How Does The Sonnet Form To A Stage Appreciation

Expressionism, Imitative and Performance all interweave among each other in terms of literature. To play is to perform, to bring in our own evaluations are to enrich the developing recreational piece in progress.
Key sections of Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella and Edmund Spenser's Amoretti will be assessed in terms of their dramatic qualities in forwarding the sonnet form to a stage appreciation. This essay will be situated around these poets of the sixteenth century, a period in which the sonnet broke away from its native model and became a dialect with the English poetic tradition. The sonnets assessed are from a post modernist perspective evaluating the relationship between the author and the reader (reader response criticism) and

It is upon a closer examination of these poems, that the realisation of the narrative content is lacking, lucid, slight and not fully polished. We tend to ignore the fact because Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare are regarded as the three of the most celebrated poets within this genre, do seem to be telling a story of sorts a story that owes more to the surmises and intuitions of the many scholars who have laboured on these poems than to the texts themselves. It is their reconstructed stories that we bring with us to the poems. How else would we know anything about the rival poet in Shakespeare or about the two year courtship of Spenser if we had not read it in the footnotes and introductions? Even more importantly, these poems do not rely on the principle of causation, so essential to successful narrative. How important is the Kiss given Astrophil in Sonnet 81, and what exactly are its consequences? What finally happens to the fair young man and the dark lady? Why does Spenser lady leave at the end of the poem? These questions, which one would expect any good narrative to answer, are not resolved in the poems and the narrative inadequacy of Sidney, Spencer and Shakespeare is compounded in the lesser writers to whom scholarly attention has been less frequently directed. ( Rosenthal,