The post where I teach you how to do sonnets. Briefly.

So, I just taught class #3 with the TIGERS management company. We're working on some sonnets, as I like to do to start everybody off. Here's how this works, kids:

First: what is iambic pentameter? It's a verse form containing five lines of iambs. An iamb is two beats with the second beat stressed. (Perhaps it's got family issues. But no matter....) Five of those are a pentameter line. At it's simplest:

Da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH da DUH.

"But SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAKS?"

If you don't really punch the stressed syllable, it sounds pretty much the way we normally speak. We have a very up-and-down cadence in English, so this style works really well. The reason it's good to know IP is that if you get confused about what you're saying, go back and beat it out with the stressed and unstressed and whatever words you stress are probably the most important. That should give you a clue what you're saying.

Once you know that, grab a sonnet. Let's focus on the most famous: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oft' is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


Now, why are the last two lines indented? This is a couplet, kiddies. The first 12 lines of the sonnet are ABAB, but the last two rhyme. Usually (and always when you're performing them), these two lines should express the "opposite" of the rest of the sonnet. Shakespeare, as my co-moderator Beki is so rightly fond of repeating, love opposites. He uses them constantly - it's like poetic algebra - almost everything evens out. So when acting, whatever you choose to be your intention for the sonnet has to go 180 by the end.

Sounds weird for this one? Think about it: "Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?" What's the answer? "No, I won't do that. You're more beautiful than that." Then the whole sonnet discusses how Summer fades, makes way for other seasons, and disappears.

It moves on to "Every fair FROM fair sometime declines." So: "Everything beautiful at some time or another stops being beautiful." Much as Summer fades and makes way for Winter, we lose our youth and move on to old age and death. Not so Summery or romantic anymore, is it? And still, he's saying he WON'T compare her. He starts to free up (which means you need a new intention and tactic) by the last four lines with "But THY eternal Summer shall not fade....... when in eternal lines to time thou growest." Or: "The real Summer fades, so I won't compare you to Summer. But YOUR brightness and warmth will never disappear because I'm going to write about them and my words will last forever, long after you are dead. You will survive and be beautiful forever since I will immortalize you in my poem." Little more romantic?

Now the couplet. "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee." - "This poem will last forever as long as people are alive to read it. And as long as this poem lives, so will you, in the minds of the readers." That's a far cry from "I'm not going to compare you to something beautiful." So if you know that the end is going to be hopelessly romantic, you can't play that at the top.

The beginning could be played very much as a prototypical guy who doesn't do sissy things like say poems and romantic stuff. And then he backs up his reasoning, because it's stupid to do that poetry stuff about "you're as beautiful as a sunny day" since at it's core, that's a cop out and really means that you're only great to be around until nighttime or the Fall. Then swing your way around so that by the end you're the most romantic person in the world, since you look far beyond the crap one-liners that guys give girls about beauty and you're looking at who she really IS. And since you love who she IS and not just infatuated with her body and pretty face, you will immortalize her, immortalize her beauty, and immortalize your love for her.

Hell, do that and I'D go to bed with you. Which, as you must remember, is the whole point to poetry. ; )

Spine, Not Skull

I just read a great essay by Wayne Narey, a fellow at Arizona State. It focused on a videotape he was asked to watch about teaching Shakespeare (‘cause why else would this story end up in my blog?). He was nonplussed, to put it politely. In what sounded like a very cheap video made by an uber-academic, it suggested teaching ROMEO AND JULIET by asking questions of the students like, “Pretend you’re Romeo – what would you do in the situation?” Balogna. I quote from his article:

‘"But," I can hear the teacher asking, "don't we need to make it relevant, to give them INFORMATION, details, and get them INVOLVED?" In a word, no. Help them to appreciate the play and its greatest asset, the language, which usually teachers perceive as the greatest liability in teaching Shakespeare's plays, and which, it becomes assumed, presents problems for both the teacher and the student. The language represents the point where the teacher must begin, whether at the high school or college level. Vladimir Nabokov makes this point through his character John Shade in the novel Pale Fire, offering the best piece of advice I've ever heard regarding Shakespeare: "First of all, dismiss ideas, and social background, and train the freshman to shiver, to get drunk on the poetry of Hamlet or Lear, to read with his spine and not with his skull." As a university professor, of course, the fictional John Shade doesn't live in the real world. At some point in weeks of study on Shakespeare, a teacher must offer something about ideas and, it must be admitted, social background. Writing his novel in the early 1960s, poor Nabokov had no idea about to the New Historicism school of criticism, and so did not, in his ignorance, know that Elizabethan culture really penned and staged Romeo and Juliet, much as the New York of the early '60s wrote Bernstein's score and choreographed "West Side Story." Anyone creative in those days wrote musicals with a lot of dancing on rooftops.’

I couldn’t agree more (especially that “dancing on rooftops” bit). First of all, why are we teaching Shakespeare in the first place? Is it so that students can somehow see that they have the same problems that Elizabethan kids had? No. Is it so that they can learn a great story that will impact their lives? Not really. So, why?

Because no one in the history of the English language (quite a bit of which he created) has been able to express the Universal themes, emotions and characteristics of the human being as has Shakespeare. He was in no way original in his choice of story, but he presented those stories in such an affecting way that they have lasted throughout the centuries, as most of his source material has not.

The study of Shakespeare can be viewed in some ways through a “Dead Poet’s Society” view of the glory of poetry and it’s expressiveness, but while “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” may be able to stand on it’s own as a piece of thematic poetry, one cannot say the same for the equally-if-not-more famous “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” from the same work. One could argue that the study of drama in it’s truest form should be one of the requirements at school, as the basis of drama and theatre is to “hold the mirror up to nature” and show us ourselves. Film, the modern derivative, is today far more frequently used as pure senseless entertainment and sheer spectacle rather than really showing us who we are as human beings and the gamut of our emotional landscape. What, especially in today’s society of apathy, warfare, divorce and laziness, is more important to instill in our youth than the self-realization of emotion in their lives. We shut down so quickly these days that any chance to experience a healthy emotional life should be welcomed with open arms.

This is one of the main reasons that “Brave New World” is one of my top ten books: we’re moving so much closer to Bokanovsky’s Process and the lack of genuine feeling that the Savage finding and cradling the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and using it as his Bible is no coincidence – The Complete Works is essentially a Bible of Human Emotion, something profoundly lacking in Huxley’s dystopic morality tale.

Pick any one of Shakespeare’s plays and you will find, if not every human emotion represented, then most. But perhaps the most notable work is Hamlet – every emotion is on display here from anger, love, jealousy, sadness, envy…. The list goes on. It’s no wonder that Hamlet is his most popular and oft-quoted work – of course, it doesn’t hurt that it contains some of the most concise and beautiful poetry in the folio. I’ve written about it before, but it bears repeating:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Fight through the haze that immediately clouds the brain when hearing an all-too-familiar phrase and try to think of the MEANING and not just the words. “Live, or die: which shall I do?” Nary a person on the planet has not thought this at least once in their lifetime.
To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause:

But obviously, not everyone on the planet has made the decision to off themselves. “To die; and to re-awaken in another world…… hmmm… not knowing whether that world will be a Heaven or a Hell, I’d probably better re-think this whole offing myself thing.”

This is some heavy thematic material. “Life and Death,” though a cliché phrase in today’s society, is really the end-all and be-all (another Shakespeare-ism, incidentally). What else is there? Okay, taxes, but what else? Nothing. And as death is such a palpable concept, especially in our younger years when we first become cognizant of mortality, this speech above all others is one that should not be “read with the skull,” but indeed, with the spine. It is to be felt in order to be understood. Such is the case with all of Shakespeare’s work: the feeling is the understanding.

Is it therefore my suggestion to teach death to high school kids? Of course not. The point is to CONNECT with students. And connecting emotionally is the best way to connect with anyone, especially teenagers who don’t think that anyone understands what he or she is going through. Not only do we all know what they’re going through, but so did people in the 1500s and beyond. That connection to similar emotions creates an understanding, which in turn creates an interest.

Interested students? That’s a pretty good starting place in a classroom, isn’t it?