (The 154 are not Shakespeare’s only sonnets — sonnets appear in his plays Henry V, Love’s Labor Lost, and Romeo and Juliet, but they are dramatic, not lyric, sonnets.) Modern editions vary as the scholars seek the best ways to bring the spelling and punctuation from practices over 400 years ago to today’s readers, and deal with textual problems and printer errors like the obvious one in 146. We do not know if the 1609 sonnets are in the order Shakespeare would have wanted, although many seem to flow from one to the next. An authoritive commentary is by Helen Vendler. Sonnets like number 20 have been used to prove both that Shakespeare’s passion for the young man (1-126) was sexual — and that it was not. It need not matter when we consider the spiritual weight of the poems. The lust for the promiscuous dark lady (127-152) certainly seems sexual. (The last two are anacreontic.) Because there is bare mention of the Sonnets for thirty years after their 1609 publication, despite Shakespeare’s fame, I wonder if Shakespeare tried to suppress the Thorpe edition. Shakespeare may have been embarrassed by so full and intimate a record of his mercurial passions; but without any evidence, I like to think that perhaps he hoped that, should others read them, his — and his readers’ — struggles might be redeemed through such ingenious verse. |
| Wikipedia bio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vern_Barnet CRES bio: https://cres.org/vern1.htm Book Bio, page 207: Vern Barnet For eighteen years the weekly religion columnist for The Kansas City Star, Vern Barnet has been honored by Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and other groups. With three others, he wrote and edited the 740-page Essential Guide to Religious Traditions and Spirituality for Health Care Providers, published by Radcliffe in 2013. He was the developmental editor for Binding Us Together: A Civil Rights Activist Reflects on a Lifetime of Community and Public Service, the memoir of Alvin L Brooks, published by Andrews McMeel in 2021, and he appears in a 2024 documentary about Brooks by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Kevin Willmott. His articles, reviews, and poems have appeared in many publications. He has taught world religions and related subjects at several universities and seminaries, and served on the faculty of the nation’s first “Interfaith Academies” sponsored by Harvard University’s Pluralism Project and Religions for Peace-USA. He has been featured in national media, including a half-hour CBS-TV special in 2002. His civic activities, including chairing the Jackson County, MO, task force studying the five-county religious situation after 9/11, have been recognized with local and national honors, and in 2010 an annual “Vern Barnet Interfaith Service Award” was initiated to honor select Kansas Citians. His interest in poetry was heightened when he studied with US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner KARL SHAPIRO at the University of Nebraska where he also studied with philosopher O K BOUWSMA and visiting Buddhist scholar and Bollingen Fellow GARMA CHEN CHI CHANG. He completed his doctoral work in 1970 at the University of Chicago Divinity School and an affiliated seminary. Among his teachers were historian of religion MIRCEA ELIADE, Templeton Prize-winner RALPH WENDELL BURHOE, psychotherapist-philosopher EUGENE T GENDLIN, and psychiatrist ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS. World religions expert HUSTON SMITH was a life-long friend. He also studied with mythologist JOSEPH CAMPBELL. Ordained a Unitarian Universalist minister, he served parishes in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kansas before dedicating his career to interfaith understanding in the Kansas City area. Now minister emeritus of the Center for Religious Experience and Study (“CRES”) which he founded in 1982, he is an active Episcopal layman. A brief biography appears on Wikipedia. A full biography with bibliography appears at https://www.cres.org/vern. |