REFERENCES

Most of the ideas in this blog originated in the following sources:

two books...

• Helen Vendler, "The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets,"
• Stephen Booth, "Shakespeare's Sonnets,"

and the teaching of William Packard, who ran a class, Poetry In Performance, at HB Studios.

Most of the other ideas -- including all the wrong-headed ones -- come from reading the sonnets over and over, and thinking about what they might mean in different contexts, and with different characters expressing the words.

As Richard Benjamin once said to me, in a very different context: The character has got to be somebody that would say those things that way.

So, many of the ideas and performances and films of particular sonnets are ways of imagining a context in which an imagined character (or characters) would say exactly those words.

(Note: The two books above/below are highly recommended for all their ideas and commentaries on all the sonnets!)

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