The Erotic Narratives: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece
The lily and the rose in Venus and Adonis belong to the world of the early sonnets and the reading of the narrative poems after the sonnet sequence leaves us convinced of their relative immaturity. When approached in the spirit of the literary historian their interest is undeniable. They are representative of two genres cultivated by Shakespeare's contemporaries and show once more his willingness to follow a convention. Venus and Adonis (1593) was suggested by Lodge's Ovidian epyllion, Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) and delighted 'the younger sort', Gabriel Harvey dixit: only Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander can compete with it. The 'graver labour' promised in the dedication pleased 'the wiser sort'; like Daniel's earlier Complaint of Rosamond, The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a historical narrative 'tragedie' whose ancestry can be traced to the Myrroure for Magistrates (1559). In both poems Shakespeare improves upon his models yet fails to transmute the convention successfully.
 | | The British Library | | Title page of Shakespeare's first published work, the narrative poem Venus and Adonis. |
Parodying Keats on the Sonnets one could say that Venus and Adonis is 'full of fine things said unintentionally', though not arising here from 'the intensity of working out conceits', which are either precious ('A lily prison'd in a gaol of snow', l. 362) or semi-burlesque (the 'stillitorie' of ll. 443-4). The fine things are images from Nature--the 'dive-dapper peering through a wave' (l. 85)--vignettes of English country-life: the hare-hunting, 'moralized' by Venus as Jaques will moralize on deer-hunting (ll. 679-708), yet a digression; or the episode of the stallion and the jennet, intended as an inverted parallel to the wooing of Adonis by Venus, yet extended and enjoyed for its own sake (ll. 259-318).
What the narrator's main 'intention' was remains uncertain. Contemporary opinion about the poem and Shakespeare's own admission that the next 'heir of his invention' should be 'graver' make it very unlikely that the intention was didactic. If the first part of the poem is meant to arouse the reader's own lust as Venus strives to inflame with desire the reluctant Adonis, it is less provocative and witty than Donne's Elegy 'To his Mistris Going to Bed'. The lusty goddess who plucks the youth from his horse, pushes him backward, lies on him as soon as he is down (ll. 41-4), or counterfeits fainting to clasp him to her breast (ll. 463-564), is a comic figure, grotesque at times, as when Adonis 'wrings her nose' to revive her (ll. 475). The situation could have been handled in a Cervantic manner but the contrast between the actions of the characters and the prevailing prettiness of the descriptive style creates in the reader an unresolved conflict of impressions. And if Venus's love's labours lost are comedy, the death of Adonis is tragedy. The two parts are linked by artful correspondences: the red-white imagery (ll. 901-2, 1053-4), the erotic wound of Adonis slain by the boar's kiss (ll. 1111-17), but the highly artificial style keeps us at a distance from the tragic scene and the emotions of Venus. Through the poem the artist seems at once hesitant about tone and too confident in the power of rhetoric. More favourable interpretations have been offered, notably by William Keach (Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, Hassocks, Sussex, 1977) describing the theme of the epyllion as 'the opposition between sexual love so intense and aggressive that it becomes self-frustrating and beauty so selfish and inaccessible that it becomes self-destructive'. Yet, even granting this, one may complain of prolixity and one would like to think the poet mocked the Elizabethan partiality to copia when he compared the 'tedious' lament of Venus to 'copious stories' that 'End without audience and are never done' (ll. 841-6). Vain wish, since wordiness grew worse in Lucrece!na size=2>The limitations of Lucrece
The experience of the dramatist may be noted in the haste in medias res, the creation of atmosphere and the imagination of movement when Tarquin's ravishing strides lead him to the bed of Lucrece along corridors where the wind wars with his torch (ll. 302-15). The ravisher, alas, speaks too much and his 'disputation / 'Tween frozen conscience and hot burning will' (ll. 190-280, 348-57) is as otiose as Macbeth's soliloquies are dramatic. Lucrece in her turn pours out a flood of words which the rapist hears patiently. When he at last has done the deed, worse follows: a complaint of 338 lines. Anaphoric questions or injunctions, exempla and repetitions of all kinds succeed one another relentlessly. Narration is mercifully resumed when Lucrece calls her maid and the 'silly groom' whose blushes declare him an honest country servant, offering again a glimpse of real life in England. When, 'pausing for means to mourn a newer way', the heroine thinks of a painting made for Priam's Troy, this elaborate piece of ut pictura poesis lacks the sensuous vividness of Spenser's similar efforts and the tragic turns to the grotesque when she thinks of tearing with her nails the beauty of the strumpet Helen (ll. 1471-2; cf. ll. 1469-70, 1564).
Throughout the poem symbolism is conventional: the 'silent war of lilies and of roses' (l. 71; cf. ll. 269, 386, 478-9) is as artificial as Swinburne's opposition of 'the raptures and roses of vice' to 'the lilies and languors of virtue'. Whether there is a graver theme than the moral conflict is not evident. The poet is hardly interested in the theological debate on Lucrece's suicide (only glanced at in ll. 1156-76) and ironic readings are baseless, as R. Levin has demonstrated (R. Levin, 'The ironic reading of The Rape of Lucrece', Shakespeare Survey, 34, 1981, pp. 85-92). The dramatist, one may add, was unlikely to blame a Roman heroine for dying in the high Roman fashion.
A Lover's Complaint, though published with the Sonnets, belongs in genre and style with the narrative poems. Its ascription to Shakespeare is now seldom denied and the lover has some resemblance with the narcissistic young man of the early sonnets.
If no sonnet was composed after 1600, which may be doubted (the eclipse of the 'mortal moon' in Sonnet 107 may allude to the death of Elizabeth), Shakespeare's last poem was 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'. It is unique and to some critics the greatest 'metaphysical' poem though utterly unlike Donne's Songs and Sonnets. It was included in a collection of apparently occasional poems, Chester's Love's Martyr (1601), but, whoever the dead birds were (speculation ranges from Sir John Salusbury and his wife to Essex and Elizabeth or Essex and Southampton), it transcends the occasion. When writing it Shakespeare, one feels, could not but think of some of the sonnets in which he had celebrated the love that made him one with the fair youth. His imagination carried the feeling to a new intensity by a play on abstractions in a liturgical setting. The play is as serious as Platonic dialectics or Christian speculations on the Trinity: So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one:
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain. The abstractions would not be so real if they were not steeped in strangeness from the opening words: Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree This is the remoteness of the land Milton called 'Araby the blest'; the remoteness of a lost Eden in the wide world and the poet's heart. And to lovers of poetry, if not to the historian, this poem, though compact and difficult, can be allowed to speak for itself, the magic of sound and cadence making comment unnecessary. |
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