Smash hit

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.

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