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"a philosopher wrapped in a mathematician inside a playwright."
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John Mighton
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The Monument by Hank Whittemore : 0966556453 : 9780966556452 - BetterWorldBooks.com - Better World Books
"Customer Reviews
* Rating Most important work on Shakespeare in a century Aug 5, 2005 (48 of 56 found this helpful)
It is gratifying to read so many other reviews that agree on the importance of Hank Whittemore's latest book, The Monument, on Shakespeare's Sonnets. What Whittemore has accomplished is nothing short of breath-taking. He has achieved in the literary realm what Thomas Kuhn so excellently described for science 40 years ago: a paradigm shift, where it takes a totally fresh view, unemcumbered by the assumptions and prejudices of a given field of inquiry, to solve what are otherwise perceived in the profession to be unsolvable questions. Einstein's Special Relativity Theory, coincidentally exactly 100 years ago, is the best example of such a paradigm shift, where the only solution to the conundrums plaguing physics was Einstein's assertion that time itself was not constant, and neither was mass.
The difference in the case of Whittemore's work is that despite massive evidence that Shakespeare's Sonnets remain to this day a virtually totally impenetrable enigma, very few mainstream scholars even appear to recognize this fact. I have recently read the work of the only four scholars, so far as I am aware, in the last 50 years who have published either a paraphrase of, or extended comments on, ALL 154 sonnets. They are to be commended for recognizing the importance of treating the entire sonnet sequence as a whole, but in each case, in my view, they are a miserable flop at explaining the meaning of the sonnets.
What Whittemore recognized is first, that the sonnets are ONE unified, coherent, internally consistent, document. Whatever is said in one sonnet MUST relate to all the other sonnets. So long as there are (apparent) contradictions between one's interpretations of different sonnets, so long is that interpretation fatally flawed. Second, he not only agreed with many scholars that Sonnet 106 is about the death of the Queen, the peaceful accession of James, and the release of Sou -
Metamorphoses - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.
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The work as a whole inverts the accepted order, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods and their desires and conquests objects of low humor.
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Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is influenced by the story of Pyramus and Thisbe (Metamorphoses Book 4), and, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a band of amateur actors performs a play about Pyramus and Thisbe. In Titus Andronicus the story of Lavinia's rape is drawn from Tereus' rape of Philomela, and the text of Metamorphoses is used within the play to enable Titus to interpret his daughter's story. Yet, most tellingly, Shakespeare adapts, with minor changes, a passage from Book 7 of the Golding translation into an important speech in Act V of the Tempest.
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