Variations on a Sonnet: A Play and Accompanying Analysis
When I first began considering writing a play based on Shakespeare's sonnets, I toyed with the idea of dramatizing the poet's life as it is revealed in the sonnets. I had read the sonnets and imagined that it would not be terribly difficult to set some of them to prose scenes in which the amorphous jealousy, obsession, and longing found in the sonnets would blossom into clear conflicts and complex characters--the protagonist being Shakespeare himself, of course. The play would give a biographical portrait of Shakespeare and his life, without being preachy or boring. However, the more I studied the sonnets and the writings of their commentators, the more certain I became that doing so would be presumptuous. "People often wish that a diary or correspondence might turn up from which we could learn about Shakespeare; in the Sonnets we have, by a fluke, something of this kind," says critic C. L. Barber in his Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (5). Barber goes on to point out that many scholars have proposed theories about the Sonnets' implications about Shakespeare's biography, and all such theories were rebutted by the late Professor Hyder Rollins (Barber 5).
Shakespeare, Variations On A Sonnet, David K. Weiser, Dr. Katherine Wilson, Variations, Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory, Theatre and Performance Studies
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