The Sonnets as an Open-Source Initiative

Summary

It is nothing new to state that Shakespeare's Sonnets have enjoyed a diverse set of attentions, reworkings and responses from the moment of their first circulation in the late sixteenth century. As Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells have previously remarked, the Sonnets are ‘[h]yper-productive of new meanings, in wildly different contexts’, noting in turn how these fourteen-line miniature dramas continue to inspire ‘an inexhaustible catalogue of praise and modification’. Michael Schoenfeldt makes a similar claim when he observes that ‘the Sonnets have frequently functioned as a mirror in which cultures reveal their own critical presuppositions’. The most recent of these interventions is poet Don Paterson's personal commentary on these sequenced poems, a composite and engaging melding of his own critical and creative talents.

Adaptation studies has long since familiarized itself with the critical rhetoric of cultural context and with the idea that texts adapt themselves to speak to and find purchase in alternative times, spaces and places. It would be natural enough, then, and not without critical interest, to offer a survey of the rich history of reception that Shakespeare's Sonnets have enjoyed, from ad hoc literary adaptations by seventeenth-century manuscript compilers to the more overt responses and reconfigurations of John Milton through to Oscar Wilde to Anthony Burgess, and from musical and artistic responses as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Benjamin Britten to Rufus Wainwright; such a survey might also encompass visual culture in the work of artists as juxtaposed as Sidney Nolan and Eric Gill. What this particular essay seeks to do, however, is argue that the Sonnets constitute and in effect have always constituted an ‘open source initiative’ and to interrogate the reasons for this claim. This availability for reinterpretation and commentary dates from the moment of the Sonnets’ first composition and circulation. The Sonnets’ status as artistic product has inspired and encouraged innovative uses by numerous reading publics. Is there, then, something intrinsic to the form and function of sonnet sequences in early modern culture that lent itself in particular ways to the kinds of re-visioning and ‘re-mediations’ that we are perhaps more accustomed to thinking about in response to contemporary literary, aesthetic and cultural forms?