Only the longest-standing readers of this blog will remember my previous encounters with Warwick Collins, early last year. I read his recently reissued novella Gents and his novel The Rationalist. You can catch up using those links, and then catch up further by reading the books, both of which I recommend unreservedly.
Since his last novel, The Marriage of Souls ; a sequel to The Rationalist , Collins has been quiet, so I was keen to see his return to fiction, which I pre-ordered for its publication this month. As the headless-woman-in-period-dress cover design suggests, with The Sonnets , Collins has returned to historical fiction. Talk about aiming high. Talk about barking mad.
_NEG_2900_(51624647349)_(cropped).jpg/1200px-Dionne_Warwick-_Don't_Make_Me_Over_(10-23-21)_NEG_2900_(51624647349)_(cropped).jpg "Woman Warwick")
But do you know? He pulls it off. This is Shakespeare as a young man, in his late 20s, from The sonnet itself had a complex history. According to a prevailing fashion, it was addressed by a poet to a mistress, often one who was out of reach, after whom he yearned, or at least affected to do so for the sake of the fulsome compliments he would bestow upon her.
Yet precisely because of this, the convention imposed its own interesting construction. By the same process, perhaps, it stimulated rather than repressed the imagination.
This stimulation is exemplified in the book itself, where Collins has given himself freedom to imagine, but within firm constraints: the most important of which are the sonnets themselves. Says Southampton:. My own foreknowledge of the sonnets was almost non-existent, save for the most famous few, so I was probably as open to fresh interpretation as it is possible to be.
