Virtual Conversation with Sir Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson

[Emily]

Hi! I thought this event may be of interest to some of you.

It's a free webinar with two of the world’s leading Shakespearean scholars, Sir Stanley Wells and Dr Paul Edmondson, hosted by Cumberland Lodge, the educational charity in Windsor Great Park.

It's free to join and takes the format of an informal conversation, with a question-and-answer session afterwards. It takes place on 27 Nov at 6-7pm.

You can find out more and register here: https://www.cumberlandlodge.ac.uk/wha...

[scherzo♫]

Thank you! I signed up for the webinar.

I've been wondering if anyone ever included the sonnets in Shakespeare's plays in a book of his sonnets. I'm ordering All the Sonnets of Shakespeare today.

[Tom]

Thank you for the webinar tip, Emily. I have registered for it.

Here in Chicago, we have a Shakespeare statue in Lincoln (yes, named for the president) Park. Children climb up onto his lap; the memorial was designed with a low base for that very purpose, so I have read about the background to the statue. People sometimes leave flowers on it in honor of Mr. William. Nearby are benches with little plaques saying who donated them or to whom they are dedicated. One of them reads, "For Daisy, her buddy Dash and Bill Shakespeare." I assume Dash is a doggie that Daisy often walked there. Isn't that charming?

There is also a Victorian-style Shakespeare Garden on the campus of Northwestern University, established in 1915 by the Garden Club of Evanston (the smaller city that abuts Chicago on its north), as an encouragement for the British during the Great War. Its flowers are those mentioned in Shakespeare's writings, e.g., Ophelia in "Hamlet." I like to sit there to read the Bard's works.

I look forward to our next reading selection. May I propose "Richard III"? It is a favorite of mine. I volunteer to emcee it.

Happy Halloween, everyone. "Something wicked this way comes."

[Martin]

Late to the party, I watched the Wells / Edmondson "webinar" - actually a recorded zoom meeting - with interest and pleasure, and felt it vindicated our "Shakespeare fans" approach to reading the sonnets in random order, just to get away from the idea that they are a story, and to accept the somewhat amorphous nature of the collection as a whole. The idea was not popular, and probably explains why we never had many readers. See the old discussion:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

The Wells / Edmondson approach strikes me as the opposite of that of Katherine Duncan Jones. To them, the sonnets are unauthorised, the dedication written by "T T", not by S himself, the sonnets and "A Lover's Complaint" are separate projects. To KDJ everything is a fully integrated work of S, where even the sonnet numbers have special meanings.

I have not seen their new edition itself. Scherzo♫ did you buy it, and if so what did you make of it? It must be pretty hefty.

Tom, most intrigued to read of your Lincoln Park memorial. Candy and Christine, also in Chicago, have I believe never mentioned it. Any chance of something for the "photos" section?

Wells/Edmonson follow LC Knights, seeing the sonnets as a collection of poems, not as a story to be deciphered. Valuable, because trying to decipher them affects mental health, and this might be the subject of another thread. The resulting damage ranges from mild eccentricity to near insanity. One thinks of AL Rowse, Samuel Butler, Martin Seymour-Smith, even Dover Wilson, or the array of characters written about in Schoenbaum's "Shakepseare's Lives". A lot of the Shakespeare deniers start from the sonnets. Here is a current example,

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...

[scherzo♫]

Martin wrote: "Late to the party, I watched the Wells / Edmondson "webinar" - actually a recorded zoom meeting - with interest and pleasure, and felt it vindicated our "Shakespeare fans" approach to reading . . .

I have not seen their new edition itself. Scherzo♫ did you buy it, and if so what did you make of it? It must be pretty hefty." . . .

Martin, yes I have the book and read it last October. The online program reflected the contents of the analysis in the book. The book includes two charts on connections between the sonnets. Table I is Nineteen Pairs & Fourteen Mini-Sequences (linked by theme or context). Table II identifies addressees for the sonnets by genders or concepts (love, time, muse, the world's wrongs, etc.).

The book is not hefty, about 300 pages. The introductory analysis is about 40 pages. Then 180 sonnets are printed in best-guess chronological order one to a page with notes (mostly vocabulary). The last section contains literal paraphrases of all the sonnets. The book includes sonnets from 14 plays plus Venus and Adonis.

This is the best approach to the sonnets I have ever encountered.

[Martin]

Very interesting, Scherzo! It is a lot smalller then the Ms Jones' Arden edition, at nearly 500 pages, with a 100 page introduction.

[Candy]

Tom, are you out there? Christine?

Tom will you meet me at the statue of Shakespeare next week? We can post some photos. I'll email you!

[Tom]

Hi, Candy and Christine, I'd love to do a photo-shoot at the Shakespeare statue. Any day this week (well, past today, Monday, obviously - it is snowing!) is good, except for Friday. Or over the coming weekend, or during the following week. I will watch for your email. Or, you can call me at 312-852-2442. If you get the voice mail, do leave a message; sometimes when I am in another part of the house from the phone, I have trouble hearing it.

When spring flowers begin to appear, we could also visit the Shakespeare Garden at Northwestern University.