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Unread 11-12-2024, 06:14 PM
Shaun J. Russell Shaun J. Russell is offline
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I also find the question of Marlowe's sexuality making him less able to write well-developed women characters to be odd. I would also suggest that some of Shakespeare's earliest plays (the ones written while Marlowe was still alive) often do a lousy job of depicting women as well. If we're ascribing sexuality to one's inability to write another gender or sexual orientation, I'm guessing there are thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of worthy counterexamples.

Anyhow, I have very strong doubts that Shakespeare was responsible for the order of the poems in the 1609 Quarto. It's a popular game to try to "reconstruct" the order chronologically, but that's even more of a fool's errand than just accepting the current order with the understanding that it may be of Thorpe's design, not Shakespeare's. Either way, while it's tempting to find groupings (some call the first 17 the "procreation sonnets"), I'm not sure how much of value it really adds to their study. Maybe Shakespeare was commissioned. Patronage was an important system for artists back then (hence the various playing companies and their well-to-do patrons), so it's anyone's guess. But then you have to start asking whether the young man of the "procreation sonnets" is the same young man Shakespeare wrote poems like Sonnet 18 to/about (assuming they're at least somewhat biographical). It leads us down a road of inventing biographical context to support theories, and my own perspective is that while that can be fun as idle speculation, it's not great as critical practice.
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