Objectives
When my students read, they resist understanding why they respond in the way that they do. If I ask why they hate one character and like another, their typical response is, "I don't know. I just do." I suppose this resistance is understandable. When many of us watch a movie, we just want the images and the story to wash over us, forgetting that craft has put these images together in particular ways to elicit our emotions. I believe, however, that whether I am watching a movie or reading literature, an understanding of the wizardry behind the curtain only serves to increase my appreciation and enjoyment. [Pittsburgh teacher] Lynn Marsico, in her curriculum unit entitled Studying the Sonnet: An Introduction to the Importance of Form in Poetry, quotes several scholars who make this point. She also suggests that it may be useful to place each quote strategically around the classroom as a reminder to students. She writes:
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, in Understanding Poetry, remind us that 'no form-no poem' (1976, p. 560). W.H. Auden said, 'In poetry you have a form looking for a subject and a subject looking for a form. When they come together successfully you have a poem.' Frances Mayes, in her book The Discovery of Poetry, (2001, p. 302) states that the poem's form and content are 'interactive systems...The form of a good poem occurs simultaneously with the meaning, not as a separate phenomenon.'1
In fact, my entire course in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition is intended to teach how the form and function of all literature work together to produce a desired effect. Our study of Shakespeare's sonnets, then, will be a continuation of this process. Each year, prior to reading one of Shakespeare's plays, we study several sonnets. This curriculum unit is written to help my students appreciate how form and function work closely together in those sonnets. We will learn the intricacies of the form of the sonnet, including the vocabulary for its various parts, so that we can speak to one another about what is going on. The history of the sonnet will be taught so that students can see the influence of past subjects and forms on the poet, and see how the changes he made in form also changed the meaning. They will then be able to appreciate the satire in Sonnets 21 and 130. They will also be able to see how Shakespeare imitated Petrarch's sonnet divisions in many cases, see how he changed these in many others, and compare how an octave plus sestet work in comparison to three quatrains and a rhymed couplet.
Students will learn how to scan a sonnet – to identify which syllables are stressed and unstressed. The purpose is to equip them to identify changes, and begin to ask why this change was made. Why does one line being with an inverted iamb? Why does one line flow smoothly in iambic pentameter, while another stops and halts and alters the beat many times? How is this related to the meaning? The primary objective of this unit is to teach my students to ask these questions, regardless of the answer.
What This Unit is Not
There are so many fascinating topics related to Shakespeare and his sonnets that I felt it was important to explain what subjects will be deliberately avoided. Scholars have been searching for the real Shakespeare for centuries. They search birth certificates, letters, court documents, and his written works. Some scholars even contend that others have written Shakespeare's plays, and dig for proof supporting one possibility or another. Within Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, scholars have focused, some obsessively so, on the true identities of the young man of the first seventeen sonnets, the dark lady of sonnets 127 to 154, and the so-called rival poet of sonnets 78 to 86. They wonder if the lady was dark in skin color or dark in some other respect. They speculate about the possibility that love existed between Shakespeare and the young man, perhaps even of a sexual nature. However, these are not questions for this unit. Since my ultimate interest is not Shakespearean autobiography, "it matters less to me whether the story the sonnets tell is literally true. Hamlet may not have been real, but indecision and adultery are." 2 Edmondson and Wells express it this way:
Perhaps more than any other text in Western literature, Shakespeare's sonnets have inspired a multiplicity of controversial biographical readings. All of these take as their central assumption the hypothesis that the 'I' of the Sonnets ineluctably represents Shakespeare's point of view and so gives direct access to scenes and events of his life. Any attempt to relate a work of art directly to the intimate, personal life of the artist needs to be treated with caution, even suspicion.3
I believe the best approach for my high school seniors is to concentrate on a close reading of the literature rather than speculate on questions that cannot ever be definitively answered. More than anything else, I want my students to understand that form shapes meaning, that a poet selects his words very carefully, and likewise works to have the rhythm, the rhyme, and all aspects of the form, even a form as strictly regulated as a sonnet, reflect and support the nuances of meaning. If a word or phrase suddenly shifts from iambic pentameter to another rhythm, this is not an accident, but an intentional change which, when examined, deepens our understanding of the poet's purpose. If Shakespeare moves the turn in his sonnet from line 9 to line 13, there is power in doing so that strengthens the meaning of the poem.
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