William Shakespeare and John Donne

Stages of the soul in early modern English poetry

Angelika Zirker

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526133298
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526133311
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

This study analyses concepts and representations of the soul in the poetry of William Shakespeare and John Donne. It shows how the soul becomes a linking element between the genres of poetry and drama, and how poetry becomes dramatic whenever the soul is at its focus. This double movement can be observed in Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and Donne's Holy Sonnets: in these texts, the connection between interiority and performance, psychology and religious self-care can be found, which is central to the understanding of early modern drama and its characteristic development of the soliloquy. The study thus offers a new reading of the poems by Shakespeare and Donne by analysing them, in different ways, as staged dialogues within the soul. It contributes to research on the soliloquy as much as on concepts of inwardness during the early modern period. The book is aimed at readers studying early modern literature and culture.

Part I

William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and the drama of the soul

1

Motivating the myth: allegory and psychology

Shakespeare’s epyllion¹ The Rape of Lucrece, first published in 1594, begins with the following lines:

From the besieged Ardea in all post,

Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,

Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host.

(1–3)²

Ardea is the capital of the Rutuli (see 234n7) which was burned by Aeneas and from whose ‘ashes the heron (ardea) emerged’ (234n7). But besides this historical and mythological context, the word ‘Ardea’ evokes Latin ardeo and ardens; both refer to burning and glowing desire; Cooper’s Thesaurus (1578) has ‘Ardere in virgine. Ouid. To be ravished with loue of’ (s.v. ‘Ardeo’). The opening words thus prepare the reader for the second and third lines by opening the semantic field of lust with this allusive wordplay.³

In Lucrece, the imagery of lust continues when Tarquin is described as being ‘borne by the trustless wings of false desire’. His desire is false because it is directed at the wife of another man. The adjective ‘false’ carries further negative connotations such as wrong, lying, trustless, and cheating (OED, ‘false, adj., adv and n.’ II.). While the Arden editors claim that ‘trustless’ is used in a new sense of the word and expresses that ‘Tarquin is sceptical of Lucrece’s chastity’ (237n2), the fact that his desire is ‘false’ points to a different reading. Were he sceptical of Lucrece’s chastity, he would not regard her body as such a desirable prize to be won, and he would not imagine how he will ‘girdle with embracing flames the waist / Of […] Lucrece the chaste’ (6–7). Primarily, it is his desire which is false, not to be trusted, treacherous and cruel (see also 47–8: ‘To quench the coal which in his liver glows. / O rash false heat’). ‘Of’ in ‘wings of false desire’ in this reading indicates that the wings are made of false desire.

But even though, contrary to the Arden editors, I do not think that Shakespeare uses ‘trustless’ in the sense of ‘[h]aving no trust or confidence; unbelieving, distrustful’ (OED, ‘trustless, adj.’ 2.), which the OED only documents for 1598, there is a double perspective involved: for ‘trustless’ need not primarily refer to Tarquin’s desire or to his view of Lucrece but to the wings on which Tarquin and his desire are borne. While it does not make sense to speak of wings that are distrustful (as the Arden editors obviously do), it makes sense to speak of desire’s wings that cannot be trusted, and this is not the same as regarding the desire itself as treacherous. Thus, while we (sharing Lucrece’s perspective) will perceive the dishonesty of Tarquin’s desire, Tarquin himself will come to realize that his desire is not supported by sufficient means to be truly fulfilled. The meaning ‘Having no […] confidence’ may be implied after all, but only with regard to Tarquin himself. The adjective thus refers to his being ‘trustless’ in the sense of him having no self-trust, a concept which is taken up again later in the poem: ‘For where is truth, if there be no self-trust?’ (158). Tarquin lacks trust in himself – and while the right desire is full of trust,⁴ his false desire is trustless, which is even more emphasized by the adjective ‘false’ that stresses the vicious character of Tarquin’s desire. This lack in Tarquin also foreshadows that he will later act out of weakness and not strength. In a single line Shakespeare manages by the apparent tautology of ‘trustless’ and ‘false’ to combine the two perspectives of Tarquin and Lucrece, the perpetrator and his victim.

Tarquin’s weakness results from his being ‘lust-breathed’, and this is the first instance where the soul implicitly comes into play (i.e. in line 3 of the poem).⁵ When man is created, the soul is breathed into him; the compound of lust with ‘breathed’ very much alludes to the divine inspiration of the soul into humankind (an overlap of Roman mythology/legend and Christian concepts that can be observed throughout the poem). In the case of Tarquin, this inspiration seems to have taken place by some devil rather than by God, which is why lust was breathed into him and seems to have taken the place of his soul. At the same time, he is also breathing lust (panting), which, together with the wings of desire, evokes the image of a dragon who is about to take the fair and chaste virgin into his captivity (see also Cheney, ‘Tarquin, Juliet, and Other Romei’ 115). The first few lines of the poem thus indicate that the inner state of Tarquin is of central interest to Shakespeare in his version of the story; later in the poem, after the rape, this will be complemented by a detailed interior view of Lucrece’s soul. The soul becomes a topic as early as in stanza one of the poem, and thus, I will argue, is one of the keys to understanding the text.

The third line of the poem also gives a hint with regard to another key, namely the way in which the complex inner states of the protagonists are made visible through language. The characterization of Tarquin on the level of content is mirrored on the level of language. This is also true for his soul as a space of antagonism: Tarquin is ‘borne by the trustless wings of false desire’ – the apparent parallelism (adjective followed by a noun) in fact contains an antagonistic structure and introduces a double perspective; another means of representing his inner debate and self-division in the poem is chiasmus. The relations of synonymy and parallelism as well as of chiasmus/oxymoron can be found throughout the poem, and they are part of the larger setup of the text in that they imitate the content iconically: form and content correspond to each other. They also become performative as the language enacts the content (see Zirker, ‘Performative Iconicity’). Through the antagonistic relationships between characters but also within them, the underlying structure of the poem is one of contrast and debate, very much in the sense and the tradition of agon in drama.

Drama therefore provides another key to the text, especially with regard to the soul. Like some of the Sonnets, Lucrece has been dubbed a ‘dramatic’ poem by various critics,⁶ and, indeed, the epyllion becomes a drama in which antagonistic characters as well as body and soul act and interact. The ‘dramatic’ quality is brought about not only by soliloquies and dialogues within the poem, but also by its immediacy of transmission with regard to thoughts and feelings, the inherent drama of its action, its generic relation with tragedy, and its content; revenge and suicide are motifs of drama that go back to antiquity. Its dramatic dimension begins as early as in the ‘Argument’ that precedes the poem in that it provides a summary of the story of Lucrece as presented by Livy, Ovid, and Painter (see Burrow ed. 240n): ‘The prefatory Argument functions rather as dumb-shows did in plays, providing the audience with essential narrative data and moral instruction which will not necessarily be repeated in the longer text’ (Introduction, Arden ed. 66).⁷ This dumb show, which is similar to the prologue of a play, is then followed by the exposition – Tarquin is introduced as being ‘lust-breathed’. Next comes the rising action, when he goes to Collatium and sees Lucrece (his inner debate can actually be regarded as a retarding moment), and his decision to rape her. The rape constitutes the peripety of the poem, followed by a retarding moment that is Lucrece’s ekphrasis of the Troy painting, and the catastrophe, Lucrece’s suicide. The epyllion even adheres to the three unities and is thus probably the only text in which Shakespeare does so (except for Venus and Adonis).

The dramatic setup of the epyllion is intricately linked to the topic of the soul which acquires a dramatic quality in that it becomes both a stage and an actor, and the essential drama of Lucrece is that of the soul.⁸ With regard to Tarquin, the soul is a stage on which a fierce battle is waged between the forces that urge him on and those that restrain him, e.g. when Tarquin’s inner forces enter a debate; the same goes for Lucrece, who finds herself in mutiny with herself and whose soul is the central actor in a drama of violation and liberation. But the soul also enters upon the stage of the poem, e.g. when, after the rape, Tarquin’s soul is described as a ‘spotted princess’.

These descriptions are part of the narrative transmission; the Arden editors note that Lucrece is a poem but is marked by its telling a story ‘with great immediacy in the present tense, with little sense of a distinct narrative persona’ (Introduction 10). The latter point is debatable – the poem clearly has a narrator, and the very existence of such a transmitting instance makes the poem lean towards the epic. The narrator structures the plot and conveys the events but also steps back whenever direct speech as well as the thoughts of the characters are conveyed, which means that he is integrated into the dramatic action and transmits the inner states of the characters in combination with the direct quotation of their thoughts and feelings in soliloquies and dialogues – dramatic modes of presentation and the narration of inner events thus go hand in hand in Shakespeare’s text.

This interaction of dramatic modes with psychological explorations of the characters still remains to be analysed. When Tarquin debates the matter of the rape in his ‘inward mind’ (185), he refers to the interiority of his thoughts. These thoughts are transmitted as in a soliloquy that is, however, allegorically transformed into a play staged within his soul; the good forces and the evil are fighting each other within him, very much in the tradition of Prudentius’s Psychomachia.⁹ This paradigm could also be found in morality plays as well as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus; Shakespeare modifies this transformation further in linking elements of psychomachia to stage elements in a poem. By focusing on the inner life of the characters, he establishes a new mode of presentation of the inward state. This means that the ‘old’ model as introduced by Prudentius is being integrated into a complex presentation of the psychological state both of Tarquin and Lucrece. But we do not just get a combination of allegory and psychology. They are linked with each other in such a way that the relationship itself between external action and being/existence on the one hand and the workings of the mind and soul on the other is held up to scrutiny. The expression ‘inward mind’, for example, illustrates this: it is tautological and signals towards the interiority of what is being described. ‘Inwardness’ was a rather new word at the time that suddenly came into fashion during the Renaissance;¹⁰ but it would have been sufficient to express the inwardness of what is being presented through the word ‘mind’ which refers to inner processes anyway: the emphasis is on the fact that this is an inner event in Tarquin which concerns his inner being and takes place within him. That this debate is set on an interior stage is directly expressed by Tarquin: ‘My part is youth, and beats these [sad pause and deep regard that beseem t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction: stages of the soul and drama in poetry
• Part I William Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece and the drama of the soul
• Part II John Donne’s Holy Sonnets and the so(u)le-talk of the soul
• Part III Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index