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:
