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  • Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and you look great.

  • Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

  • Nah. Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  • That William Shakespeare, he knew how to deliver a compliment.

  • That's right, today, we're talking about Shakespeare's sonnets, collected and published in 1609.

  • Mr Green, Mr Green, what's a sonnet?

  • Good question me from the past.

  • In fact, such a good question that your 7th grade English teacher answered it for you, but apparently you've forgotten.

  • A sonnet is a poetic form consisting of 14 lines.

  • And there are various ways to order the stanzas and the rhyme scheme,

  • but the Shakespearean stanzanamed for Will not because he invented it,

  • but, you know, because he was the best at itconsists of three four line stanzas and a final rhymed couplet.

  • So, the rhyme scheme is: A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, E, F, E, F, G, G

  • And the meter in Shakespeare's sonnets, as in much of Shakespeare's plays, is iambic pentameter,

  • which means that every line has 10 syllables, consisting of five iambs.

  • Which is just a fancy word for pairs of unstressed and stressed syllables,

  • so a line of a Shakespearean poem goes: duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH duh-DUH.

  • This turns out to do something to English speaking brains that's just very catchy.

  • Like, a lot of times pop songs are written in iambs.

  • Like, a lot of times when we speak, we accidentally speak in them.

  • But when I'm trying to remember the sound of iambic pentameter,

  • I just remember John Keats's last will and testament, which was one line of iambic pentameter.

  • My chest of books divide among my friends.”

  • So today we're going to look at the history and controversy surrounding Shakespeare's sonnets

  • and we'll look at three particular sonnets.

  • They're often known by their first lines, but they're also known by numbers.

  • So, we're going to look at Sonnet 18, aka Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?,

  • Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,

  • and Sonnet 130, My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun.

  • So the sonnet gets started, like so many great things, in 13th-century Italy.

  • Dante got into it, and then Michelangelo. Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • So the most famous early examples of sonnets were probably those by Petrarch.

  • He used a different structure from Shakespeare,

  • and spent most of his time talking about a woman named Laura,

  • which you have to pronounce La-oo-ra to make it fit the meter.

  • Anyway, he barely knew Laura, but when did that stop men from romanticizing women.

  • English sonnets started in the 16th-century and by the 1590s there was a huge craze for them,

  • kind of like the craze for boy bands in the 1990s.

  • Except with less choreography and hair gel.

  • This is more or less when Shakespeare started writing them.

  • Dates for his sonnets are pretty inexact, but actually that's the least of our problems.

  • I mean, we know almost nothing about the poems, except the sweet rhyme scheme.

  • And that Shakespeare wrote them.

  • And yes. We are sure that Shakespeare wrote them.

  • He also wrote all of his plays, although the earlier and later plays were probably collaborations.

  • OK? That's settled.

  • So Shakespeare wrote these sonnets, 154 of them, probably some time in the 1590s and early 1600s.

  • We don't know if the speaker in the sonnets is Shakespeare himself or some imagined figure,

  • although it's widely assumed that they're fairly personal, as were most sonnets.

  • And we don't know if these were all the sonnets he wrote.

  • They're just the ones we have.

  • And they might have been intended for an audience of everyone,

  • or just for the people they were written for, or for an audience of no one.

  • However, two of the sonnets showed up in a collection in 1599, so he definitely didn't keep them too private.

  • And a contemporary describes him as showing hissugared sonnetsaround to hisprivate friends.”

  • And then, in 1609, a reputable publisher named Thomas Thorpe,

  • publishedShakespeare's SonnetsNever Before Imprinted.”

  • Well, except for those two published earlier. Thanks, thought Bubble.

  • So, the book is dedicatedTo the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr WH.

  • All happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth that well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.”

  • Now this dedication is signed TT or Thomas Thorpe so we have no idea if the dedication was actually Shakespeare's,

  • or if it was just Thomas Thorpe, and we don't have any idea who Mr. WH is,

  • although that hasn't stopped scholars from trying to find out.

  • We also don't know if Shakespeare wrote the sonnets in the order they were published in,

  • or if he wanted them to be published in that order.

  • So as originally published the first 17 sonnets are addressed to a young man,

  • telling him to settle down and have kids.

  • And then sonnets 18-126 are still concerned with that young man. Probably.

  • Relatively few of the sonnets have gendered pronouns, which has caused a lot of bother over the last 400 years.

  • But there's fairly widespread agreement these days that in these sonnets there is

  • a relationship between two men that is passionate, and possibly even erotic.

  • And this bothered a lot of earlier editors so much,

  • that some went to all the trouble to change the pronouns from male to female.

  • So, does this mean that Shakespeare was gay?

  • I don't know! I wasn't alive in the 17th century.

  • I also think it's dangerous to read biography into poetry.

  • Also, in 16th and 17th century England, passionate friendships among men were common,

  • and they didn't necessarily involve sex.

  • That said, I still think it's worth noting and understanding,

  • that all of the most romantic and loving of the sonnets are those addressed to the young man.

  • Like, sonnets 127-154, the ones addressed to the so-called black mistress are a lot darker.

  • And no one's reading those at weddings.

  • But about the black mistress or the dark lady, who appears in those sonnets, we also don't know who she is.

  • Scholars have suggested royal waiting women, female poets, at least one British-African brothel owner.

  • But we don't even know if she was black as we use the term today,

  • or just brunette, in contrast to the blond young man.

  • But the dark lady sonnets are more complicated than the ones addressed to the young man.

  • The speaker feels tormented and ashamed of his sexual attraction to the woman

  • and even in the sonnets praising her, he gets, as we'll see, some insults in.

  • Like, in sonnet 144, he actually compares the two muses.

  • He talks of having two loves: “The better angel is a man right fair; The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.”

  • One more thing to know:

  • Although Shakespeare was a beloved and popular playwright, his sonnets were not initially a hit.

  • Like, that 1609 edition? Pretty much nobody paid attention.

  • In fact, for 200 years whenever anyone wrote about the sonnets it was to complain about how boring they were.

  • One editor, explaining why he didn't reprint them in 1793 wrote that not even

  • the strongest act of Parliament that could be framedwould make readers like them.

  • And yet, I quite like them.

  • Like, Shakespeare manages to cram a lot of emotion even into his highly structured form.

  • And maybe most importantly, these sonnets make Shakespeare's case for why he thinks poetry is important in the first place.

  • That people die, but poetry lives on.

  • Like, in sonnet 55, Shakespeare writes,

  • Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlast this powerful rhyme

  • but you shall shine more bright in these contents than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.”

  • And yet, quick side note, Shakespeare talks about how bright this young man's memory will shine,

  • uuh, but we know nothing about him!

  • The poetry may last, but people still don't.

  • So, OK, let's move on to sonnet 18.

  • Now if you've seen Shakespeare in Love, you know that Shakespeare wrote this for Gwyneth Paltrow.

  • No. He didn't.

  • InShall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day,’ the thee in question is that mysterious young man.

  • Basically, Sonnet 18 is one big extended metaphor.

  • But the hook is that it's a metaphor that the poet admits isn't especially successful.

  • Yes, the poet could compare his beloved to a summer's day, but it turns out this comparison isn’t really apt.

  • Like, the beloved is nicer than a summer's day.

  • The beloved has better weather.

  • (Really? Better weather? Well, I guess this was England, so, yeah. Let's just go with it)

  • And there's always sometimes lousy about summer days

  • they're too hot or they're windy or if they're perfect, they're over too quickly.

  • But that's not going to be the case with the beloved, because just like in sonnet 55,

  • the poet is going to immortalize the beloved in THIS VERY POEM.

  • Thereby he will make the young man perfect eternally.

  • Like, a summer day might end, but the beauty of the beloved is going to go on forever

  • So long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”

  • And this wasn't just, like, Shakespeare being arrogant.

  • It was a pretty common trope of Elizabethan verse,

  • this idea that human life is temporary, but that poetry is forever.

  • You have to remember, this was a time in human history where mortality was extremely common at all ages.

  • It's not like the vast majority of people died old.

  • There was a lot of chance involved.

  • So it makes sense to draw a distinction between the constant changing of nature's seasons,

  • versus the eternality of lines of poetry.

  • In the end, a poem that starts out saying that the beloved is not like a summer's day,

  • turns out to be a poem in praise not of the beloved, or of summer, but of poetry itself.

  • But there's one more brilliant twist in the poem.

  • I mean, look at the end, future looking verbs like

  • shall not fadeandnor shall braggive way to ones in the conditional like,

  • can readandcan seeand then to the present tense oflivesandgives.”

  • So maybe Shakespeare is admitting that poetry has its own limits, too?

  • And then there's Sonnet 116, which is the one you're most likely to hear at someone's wedding.

  • This one is also addressed to the young man.

  • This is in some ways the high point of Shakespeare's love poetry,

  • although it's perhaps a more insecure poem than it seems at first.

  • Here it's not poetry that's the greatest thing ever,

  • although Shakespeare definitely gives a hat tip to his own writing, but love itself.

  • Now, just as in Sonnet 18, there's worry over the impermanence of human life and beauty,

  • howrosy lips and cheekswill be undone by time and death.

  • But hey, that won't matter because love will last eternally or at least untilthe edge of doom

  • That's what Shakespeare hopes, anyway.

  • But maybe he isn't certain, because he's playing some games with the language here,

  • and he's showing how easily change and fickleness can happen.

  • Like, when you look at, or read the poem, notice how easily words change in it

  • alters to alteration, remover to remove.

  • Maybe he's worried that love might change, too.

  • I mean, look at that first line, “Love is not love,” and look at all the nos and nors and nevers in the poem.

  • But in the end, he does come to an emphatic conclusion.

  • He says that if all the things he's said about love are in error “I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

  • Obviously, he has written, and men have loved. So his defense of love is solid, right?

  • Well, but then remember the line, “Love is not love”?

  • There are all kinds of explorations in Shakespeare's work about what real love is.

  • But for me at least, the best line of the poem is when he writes thatlove is not time's fool.”

  • True love, to Shakespeare, is not beholden to time. It doesn't answer to time. It somehow transcends time.

  • And lastly, let's take a brief look at Sonnet 130, one of the ones addressed to the dark lady.

  • This sonnet is almost a parody, a send-up of Petrarch's sonnets about the lovely Laura, whom he barely knew.

  • That weird Renaissance worship of the person you met just one time, 20 years ago,

  • and the constant exploration of every facet of their beauty, their mouth, their eyes, their cheeks, their hair.

  • It gets a little overwhelming.

  • In sonnet 130, Shakespeare simultaneously does that, and refuses to do it.

  • Like, If he suggested that a summer's day wasn't a good enough descriptor of his beloved,

  • now he's suggesting that if you compare his mistress to any of the typical stuff

  • suns, roses, perfumeshe's going to fall very short.

  • Her breasts are the color of dun, her hair is like black wires, sometimes her breath smells.

  • This strange descriptive aggression characterizes many of the late sonnets,

  • where the poet seems to feel ashamed about being attracted to this woman.

  • But again, there's a twist in the end, as there is with every good sonnet's final couplet.

  • And yet by heaven I think my love as rare/ As any she belied by false compare.”

  • Shakespeare isn't saying, look, my mistress has onion breath.

  • Instead, the speaker is instead saying, all of you other poets have been exaggerating like crazy including past me.

  • If you were actually going to describe people realistically, his lover would be as beautiful as any other.

  • So take that, coral and perfume, and summer days.

  • And for me at least, that humanization of the romantic other is more romantic,

  • and ultimately more loving than any summer's day.

  • And plus, she's gonna get to live forever!

  • Well, not actually. Because we're all going to die.

  • Even the species is going to cease to exist.

  • Thanks for watching Crash Course Literature. See you next week.

  • Well, actually, I can't guarantee that I'll see you next week.

  • But I will, so long as YouTube lives, and eyes can see.

  • Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacy Emigholz Studio.

  • It's made by all of these nice people and it's made possible thanks to your support on Patreon,

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  • Over at Patreon you can also get amazing perks, so please check it out at patreon.com/crashcourse

  • Thank you again for watching and as we say in my hometown: Don't Forget To Be Awesome.

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and you look great.

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シェイクスピアのソネットクラッシュコース文学304 (Shakespeare's Sonnets: Crash Course Literature 304)

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    Chia-Yin Huang に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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