Originally What Silent Love Hath Writ: Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann
Price: $15 with $5 shipping and handling media mail and $7 regular mail. To be published as an IP Books book later this year.
This book was originally published by Gotschna Ventures Press Pub. Date: March 2008 and is 440 pp.
In this study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets the authors, a psychoanalyst and a director, examine what the speaker (the “I” of the poems) reveals about himself to his readers. By reading many sonnets together the authors build up a picture of this character, one Shakespeare’s most interesting and unusual creations. The reader emerges with a thorough grasp of the major themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
The sonnets can be read together as if they are all spoken by one person and afford us a chance to get to know him by understanding what he writes and what he means in his various moods. Shakespeare’s sonnets, anxious in their homosexuality and angry in their heterosexuality comprise a most unusual body of love poems. Awesomely skillful and limitlessly beautiful, they a pleasure to get to know while also being deeply disturbing.
Review from a Reader on SpeedyText.com:
Quite aside from the tacit pleasure of reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, many of which were unknown to me, I found this a well researched and illuminating study on several levels. The authors give us a statistical way of looking at the collected sonnets popularity, a good dose of other shakespeare scholars opinions as compared to their own, a historical placement of the ideas and language of both the sonnets and their more persistent interpretations, and tie it altogether in their unique discussion of the sonnets psychoanalytic implications (mostly freudian based.) The work is both systematic and creative in its approach, and although the reader sometimes has to stumble through some awkward writing and excess repetition and re-explication there are many gems of thought in here to inspire scholars, students, and lovers alike. Worth the read.
Bios of the authors:
Martin S. Bergmann, was clinical professor of psychologist of the New York University post-doctoral program, where he taught the course on the history of psychoanalysis. He was a trainer and supervisor of psychoanalysts at the New York Freudian Society; a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association; recipient of the Sigourny Honorary for Outstanding Contributions to Psychoanalysis (1997); and the recipient of the Distinguished Psychoanalytic Educator Award by the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education (1998).
Michael Bergmann graduated with a B.A. in Latin from Columbia University in 1975 and studied film concurrently at N.Y.U. Undergraduate Film School and then at the N.Y.U. Graduate School of Film and Television.

In this study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets the authors, a psychoanalyst and a director, examine what the speaker (the “I” of the poems) reveals about himself to his readers. By reading many sonnets together the authors build up a picture of this character, one of Shakespeare’s most interesting and unusual creations. The reader emerges with a thorough grasp of the major themes of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
$15 + shipping/handling.
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