Please read H. Vendler's paper, and identify the different strategies Shakespeare uses in the

sonnets. Choose THREE strategies and find them in the poems you have read. Please do not

use Vendler's examples.

Helen Vendler identifies in her commentary of Shakespeare’s sonnets several compositional

strategies which help the speaker of his sonnets appear as a “real” and “believable” voice to

the readers, even today. As far as I understand, the classification Vendler constructs

distinguishing into temporal, emotional, semantic, philosophical, perceptual and dramatic

strategies, is a bit artificial. I am writing this on the basis that she is redundant inasmuch as all

those are aspects of one and the same main strategy.

I would rather say that Shakespeare’s main strategy is that of using the antithesis to construct

a more complex interpretation of reality, playing with different and even contradictory

viewpoints and sensitivities, yet complementary to some extent. He achieves that by

presenting in the first verses what I can describe as the more immediate and simple cognition

of emotions of the speaker’s persona, to be contrasted in the following quatrains with

another. This is what Vendler means by saying that Shakespeare’s sonnet is “a system in

motion” which evolves according to “the trajectory of changing feelings”.

However, from her commentary I can distinguish three main manners in which Shakespeare

achieves what has been described. First, I identify how she depicts the use of linguistic and

stylistic ornaments as “fanciful but not frivolous”, paralleling the unfolding structure his

exploration of some concepts and feelings. Second, the different sematic levels and fields that

we can see interplaying, even contradicting different types of discourse (“a constant fluidity”

of frames of reference). Finally, the use of the couplet as a sort of conclusion for a

progressively complex approach to the issues concerning the specific sonnet.

Taking sonnet # 66, I would first and briefly analyse Shakespeare’s stylistic ornament. Although

ornament is typical of Renaissance lyric, as Vendler points out, it also acquires a relevant

semantic function in Shakespeare and in this sonnet. For instance, since polysyndeton

reinforces the speaker’s sense of unbearable wearing, its use does not seem vain. On the

contrary, it reproduces on us that sense at the same time that it is helping the unfolding of a

successively louder complaint. Furthermore, repetition of the same word “and” at the

beginning of each verse (anaphora) adds to the sense of tedium, justifying why in the first lines

he implores to die (“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”) but disappearing abruptly

when he realises the adverse consequence of “leaving my[his] love alone”.

As for the contrast of different semantic levels, I would like to take sonnet # 119. Its quatrains

abound in the contradiction between perceptual experience of love and the more spiritual

conventions regarding it, as well as in its paradoxical charge of “hopes” and “fears”. With

reference to medical field, he asks if “madding fever” is caused by “potions” made of the

beloved’s “siren tears”, and he he then outlines the physical symptoms of that evil. But after

those hopes and “gain” are “built anew”, the speaker’s turn of viewpoint perfectly exemplifies

that trajectory of changing feelings I talked about at the very beginning. Here, the semantic

move towards rebuilding is not at random but echoing the intrincate and ambiguous dynamics

of human relationships based on love: they undermine and re-create life on us.

Last but not least, and taking again sonnet #119, it is clear that the couplet achieves certain

“objective” distance from what Vendler calls empathetic perception. The couplet is formulated

as if it was a moral: he is not imposing on us the truth he has acknowledged by telling us a

definition we are going to forget, he is instead transmitting us something he has learned after

a long and painful process: “So I return rebuked to my content”. And he shows us his journey

because we are closer to grasp all of this human feeling only when our experience (even when

reading his words) recreates that non-linear trajectory from one stage to the other. That

insight is what the author tries to offer the reader after having followed the entire sonnet.

Anita Steiner, 2ºB Inglés- IPA