BASC70015 - Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Course Description

Instructor: Claudia Traudt

Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new. (Sonnet 27)

Shakespeare's one hundred fifty-four sonnets themselves make beautiful and new, and also plumb the ghastly. They are astonishing. They are a gorgeous tour de force - as he wrote of his Cleopatra - of "infinite variety." They both draw one in - and kindle - by their content and form. We will encounter early counsel to a young nobleman, growing complexity and affection, the famous "dark lady, " ardor and riving, sly humor, soul-opening meditations on lust and rage, crescent hope and abysmal despair, time, memory, beauty, identity, death. Our savoring Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ poetic forms will reveal both sinewy, supple structure and revelatory nuance.