Ambiguity In Selected Shakespearean Sonnets:

Ibrahim Mohamed Hamed Abd El-moneim

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze some of the Sonnets ofShakespeare that offer difficulties or problems of interpretation which canbe resolved by the use of the proper contexts. The more we read theSonnets, the more we are struck by the extent to which they exploitvarious kinds of ambiguity at different levels of meaning: the word orphrase, the line, the quatrain, the poem, the relationship between poems.The presence of ambiguity in the Sonnets may be attributed in part to theflexible state of analytic language in Shakespeare’s time, but its deliberateuse must be attributed largely to Shakespeare’s associative mind and thefrequent ambiguity of his feelings (Landry, 1963: preface).Actually, the sonnets cause reader and critic alike the morefundamental problem of determining the tone, both of individual poemsand groups of poems, and of the sequence as a whole. This difficultydestroys the reader’s basic allegiance to the sonnets, and only from suchan allegiance does constant rereading of the work and eventually a goodwork of criticism emerges. There is a kind of uncertainty which is builtinto many individual sonnets and into the whole young man sequencewith the aim of frustrating and alienating the reader. from very early inthe sequence the reader encounters forms of wit, sarcasm, and innuendowhich force him to reconsider his response to a sonnet or group ofsonnets. Sometimes the reconsideration only begins in a sonnet’s couplet,at others it begins as early as the first line. The poet’s irony or sarcasm orbitterness do not replace the lover’s pose: the two co-exist so disturbinglythat the reader is often frustrated in his attempts to make a decision aboutthe tone of the poem (Hammond, 1981: 11-12).