Have you ever tried reading all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets cover to cover and end to end over a period of two weeks? Self did. For class. The marathon left Self really jonesing for a plot. Give Self plot or give Self torture---please! Anything else but love, love, love. Enough already! Man, how many ways can a man write about love, and fair youth, and time, and immortality, and eternitizing (is that a word) verse, and exhortations of hurry-up-and-get married and you-must-have-kids so you can leave the world a richer and better place, and did-I-tell-you-I-love-you-btw-I-love-you. We get it already! You're in love! Blechh! Granted, the language is beautiful, the images tight, the metaphors rich, the puns punny, the logic of the arguments sound. But please kill Self already before Self has to read yet another lovely, lovely sonnet!
And just when Self can’t take it anymore, finally, a plot twist arrives. A rival poet enters. Goodie! Betrayal occurs. Hooray! And the fair youth slept with the dark mistree. Whoo hoo! Yes Houston, we have plot development! So, can you tell Self why, why it always the brown people who always have to be the bad guys/gals? Why couldn't the other woman be with a white mistress or a pink Irish mistress? And why, in sonnet 20, does the poet feel cheated when his young lover has a woman’s face, a woman’s gentle heart? Because Nature “pricked thee out for women’s pleasure” and other women are the competition for the faith youth's affections. Ah well, that’s why the plumbing between the genders is different, don'tcha think? Don’t go blaming the women for it. By sonnet 66 the poet is world weary. He enumerates wretchedness, injustice, disfigurement, dishonesty, lust. And so finally, there is form variation. in sonnet 126. This sonnet has only 12 lines! Wassup wid dat? Where’d the other 2 lines go? Stay tuned for more… as the plot turns.
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