Download an audio version here.
In this discussion, Paul will present a short restructuring of the sonnets to give voice for two characters: the Old Shakespeare and the Dark Lady. This follows the “May and December” tradition in literature—an old man pursuing a young woman.
From Paul:
“Among its many genres, verse poetry had long been written as dramatic monologue as well as epic narrative, lyrical self-expression, philosophical inquiry, and so on. While Elizabethan and Jacobean drama employed various verse structures (blank verse, rhymed couplets, and other verse techniques such as alliteration and assonance), the sonnet sequence, so enormously popular during Shakespeare’s life, is also ideally suited to restructuring as dramatic dialogue.”
Thank you to the City of Coronado Public Library for hosting this event!
Paul Majkut has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Shakespeare, Elizabethan-Jacobean drama, and the poetry of the English renaissance and 17th century in his career as a university teacher. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Humanities grants (Cambridge, 2003, Oxford, 2010), and has served as a Fulbright Scholar (Argentina) and Fulbright Senior Specialist (Finland, Germany, Mexico). In March, he has again been awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to advise and lecture at the University of Tallinn, Estonia. For over a decade, he was the drama and film critic for The San Diego Review, winning numerous press awards, including reviews of Old Globe productions of Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and As You Like It, as well as films (Richard III, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream).
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