British Shakespeare Association Biennial Conference 2005
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Programme : Panels - Seminars - Workshops
Panel - Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
Friday 2nd September 2005, 11.00am-12.30pm,
Herschel Lecture Theatre 1
Participants
Dieter Fuchs, University of Vienna
Small Latin and less Greek? A Hellenistic
Source for the ‘Magic Fountain’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153/154
Ivan Lupic, University of Zagreb
“Not of an eternall durie”:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Art of Perpetuation
Sergio Amigo, LAMDA/Argentina
Luis Gayol, LAMDA/Argentina
Abstracts
Small
Latin and less Greek? A Hellenistic Source for the ‘Magic Fountain’
in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 153/154
Dieter Fuchs, University of Vienna
As James Hutton elucidated, the final poems of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
refer to a Hellenistic epigram from the fifth century A.D. This intertextuality
can be traced back to an even earlier source which has not yet been discovered:
according to Eunapius’ Lives of Philosophers (fourth century A.D., edited
in English in 1579) the Neo-Platonist Iamblichus performed a love-miracle when
taking a bath in a hot spring called ‘Eros’ which is to be found
in the Syrian city of Gadara.
Whereas Shakespeare’s rewriting of Eunapius’ eros/water-allegory
refers to Plato’s philosophical approach to love and its adaptation by
Marsilio Ficino, the geographical context of Gadara alludes to two literary
traditions that came into being at that place: the love-poetry of Meleagros
and the Cynic satire of Menippus. These aspects are combined with references
to the English translation of the New Testamentarian episode of the ‘Gadarene
Swine’ as it is to be found in the Geneva-Bible.
As the paper will show, this intertextual and allusive polyphony not only contributes
to the semantic spectrum of the two poems discussed in detail but to the macro-structure
of the Shakespearean sonnet-sequence as a whole.
“Not of an eternall durie”: Shakespeare’s
Sonnets and the Art of Perpetuation
Ivan Lupic, University of Zagreb
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, first published in print when the vogue for the sonnet in England was already on the vane, are famous for their deployment of what has traditionally been termed “the eternising conceit”. This particular poetic device has a long literary tradition stretching back to the classical Greek and Latin poets and surviving, though more modestly, throughout the Middle Ages. The examples that we find in the Sonnets, starting early in the sequence with the last sonnets in the so-called “procreation section” and reappearing frequently until late in the sequence, are not all of the same kind. Poetry that perpetuates, either itself, the “I”, or the “you/thou” of the quatorzains, does this in several distinct ways. The aim of the presentation is to contrast some of the uses of this curious rhetorical strategy in Shakespeare’s Sonnets with the analogous examples found in other Elizabethan sonnet sequences, from Soowthern’s Pandora of 1584 onwards. The chief interest throughout the presentation will be in the relationship between “perpetuation” and “performativity”: in the role that readers are invited or obliged to play in the sonnet.
