- Welcome to the Madison Early Music Festival
and our July 15th lecture.
This is our 17th year here in Madison
and we're so excited to have you here tonight
with us for our pre-concert lecture,
Repackaging Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I'm Sarah Marty, the program director
of the Madison Early Music Festival,
a program of the UW Arts Institute.
It is my pleasure to introduce Professor Joshua Calhoun
from the English Department here
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He teaches Shakespeare, 16th and 17th century poetry
and also works in the environmental humanities.
He has a very broad background,
which you'll see shortly in this presentation.
Recent projects include some work
as a novice hand paper maker
and doing some DNA testing in special collections
here in UW-Madison Libraries as part of
an international project with the London Cell Project,
The Center for Editing Lives and Letters.
Before we get started, I have a few brief thank you's.
The first is to Teresa Kelly and Thomas Baliss
for their support of this lecture
and also to UW-Madison Libraries for making us
part of their Shakespeare in Wisconsin initiative.
With no further ado, I'd like to introduce Joshua Calhoun.
[audience applauds] Thank you.
- I promised to talk today about this question
of is there a right way to read Shakespeare's sonnets?
And this lecture is going to explore
how the sonnets have been printed and reprinted,
praised and scorned, clustered and reorganized
throughout the last four centuries.
Here on the screen you're looking at a,
well, slightly doctored version of the first page
of the 1609 printing of Shakespeare's sonnets.
But today I'm gonna focus on
a very particular repackaging of Shakespeare's sonnets
and that's this edition printed in 1640.
31 years after that first 1609 edition had appeared.
I wanna focus on this volume partly because
the way, I love the way it represents the sonnets.
It literally represents these sonnets
and also partly because the volume we have here
pictured on the screen is available here on campus
and it's in our special collections
and some of you have had a chance to engage with that.
Just earlier in the week, we had a group
up in our special collections looking at
a number of volumes, including that 1640 edition
and this was part of our Holding History event,
which if those of you who didn't get a chance to do that,
you hopefully will be able to come and spend a session,
an evening session with us sometime
in our Holding History program, engaging with
a number of really amazing volumes that we have.
I like to say that we have some of the world's amazing
students showing some of the world's most amazing books
through our Holding History program
and I'd be excited to welcome any of you to that program.
At a future date, we're always having those events,
but there's a reason that I end up
having students really excited about
being in our special collections
and showing these books to others
and that's because I take every single class that I teach
to our special collections, our rare books archive
and I've not yet taught a class here at the university
that I have not taken to our special collections
and there's a reason for that because
a place like special collections
where 16th century books on handmade paper
and 14th century scrolls and some really old stuff,
some Greek writings on papyrus are housed,
this is a place, these special collections,
a place where I can teach students
something about technology and ideas and about art
that they just can't fully grasp anywhere else
and I like to say that the great minds
that have gone before us,
the thinkers, the writers, the musicians, historians,
those who've worked through these important ideas
that have really become the basis of the way
we think about what we think of as culture,
they've all been interested in different kinds of problems.
Euclid was interested in something
different than Shakespeare,
but they've all shared one fundamental concern.
Once I have my big idea,
how do I convert my ideas into something
I can hold in my hands and share with others?
In a rare books library like special collections,
we can see 1,000 years of how civilizations
have solved that problem or attempted to solve that problem
and if we want to, we can, as my students often do,
take out our smart phones and snap some pictures
and post them to social media, holding in our hands
and sharing with others in new and exciting ways.
Now we'll talk about the great minds,
but I really end up focusing mostly on poets.
So if you're a poet and you want to write
a beautiful poem about a beautiful person,
you confront a real and deeply moving set of questions
and they have as much to do with loss and death
as with love and life.
These questions are how can I save you?
How can I capture who you are?
These are these questions these poets ask.
How will I preserve you into the future?
How can I turn the idea of you into something
I can hold in my hands and share with others?
Now Shakespeare is not the first to ask these questions.
He's not the last to ask these questions,
but culturally he's an important voice in that procession
of people who have been asking that question
and so I wanna focus today on the sonnets,
but I give you that overview to help you think about
how I think about these books,
how I think about our engagement with these texts
and how for me it's really deepened by engaging with
something like a copy of the 1640 sonnets,
the 1640 poems of Shakespeare,
but I've got a little bit of bad news
about that 1640 edition and I'll explain that to you
in terms of explaining my strategy
for the next few minutes here.
So here's what we're gonna do.
I wanna first tell you about a love story
that we find in the first 18 of Shakespeare's sonnets.
This might be a familiar love story for you, okay?
After I tell you about that love story,
I wanna tell you about how that love story
was supposedly ruined by that little volume
that we saw a few moments ago on the screen
and then finally I wanna try like Puck
at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream
to make amends and to bring it together
and by showing you that the supposedly ruined love story
is quite a lot like a well-loved landscape.
This is where I wanna touch on
the environmental humanities at the very end.
So right, you got it?
We're gonna go from love to heartbreak.
[audience laughs]
To tree-hugging.
[audience laughs]
We'll see if we get there.
Oh, by the way, we have 30 minutes to do this,
so please make sure your seats are in
their full and upright positions and let's go.
Let's start with the love story.
Here's an image of the first,
the opening of Shakespeare's sonnets.
They were printed in 1609.
It's the version of the sonnets
that most of us are familiar with.
It begins with sonnet number one,
from fairest creatures we desire increase,
and it ends with, well, not so memorable sonnet number 154
about the careless napping habits
of the little love god, Cupid.
[audience laughs]
Some are more memorable than others.
Some preserve better.
Now the first 17 sonnets are often
called the procreation sonnets
and Shakespeare in these first sonnets
talks to a young man, a young man he thinks is beautiful
and worthy of being preserved.
This opens with these famous lines.
From fairest creatures we desire increase
that thereby beauty's rose might never die.
And he tells the young men that because media
is not capable of making a perfect copy
of the beauty, he needs to procreate.
This young man needs to procreate.
He needs to have a son to carry forth
his image or his likeness.
"The likeness I can make with my poetry
"just won't do it," he claims.
In sonnet two he writes,
when forty winters shall besiege thy brow
and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field.
40 years of age, right?
Of changing the young man, diminishing his beauty,
and giving him wrinkles.
[audience laughs]
And on it goes and sonnet three continues
and then onto sonnet five.
I'm gonna jump over what many of you
may be familiar with this narrative.
We'll jump through, but it's really these first 17 sonnets,
these procreation sonnets and here in sonnet five
we see that he talks about distilling
this loved one as though it were perfume,
but flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
lease but their show, their substance still lives sweet.
Then in sonnet six, then let not winter's ragged hand deface
in thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
He's laying it on thick.
He wants this young man to procreate, to make a baby,
to put his image out there
and to copy his image out into the world.
Sonnet after sonnet, trying to convince this young man,
cajoling him into this strategy.
By sonnet 15, we've skipped from six to 15
and the same thing is still happening.
There's a hint that the poet realizes that the young man
is not going to be convinced to procreate,
so these poems that he's writing will just have to suffice.
He imagines himself battling with time and he writes
and all in war with time for love of you.
As he, time, takes from you, I engraft you new
and you hear that pun, engraft, right?
See, I'm already setting up the trees at the end.
Engraft, but also you hear the word,
that graph, like calligraphy, right?
Anything that has the graphic arts, anything about writing,
so there's a pun there with engrafting.
So after he decides that this is gonna be a battle
he's gonna take on with time,
again, he kind of, he gets a little scared of this strategy.
Again he says, "But okay, that might work,
"but wherefore do you not a mightier way
"make war upon the bloody tyrant time?"
There's a better way to do this.
I've been trying to tell you, you're not listening to me.
By sonnet 17, we see the poet finally resigning himself
to the strategy that then becomes
what we know of as Shakespeare's sonnets
where he's going to try to record,
he's going to try to save and capture
this young man's beauty in a number of poems
and he says here, and these are some of my
favorite lines I think in all of the sonnets.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
and in fresh numbers number all your graces,
the age to come would say, "This poet lies.
"Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue?
You see a dual strategy there.
Even at this moment, he's realizing
the importance of writing these poems.
You see he's still trying to hold on to the idea
okay, tell you what, I'll make the backup copy.
[audience laughs] Right?
Then we get to sonnet 18, how many of you know sonnet 18?
I'm not gonna ask you to quote it,
but so many of you, you are familiar with the sonnet.
It's probably the most famous of Shakespeare's sonnets
and he's finally, this is where the poet
finally resigns himself to his role as record keeper, right?
Giving up this role and moving into
shall I compare thee, what, to a summer's day?
It's a beautiful narrative, isn't it?
And I love to teach this story from the sonnets.
I love looking at how sonnets one to 17 culminate
with sonnet 18, ending in a promise
to immortalize his beloved in eternal lines.
Of course, it worked.
Here we are today reading something like
so long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
so long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Now it's a beautiful story
and we're reading it now,
but one of the glitches in this story,
in the story of preservation is that when it was printed,
nobody really read it. [audience chuckles]
When Shakespeare's poems were printed in 1609,
this narrative, well, there's really no way
to put it delicately, they flopped.
[audience laughs]
They failed on the book market
and I don't have time to get into why tonight,
but here's what I can tell you.
These sonnets, supposedly eternal lines disappear.
The next time we find the sonnets reprinted in this way
is over a century later and the first time they'd be
formally included in the canon of Shakespeare's works
is 171 years later in 1780.
Now just for a little bit of perspective,
171 years ago, Wisconsin was not a state.
[audience laughs]
And Frederick Douglass had just written his narrative,
as well as Edgar Allan Poe had just published The Raven.
Imagine these two important works of literature
just now being sort of brought into the canon.
Hey, we should pay attention to this.
This is an interesting little thing
that Frederick Douglass wrote.
We should read that at some point, right?
Many of you, there's so many editions of this.
I remember memorizing sections of that for a history class
when I was about my daughter's age sitting here.
So we're talking about this gap
of 171 years and in this time,
something does happen to preserve the lines
because when I say it wasn't reprinted in that format,
I'm splitting hairs a little bit.
The sonnets were not reprinted in their original format
until the 18th century,
but they are reprinted in a different format in 1640.
In 1640, John Benson, not to be confused
with another famous Renaissance playwright, Ben Johnson.
[audience laughs]
Not this guy, John Benson.
He published a small volume called Shakespeare's Poems.
Now if you look through this volume,
you will never find the word sonnets,
but it is the second printing
of Shakespeare's sonnet in disguise.
Now Benson's version is really more of a hodgepodge.
In it you'll find most but not all of the 154 sonnets.
You'll also find other poems by Shakespeare,
poems found in The Passionate Pilgrim
and even a really bad poem
written by Orlando in As You Like It.
Remember when he runs around writing bad poetry
and sticking them into trees and he gets made fun of?
That appears, parts of that poem appears in here.
There's also poems by Christopher Marlowe, John Fletcher,
and even John Milton included in this volume.
Now it's worth noticing that Benson was aware
that he had to repackage this volume
and he writes, this is his to the reader at the beginning.
I here presume under favor to present to your view
some excellent and sweetly composed poems
of Master William Shakespeare.
Now here's the kicker, okay?
In your perusal, you shall find them
serene, clear, and elegantly plain.
Do you remember when you studied the sonnets
[audience laughs] in some required class?
I have never had a student say,
"My, these are so serene and clear and elegantly plain."
[audience laughs]
That, the line I read earlier from sonnet 17,
and in fresh numbers, number all your graces,
that's just the beginning of the kind of
convoluted wordplay we see throughout the sonnets.
Now one way Benson makes the sonnets more clear
and simple and serene is by replacing the numbers
with descriptive titles, such as An Inconstant Lover.
So instead of having this numerical title, sonnet one,
you would have a different title.
So his titles include things like An Inconstant Lover
or The Benefit of Friendship, right?
This helps you and in fact helps
when I do teach it with students, it helps them say,
"Oh right, this is a sonnet about friendship."
And it helps you into it, right?
So the best way to see what he's doing
is really just take a look at what we've got here,
so here's an opening that shows
my favorite sonnet, which is sonnet 29.
Now if you're trying to find sonnet 29 on the page,
you already know you're not gonna find the number
because he doesn't give them the numbers.
There's no individual sonnet though
when you look at this page.
When you look at what's on the left
and the top of the right page there,
you see what appears to be
a 42-line poem titled A Disconsolation
and Benson replaces these numbers with titles
and he merges the sonnets as well.
[audience groans] Okay?
So in this sonnet, a dense consolation is followed
by a poem called A Cruel Deceit.
It's a poem about Venus and Adonis
and Venus and Adonis was by the way,
it was far and away Shakespeare's bestseller.
It went through 16 editions during his lifetime.
His most popular play went through seven editions
and it wasn't Hamlet, it was Henry IV, Part One.
Hamlet was a close second,
but this poem about Venus and Adonis that we see here,
this Cruel Deceit, it's not by Shakespeare.
It's by that other equally famous
Renaissance poet, Bartholomew Griffin?
[audience laughs] You remember him, right?
Now for as much as we learn about Renaissance writing
and reading and printing practices from this 1640 volume,
we don't learn anything about that love story
we were interested in at the beginning.
We don't get any closer to finding out who Shakespeare,
the man, the myth, the legend,
was comparing to a summer's day.
In fact, to add perhaps insult to injury,
sonnet 18, the most famous sonnet of all
is one of eight poems, one of eight sonnets
that John Benson excludes from this volume.
He only cuts eight and sonnet 18 is one of them.
Here we see William Wordsworth,
in this line here, we're gonna jump forward and think about,
then why do we come back to the idea of the sonnets?
What are we looking for when we look to the sonnets?
We don't wanna learn about Bartholomew Griffin.
We don't wanna read necessarily his Venus and Adonis.
By the time we get to the 19th century,
we wanna know about Shakespeare.
Wordsworth writes, scorn not the sonnet, critic.
You have frowned, mindless of its just honors.
With this key, Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
We realize immediately that two things
are happening in this line.
First Wordsworth feels the need
to defend Shakespeare's sonnets.
You don't say scorn not the sonnet
if everybody loves them, right?
And secondly, you find in this comment
a not so compelling defense, right?
If you think about this as maybe a poetry workshop moment,
[audience laughs]
it becomes this moment of really your personality
is really shining through here, Will.
I like what you're doing, I really feel the love,
but you know, this is not really
about the quality of the sonnets
and for many years this was not read as,
the sonnets were not read for their quality
and in fact for many years, they were also
a number of poets and writers avoided them,
carefully avoided talking about them because
they were written to a young man
and there was the fear of having the idea
that they would then, those who talked about,
those who praised the sonnets would be seen in some way
as supporting views that were outlawed at the time
and Oscar Wilde ran into some of
this problem as you probably know.
So caricatures aside, what I'm trying to emphasize
is that when readers finally showed
an interest in Shakespeare's sonnets
as they were originally published,
they were interested in them
because they were interested in Shakespeare.
In the plays, Shakespeare reveals little about himself,
but in the sonnets, we find first person narratives
that tempt us to read the eye of the sonnets.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
that then I, Shakespeare,
scorned to change my state with kings.
It leaves us eager to know
who's sweet love is being remembered?
Now if you need the narrative of the sonnets
to gain access to Shakespeare's love life,
then you have very little appreciation for someone
like John Benson, who goes around messing it all up.
And this has been the critical view of them for many years.
In a really terrific essay on Benson's volume,
Cathy Shrank observes that Benson's edition
is variously mutilated, is variously described by critics
as mutilated, corrupt, and deformed
and its editor is castigated for committing
a series of unforgivable injuries upon the text.
[audience laughs]
And I would just draw your attention
to how forceful this criticism is.
How caught up with the idea of perhaps sin, right?
Corruption and deformation.
One of the most amazing critics of the sonnets,
one of the most amazing readers of the sonnets
is Katherine Duncan-Jones who has produced the Arden Edition
and she is just a really fantastic reader of the sonnets,
but also someone who is deeply invested in the idea
that Shakespeare's, the numbers that we see in the sonnets,
that that order is from Shakespeare
and so we wanna preserve that
and she says for well over a century,
John Benson succeeded in muddying the textual waters.
It was Benson's edition that was read
and edited and almost exclusively
until the superb work of Malone in 1780.
Benson's disintegration of Q,
of the 1609 first edition, did lasting damage.
We might say, I wanna bring the,
sort of bring the conversation together
around this idea of disintegration
and then make this last turn in our talk today.
Duncan-Jones means disintegration
in a pejorative way in this statement obviously,
but what if we grab onto that word?
We might say that Benson does disintegrate the sonnets,
but then he reintegrates them in interesting ways
in that create fresh and insightful narratives.
Now we don't get the procreation
narrative that we discussed earlier.
We lose the love story, but we might say that,
and this is I think Shakespeare,
Shakespeare's plays especially prove this,
that to read well is to disintegrate.
To write well is to reintegrate
and it's when Benson puts these titles on top of the poems,
he's following a tradition, a commonplace tradition
of grabbing and sorting ideas into titles
and ideas and then taking really,
they think of themselves as honeybees, right?
The honeybee goes out and gathers nectar
and that's the reading.
Brings it back to the hive, that's copying down
something you really like and then makes honey,
making honey is the writing, it's reintegrating.
Disintegrating and reintegrating and moving it around
and so certainly something that I think
Shakespeare would have appreciated.
What we also see then is that somebody like Benson
invites readers to engage as well.
We don't have in the 1609 editions that survive,
there are very few marginal notes by contemporary readers,
but in the 1640, that's a little different.
Here we have a perfect example.
This reader has decided, and I agree with this reader,
whoever she or he may be, I agree
that so we have in this 27, 28, and 29,
we have the first 27 and 28.
These are the ones about basically I can't sleep at night
because I'm thinking about you and I'm daydreaming all day.
Right, so at night I can't sleep
and during the day I'm dreaming
and it's really messing up my schedule here.
[audience chuckles]
But then 29, when in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast
and he goes through this sort of moment of self-pity
and he says, "But thy sweet love
"remembered such wealth brings
"that then I scorn to change my state with kings."
Disconsolation consolated, right?
Now this is, Benson's disintegration encourages
other integrations or disintegrations like this,
the changing up, but it also encourages
this disintegration, reintegration,
a form of other writers, other writers making honey
and perhaps the most stunning disintegration
and reintegration of sonnet 29 came centuries later.
This is Maya Angelou in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.
She writes during these years in Stamps,
I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare.
He was my first white love and it was Shakespeare who said,
"When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes."
It was a state with which I felt myself most familiar
and she talks about the thy sweet love remembered.
That's her grandmother.
This is what she says and if you haven't
had a chance to read this book, I really encourage it.
So when we begin looking at these readerly engagements
with the sonnets by Benson, by a 17th century reader,
by Maya Angelou, we begin to see how beautifully
we can disintegrate the love story
we saw in the first 18 sonnets.
We see just how movingly we can reintegrate the ideas
and read them into our own imperfect narratives
because I bet every one of you during,
as I've said a few times, thy sweet love remembered,
somebody came to your mind, didn't it?
You reintegrate this into your own narrative.
Whose love remembered makes you happy when skies are gray?
Yes, it's a disintegration,
but it's a reintegration of sorts,
a way of taking things apart and putting them back together
in exciting and new ways.
I wanna conclude by taking one last step
and drawing these threads together into a conversation
about how what I think Benson is really doing
is fitting into a strategy
that's very much like ecological conservation
and how that affects, when we think about
this book that I showed you.
So in the last about three, four minutes,
I just wanna pull those threads together
into the tree-hugging that I promised
because books are of course natural resources.
They're made from plants and animals
and I was so thrilled to take a job here
because growing up in the Adirondack Mountains of New York,
I have known about Aldo Leopold for a long time,
but have really enjoyed getting to know more
about his history and his activity here in this area
and as a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
The duration of Leopold is one of conservation, right?
Not so much preservation, but conservation
and when we think about, let's just, as we think of
what conservation is versus preservation
and we'll pull this back to Benson here in a second,
preservation of course, National Park Service
gives this definition, but preservation essentially says
don't touch it and conservation says handle with care.
The risk of preservation is that if you don't touch it,
you have trouble getting to know
and falling in love with it.
The risk of conservation is you're gonna make mistakes.
You mess things up sometimes.
You care about the land and so much
that you disagree with somebody else
who cares a lot about the land
and we see this happen and conservation is messy.
My students when we read Leopold, they catch onto the fact
that he never leaves the house without two things.
His notepad, which I encourage them to take out with them
when they go and do some nature writing,
but the other thing he never leaves the house without
is his gun and his dog, the dog and the gun go together.
Right, so and that's a, because he's a hunter
and so there are different ways to think, okay,
we wanna conserve the land and we have different ideas.
I think we should hunt here, I think we shouldn't.
I think we should hunt these kind of animals.
I think we shouldn't.
And so we have these messy negotiations
that happen with conservation
and you begin to ask sometimes is it worth it?
Why don't we just cordon off the land,
close it off, and say let it come back
to its natural state and be preserved?
And I don't think a leap at this moment
back to a 1640 volume is such a big leap.
I think the conservation that we've been,
the conversation we've been having about conservation
is very much in line with what we see
in something like Benson's strategy towards the sonnets.
Those who say, "This is not the sonnets.
"This is a muddying of the waters.
"It's disintegration, it's a messing up of the sonnets."
They really fall on the side of preservation.
Let's get back to exactly what
Shakespeare wanted this to be.
Let's somehow restore that, like the state of nature?
The state of Shakespeare?
Let's restore it to its perfect form,
even though that's gonna be messy
and those, they may acknowledge
that Shakespeare struggled with his media,
that he struggled with his pens and his ink and his paper,
but they think that once these ideas are down on paper,
the creativity should cease
and the preservation should begin.
Benson's model is I would say a lot more like conservation.
Consider this, a century and a half of readers
may not have known about the sonnets if not for Benson.
From 1640 until 1780, Benson's was the one
that was commonly used to reprint the sonnets.
It could be argued that sonnets,
that Benson even keeps them on the map
so that the later 18th and early 19th century readers
are engaging with them in the Shakespearian canon.
Conservation is use and it creates wear and tear.
It moves things around and it changes them.
To me, it's more interesting.
So there are libraries that are certainly more interested
in preservation than conservation
and here's where I really wanna land with this today.
Lot of libraries have decided
that something is too important, don't touch it,
and it's probably a good principle
that can preserve some really endangered books,
but conservation says handle it with care
and it gives us the chance to fall in love.
Conservation says touch it, get to know it.
Mess with it and pass it on
and I think when we see, when we really step back
and we look at this love story,
yes, Benson took that love story
and he certainly changed them.
He sure took sonnet 18 out,
but even the removal of sonnet 18
makes us question where it is,
makes us question what that love story's doing.
It allows us to have a conversation
about how you can move the sanctity of Shakespeare's words
and whether you can move things around.
I think that the tradition of conservation
is strong here at the University of Wisconsin,
both in the sense of ecological conservation,
but also in our special collections
of the rare books where we can take students
and we can invite the public in to see what we have,
to handle it and perhaps to fall in love with it
so that maybe sometime you'll take someone in,
someone that you love, some beloved of yours
into the special collections or into a bookstore
and show them a volume of Shakespeare
with a poem that is your favorite.
I really encourage you if you can
take something away from the talk
to walk out of here and think someone that you can share
something you've written forward with.
That's really the spirit of the sonnets.
How do you share this forward with somebody?
And I love encouraging our students
and our community members to get in contact,
to be talking to each other.
I encourage you to take that forward and pass it on
to someone in the spirit of conservation,
in the spirit of opening up a conversation
about what you're reading and what you're thinking about.
Thank you.
[applause]