The Sonnets and Other Poems

The RSC Shakespeare

Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Jan Sewell

The Sonnets and Other Poems

Textual editing: Jonathan Bate with Jan Sewell
Introduction: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Penelope Freedman, Héloïse Sénéchal, and Jan Sewell

Editorial Advisory Board

Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Artistic Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Maria Evans, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

Introduction

Venus and Adonis

The Rape of Lucrece
and “A Lover’s Complaint”

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Other Poems

Key Facts

Venus and Adonis

The Rape of Lucrece

The Passionate Pilgrim

“To the Queen”

“Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (“The Phoenix and Turtle”)

Shakespeare’s Sonnets

“A Lover’s Complaint”

Textual Notes

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading

Shakespeare became famous as a poet before most people knew that he also wrote plays. To judge by the frequency of admiring allusions and demand for printed copies,
Venus and Adonis
was the most popular long poem of the Elizabethan age. The language of praise in a poem by Richard Barnfield, published in 1598, is typical:

In that same year of 1598, Francis Meres, an Oxford graduate with his finger on the pulse of the literary world, sought to dignify contemporary literature by comparing English poets and playwrights to their classical forebears. He numbered Shakespeare among the best for both tragedy and comedy, but also contrived an astute comparison for his non-dramatic poetry: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his
Venus and Adonis
, his
Lucrece
, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends.”

Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems, written during the period in 1593–94 when the theaters were closed due to plague, are based on the Roman poet Ovid. They are calling cards which announce his poetic sophistication, perhaps in response to the jibe in
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit
(1592) about “Shake-scene,” the “upstart crow,” the vulgar jack-of-all-trades from the country.
Venus and Adonis
takes a one-hundred-line story from the third book of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and expands it into more than a thousand lines of elegant artifice. Ovid provided the narrative framework: the comic idea of the lovely young Adonis’ resistance to love, the dark twist of his boar-speared death, and the final release of floral transformation. Shakespeare wove into this structure elaborate arguments for and against the “use” of beauty. These were opportunities for him to show off his rhetorical skill, while also engaging with an issue much debated in Elizabethan times, namely the relative value of courtly accomplishments and military ones. The successful courtier would have been equally adept in the arts of praise and chivalry. Shakespeare gives the chivalric skills to the hunter Adonis, then inverts the norm of man-praising-woman by having a woman—and not just any woman, but Venus, the Queen of Love, herself—praise a young man. For this, he pulled together different parts of Ovid: the witty persuasions to love are in the manner of the
Amores
and the
Ars Amatoria
, while the figure of the vain youth has something of Narcissus, and that of the “froward” woman more than a little of Salmacis, who, in book 4 of the
Metamorphoses
, seduces another gorgeous but self-absorbed boy, Hermaphroditus.

Most distinctively, Shakespeare wrote his narrative poem as if it were a play. Great swathes of
Venus and Adonis
are composed in the form of dialogue, while the eye contact between male and female subjects is self-consciously theatricalized:

In both their speech patterns and their accompanying actions, Venus and Adonis are turned into dramatic characters, their story into a theatrical encounter, albeit one that relies on a naturalistic rural setting peopled with animals and natural forces that could not have been represented onstage—though in the early twenty-first century, the Royal Shakespeare Company achieved a small theatrical triumph by turning the poem into a puppet show, influenced by Japanese bunraku, complete with horse, hare, and boar, and with an actor adopting the wry voice of the narrator. There was a precedent for this adaptation in Ben Jonson’s 1614 comedy
Bartholomew Fair
, in which Christopher Marlowe’s poem “Hero and Leander,” a work closely related to
Venus and Adonis
, underwent transformation at the hands of a puppet master.

The Elizabethan reader’s pleasure in Shakespeare’s poem lay in its cunning rhetoric, the inventive conceit of its language. The resourceful Venus has many an example:

The double entendre whereby landscape and body parts become as one is typical of the poem: Shakespeare is trying out that language of indefatigable innuendo that will characterize so many of his subsequent plays. He is also experimenting with the idea that sexual attraction is sparked by contrariness and apparent disdain. The dynamic between a pair of erotically charged horses anticipates not only the relationship of Venus and Adonis, but also those of the speaker of the sonnets and his beloved, not to mention Berowne and Rosaline in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and Beatrice and Benedick in
Much Ado about Nothing
:

The poem ends with the death of Adonis, described as a pattern that will recur perpetually. This sense of inevitable future repetition is what gives the story its mythic, archetypal quality. In one tradition of interpretation, the tale was read as a vegetation myth: Abraham Fraunce, in a mythography published the year before Shakespeare’s poem, interpreted Adonis as the sun, Venus as the upper hemisphere of the earth, and the boar as winter. Shakespeare, though, did not go in this direction: he was more interested in the nature of human sexual desire, making the anemone-like Adonis flower symbolize the transience of beauty and the vulnerability that is created by erotic longing.
Venus and Adonis
moves toward an etiology of love’s anguish: “Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend.” And yet the tone throughout remains gossamer-light, as the reader is invited to delight in the reversal of conventions (woman as seducer, man effeminate and passive) and the excursions into a vibrant surrounding countryside of hunted hares and randy horses.

Venus doesn’t metamorphose herself into the boar in the manner of Ovid’s Jupiter becoming an animal in order to rape a mortal girl. The story is about frustration rather than violation because a woman cannot easily rape a man. The tone is set not by the spilling of blood toward the end, but by the earlier sequences in which the violence is playful and nobody really gets hurt: “Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust.”

While for most of
Venus and Adonis
, sexual desire is a source of comedy, Shakespeare’s second narrative poem is unquestionably tragic because Tarquin does rape Lucrece. The story of sexual pursuit is replayed in a darker key. Having made a comic spectacle of the rapacious goddess, Shakespeare makes a tragic spectacle of the raped emblem of chastity. The two poems are opposite sides of the same coin, as may be seen from their structural resemblance: in each, an ardent suitor attempts to gain the reluctant object of her/his sexual desire by means of rhetorical persuasion, fails, and indirectly or directly precipitates the death of the object of desire. The difference between the two works is that Adonis dies with his chastity intact—he is only metaphorically raped by the boar—whereas Lucrece stabs herself because she has been ravished. Both poems are centrally interested in the way in which linguistic art is instrumental in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction.

The Rape of Lucrece
is not only Shakespeare’s most sustained imitation of a classical source, it is also a supreme example of the art of “copiousness” that was recommended by sixteenth-century humanist literary theorists: Shakespeare expanded the seventy-three lines of the Lucrece story in Ovid’s
Fasti
into nearly two thousand. As with
Venus and Adonis
, the most significant elaborations are those that invest the characters with linguistic arts. Three extended discourses are introduced: Tarquin’s inward disquisition as to whether he should carry through his desire, the disputation between the two characters in the bedroom, and Lucrece’s formal complaint after the rape. The genre of the “complaint” seeks to give a voice to the women who are the victims of history: it is the mode of Queen Margaret in her farewell to the Duke of Suffolk in 2
Henry VI
and the voice of the team of lamenting women in
Richard III
. “A Lover’s Complaint,” published with Shakespeare’s
Sonnets
in 1609, is a self-contained foray into the genre.

Nothing provokes desire more than antithesis. The more artless Lucrece is, the more Tarquin wishes to exercise the arts of love upon her. In the Ovidian source, the very fact that Lucrece has not dressed her hair seductively, that it falls carelessly (“neglectae”) on her neck, makes Tarquin all the more hot to seduce her. In Shakespeare, “Her hair like golden threads played with her breath — / O modest wantons, wanton modesty!” The oxymoron comes to the core of the poem’s depiction of Tarquin’s antithetical desire.
The Rape of Lucrece
is full of puns such as “for his prey to pray he doth begin”: such play of linguistic contraries is not just ornament, for it figures the psychology of contrariness. Tarquin’s desire increases in proportion to Lucrece’s unattainability. The psychology is similar to that in the sonnet tradition, where it is the frosty disdain of the object of desire that energizes the lover into verse.

Tarquin is inflamed by the very image of Lucrece’s exemplary chastity. The word itself is enough to fire him up: “Haply that name of ‘chaste’ unhapp’ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite.” His lust is also bound up with the dynamics of power: the idea of Lucrece’s loyalty to her husband provokes envy and the thought that “meaner men” should not be entitled to possess anything which he, the king’s son, lacks. Tarquin is an image of the same thing as Angelo in
Measure for Measure
: a man who is made very excited by the thought of purity and whose dominant social position gives him (he thinks) a freedom to satisfy his desires without paying a price.

On the way to Lucrece’s bedroom, Tarquin’s torch is almost extinguished by the wind which tries to stay his steps, then reignited by his own hot breath. This kind of enlivening detail is typically Shakespearean: it is no coincidence that the poem’s stealthy pacing to the bedroom is reimagined in those great theatrical nightpieces, Macbeth as the embodiment of “withered murder” en route to Duncan’s chamber “With Tarquin’s ravishing strides” and Iachimo in
Cymbeline
emerging from the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom with the words “Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded.” Though it was subsequently turned into a play by Thomas Heywood,
The Rape of Lucrece
is not a dramatic poem in the dynamic sense: it is interested in the action of language, not a language of action. Yet it does share with the Shakespearean drama a taste for interior monologue. Tarquin stops in his tracks before reaching the bedroom “And in his inward mind he doth debate”—for twelve whole stanzas. This retards the action but opens up the character of Tarquin, allowing the reader to get inside his mind, to see the “disputation / ’Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will” in a dry run for the soliloquies of Angelo and Macbeth.

At the end of the poem, the final consequence of the rape is played through as the Tarquins are heaved off their throne and the Roman republic is established. It is because loss of empire is the ultimate cost which Tarquin pays for his conquest—the military metaphors are all-pervasive—that his victory is a defeat. The oxymoronic structure of the narrative is thus brought to a climax: Tarquin’s gain is his family’s loss, Lucrece’s loss is Rome’s gain. She is the sacrificial victim required for the bringing of a new political order.

Before Lucrece’s suicide, she speaks to herself for more than a thousand lines. First she tries to sublimate her anguish through the traditional mode of the female “complaint,” with its highly formalized expressions of woe. But this tradition is moribund: the elaborate rhetoric simply does not work for her. In a “helpless smoke of words” she endlessly reduplicates verbal figures without achieving any emotional advance. She achieves a degree of catharsis through her identification with other archetypal female victims: Philomel, who was released from her anguish by being transformed into a nightingale, and the suffering Hecuba in the painting of the fall of Troy that she contemplates (an opportunity for Shakespeare to display his skill in the art of
ekphrasis
, the intricate poetic animation of a scene in a painting).

At the climax of the viewing, a face stares back at Lucrece. It is that of false Sinon, who insinuated the fatal wooden horse into Troy. In Lucrece’s mind, Sinon’s face is metamorphosed into that of Tarquin, provoking her to scratch Sinon out of the painting in her most vigorous action prior to her suicide. Rape is mental as well as physical spoliation. Lucrece’s attempt to erase the image of her attacker from her mind is fruitless: you can’t undo a rape, you can’t undo history. The fall of Troy and the deed of Tarquin will never be unwritten. Lucrece herself recognizes this, but her action affords her a degree of satisfaction: “At last she smilingly with this gives o’er: / ‘Fool, fool!’ quoth she, ‘His wounds will not be sore.’” That wry smile is a kind of victory over Tarquin.