Sonnet 115: Those Lines That I Before Have Writ Do Lie
SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, RelivedShow Notes
With Sonnet 115 William Shakespeare turns his attention to the perplexing paradox that a love that is experienced as complete and absolute and therefore perfect, such as his love for his young man, may turn out, over time, to have been but a fledgling infant compared to the even fuller, more profound, more mature love that it has the potential to grow into.
In acknowledging that love can evolve and grow over time it sets the premise that love itself is changeable – here for the better, to be more deeply and more sincerely felt than ever before – and it therefore not only concedes, but claims as a lover's right, the necessity, perhaps, to revise statements made about love in the past, and in doing so to effectively give those pronouncements the lie.
More from SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived
In this, the – at least for the time-being – final episode of his podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sebastian Michael offers a brief summary of his findings and also takes the opportunity to examine in a little more detail the view held by some contemporary editors that the sonnets may not principally be about a Fair Youth and a Dark Lady – a contention that is largely based on a supposition that many of these poems "could be addressed to a male or a female" as one recent edition puts it – to see whether it stands up to scrutiny as we formulate any conclusion.
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In this special edition of Sonnetcast, Sebastian Michael takes a closer look at our original source for William Shakespeare's Sonnets, examining in detail the few textual issues it presents, the much debated origin of the manuscript, and the dedication by its publisher Thomas Thorpe to a "Mr. W. H." which has been puzzling readers of these poems for centuries.
Following an established tradition at the time, William Shakespeare furnishes his collection of 154 Sonnets with a poetic Complaint that acts as a coda to the series.
Sonnet 154 brings to a close William Shakespeare's collection of sonnets, and it does so hand-in-hand with Sonnet 153, of which it is not a continuation, but a reiteration.