人类创造的诗歌反思：莎士比亚十四行诗中的反思缪斯
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内容摘要
从文化角度来讲，人类的进步已被展示为一种由传统向反思的进化，“传统”指的是整体思维及仪式/方式，而“反思”指的是个人自我的成长。在文学领域，或更准确地说，在言语艺术领域，这两者间的对立导致个人天赋的长进，将自己从体裁及其它约定俗成的标准权威里解放出来。通常在文艺复兴后期和早期浪漫主义之间，可以标出一条边界线，体裁的权限在线外明显地丧失自身约定俗成的标准权威，进而由个人才智取而代之。鉴于其在“现代思维起源”中所起的作用”（P·奥本海默），十四行诗就是一个鲜明的例子。它的作用是解答一个问题的唯一办法，即为什么一个死板的诗歌形式（似乎与小说的言语自由正好相悖）可以独统欧洲抒情诗长达三个世纪，从14世纪的彼特拉克到16世纪后期的莎士比亚。答案十之八九就是十四行诗有自我批评的能力及反思性的“双重性诗学”（J·布鲁克斯戴维斯），彼特拉克风格与反彼特拉克风格得以在一种巧妙的平衡中并存，而这种平衡早在伊丽莎白时代的诗歌里就已形成。
关键词
十四行诗；阿韦林采夫；巴赫金；彼特拉克风格；莎士比亚
作者简介
伊戈尔·沙伊塔诺夫是俄国国家人文大学比较文学研究中心教授、主任，也是俄国国家经济和公共管理总统学院成员和学术双月刊《文学问题》的主编。
Title
Poetic Reflection in Creation of the Human: The Reflective Muse in Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Abstract
The progress of the human in cultural terms has been memorably presented as an evolution from tradition to reflection where “tradition” stands for the collective mind and the ritual/norm, while “reflection” for the growth of the individual self. In the field of literature, or to be more precise – of verbal art, this opposition results in the progress of an individual talent liberating itself from the normative authority of generic and other prescriptions. The borderline, beyond which the power of genre visibly loses its prescriptive power and the individual talent takes over, is usually located somewhere between the late Renaissance and an early Romantic era. Sonnet is a glaring case with the role it played in “the origin of the modern mind” (P. Oppenheimer), the role that is the only way to answer a question – why could it happen that a rigid verse form (seemingly opposite to the verbal freedom of the novel) could dominate the domain of European lyrical poetry in three centuries – from Petrarch in the 14th to Shakespeare in the late 16th century. In all probability, the answer lies in the sonnet’s capability of self-criticism, its reflective “poetics of doubleness” (J. Brooks-Davies), where petrarchism /anti-pertrarcism could co-exist in a delicate balance reached in Elizabethan poetry.
Key words
sonnet; Averintsev; Bakhtin; petrarchism; Shakespeare
Author
Igor O. Shaytanov is a professor and the director of the Comparative Literature Research Center, Russian State University for the Humanities. He serves as a member of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and the editor-in-chief of an academic bimonthly, Voprosy Literatury (Problems of Literature).
Email: voplit@mail.ru
It is more usual to refer the term, “ethical literary criticism,” to moral values acquired, changed or lost in the creation of the human. But ethics cannot be reduced to morality with its set of regulations and even values. Ethics is a term that covers a broader domain of the human in its manifestations and in the very process of its creation. Reflection in the title of my text is not exactly a value but an attitude to values, to the capacity to demand or doubt certain values already established or desired. Reflection, as I will treat it, is an ability of the human mind that has secured its development and more than elsewhere has been manifested in literature, or, more precisely, in verbal art. The ethical model can be reconstructed for the texts long before they were penned down to deserve the name of literature – a socio-cultural system of related functions (an author, a reader, a publisher, a literary critic, a bookseller, etc.).
This system of relations/functions came into being around the turn of the 18th century. It was an epoch when European culture, according to the order of cultural periods, widely accepted nowadays, has reached its modern stage. In Russia this staging (or periodization), based on the views of an outstanding German historian of the Middle Ages, Ernst Robert Сurzius (1886-1956), was advanced by two influential historians of culture, Aleksandre V. Mikhailov and Sergey Averintsev. The opposition of two terms is laid at the foundation of this cultural construct: tradition vs. reflection.
Within this opposition, the archaic stage of human culture was dominated by tradition with its repetitive order of rituals and no, or very limited, possibility for an individual invention. This stage was followed by the second period stretched out for more than two thousand years, from classical Greece up to the Romantic era. Tradition gradually gave in to the pressure of the individual initiative, reflective in its nature, till reflection did not take over at the third stage of cultural evolution, the one we live in now.
Both tradition and reflection function as umbrella terms for a related group of subordinate notions. Opposed to tradition, reflection stands for the individual mind able in its progress to take a critical stance towards actions or thoughts of other people or one’s own, engaged in a process of continuous adaptation and growth. In this process, a critical ability was gradually moving to the forefront in creation of the human. In the field of verbal art, this opposition results in the progress of an individual talent liberating itself from the normative authority of generic and other prescriptions. The borderline, beyond which the power of genre visibly loses its prescriptive power and the individual talent takes over, is usually located somewhere between the late Renaissance and the early Romantic era.
Since then, tradition was, by no means, discarded by the winning creative mind. To draw on tradition, or to claim the departure from it, becomes each time a case for an individual choice. Under these circumstances, reflection an eternal companion to the tradition, in whose presence tradition loses its normative/prescriptive power and obtains a quality that may be adequately defined “self-critical,” as Michail Bakhtin had qualified the generic form most representative in the new situation, the novel.
The opposition of tradition-vs-reflection, as a basis to mark the stages of cultural evolution, is, of course, a flashback from the 20th c. meant to substitute former oppositions, synchronized to the evolution itself: les Anciens vs les Modernes in the 17th c., followed by classics vs romantics. The 20th c. responded with an opposition driven by the reflection as its universal creative principle, both ethical, i.e., related broadly to the human mind, and cultural, i.e., regulating tradition in its relation to the individual talent.
Reflection was mostly hailed as an evolutionary innovative step – the more reflective, i.e., the more individual, - the better. Reflection in its generic and stylistic inventiveness accompanied the individual talent on the illustrious way of cultural and literary evolution. But warnings against the prevalence of the individual talent over tradition were heard even prior to T. S. Eliot’s apprehensions, voiced in 1918 in the article titled after the problem “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” and long before the avant-garde or postmodernist onslaught on tradition.
What were the first tangible fruits of reflection and when?
This turn of world culture, most persuasively represented in literature, according to Sergey Averintsev, “cannot be unreservedly located within a certain century and still less a decade. It must have been anticipated at the very turn of the Renaissance (Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and Montaigne’s Essays), in the shade of the baroque-classicist culture (Pascal’s principal anti-rhetoric)...”
As one can see, the turn is represented not by the writers’ names only, but by new, or renovated genres. Cervantes’ Don Quixote with Rabelais, almost a century before him, introduced a new genre - the novel, most influential in the ages to come, and most reflective both in its relation to the choice of a hero and to the generic form. Bakhtin has memorably proposed a new genre theory based on the renaissance novel. Unlike the former thematic classifications, Bakhtin approached the novel as a verbal genre, a principally new form created beyond the classical poetics. Its novelty depends on the verbal strategy to open the plot for a speaking man, to represent both the hero and the form as not ready but essentially becoming, being in process, “self-critical” according to Bakhtin’s definition (Bakhtin III, 611).
This dynamic concept of genre was primarily manifested in the novel and based on its Renaissance experience. According to the genre theory within the new poetics, named by Aleksandr Vesselovsky – historical poetics, every individual text is not to be pigeonholed into a generic classification but to be viewed as a battlefield for the struggle of genres, each one with its own verbal orientation. It was in this vein that Bakhtin defined the novelty of the novel through dialogue and heteroglossia.
This concept can be extended to all the generic forms that came into being beyond the classical poetics and even to those forms that bore traditional names but did not follow a traditional strategy, the case of Shakespeare’s tragedies. The term “experiment” is from time to time adequately applied to Shakespeare’s work, though it is more reminiscent of later periods and talents ripe in their individuality. But, of course, Shakespeare was an experimenter. To what degree conscientiously and intentively? It can be discussed, but there is no doubt that his best works (and his creative strategy in general) drew on tradition in order to transform it by intrusion of the elements alien to it, reflective in their nature.
Hamlet, written and, in all probability, seen at the Globe as a tragedy of revenge, is the best illustration to a self-critical form. Parallel subplots, usual in Shakespeare’s dramatic technique, leave no doubt that the author was aware of how a regular avenger should act with Fortinbras and Laertes as Hamlet’s counterparts. His due was to raise an army or one’s own sword, to rush without the least moment to doubt or reflect. Hamlet is not like that. He deserved to be dubbed “the first reflective hero in world literature” (L. E. Pinsky) memorable for his confession:
The word “conscience” here, we tend to understand in accordance with its modern usage in a moral sense as a “sense of indebtedness, feeling of obligation,” thus cutting short what it meant in Shakespeare’s time: “internal reflection, inner thought” (Crystall 94). In the Companion to Shakespeare’s Language the moral sense stands third and “reflection” is the first to be mentioned and comprehended in the word “conscience.” Hamlet does not exclude a moral sense, but he incorporates it in something that goes deeper, inwardness, in a broader sense as an ability to reflect on and thus to prove his humanity.
T. S. Eliot was in his right to notice that “few critics ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary” [Eliot 45]. Eliot was irritated by what in his eyes looked as a romantic and psychological interpretation of art. He stood for something more formally significant in a sense that in verbal art psychology and emotions depend on the word, and the word dictates the transformation of the generic form. It is true that too much was said about Hamlet the character to the belittlement of Shakespeare’s tragic form. The revenge tragedy should be seen transformed by the advent of a reflective hero with a traditional book in his hand that more than any other could have been a copy of Montaigne’s Essays. The essay, another generic form beyond the classical poetics, opens an age of reflection.
Reflection as a new psychology in a character is paralleled by a creative principle in a “self-critical” form. Both, new in Shakespeare’s time, were reflected theoretically by the contemporaries with more or less success. In genre the retreat from classical regularity was then and long after conceptualized as a mixture of already known forms, willfully combined by les Modernes. Theoretical thought steeped in classical poetics for centuries did not advance much far beyond Polonius’ ironic introduction of actors in Hamlet: “The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light…” (II, 2).
By the way, Seneca, mentioned by Polonius in a role of a philosopher and a serious mind, is important as both a generic and reflective reminder. On the one hand, he was a major influence for an old Elizabethan revenge tragedy, while on the other the most appreciated ancient authority for Montaigne, a persuaded anti-ciceronian in opposition to Cicero’s golden Latin rhetoric and admirer of a spontaneous and reflective prose style of senecian prose.
Polonius, in his attempt to give a terminological concept for the novelties in Elizabethan drama, epitomizes a standard for a long-made theoretical efforts to comprehend a new genre under reflection dominating over tradition and resisting traditional regulations. Where the old poetics is not able to reach beyond the fact that regular forms had been distorted and mixed, a new poetics is in demand. Its creation has been started as an achievement of the 20th century and is still on the agenda. Its foundation had been laid by Aleksandr Veselovsky in historical poetics, variably continued by the Russian Formalists, Mikhail Bakhtin, Vladimir Propp, among the first to be mentioned. These efforts were directed towards a new theory/poetics but no less important were the insights of many critics and poets, like those of T. S. Eliot, mentioned above. Even if they were not in search for new poetics, they displayed a new perception adequate to a literary progress in an age of reflection.
Renaissance was the time of a powerful renovation of the human in all aspects, intellectual, moral, and artistic. As it happens in such periods, practical changes went ahead of theoretical comprehension, and above all the Renaissance mind was accustomed to looking for support in the ancient wisdom. The name of the epoch provides evidence for such a cultural orientation. In the field of artistic practice new genres had developed far beyond Aristotle, while in the knowledge of the human a new reflection was still diagnosed in terms of the ancient medicine as melancholia.
Its symptoms were recognized as an old malady, though with some new attributes, portrayed in the famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer in 1514. A sad female figure, deep in thought, surrounded by the objects conspicuous for their connection with what could be called science (if the word “science” had existed in the 16th century – it will come into use a century and a half later), or, with more historical precision – the knowledge of the natural and supernatural, such as astrology, alchemy…
Melancholia, a black bile, is seen in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving as a mind tormented with a Faustian temptation to stretch one’s mental power beyond artes liberales. Faust, another reflective hero, will be the first Elizabethan contribution by Christopher Marlowe to the archetypal gallery of the new time, endlessly extended in Shakespeare’s work.
Shakespeare, unlike his friend and competitor, Ben Jonson, did not draw in his dramatic practice on the medical theory of four humors, but melancholia, one of them, can be traced as a stigma born by some of his important characters, both tragic and comic: Antony (The Merchant of Venice, 1597), Brutus (Julius Caesar, 1599), the melancholy Jaques (As You Like It, 1599-1601)… The line is crowned by Hamlet, melancholic and most inadequately posing as a hero in the revenge tragedy, a reflective hero processing a self-critical genre.
Melancholia as the “Elizabethan malady” blights man’s “sensitive soul” with fear and sadness – new states of the mind that incline man to a solitary meditation. This malady is a symptom domineering in many Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.
If once again we look back at the late Renaissance genres, mentioned by Sergey Averintsev as those anticipating the triumph of reflection in literature, they belong to prose (novel, essay) and drama (Shakespeare’s tragedies). But it would be surprising if lyrical poetry would not partake in this cultural evolution. Meditative notes always resound in the lyrical harmony. It was not otherwise in the Renaissance from the start expressed in new lyrical genres. One of them, the sonnet, undoubtedly a leading form through the whole epoch, presents a problem – pourquoi – which, according to Veselovsky, is a starting point in every research.
Why in three centuries – from the early 14th till the early 17th century – the sonnet, this highly conventional form, could stay in a leading position among the lyrics in most of the European cultures? Its stanzaic structure and order of rhymes could vary from language to language, but its 14 lines were a generic feature. Was it the only rule for the verbal orientation? The majority of verse written in this genre either retained or at later times ironically undermined the convention established and made popular by Francesco Petrarcha (therefore known as Petrarchan). Petrarcha followed Dante’s new life (Vita nova) and its philosophy of divine love addressed to a woman, who (as Shakespeare will advocate at the end of the period and its lyrical convention) “treads on the ground” (Sonnet 130).
“On the ground”… At the end of the 16th century, in Shakespeare’s time, this location was to sound as a challenge to the generations of Petrarch’s imitators but not to Petrarch himself.
Almost three centuries prior to the Elizabethan finale of sonneteering Petrarch initiated the heavenly adoration of an earthly woman, treading “on the ground,” as another aspect of love to God. His spiritual topography was to establish a vertical vector directed upwards to heavens. But earth was not rejected, on the contrary, it was elevated in this opposition. As it often happens artistic discoveries are gradually worn out to conventional patterns, heavenly love reduced to the scattering of jewels and rubies, to old-fashioned comparisons with the sun and stars to adore and decorate the beloved: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…” as Shakespeare memorably began his anti-Petrarchan Sonnet 130 with a generic irony.
Elizabethan anti-petrarchism did not put an end to the flow of the generic tradition but manifested its self-critical renovation in the reflective “poetics of doubleness” (Brooks-Davies xliii], where petrarchism /anti-pertrarchism co-existed in a delicate balance first reached in Philip Sidney’s poetry. ①
Sidney’s sequence, Astrophel and Stella, published posthumously in 1591, had triggered off the sonneteering fashion in the 1590s when most of Shakespeare’s sonnets must have been written. As for reflection, Sidney was, like no other poet, intrigued by the questions how to write and how to voice a praise to the beloved. He asking these questions from the first sonnet was answered by his Muse in a very blunt manner: “Fool,” said my Muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.” In Sonnet 32, Muse will be echoed by Morpheus explaining where he finds all the treasures to decorate Stella in Astrophel’s dreams:
Anti-petrarchists, tired of conventional praises and stale compliments, appreciated sincerity in praise and worshipping. Sensitive to the danger of flattery Sidney invented intricate arguments, like that in Sonnet 35, following the Platonic theory of heavenly ideas reflected or processed on earth: “Not thou by praise, but Praise in thee is raised; / It is a Praise to praise, when thou art praised.”
The upper-case letters in “praise” if used could have pointed to the heavenly entities opposed and related to their earthly projections.
A long history of the Renaissance sonnet made the form liable to self-criticism but did not explain its longevity in fashion. The explanation has been provided in the hypothesis advanced by Paul Oppenheimer in the anthology with an ambitious title, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness and the Invention of the Sonnet (1989).
The modern, i.e., reflective, mind was born in the sonnet, “the first lyric form since the fall of the Roman Empire intended not for music or performance but for silent reading. As such it is the first lyric of self-consciousness, or of the self in conflict. Imaginative literature, or meditative lyrics is meant to be read in private or at most to a few people. This is probably due as much to the handling of time as to the inward-turning nature of personal silence. In performance, time is fleeting. It passes without pause. The audience must surrender a good deal of its capacity for reflection. In privacy and silence, however, readers may grant themselves total control...” (Oppenheimer 28).
With Sidney’s “capacity for reflection,” Shakespeare wrote his sequence and, more than any other among Elizabethan poets, had advanced this tradition into contact with the metaphysical poetry of the next generation with John Donne foremost in it.
All the dates for Shakespeare’s sonnets, as well as the very fact whether the sequence was published in 1609 in the authorized order and with any consistency in its movement, are conjectural. But some conjectures have been sufficiently supported by the academic tradition, based on the research of Shakespeare’s life and work in the context of the epoch, to deserve the status of a reliable hypothesis. I will choose two groups of his sonnets to look at them in the light of reflection on the basis of their conjectural chronology. One of them, in all probability the earliest group – Sonnets 1-17. The other, in all probability the final group – 104-126, the so called “sonnets of 1603.” ②
Among the facts concerning Shakespeare’s Sonnets that enjoy an almost unanimous agreement is an initial pretext for him to turn to a lyrical genre from his dramatic career in its first success. The major event was the plague and the closure of London theatres for two years from June 1592. A more personal occasion must have included an acquaintance with a young aristocrat, enthusiast of poetry and a theatregoer. Among many candidates as the most plausible must be accepted the 3rd Earl of Southampton born in 1573. He fits as a candidate for a number of reasons, his unwillingness to marry even under threat of a huge fine, one of them.
The version of how Shakespeare began his work in a lyrical genre runs as follows: mother and grandfather of the young Southampton (his father was dead by that time), having exhausted all other arguments, resorted to poetry. Thus Shakespeare, a successful beginner at the theatre but temporarily out of job, was commissioned to persuade an obstinate Earl. This is why the first 17 lyrics in the sequence are known as “procreation sonnets” shot through with an idea addressed to the young earl: to save your beauty from the devouring time there is one way but to marry and to give another life to your precious self in a son.
Poetic arguments should have been persuasive but not straightforwardly didactic to impress the young man. Shakespeare’s sequence, in the order it was published in 1609, opens up with the sonnets that do not belong to the best lyrics from his pen. One may receive an impression that, like a musician, the poet touches the keys and runs over a keyboard of pertrarchan metaphors borrowed from different sources: gardening, war, husbandry, nature, money lending, music, a scent saved in the vial, reflection… The first glimpse of reflection springs up in its visible presentation - in the mirror: “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest, / Now is the time that face should form another...” (Sonnet 3)
The metaphor itself is a means of reflection in the sonnet, a reflective trope that had arrived as a renaissance substitute for a medieval allegory. They are primarily different in their relation to the material world. In the allegory, objects are relevant as a sign towards some moral or religious idea. In the metaphor, objects meet with objects or ideas producing new relations between them.
In search to establish metaphoric relations an important feature of the renaissance mind was in demand – wit, the art of a keen intellect and an essential constituent of human dignity, a feature pertaining to the moral ideal of the epoch. So, in the sonnet a reflective mind was free to realize itself in one of the epoch-making presentations of a witty metaphor.
In the opening sonnets in the sequence, Shakespeare’s style is recognizably metaphoric though not strikingly inventive. But before the procreation group is reached to its middle there comes up a sonnet so exquisitely witty that its wit is not easily appreciated either by English commentators, or Russian translators, Sonnet 9 is usually taken seriously at its face value, though if one looks into it a bit more conscientiously it must open, at least, in its strangeness. Helen Vendler thought it dedicated to the letter “w” running through the first lines and imitating a weeping, wailing sound:
Poetic mind is not altogether alien to the prosaic everyday logic, especially when poetry had been commissioned for a pragmatic purpose. If logic of the everyday is switched on in reading Sonnet 9, could the text be taken as plain truth? Just imagine a 20-year-old aristocratic scapegrace who chooses a single life on reason that provisionally he begins to think of some yet unknown to him woman left in tears on his untimely death! If the poet saw his task of persuading the young earl to marry in this vein, then he was doomed to a failure. And a failure Shakespeare was if one considers the whole sequence from the point of view of marriage and procreation. This motif was practically dropped after the first 17 pieces or even before that first group was completed. Within this group Shakespeare strikes much more personal notes. He promises eternity to a young man not in marriage but in his own poetry with the first allusion to it in Sonnet 15 (“And all in war with Time for love of you, / As he takes from you, I engraft you new.”) and in all sincerity in the first sonnet beyond the procreation group (18): “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”
Philip Sidney, in his first sonnet, addressed the question “how to write” to Muse, and received a definite answer: “Look in thy heart and write.” Shakespeare did not ask but stumbled on a similar persuasion in the process of a commissioned work. His first personal note sounds in the earnest execution of an order when he asks his addressee: “Make thee another self for love of me” (10). Two key words of the sequence spring up and immediately meet: “self” and “love.” Poetic self will express and reflect itself in love.
The word “self” will be involved in intricate repetitions in not a single sonnet with an impression that the poet had plunged into these verbal whirlwinds in hope to come up with the right understanding of his own self, or with a suggestion for his young friend, an addressee of the sonnets, to address his own inwardness. The first such case is Sonnet 13 where “self” is entwined into an intricate interplay of pronouns:
This interplay will follow raising the same question of identity for both of them – the author and the addressee in their love:
Let me confess that we two must be twain,Although our undivided loves are one;So shall those blots that do with me remain,Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
And again in Sonnet 39 with a doubt – how can I praise you if we make up one self:
This experience with the repetitive pronouns reminds of the early metaphysical gestures by John Donne in the “Storme” (1596) where the poet begins with the reflective thought in an attempt to establish correct relations between the two selves – his own and that of his friend:
Shakespeare’s sequence is shot through with reflection on the nature of love between the addresser and the addressee. Love brings up a reflective self, makes him plunge into the soul’s inwardness and come up with another question concerning the relation between the inner self and the outer world. Later group of 1603 sonnets is most representative in this aspect with its central sonnets 113-114 treating the motif that accompanies the whole sequence but reaches its climax here: is the eye taught by love true to life, or flattered and flattering?
In Sonnet 114, Shakespeare introduces the notion of love’s alchemy reminiscent of Donne’s poem of the same title. As the date of Donne’s poem (like most of them) is unknown and Shakespeare’s only hypothetically established, one could suppose both ways – who used the expression first and who responded to it. If Shakespeare (that is most likely) had picked up this image from Donne then it looks not as a polemical allusion to the poem but to Donne’s baroque vision in general, able
To make of monsters, and things indigest,Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble,Creating every bad a perfect bestAs fast as objects to his beams assemble…
For himself Shakespeare’s poet, though not without a doubt, chooses another ability due to love:
In this sonnet, like in quite a number of them, the poet makes a pause after the first two quatrains to begin the third one with a response to what has been discussed or stated above: “O,’tis the first...” After a pause the choice has been made in the alternative between flattery and love’s alchemy. Fastidious critics used to find faults with Shakespeare’s sonneteering technique, the worst of them in the broken spine by which they meant an interruption in the musical flow. Like the one in 114. This “fault” is but a pause of the reflective mind that takes time to meditate making his choice and manifest it in the change of tone.
There are three points I would wish to include in the summing up of my reflection on reflection. The first two concern the sonnet as an innovative genre and Shakespeare’s development of an innovative genius. The third point will concern reflection as a subject for the ethical criticism.
The sonnet’s vision of the world in the light of love is inherent in the Renaissance worldview and its philosophy proclaimed first in the book of love as a new attitude by Dante in Vita nova. Sonnets were among means of expression in it. Sonnet came as one of the earliest and long-term forms in the origin of the human mind. Born by the new reflection it continued as a reflective form in its progress from petrarchism to antipetrarchism, outspoken in the “double poetics” at its final stage in the Renaissance England with Sidney and Shakespeare. Even Shakespeare’s “broken” movement of the sonnet (sometimes taken for a drawback in his poetic technique, a ‘broken spine’), when after the first two quatrains there comes a pause, is a reflective device. The pause is made to reflect and to doubt, to answer or to ask a question that is arrived at after a certain statement in the first 8 lines (in a number of sonnets, 104 and 114 among them).
Sonnet for Shakespeare was an important step toward his maturity as a man and a playwright. After the plague years he returned to the theatre with a new experience and a master of the lyrical form. So, the next year was his annus mirabilis when his three plays in the major Elizabethan genres were staged to enter the world repertoire: Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each of them could be demonstrated as self-critical in its genre and unprecedentedly reflective in its feeling.
The third point will echo my introductory note on the importance for ethical literary criticism to research the movement of the human. Reflection is one of the mechanisms in this movement demonstrating how ethical values were adopted and doubted, what stages the creation of the human has passed, and how their results have been translated into literature.
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