Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems

A. D. Cousins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138160613
• eBook ISBN: 9781317893684
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Alongside Spenser, Sidney and the early Donne, Shakespeare is the major poet of the 16th century, largely because of the status of his remarkable sequence of sonnets. Professor Cousins' new book is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade. He focuses in particular on their exploration of self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. Throughout he provides a comparative context, looking at the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. The relation between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays is also explored.

Chapter 1

Venus and Adonis

(I) THE MINOR EPIC. LODGE’S SCILLAES METAMORPHOSIS

Venus and Adonis was the first of Shakespeare’s poems to be published. It was registered at Stationers’ Hall on 18 April 1593 and may have been begun in the summer of the previous year.¹ For much of the time, approximately between that summer and May 1594, the London theatres were closed because of the plague.² His career as a playwright interrupted, Shakespeare took the opportunity to present himself publicly as someone who could write not only plays.³ He dedicated his poem to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who was then nineteen years old, prominent at court and a sought-after patron.⁴ As has often been pointed out, the wording of the dedication gives one no reason to believe that Shakespeare knew the Earl well, or even at all.⁵ Moreover, what he hoped to gain from dedicating the poem to Southampton is not clear. Shakespeare no doubt desired the prestige of patronage by the Earl; he also probably wanted more than prestige. It may be that he wanted hospitality in a comfortable residence outside London and hence away from the plague. Perhaps he wanted, indirectly or directly, financial support now that his livelihood as a dramatist was under threat.⁶ Whatever his likely hopes, his gains – if any – are unknown.

The poem through which Shakespeare courted the Earl’s attention is in kind a minor epic, or epyllion.⁷ Some reasons for poems such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and others by their contemporaries or successors being called ‘minor epics’ have been usefully suggested by Clark Hulse:

Minor epic is linked most closely to epic in its materials; its characteristic diction, verse forms, and mythological imagery all seek out the marvelous and often the extravagant. Its amorous action is quite literally the minor action of epic, set in counterpoint to the major themes of public and military virtue…. And, like so many epics, it is a mixed genre, presenting its objects with motifs from drama and lyric, especially the sonnet and pastoral.⁸

Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) appears to have been the first of the English minor epics. Like most of the minor epics subsequent to it, the poem is partly an imitation of and partly an elaboration on a story as re-told by Ovid. Not solely the Metamorphoses was used, of course, in Lodge’s making of his poem – something that also links it to others of its kind. Furthermore Lodge does not merely re-tell Ovid’s version of the Glaucus and Scilla myth; nor does he suggest that it has a moral content, as English verse translations or imitations of Ovidian narratives, prior to his poem, tended to do.⁹ He playfully revises the Ovidian narrative on which he draws – just as Ovid, in his epic, playfully revised the familiar form of the myth.¹⁰ Glaucus, for instance, becomes in Lodge’s poem a deft, amusing parody of the unhappy male lover to be seen in so much other Elizabethan verse: the sea-god ponderously complains, at comically tedious length, of his unrequited love (as in stanzas 18–32); he is comic, too, in his long-winded self-pity (as in stanzas 43–69). Then, too, in the Metamorphoses Scilla is transformed by a jealous rival, a witch, who poisons her, whereas in Lodge’s poem Cupid punishes her for disdaining Glaucus, her loyal suitor, but her consequent transformation results from her mental sufferings (see stanzas 115–24). Lodge’s revision of Ovidian fable is wittily parodic. Creating a (mostly) comic Glaucus, he parodies Ovidian narrative in order to parody an aspect of current literary fashion. And instead of tacking on or inserting a moral to legitimize his doubly parodic fiction, for the quite different benefit of an apparently young, male audience he offers male wish-fulfilment (a disdainful object of desire is punished) and male sexual fantasy (a bevy of attractive, sympathetic, sexually aware females surrrounds Glaucus, and he is freed from unrequited love).¹¹ The poem ends with the narrator’s repetition, notionally to the female reader but, more likely, for the male reader’s delectation, of a message from Glaucus: ‘Nymphs must yield, when faithful lovers stray not’ (L’ENVOY, 1.3).

The narrator, who in repeating that message confirms the poem’s abandonment of the convention that the Metamorphoses should be read as moral allegory, is himself one of the poem’s significantly new elements. He is the frame to the poem’s action; he is also closely involved in its action; in fact, he is a main figure in the poem from its beginning. Represented as mingling ironic ingenuousness with a more overt sophistication, a sensitivity to pathos with a sense of the ludic and the ludicrous, he is as well a quite distinctly characterized figure: like others in the tale in as much as he is a disappointed lover and (or) preoccupied with the psychology of sexual experience, but unlike those others in having the traits of ironic ingenuousness and so on.¹² Because he is indeed a main figure in the poem and quite distinctly individualized, Lodge’s narrator would seem to be new to Tudor verse narrative derived, by imitation or by translation, from the Metamorphoses – new, that is to say, with the appearance of the minor epic itself.¹³ Moreover, those features that seem to make him novel – and one would want to emphasize here his obtrusiveness in conjunction with the specific traits that distinguish him from the other figures in the poem – seem at the same time to make him resemble the narrator fashioned by Ovid in his epic.¹⁴ Lodge appropriately gave a poem close in spirit to the Metamorphoses a narrator recalling the ironic, sophisticated, game-playing narrator who guides the reader through Ovid’s tales of transformation.¹⁵

No one, I think, would want to argue that Venus and Adonis is both directly and heavily indebted to Scillaes Metamorphosis, although there have been suggestions that at some moments Shakespeare’s poem clearly echoes Lodge’s.¹⁶ Yet it would seem reasonable to argue that Lodge’s poem provided Shakespeare with an opportunity. Scillaes Metamorphosis was written primarily for a specific, sophisticated audience, the young men at the Inns of Court. When Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis he was, apparently, no longer writing for the very diverse audience of the playhouse but for an audience similar to that of Lodge’s poem; for a similar audience he wrote a poem of the same kind as Lodge’s.¹⁷ Of course one member of that new audience was hopefully identified by his poem’s being dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare, then, in his new role as non-dramatic poet, wrote for a new audience – particularly including the Earl as (possibly) also a patron – a new poem of a new kind.¹⁸ It now seems appropriate to look at the concerns and strategies of Shakespeare’s poem, and at how his poem relates not only to Scillaes Metamorphosis but, as well, to other poems by his contemporaries or successors.

(II) THE POEM’S NARRATOR. VENUS AND THE MULTIPLICITY, THE OTHERNESS OF LOVE

Before discussion of Venus and Adonis as they are fashioned in Shakespeare’s poem, something must be said of the poem’s narrator, for in presenting Venus and Adonis to the reader he himself is carefully presented. Unlike Lodge’s narrator he is not a character in the story he relates, yet like Lodge’s narrator he is distinctly individuated as a storyteller. He has some characteristics in common with the narrator of Scillaes Metamorphosis but those seem to derive from the characterization of Ovid’s narrator in the Metamorphoses. It may be that Shakespeare modelled his narrator on Lodge’s, elaborating on Lodge’s achievement; it is also possible, and I think more probable, that Lodge’s poem suggested to Shakespeare how effectively Ovid’s narrator could be recreated in English verse.¹⁹ Like the speaker of Ovid’s epic, Shakespeare’s urbanely plays with myth, implicitly being far too sophisticated to accept it merely at face value. He brings out its comic incongruities (like Ovid’s speaker, however, he does not always bring out merely the comic aspects or possibilities of ancient myth); he brings out its paradoxes (enlarging on or inventing them). He seems at a distance from what he describes (though, like Ovid’s speaker, he can also at times seem very responsive to scenes of pathos or of suffering); he confronts the reader with the unexpected; he favours epigrams and the epigrammatic – and also luxuriant description. One result of the many specific similarities between Shakespeare’s narrator and Ovid’s is a further and more comprehensive similarity: the former, like the latter, appears to be in almost total control of the mythic world that he pictures.²⁰ Thus Shakespeare’s narrator indicates his creator’s insight into and ability to recreate the narrator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; nonetheless, when one sees the narrator presenting and, hence, represented with Venus and Adonis, one sees that Shakespeare’s poem as a whole signals its maker’s mastery of the genre that Lodge had recently introduced into Tudor literature.

The Venus presented by Shakespeare’s narrator has been studied in recent times from mainly two angles. Sometimes she has been looked at as if a character in a play, which seems appropriate enough given that her creator was a playwright and that he gave her speech after speech. As a result, the consistencies, fluctuations and contradictions in her characterization have been often discussed, with a good deal of agreement but by no means with unanimity.²¹ Sometimes she has been studied in connection with particular aspects of Renaissance symbolism or thinking about ancient myths. Critical commentary adopting that angle of approach has occasionally interpreted Venus as a simple, symbolic figure but, more usually, as an evocatively allegorical one – especially, of course, in the context of some Renaissance interpretations of the Venus and Adonis story.²² Here, employing both well-established ways of approach, I want to offer a new account of Venus’ presentation in the poem. First it will be argued that the characterization of Venus, although often acknowledged to be various, is in fact far more diverse than has been recognized. Most of the manifold aspects of her, it will be suggested at the same time, accord with (maybe derive from, partly or wholly) ancient representations of her that were still known and studied in Shakespeare’s time, as can be seen from a range of contemporary books about the meanings of ancient myths.²³ The main points of that first argument will be: that even if most of the different aspects of Venus’ characterization seem conventional, frequently their conventionality is subverted; that, in presenting the goddess of love as having a great variety of aspects, Shakespeare’s narrator implies not merely love’s many-sidedness but its often incongruous multiplicity. The second argument put forward will be that one of the more important aspects of Venus’ characterization is her discovering the familiar, human experience of loving another in vain.²⁴ It will be suggested that her experiencing the misery of unrequited human love has significance for a couple of reasons. She comes to know something of not only the unhappiness to be found in human love but, as well, of how love can usurp control over a human consciousness.²⁵ Therefore the goddess of love comes experientially to know – to a degree – a phenomenon that she has necessarily seen yet never felt. For her, the experience of loving Adonis both in vain and obsessively is a new, alien experience: ultimately, the experience of love as otherness. The third and last major argument proposed in what follows will be that Venus, herself partly transformed by her unrequited love for Adonis, offers him her love as a means for his achieving self-transformation. To be more specific, it will be argued that, in offering Adonis her love, Venus simultaneously offers him metamorphosis, a redefined subjectivity, in which self-perfection and safety will be supposedly gained but a loss of self will be inevitable.

Venus had been seen since ancient times as having a wide range of aspects; there were, as various writers had demonstrated, many Venuses. Early in her initial wooing of Adonis, Venus uses a tactically considered, schematic language of sexual seduction, and it characterizes her as a goddess of physical desire, wise in the techniques of enticement. That characterization is developed when she goes on to say:

‘Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed,
And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow;
If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed
A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.

Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses,
And being set, I’ll smother thee with kisses.

‘And yet not cloy thy lips with loath’d satiety,
But rather famish them amid their plenty,
Making them red, and pale, with fresh variety:
Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.

A summer’s day will seem an hour but short,
Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.’

(ll. 13–24)

The rest of Venus’ opening speech suggests both the mingling of imagination with sensuality in her attempt to seduce Adonis and how intensely, almost boundlessly physical her desire for him is. The speech as a whole, then, shows the goddess of love to be skilled in the deceptive language and rhetoric of seduction; it shows, too, that she is obsessive in her desire, in effect seeking infinite physical enjoyment of Adonis who, in his physicality, is finite. Yet while Venus’ opening speech vigorously characterizes her, it does so in accord with two ancient versions of the goddess which were still current in the sixteenth century. Insofar as she is the calculating rhetorician of love, Shakespeare’s Venus recalls the Venus Mechanitis of the ancient world, the Venus practised in love’s verbal and other artifices.²⁶ Insofar as she is the goddess of virtually limitless physical desire, she recalls Venus Vulgaris, an ancient representation of Venus as the goddess of wholly sensual love.²⁷ Venus’ opening speech at once forcefully presents her and offers what can be seen as a conventional representation of her. It seems clear, however, that whether Shakespeare’s Venus merely harmonizes with or actually derives from convention, the conventional elements in her characterization are treated ironically. For a start, Venus fails as a rhetorician of love. Her language and tactics of seduction are problematic because some of their main images for praising Adonis’ exceptional beauty also highlight its transience and (or) vulnerability (‘flower’, ‘doves’, ‘roses’). But a far more important problem is that in tryin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Venus and Adonis
• Chapter 2 Lucrece
• Chapter 3 Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1–19: The Young Man, the Poet and Father Time
• Chapter 4 Shakespeare’s Sonnets 20–126: The Poet, the Young Man, Androgyny and Friendship
• Chapter 5 Shakespeare’s Sonnets 127–154: The Poet, the Dark Lady and the Young Man
• Conclusion
• Index