SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

• Sonnet 124: If My Dear Love Were But the Child of State

  Having denied time the power to make his love change in the previous poem, William Shakespeare now with Sonnet 124 turns his attention to politics, statehood, and the fashions of a notoriously fickle society, and further delineates his love for his young man against such other, more trivial, more volatile, much more feeble affections as it may be surrounded by and as it may be finding itself compared to or accused of being. When Sonnet 123 addressed time itself directly, this sonnet speaks to no-one in particular but makes a general, and even bolder, assertion that his love is unmatched by any other; that it, in itself, is a kingdom, one might say, which does not rise and fall with fortune or the ever-fluid vagaries of opinion and manipulated opportunity but stands strong and singularly tall. 

  --------  

  29:30
• Sonnet 123: No! Time, Thou Shalt Not Boast That I Do Change

  Sonnet 123 is the first in a final group of three sonnets that speak the penultimate words on William Shakespeare's relationship with his young man. The last word isn't truly spoken at all, it sits silent in a pair of empty brackets where normally the closing couplet of Sonnet 126 would be, but before he addresses his lover there directly, as 'my lovely boy', and warns him of the all-consuming force of time once more, Shakespeare with this sonnet speaks to Time itself and declares his resolute defiance, by and through love.

  --------  

  26:21
• Sonnet 122: Thy Gifts, Thy Tables, Are Within My Brain

  With his curiously themed Sonnet 122, William Shakespeare tells his younger lover that although he has parted with a notebook he had received as a gift from him, its contents are in fact kept entirely in his memory, where they will remain safely stored and complete until the day he dies. This, he assures him, is a better way of holding on to them than relying on any external object or item, since doing so would only foster forgetfulness in Shakespeare and therefore weaken the young man's presence in his heart.

  --------  

  34:37
• Sonnet 121: Tis Better to Be Vile Than Vile Esteemed

  With Sonnet 121, William Shakespeare claims his right to be who he is and negates the authority of others to pass judgement on him and his actions, specifically those who themselves are not morally or ethically superior to him but who would appear to project their own corrupted values and jaded view of the human being onto those around them. In doing so, he stakes out a territory of moral autonomy for himself where he alone may determine whether his actions are in fact reprehensible or whether they are simply thought to be so by others, when to him they are the source of rightful delight and pleasure.

  --------  

  31:51
• Sonnet 120: That You Were Once Unkind Befriends Me Now

  With Sonnet 120 William Shakespeare draws a line under the explanations and excuses offered throughout the previous three sonnets for his own infidelities in relation to his young man, and simply reminds himself now of how awful he felt when his lover treated him in a similar way on those occasions when it was him who was sleeping around with other people. The conclusion Shakespeare comes to is that they both in turn have been through hell, and that their respective debt to each other for each other's transgressions now must surely cancel itself out. 

  --------  

  37:57

Meer Kunst podcasts

Trending Kunst -podcasts

Over SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived