WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)



WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

Shakespeare perceived primarily as a dramatic poet

poems often stigmatized by the privative prefix: non-dramatic works; excluded from the collected works or shuffled into the final volumes or appendices to the dramatic works

(except for some brilliant appreciation by Coleridge) the poems received faint praise mingled with outright condemnation from the 1790s to 1970s

Sonnets typically seized upon as objects of biographical speculation

Venus and Adonis (1593) the first work to which he attached his name and which made his name; at least 16 editions by 1640 (5 of Hamlet in the same period!)

1592-1594: theatres were closed, he worked on his narrative poems and (some of) the Sonnets

Dedicatory epistle to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (W.H, the "sweet youth" of the Sonnets?)

Ovidian poem written in sesta rima (quotrain followed by a couplet, ababcc), based on the 10th book of Ovid's Metamorphoses

a number of Ovidian poems in the Elizabethan age; these poems seek to make men desirable by men, and to blur the divine between genders

(poetry of 1590s: often homosocial, frequently written by poorer male poets to richer and more powerful male patrons to get financial support. That relationship often takes on a homoerotic charge; to engage a male reader's desire for a male author's male creation)

Venus, in love with young Adonis, woos him but cannot win his love. She begs her to meet her the next day, but he is then to hunt a boar. Venus tries in vain to dissuade him and when the morning comes she finds him killed by the boar.

Venus: fully mature woman=full summer bloom; Adonis: beardless boy=springtime under-ripeness

Venus's courtship is scandalously inappropriate: she is given the full repertoire which men in the Petrarchan tradition use to seduce women: breed, reproduce yourself, pluck the flower of youth, avoid the fate of Narcissus (out of the 1194 line of the poem, she occupies 1106!); "textual intercourse"

'Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here

Within the circuit of this ivory pale,

I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;

Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:

Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,

Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Love often presented as a predatory chase; Venus's kisses are consuming, mother love transformed into smother love, Venus at the end of the poem: mater dolorosa

multiple perspectives and self-deception; discrepancy between what the grieving lover feels and what is represented as being true: central to Shakespeare's poems (groundwork on which the Sonnets are based)

(The Ravishment of) Lucrece (1594), narrative poem in rhyme royal, a highly rhetorical expansion of the story as told by Livy; part complement, part sequel to Venus and Adonis

dedicated to the Earl of Southampton; a fusion of the language of devoted love with that of patronage in a manner which is to become the central element in the Sonnets

slowness, reflection, domestic space and a preoccupation with how deeds and desires and persuation interconnect: these themes and moods Shakespeare came to first in Lucrece (they remained central to Shakespeare, cf. Machbeth, Othello)

Lucrece is about a rape and about how women and men respond to rape (discloses much about early modern thinking about rape)

by the later 1590s: Venus and Adonis and Lucrece were two of the most popular and widely imitated poems in English

Shakespeare's Sonnets (published in 1609, a decade after the main vogue for s.sequence)

154 sonnets, followed by A Lover's Complaint

Dedication to the Sonnets: enigmatic; non-ceasing speculations about the identity of "Mr. W.H." "begetter of these ensuing sonnets" (Dedication was most probably the publisher's design, perhaps to sell the book?)

1-60 composed c. 1595-6 (possibly revised later); 61-103 composed c. 1594-5; 104-26 composed c. 1598-1604; 127-54 composed c. 1591-5

Some (structural) models for the sonnets:

Petrarch - preoccupied with fame and thoughtful solitude

Michaelangelo - poems addressed to a male beloved

Sidney - concern with the inner secrecies of the mind

Erasmus - exhortation to marry

Main characters of the sonnets: the Poet, the Young Man, the Dark Woman, the Rival Poet

1-17: urge the young friend to marry to sustain value by biological reproduction „Dear my love, you know,

You had a father; let your son say so.” (Sonnet 13); failed urge

much of the rest of the sequence: revolve around the question whether poetic power can provide an alternative to the biological decay, whether it can provide a form of permanent beauty which could substitute for biological reproduction

Later the Young Man has an affair with the Dark Woman

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still;

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.    (Sonnet 144; see also 40-42.)

multiple aspects of the friend: his androgyny, his mutability, his cruelty

time: destructive force which can write its presence into the most beautiful faces

the very last poems: little allegories about Cupid; considered as a detached coda to the mistress

1-126: to a Young Man(?); hard to define the addresse: 'youth', 'sweet boy', 'friend', 'thou', 'he'

(Shakespeare's 'homosexuality' is a readerly fiction generated by the desire to read narrative coherence into a loosely associated group of poems) very often poetic persona rather than the poet himself (cf. 73; persona: old man, poet: about 34 years old!)

'Dark Lady' - never called by that name in the Sonnets!; she escapes poetic conventions

„For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright / Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.” (147)

her role is different in each poem, perhaps not even one person; her role is to triangulate desire

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still:

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil,

Tempteth my better angel from my side,

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,

Wooing his purity with her foul pride. (144)

Rival Poet – competes for the attention of the Young Man (79-86)

Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,

My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;

But now my gracious numbers are decayed,

And my sick Muse doth give an other place.

I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument

Deserves the travail of a worthier pen;

Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent

He robs thee of, and pays it thee again. (79)

He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word

From thy behaviour

rivalry is of central importance: rivalry between lovers and between poets

losing someone to a rival and the subsequent experience as a provocation to desire is the theme of the final poems

eye of love and eye of knowledge are at war (you know you do not love the right person yet you cannot help it)

Meditations on the destruction of beauty and passage of time (5,7,11,12,15,18,19,60,63-65,73,100,115,116,123,126)

A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,

Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion:

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue all hues in his controlling,

Which steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure (20)

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red, than her lips red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare. (130)

The Sonnets have had hard press:

George Steevens, editing Shakespeare' works in 1793 omitted them arguing that "the strongest act of Parliament that could be framed, would fail to compel readers into their service"

Wordsworth (around 1803) the Sonnets "are abominably harsh, obscure, and worthless"

they are elusive, frustrating, they are not confessional, but in their continual counterpointing of language against implied circumstance they are the culmination of Shakespeare's career as a poet

Shakespeare's Songs: 124 songs in the plays. They serve a specific purpose in the play, not merely ornaments. Originally sung butnone of the printed versions includes the music. The lyrics can be enjoyed as poems and can be appreciated outside the context of the plays.

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