engleski

"All men are bad and in their badnesse raigne": Shakespeare's Sonnet 121 in Contexts of War

The paper is concerned with what can be termed a "con-textual" reading of Shakespeare's sonnet 121, published in translation in one of the most popular Croatian daily newspapers in the summer of 1991, when the bloody Yugoslav war was already taking its heavy toll of suffering and death. In the case of Shakespeare's Sonnets, contexts primarily denote the poems within which a particular sonnet is embedded in the 1609 quarto order, but also those texts in relation to which an individual sonnet is made to function at a certain moment of its publication history. This historically situated embodiment of a Shakespeare sonnet deserves attention because it alerts us to the various ways in which universalizing discourse, for which Shakespeare as fashioned by the dominant traditions of Shakespearean criticism has become so in/famous, is deployed in order implicitly to support or additionally legitimize certain political assumptions and national allegiances in times of war. Prompted by the immediate textual environment of the newspaper in which the sonnet was published as well as by the accompanying translator's note, the discussion focuses on the complex semantic nature of this textual event and serves as a painful reminder of what readers of Shakespeare, marked by the difference of their specific cultural situations, are up against

Shakespeare’ s Sonnets; sonnet 121; contextual reading; translation

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