Shakespearean Sonnets

Portal To Understanding Dramas

By Nancy K. Crevier

Professor Bill O’Connell, a Newtown resident and instructor at Norwalk Community College, teaches writing, composition, humanities, great books, and Shakespeare. But it is the world of Shakespeare that leads the former football coach to consider himself a romantic. “That is, in the sense that I am powerfully moved by beautiful writing and imagery,” added Prof O’Connell.

“When I was 15, I had a teacher who taught Othello and it opened up a whole new world for me. So for 30 years, I’ve been passionate about Shakespeare,” said Prof O’Connell.

He plans to share that passion for the Bard Thursday evening, September 20, at 7 pm, at Mocha Coffee House on Glen Road as part of the upcoming eight-month-long Shakespeare Festival Series sponsored by the C.H. Booth Library. His focus will be the sonnets of Shakespeare. “Without understanding his sonnets, you can’t access Shakespeare,” said Prof O’Connell. “Many of the themes of his dramatic period are actually voiced earlier in his sonnets.”

Shakespearean sonnets, which are written in a tight form of three quatrains of four lines each and a concluding couplet, all in iambic pentameter, are a record of the artist developing his power, said Prof O’Connell, and are also the only true autobiographical records of Shakespeare that exist.

“Some are intensely personal. The great theme of a sonnet is the power of time and how time takes away youth and beauty. There are two forces that transcend the ravages of time, and those are love and art, poetry in particular. Even in his early career, we see that Shakespeare was already wrestling with the idea that his art would continue long beyond his life,” explained Prof O’Connell.

His September 20 discussion will appeal to those who are new to Shakespeare as well as those who have studied the famed English playwright, he said. “What I intend, is to make a case for the importance of the sonnets and how they indicate Shakespeare’s dramatic universe. The learning of the sonnets will help people better understand the other plays in this series.”

As an example, Prof O’Connell named Sonnets 29 and 73 as two of what he believes to be the greatest sonnets ever written. “Sonnet 29 is the most poignant and exquisite profession of the painful features of love,” he said. The theme of this sonnet resonates in later works of Shakespeare, including Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida.

In Sonnet 73, the reader sees an awareness of coming to terms with the aging process, said Prof O’Connell. “This is evident in King Lear, and there is a passage that is recreated 20 years later in Macbeth.”

He admits that Shakespeare can be difficult to understand. “You have to be able to hear it,” he emphasized. “You have to be able to hear the language, the cadences, the rhythms. The lyricism is inaccessible unless you get a sense of the beat,” he said.

He regrets that the form has lost favor to free verse. “Sonnets are closed form poems and open form poems are more palatable today. Sonnets have gone the way of epic poems,” he said.

It is always his hope, said Prof O’Connell, that any study of Shakespeare might pique an interest in further study. “I want people to feel less intimidated by Shakespeare so that they can access the universal issues, those of love and death, that he wrote about and that are still pertinent today.”