March 5, 2008
How Shakespeare started out
Dominant on page and stage: but is the greatest writer in the English language primarily a poet or a dramatist?
William Shakespeare
SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS
Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen
593pp. Thomson: The Arden Shakespeare. Paperback, £9.99.
978 1 903436 87 5
The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later. The introductions and general essays, however, are more important, even when they swell to mammoth proportions as editors pursue theories of their own.
One of the fascinations of literary scholarship is its hold on writers of our own time. Contemporary poets read Shakespeare almost as if he were a rival, or some sort of perennial vade mecum of technical forms and approaches. John Berryman, embodying that special concept of his time, the “anxiety of influence”, went so far as to lament having written so much verse when he might have spent his life editing King Lear. Even without the expanding needs of modern education, Shakespeare would be with us in hundreds of studies year by year. What remains to be said that is new? Must all evaluation be reassessment in historical and lexicographical terms, or forays into literary value-judging, a procedure with hundreds of books behind it, from ancient Bradley to latest Kermode? The present fascination with Shakespeare’s life and some of its more speculative corners (E. A. J. Honigman’s Lost Years, James Shapiro’s 1599 and Charles Nicholls’s The Lodger) turns out to be as packed with basic literary criticism as any of their more orthodox predecessors. However equivocal Shakespeare’s record may be, his is one of the most familiar presences in our lives.
In Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, scholarship is happily united with clear thinking and witty writing. Duncan-Jones’s Arden edition of the Sonnets (1997) brought her face to face with the most intractable of all Shakespearean dilemmas. One of the basic problems she encountered was the tendency, perfectly natural in poetry-lovers, to look away from what the sonnets might signify when read dramatically and in situ. A similar concern preoccupies the editors here when they consider Love’s Martyr (1601), the marsupial volume containing “The Phoenix and the Turtle”. Lured by the poem’s enticing difficulties, so many previous expounders have wandered into all sorts of metaphysical mazes. It is hard enough to decipher and so attractive to imaginative commentators that one down-to-earth critic has attributed its appeal to its being considered “ravishing nonsense”.
Though Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen deplore a tendency to regard “The Phoenix and the Turtle” as Shakespeare’s anticipating the Metaphysicals – George Gascoigne and Fulke Greville might be thought better candidates for that doubtful honour – they do not insist that their own fixing of the poem in its historical context as a propaganda device honouring the very forward Welsh courtier, Sir John Salusbury, dispels its strangeness or mitigates the difficulty of interpreting it even when its special circumstances and surroundings are examined. Similary, in her previous Arden edition, Duncan-Jones’s tracing of Shakespeare’s activities during the frequent closing of the theatres by the plague as a possible aid to dating the Sonnets, and her careful readings of the texts themselves do not tempt her to underestimate how problematic the sequence remains. What is admirable in poetry lives a multiple of later lives, and while continuing to admire forensic searching, one’s ungrateful self goes on wanting to esteem Shakespeare independently of historical connections. This is the truth underlying that over-casual phrase, “Shakespeare our contemporary”: nowhere more so than when reading “The Phoenix and the Turtle”.
This Arden is made up of all Shakespeare’s poems as such, minus the Sonnets – which amounts to the long narratives in formal stanzas, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, those poems included in The Passionate Pilgrim and those in Love’s Martyr, and a handful of dubious or lost pieces. Songs and lyrics from the plays are excluded except when they crop up in modified form in any of the above collections. There is a proselytizing tone to the preface and introduction, launched by a quotation from a passage in Don Marquis’s archy and mehitabel, where the Bard (a term fortunately never used by these editors) explains that he wanted to compose sonnets and poems in stanzas but got into “the frightful show game business” and so lost his true calling as a poet. Immediately there opens up that worrying crack in literary sensibility which generations of poets have pondered over and felt sorry for themselves about.
Is the greatest writer in the English language primarily a poet or a dramatist? The easy answer, that he is both, is no answer at all. The better one, which most practicing poets of whatever age have endorsed, is that he is a poet who, wonderfully well equipped at adapting stories and devising theatrical situations, also can tame the lightning of poetry for stage performance. Readers and recitalists who have mouthed their way through “The quality of mercy is not strained”, “Time hath my lord, a wallet at his back” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”, feel him as a poet, and leave it to the literary critics, philosophers and historians to create their special edifices of illumination from his works. At least the poems cut from his plays don’t seem like fish on dry land the way that “Voi che sapete”, “Nessun dorma” and “When I am Laid in Earth” do when set adrift from their operas.
In essence, this edition is an opportunity to revisit Shakespeare in guise as the poet he may have wanted to be when he started out, in the company of two editors with remarkable gifts of erudition and patience. The division of labour is a generalized one, and if Duncan-Jones seems the moving spirit in the discussion of Venus and Adonis and Woudhuysen The Rape of Lucrece, they are joined at the hip in responsibility and temperament. Why, they ask, do convenors of Shakespeare conferences, academics in general and almost all authorities of sententious disposition ignore the poems, concentrating on the plays? He arrived at fame and consciousness first as a poet, and a remarkably realistic and accessible one. The introduction puts this directly – “Although both Venus and Lucrece are more patterned and verbally complex than the plays, they are considerably more naturalistic”. Viewed together, the two poems offer unique opportunities to link Shakespeare with the great Renaissance painters of Italy and France.
In a psychologically acute moment in Lucrece, when she is bewailing her rape before the return of Collatinus, Shakespeare devotes many stanzas to describing a wall-hanging in her chamber depicting aspects of the Trojan War. This is done at such length as to seem almost a show-off interlude, but is typical of him as a verbal architect. Lucrece’s eye falls at last on Hecuba, soon to be Hamlet’s ghostly spokeswoman –
On this sad shadow LUCRECE spends her
eyes,
And shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes,
Who nothing wants to answer her but cries
And bitter words to ban her cruel foes:
The painter was no god to lend her those,
And therefore LUCRECE swears he did
her wrong
To give her so much grief and not a tongue.
Richard Wilbur once wrote “odd that a thing is most itself when likened”, and such likening done over considerable length is at the heart of many of the great soliloquies in the plays. As such it is a technique developed in these early poems, often amounting to a veritable narrative of metaphor.
It was here, and in such of his sonnets as filtered into public knowledge, that Shakespeare became renowned while still young. The testimony is well documented, its most famous record being Francis Meres’s “mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare. Witness his Venus and Adonis. His Lucrece, his sugred sonnets among his private friends”. And there was something else: he was a purveyor of erotica. Venus and Adonis was so popular it was often reprinted. It has a lightness and charm that masks its reversal of the usual role of male pursuer and female pursued. It seems perfectly possible that the atmosphere of soft porn in the poem runs counter to its ostensible moral purpose. Many Elizabethan young men must have been fantasists of the kind familiar to us as the buyers of top-shelf magazines. Adonis’s coyness amounts to a revulsion from Venus’s physical allurements, but both plot and tone require her to be ever more pressing and so give the poet freedom to elaborate her sexiness. That her wiles are wasted does not make such vernal venality like Sonnet 129: there is a waste, but not of shame, only of Adonis’s life, slain by the boar Venus has warned him against in her campaign to keep young men’s attentions where they should be – hunting women and not wild animals. Her own retreat from love is godlike in the best Greek manner:
Thus weary of the world, away she flies
And yokes her silver doves, by whose swift aid
Their mistress, mounted through the empty
skies
In her light chariot quickly is conveyed,
Holding their course to Paphos, where their
queen
Means to immure herself and not be seen.
She gives up on love and retires to her birthplace, defeated not by morality but by bad choosing and masculine self-sufficiency. That Adonis ends up gashed in his genitals by the boar he pursues may be a bit cruel, but is in line with many Renaissance works of art rebuking reluctant lovers, male and female alike – a favourite Monteverdian theme. There is a serious caution below the surface innuendo – attractive people must accept responsibility for the feelings they arouse in others. Adonis is a tease, and his fate serves him right.
Shakespeare’s ambiguous lubricity in Venus is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of Lucrece, where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the dew on the grass in Venus, but the ill-lit world of Livy’s Rome darkens Lucrece. The first poem lives out of doors; the second is in a permanent chiaroscuro.
Rereading the boisterous verse of these two poems (3,045 lines in all) more than forty years after first encountering them is more enjoyable than their current neglect might suggest. They are, of course, masterpieces by a colossus, but what are they like as versifying? The biggest problem is their rhyming. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen give the reader copious information on Elizabethan and Jacobean pronunciation, but too often refer dubious rhymes to a single article, that by Helge Kokkeritz, Shakespeare’s Pronunciation (1953), without attempting a résumé of its conclusions. The user of this Arden will profit from the editor’s encyclopedic knowledge of Elizabethan publishing, a detailed consideration of how poets dealt with courtiers, and firm unpacking of meaning in the many footnotes. For a large part of their intention they will be hostages to scholars for the certainty of some of their decisions. Recent correspondence in the TLS shows how tendentious disputes over attribution can be. For a reviewer who is firstly a reader and secondly a working poet, this book is a welcome home to a prodigal. But it leaves the matter of his versifying still in doubt.
Venus is composed in six-line stanzas made up of a quatrain rhyming in the usual abab pattern, with a rhyming couplet at the end. Lucrece is in rhyme royal, a stanza which seems more like a Manx version of ottava rima than any more stable structure. To state this is to fly in the face of the received notion of rhyme-royal’s being well established in English poetry. Nevertheless, it forces the last four lines of each stanza to become rhymed couplets, inadequately introduced by an aba triplet. W. H. Auden’s handling of it in Letter to Lord Byron shows no inadequacy against his model Byron’s ottava rima, but then Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not. Before crying outrage, Shakespeare idolators should look at the impact the poems make. They should also consider the Sonnets – one after another in this sequence of the greatest sententious poetry in the language is spoiled by clunking final couplets. In the plays, with the exception of Romeo and Juliet, and occasionally in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, nothing that rhymes enlivens the action; they only serve as door stops. In Venus and Lucrece the worst sins of rhyming occur in the frequent employment of feminine endings, in some cases over whole stanzas:
As one of which doth Tarquin lie revolving
The sundry dangers of his will’s obtaining;
Yet ever to obtain his will resolving,
Though weak-built hopes persuade him to
abstaining.
Despair to gain doth traffic oft for gaining,
And when great treasure is the need
proposed
Though death be adjunct, there’s no death
supposed.
At least, in this example, the final couplet is a powerful aphorism. But there are several stanzas where continuous feminine endings become ludicrous. It would take a W. S. Gilbert to make this work. Shakespeare has no scruple in allowing present participles to seem true rhymes. In Italian, owing to the inflected language, rhyme is no great matter, but in English any feebleness is injurious. Shakespeare must have been relieved, on moving into the theatre, to be able to keep rhyme for occasional moments and not be bound by its peculiar restrictions. Perhaps for him, it became a holiday addiciton as it seems to have been habitually for Milton.
Outside of rhyming, both poems are remarkable achievements and play on their author’s great strengths – his phrase-making, his audacity with metaphor, and his magniloquent sound. Striking lines abound:
Forced to content, but never to obey,
Panting he lies and breatheth on her face;
She feedeth on the steam as on a prey
(Venus)
This is Shakespeare’s only use of steam in all his works, the editors observe.
Is thine own heart to thine own face affected?
Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?
Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected,
Steal thy own freedom, and complain of theft.
(Venus)
“The boar!” quoth she, whereat a sudden pale,
Like lawn being spread upon the blushing rose,
Usurps her cheek; she trembles at his tale,
And on his neck her yoking arms she throws.
She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck,
He on her belly falls, she on her back.
(Venus)
One more instance illustrates the realism Shakespeare mixes with his high style:
This said, he shakes aloft his ROMAN blade,
Which like a falcon towering in the skies
Coucheth the fowl below with his wings’
shade,
Whose crooked beak threats if he mounts he
dies:
So under his insulting falchion lies
Harmless LUCRETIA marking what he
tells
With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon’s
bells.
(Lucrece)
That gallimaufry The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) is presented as further evidence of Shakespeare’s popularity as the best amorous poet of the day. A continuous glow of mild pornography hangs over this compilation as well. Whatever their authenticity, these poems seem derived from already acknowledged works of Shakespeare:
Hot was the day, she hotter that did look
For his approach that often there had been.
Anon he comes and throws his mantle by,
And stood stark naked on the brook’s green
brim.
The sun looked on the world with glorious eye,
Yet not so wistly as this queen on him.
He, spying her, bounced in whereas he
stood;
“O Jove”, quoth she, “why was I not a
flood?”
The humid ambiguity of randy Cytherea waiting for Adonis by a watercourse could hardly be plainer. Then, in Stanza Nine, all delicacy is cast aside:
Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love,
Paler for sorrow than her milk-white dove,
For Adon’s sake, a youngster proud and wild,
Her stand she takes upon a steep-up hill.
Anon Adonis comes with horn and hounds;
She, silly queen, with more than love’s good
will,
Forbade the boy he should not pass those
grounds.
“Once”, quoth she, “did I see a fair sweet youth
Here in these brakes deep wounded with a
boar,
Deep in the thigh, a spectacle of ruth.
See in my thigh”, quoth she, “here was the
sore.”
She showed hers; he saw more wounds
than one,
And blushing fled, and left her all alone.
Is our editors’ general plea for equality of the poems with the dramatic writings affected by the many lyrics inserted in the plays? Are they like arias in music or are they passing divertissements? Some are ironic asides; others direct interventions, such as the Fool’s Blakean riddles in Lear. Yet others can contribute to formal masques, as happens in The Tempest. However we regard them, they do nothing to challenge the supremacy of blank verse and pontifical prose in Shakespeare’s later work. After “The Phoenix and the Turtle” there are only a few extant squibs of poems, if one excludes the Sonnets as most likely written largely in the previous century, though published in their entirety only in 1609. It was now plays all the way.
There is a final embarrassment one would wish were out of the way – the awful threat on his gravestone:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare
To digg the dust enclosed here!
Blest be the man that spares these stones
And curst be he that moves my bones.
How convenient it would be if there were a tradition of Jacobean tomb monuments being ordered from monumental masons, as hurried mourners can do today. Unfortunately he may have written the lines himself; certainly their doggerel has worked, and nobody has moved his bones to an ossuary.
Whatever the rest is, it isn’t silence. He still dominates English Literature and World Theatre. This new Arden edition should inspire all who think they know Shakespeare to return and visit him at the explosive start of his career. It’s a rough ride, but an exhilarating one.
Peter Porter's most recent collection of poems is Afterburner, 2004. His Saving from the Wreck: Essays on poetry appeared in 2001.
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