This presentation is an example of deconstructive reading of sonnet. The sonnet studies is written by William Shakespeare. Watch video here - https://ed.ted.com/on/r9V6IJiO

1. Deconstructive Reading of
the Sonnet
William Shakespeare’s
Shall I Compare thee to the Summer’s Day

3. • Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?’, is one of his most popular poems. People read it out at
weddings (though not as often as Sonnet 116) in lyrical
celebration of an ideal romance. Will writes it for Viola in
John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love (1998).
• The poem seems to turn on a binary comparison between the
beloved and the summer’s day, in which the beloved is always
the privileged term: Thou art more lovely and more
temperate’. By contrast with the loved one, the weather is
never quite right: ‘Rough winds do shake the darling buds of
May’; the temperature is either too hot or too cold. Besides,
the products of the season are perfect only for a moment,
while Thy eternal summer shall not fade’.

4. • But what is the condition of this timeless perfection? Writing! The
beloved is immune to decline and death only When in eternal
lines to time thou grow’st’. The poem itself, it turns out, is what
endows the mortal human being with immortality: ‘So long as
men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee’. Sonnet 18, in other words, celebrates its own
power to confer eternity.
• The binary opposition, then, is not quite as simple as it first
appeared. Thou’ and the summer day, distinguished as
antithetical, now appear on the same side of a line that divides
mortality from poetry. All that lives is transitory, including the
beloved: ‘Every fair from fair sometime declines’. Just like the
summer day, the living object of the poet’s desire will, after all,
fade and die: eternity belongs only to the poem and the poem’s
inscription of love.

5. The ‘Other’ invades the ‘selfsame’
• But if love and summer resemble one another after all, in contrast to
writing, which alone has immortal powers, what are we to make of
the excess heat and cold of the summer day? Are they also properties
the season shares with human love?
• Does the Sonnet imply that love too is very rarely, in practice, just
right? And the rough winds that shake the darling buds? Are they,
perhaps, sensually attractive? Or at least tempestuous, the element
of passion that makes love itself anything but ‘temperate’?
• The other invades the selfsame. The qualities of the repudiated
summer day return to inhabit the romance they seemed designed to
define by contrast.

6. Conclusion
• What exactly, then, does Sonnet 18 claim?
• You are better than a summer’s day, since you won’t fade now
that I’ve written this poem? Or, alternatively, you are mortal, like a
summer’s day, and won’t fade if - and only if - I immortalize you in
my poem?
• Who is in control here - the ‘lovely’ but mutable object of desire,
or the desiring but life-giving poet? Or is the Sonnet a
dramatization of a miniature power struggle, the sequence of
implied threats and promises that goes on just below the surface
of so many passionate relationships?
• Exactly how idealistic is this lyrical text?
• What is the truth of Sonnet 18? Perhaps it’s undecidable?

7. Reference
• Barad, Dilip. “Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18.” TED-Ed, July 11, 2020.
https://ed.ted.com/on/r9V6IJiO.
• Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2002.
https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192801807.001.0001.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Of Grammatology.” Accessed August 24, 2021.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm.
• Dilip Barad. Deconstructive Reading of Sonnet 18. Accessed August 24, 2021.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohY-w4cMhRM&t=1s.
• Eve, Martin. “Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in
Writing and Difference, Trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2006), 351-370,” n.d., 11.
• Lawlor, Leonard. “Derrida, Jacques | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” Accessed August 24, 2021.
https://iep.utm.edu/derrida/.
• ———. “Jacques Derrida.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall
2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2021.
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/derrida/.
• Shakespeare, William. “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? (Sonnet 18)| Academy of American
Poets.” Text. Accessed August 24, 2021. https://poets.org/poem/shall-i-compare-thee-summers-day-
sonnet-18.