Word: sonneteers
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...filled with far more legalese than Shakespeare's-but the Bard's characters have as effective counsel as any. Henry IVs plotters do not just plan to split their loot (the realm); like law clerks, they aver that "our indentures tripartite are drawn" and "sealed interchangeably." In Sonnet 35, the poet acts against himself as a friend's defender: "Thy adverse party is thy advocate." In Sonnet 46, a fair lady is partitioned-her lover's heart the plaintiff, his eye the defendant. In Henry VI, Part II, Jack Cade promises to "make it a felony...
Snuffling about in the text for historic cross references to support any and all of these theories, the critics stumbled upon all manner of troubling touchstones. The most famous is contained in sonnet...
Begetter Guessed. Into this mare's nest Rowse has stalked, offering his services, as he puts it with marvelous false humility, as a "mere historian." For anyone acquainted with Elizabethan history, he reports, it is all "quite simple." Beyond all doubt, the sonnets are to Southampton. W. H. was, clearly, William Harvey, Southampton's stepfather, who, when the young earl's mother died in 1608, inherited the sonnets and "got them" for Publisher Thorpe. Rowse points out that "beget" is used twice in Hamlet as meaning simply "to get." The sonnets were written in 1592-94, because...
...performed the stupefying task of sorting out Frederick's romances (he fathered legitimate children by several queens and was responsible for numberless bastards; in addition, making no distinction between sexes, he carried on a lifelong affair with Pier della Vigna, the lowborn lawyer who may have invented the sonnet). The novel is not, like its subject, a stupor mundi, but it is a careful, craftsmanlike job, done with intelligence and conscience...
Does old Sinclair have more than an inkling of his own character? A sonnet he chooses to quote suggests that he does. "Child." apostrophizes Poet Harry Kemp, whose ear, like Sinclair's own, was of purest...