Shall I Compare Thee to a Hampshire Town?

In an appealing article on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Don Paterson speaks up in favour of a more direct, personal response to the poems, against some of the more forbidding works of literary critics. Yet he lets slip a rather extensive knowledge of their Elizabethan context which he then seems to assume his reader shares. As if we’re all clued up on the names and addresses of Shakespeare’s known associates. ‘The trouble,’ he says, ‘is that it’s impossible to read the sonnets without speculating on identities.’

Well not for me. But then again I know as little about Tudor England as I do about…

Quite why I resolve the momentary dilemma of having to choose just one thing from the vast gunny sack of my ignorance by lighting on modern Basingstoke is something of a mystery. Perhaps the home of the Automobile Association and the Macmillan publishing firm ranks quite high in the list of British placenames that proverbially suggest a certain comic mediocrity. And for those who would say that it’s not too difficult to imagine Basingstoke if you haven’t been there, that a quick visit to a small library or a well-aimed search query should reveal its essential features if not its deepest secrets, I would refer them to my birthplace. In twenty years I acquired a high level of psycho-geographical mastery of its back streets, playing fields, waste grounds and cul de sacs. But of most of the neighbouring towns and villages I saw little beyond the main roads that passed through them, oblivious of the unexpected turns and confusing junctions that would have no doubt greeted those strangers who dared to alight from the bus, overtaken by a sudden impulse to explore the unknown.

The nearest I’ve been to Basingstoke was during the few summer months I spent in Reading in 1979, lodging with a Ukrainian couple near Cemetery Junction. Twice, I think, some friends with a car drove me to a country pub off the A33 and a bracing walk on a day that may or may not have resembled the one the author of Sonnet 18 had in mind when he penned its first line.

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