not the Sonnets
Foreword
There is a ‘scene’ in my verse narrative, After the Rehearsals, where the lead character gives a poetic eulogy at his sister’s funeral. It is, I suppose, a Stop All The Clocks moment, and so - even though the piece in After the Rehearsals is wholly mine - from the perspective of the ‘filmic’ insertion, the notion itself is not entirely original. When I came to write the eulogy I tried to think how someone who was not ‘a writer’ might embark on such an onerous task, and settled on a reworking of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Why would they not start using the building blocks of something known, exceptional, proven? Obviously my character would be changing the meaning of the piece, but in terms of approach, style, emotion and ‘feel’, it seemed the right thing to do.So appropriate, in fact, that I did it twice in the same book!
Setting aside any considerations relating to the quality of the final output, undertaking the 'reworking' of a Shakespearean sonnet was, above anything else, a challenge. If the final pieces in After the Rehearsals are not as ‘perfect’ as I might wish them to be, as a result they are potentially even more fitting for the character who has crafted them as he is no poet. I think they work well enough within the context of that narrative, so job done.
A fellow writer, on hearing the piece in isolation, wondered if I hadn’t somehow straight-jacketed myself; or even if the task was doomed to failure because of its source. And they may have had a point. Forcing myself to adhere - more or less - to the rhythmical form (though not necessarily the meter), perhaps those two efforts came across as a tad 'forced', a little dated. However, given their context and nominal ‘author’, this was fine; they were serving their narrative purpose.
It was probably at the point of completing After the Rehearsals that the idea of tackling the entirety of Shakespeare’s sonnet cannon in a similar vein came to me: would it be possible to 're-imagine’ all 154 of The Sonnets, to give them a new twist, to make them contemporary and modern, to at least partially free them from their time-honoured love-bound context? And if so, how?
Initially at least, it was an experiment. I decided to start where most poets end i.e. with the rhyme. I began by stripping out every single word from each of the poems except the last one on each line. This had been the approach I had taken with the After the Rehearsals pieces, and it worked there - after a fashion, anyway! And, unless the subject of the new piece demanded it, I would allow myself the freedom not to stick to the sonnet’s original subject. The last thing I wanted to produce was something that was little more than pastiche, a regurgitation of nearly thirteen dozen love poems! At all costs I needed to avoid saying the same thing over and over again, and/or in the same way; each poem needed to be able to stand on its own unmetered feet.
Of course the starting point - the chain of those last words - offered two immediate challenges. The first was the nature of the language itself (e.g. the considerable number of repetitions of ‘thee’, and the plethora of archaic words ending in ‘est’). Setting out some loose rules, I decided to allow myself the latitude to amend or replace - but within the rhythmical confines of each sonnet. For example, in #3 ‘viewest’ becomes ‘view’, ‘renewest’ becomes ‘renew’, and ‘thee’ becomes ‘alchemy’ (to keep the rhyme).
The second challenge was subject. It is with subject that most poems start, and if one is rhyming - to any schema - rhyme almost always comes last. By tackling the pieces so completely the other way around, the primary question became ‘what subject will fit a poem whose lines end with these exact words?’ Solving that particular conundrum is much harder than you might imagine! I found as I worked through each sonnet that the subject of my ‘translation’ often changed; I might start thinking it was a love poem (often inevitable, even though I wanted to avoid those as much as possible!) yet through rewriting, found it being transformed into something else entirely. When one starts with one’s own draft words on the virgin page, there is something of you already invested in them before editing begins, an investment which can mean making wholesale changes particularly difficult. When you are starting with fourteen words that are absolutely not your own, every other word you subsequently put down on the page seems magically to become fair game. The degree of liberation is considerable.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was actually a third challenge; one which appeared soon after the first few poems were drafted. And that was the challenge of metre. If rhyme is the most common trap laid by the gods of pastiche, the second has to be rhythm. All the while the poems - the words in the poems - sat on the page arrayed in fourteen lines, rhyme screaming out at the end of each and every one of them, then instinct, conditioning (call it what you will) kicks in i.e. the writerly impulse to fall into some dum-de-dum-dum-de-dum meter, line after line. Make no mistake, it was not so much the words themselves beating this drum - though they had a significant role to play in it, of course - but rather how they looked which set expectations. And how could I not know their source was a Shakespearean sonnet in the first place? If the rhyme were the straitjacket, then the appearance of fourteen lines on the page fixed the buckles. Such a layout seemed to insist on syllable count. No, it demanded it.
In spite of a stated desire to diverge and modernise, it proved difficult not to give in to the compulsion to adopt ten syllables per line, and to beat a tattoo which proclaimed "this is a sonnet!" Only by physically breaking those bonds and by running lines together when drafting the poems (i.e. making them something other than 14-lines) was I able to loose myself Houdini-like.
And then something else interesting happened. As I began to draft more pieces in this prose-like layout, I found the original dominance of rhythm weakening, and then it became possible to once again see the poems as fourteen lines and not feel them as sonnets. The seventh was the first example of that. Not only did it work as a fourteen line poem and a piece where the rhyme was not a burden, I found that it stood on its own two feet well enough to be the first to be rewarded with a title. It became ‘Pilgrimage’; it was no longer ‘#7’.
This was a breakthrough. It was as if I had discovered a new rhythm for the poems. It allowed me to revisit some of those that I had rough-hewn into coarse strings of words, and free them back into the fourteen line pattern from which they had originally sprung. The pastiche had been magically banished; it was now a new mythology, like seeing a swan emerge from an untidy and grubby cygnet. More than that. Knowing I could achieve my goal allowed me to go back to drafting some of the later sonnets from their original scaffolding -without falling into the original traps.
People will have their own views, of course. The upshot of all this theorising - never mind the fundamentals of the undertaking - may simply be to offer ammunition to those who feel the overall premise is profoundly ‘wrong', that the audacity of stealing from the Bard is a capital offence. On that basis, my decision to call the collection not the Sonnets is one which aims to reflect the fact that, by and large, these pieces are something else entirely. Conversely, the title also tries to recognise the poems’ source, and in the back-to-front endeavour of the whole thing, the denial of what they are (or are no longer) is perhaps only fitting.