SHAKESPEARES POETRY

BIOGRAPHY
William Shakespeare was born, in Stratford-on-Avon in 1564 and died in 1616. He moved to London and he became the principal actor in the Lord Chamberlains company until 1603. Before 1594 he had established a friendship with the Earl of Southampton a very important figure in his works. His posthumous criticism has been very active. Many of the most important writers in criticizing him are Pope, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Walt Whitman and in foreign countries figures such as Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Lessing, Schlegel and many others. The Shakespearean interest during the 18th century and the 19th effervesced into a movement know as Shakespeare Idolatry

NARRATIVE POEMS
A narrative poem is poetry that tells a story about anything. The poem can be short or long, and the story it relates to can be simple or complex. Sometimes the poems lines have a rhyme pattern and sometimes they do not rhyme at all. With this kind of writing Shakespeare was going with the crowd, the themes dealt in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece had the greatest popular appeal and are written in the most conventional stanza-forms.

VENUS AND ADONIS

Venus and Adonis was published in April 1593 and appeared shortly afterwards with a fully signed dedication by the author to the earl of Southampton, in which he describes the poem as the first heir of my invention in the sense that it was the first piece of Shakespeares writings that actually appeared in print. It was the poets most popular work, going into 16 editions before 1640. Venus and Adonis tells the story of the goddess of love, Venus, who falls in love with a handsome mortal, Adonis, a lover of boar and hare hunting, and tries to woo him and distract him from his haunting. Nevertheless, he is reluctant and rejects her all the time. Finally, she finds him killed by a boar and she puts a curse on love, saying that it will be full of paradoxes. The story must be seen as an epyllion. The form is an erotic narrative poem strongly sensual and lacking any assertion of spiritual love. Its stanza consists of an iambic pentameter (in poetry, a line of verse containing five metrical feet) quatrain and a couplet with the rhyme scheme ababcc. It is called the Venus and Adonis stanza after its first use in this poem. The style is richer and glower than the one used in previous Histories and comedies. It is full of rhetoric but it is more the rhetoric of the Renaissance treatises than the Ovids one. The main source is the version of the story in the tenth book of Ovids Metamorphoses. Other episodes in the Metamorphoses which contribute something are Salmacis and Hermafroditus, and Narcissus and Echo, and also Hippolytus. Therefore this narrative poem belong to The Ovidian mythological narrative genre, which was one of the most popular ones of the 1590s and Shakespeare is among its first distinguished exponents. Shakespearean poem is not just an explanation of a floral phenomenon (as the Ovid's one), that is, how the anemone got is colour, but also it is an explanation of love's urgencies, perversities and contrarieties; and this were the subjects of Shakespeare's next plays. Venus and Adonis is closely related to the first seventeen sonnets, in which Shakespeare urges his friend to marry and have children, using Venus arguments among others. These sonnets were probably written at the same time as the narrative poem. ..THE RAPE OF LUCRECE The Rape of Lucrece was published in 1594 in the Hall Book of the Worshipful Company of Stationers intituled The Ravyshement of Lucrece. It was dedicated to Southampton in more

intimate terms than Venus and Adonis and it must be the graver labour mentioned in the epistle to the earlier work, it is also twice long and more traditional in manner, with a moral and tragic tone. In regard to the sources, it talks about a story told by two Latin authors, Ovid and Livy, as well as several writers in English as Chaucer, Geoffrey Bullough and Painter. But the differences between Shakespeares work and the previous ones are evident, firstly, it is over nine times longer than Chaucers version (the longest of the previous ones) secondly, it does not follow in style and structure earlier versions of this story, for example, Shakespeares Lucreces verbose was not suggested before, in the beginning it makes no reference to some facts, chastity was not mentioned by Ovid... and this last point is used by feminists, among others, to see the development of women in Shakespeare's works. The poem is divided into two parts, the first tells of Tarquins exploit, and the second one provides the lament of Lucrece. For the first episode the model was the large collection of historical tales entitled A Mirror for Magistrates and for the second part it was chosen a variation of these tales, Samuel Daniels Complaint of Rosamond, a complaint poem broadly classified as Ovidian, although Shakespeares tone remains remote from Ovid. On the other hand, it follows the classical advice to open with an action, that is, in medias res and the action is set indoors for the most part of the poem. It is also written in Rhyme Royal whose rhyme scheme is ababbcc and consisting on a 7-line stanza in iambic pentameter (Chaucer was the pioneer of this scheme), with an elegant language and imagery, showing Shakespeares technical skill. The Rape of Lucrece has been seen as a storehouse of Shakespearian themes and images and it is difficult not to see it in retrospect taking into account our knowledge of the plays. The poem has found its place in collected editions or as a way of know Shakespeares imagery, themes, etc. for scholars; but this glory has added little to its own reputation among ordinary readers, it remains the less known and enjoyed of the writers works. But we have to forget about the plays for not to regard this works as an adjunct to them, yet in its own right, it is a striking manifestation of Shakespeares creative power.

THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE (DOVE).

The poem dates from 1598 or early 1599 rather than the more traditional, 1601, year in when it was published. This poem belongs to a little collection published under the name of Loves Martyr by Roger Charter. This book contains many poems from many authors such as John Marston, George Chapman, and Benjamin Johnson etc. Shakespeares little contribution to the collection is difficult and enigmatical, and no one has yet offered any satisfactory interpretation of its inner meaning. The poem is written in strict trochaic tetrameter, in which thirteen verses have a rhyme-scheme abba, and it is followed by a threnos whose rhyme-scheme is aaa. The poem deals with love, beauty, truth and constancy through two characters, The Phoenix and the Turtle, from which it takes the name, but the two characters are dead or nearly to be dead. One author says that in this poem, the phoenix is referring to a woman and the turtle to a man and from this union emerges not a child but a new phoenix. From the point of view of other author, the poem exploits a paradox to produce art, not political or social commentary. Another author considers, Shakespeare uses platonic ideas about human love and presents them in a metaphorical fashion. The poem, apart from these topics, does not deal with immortality but with mortality; the death of the phoenix is the culmination of the metaphysical surprises in the poem. In this poem there are few characters which make reference to famous people in that moment: The phoenix, the turtledove, the eagleetc. The phoenix may make reference to the Queen Elizabeth I who reigned during 45 years and lived 69 years, as the phoenix, who lived for exceptional numbers of years. But the link between the Queen and the Phoenix is in the portrait of the queen made by Hilliard (1575) where the Queen has a medallion with a phoenix on it. Now, the turtledove makes references to Robert Deveroux , earl of Essex, of whom is said to be the lover of Queen Elizabeth I. He led a rebellion against the Queen and because of that was beheaded. It could be possible a link between the Arabian Tree and the Throne of England. And Finally, The eagle could make reference to the new King, James I of England

(Buscar lo que dijo la profe-Ana)

THE SONNETS INTRODUCTION

The sonnets were published in 1609 when Shakespeare was 45 and he was already the author of most of plays that have made him famous. The book was untitled as Shake-spears sonnets. Neuer before imprinted. This book contains about 154 sonnets and a longish poem in Rhyme Royal called A lovers complaint. It is said that his poems were distributed between his friends and the publication was made without his approval. Even, there is a testimony which corroborates this theory by Francis Mere. The editor was Thomas Thorpe, who included an enigmatic dedication, and there are many theories about that. Apart from the enigmatic dedicatory, there is the question about the dark lady and the rival poet. Many authors had tried to identify them but there are just hypothesis about that. About the Rival poet, for instance, many authors have said that probably he could be: Christopher Marlow or George Chapman.

CHARACTERISTICS Division: Young man and Dark-Lady

The sonnets are untitled, they have only a number. They are 154 sonnets usually divided into 2 parts and published with a long work called A Lovers Complaint; the first part goes from 1 to 126 and the second one from 127 to 152. The first part is addressed to a beautiful young man using a more polite and elevated vocabulary than in the second part, having this to do with the decorum since the young man remains to a high class while the dark-lady to a lower class, who is address the second part to, there the poetic focus shifts away from the friend to a seductive treacherous dark lady and they deal with her charms, with the poets adulterous passion for her and also with the disgust when she proves false. Many authors think that these two sections are related in some way. For example, in poem 40 he forgives the youth for being seduced by his mistress and in some poems of the second group the poet asks the lady why she must enslave not only him but his sweetst friend, that is, the young man. These poems of the first group are said to remain a distinct sub-sequence. These two sections are not related with the last two poems (153-154). They are imitations of an epigram in the Greek Anthology devoted to Cupid, etc. It seems that these poems separate those two groups from the work in rhyme royal A Lovers Complaint. The sonnets addressed to the dark lady seem to be less homogeneous, even they have been called a disordered appendix although there is evidently some grouping in the sonnets and there is no obvious lack of coherence. The sonnets are divided in this way: 1-27 the poet urges the young man to marriage and progenyone of the 3 solutions to the topic of time as an enemy in Shakespeare, the biological one, together with the literary solution and transcendental solution. In some of the poems he is called You and in other ones in the more intimate Thou. From the poem 18 to 126 the poet addresses the youth on different topics and occasions. Along the poems the sense of intimacy increases, admiration warms into love At first the poet was shy and could only express himself through the poems; the poet is separated by travel and thinks continuously of the youth (27) then the friend steals the poets mistress, but is forgiven (40-2), etc. Going deeper into these two sections, we can see important differences between the young man and the dark lady. The young man represents the spiritual, pure love because although having characteristics of the human love, the poet removes or avoids the sexual part of love, there is no sex. The dark lady also called by him Black Woman represents sex without romance, it is not as pure as the love felt for the young man, these sonnets record the poets love for a dark beauty who is faithless to him, they express repulsion as well as fascination, the Dark

Lady is seen as cruel because she is promiscuous the bay where all men ride. She is also physically unattractive, false to her bed-vow, etc and yet irresistibly desirable. The Dark Lady contradicts all the Elizabethans patterns of beauty, so Shakespeare is subverting the conventions. On the other hand, the poet gives her some characteristics that humanise her. Structure The sonnets consist of four quatrains and a final couplet, composed in a iambic pentameter which rhyme-scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. It is formed by three quatrains and a final couplet. In the first quatrain it is exposed the theme; in the second, the argument; in the third, the conflict; and in the couplet the conclusion. Not all the sonnets follow this structure: about a third of them are fairly exceptionable in having the logical structure but about a half of them might be said to be tolerably workmanlike in this respect. Shakespeare manipulates, extracts new effects within the rhetorical and metrical framework of the sonnet. Topics The diversity of the topics is the first thing that attracts our attention when we read The Sonnets. These topics, at the same time differentiated and interrelated, form the significant framework of the series. This great variety of topics does not mean the exclusiveness of them. He made use of traditional poetic topics (present in his previous or contemporary authors) but he provided them a unique and original style. The love-inspiration Elizabethan binomial, base for the sonnets writing, is faded in Shakespeare because of his concern of giving an answer to the human- love conflicts. Love is the main topic in The Sonnets and with it come together some subsidiary topics. There are two axes, one of them is: poet-friend-rival poet; and the other one is: poet-dark lady-friend. Both of them corroborate Shakespeare's originality as a sonneteer, since he inverted the Petrarchan formula changing the lady for the friend, manipulating the loving couple with the resulting increase of the characters involved until four, replacing the fair beauty of inaccessible virtue by a dark-haired woman whose physical and moral qualities are uncertain, as his feminine loving object. These parallelisms affect as much to the formal dimension of the sonnet as to content aspects. But, above all, what The Sonnets have really unique is their own essence. Nevertheless, there are also similarities with regard to the Petrarchans, since like them Shakespeare focuses in the Platonic component (love, beauty), or in the love dialectic. As we have said above, not only is the love the outstanding topic in the sonnets, there are other important aspects as time. In his sequence Shakespeare includes mainly the negative sense of it saying that it is cruel, despotic, fallacious, etc. for being the accomplice of the decadence and pessimism, of the painful absence of his friend, of the ephemeral nature of all youth and beauty and finally of death. (e.g.: Pedro) The poet presents his battle against it because the main thing that he wants to preserve is the loving object par excellence in The Sonnets, his friend with his youth and beauty. In this way, he suggests two answers or solutions. The first one is the perpetuation of his friend through the procreation and the second one is the artistic perpetuation, poetic in this particular case, of the loving object. But the latter does not satisfy him because for him it is something cool, and in the last sonnets Shakespeare makes reference to his own love for his friend, a love that no decrease with the pass of time. Also we can see the unfaithfulness represented by the three main characters (poet- friend- dark lady) because it is thought that the friend and the dark lady had an affair and Shakespeare was disillusioned with that fact. Together these central topics there are other secondary thematic elements such as death, weariness of world, frustrations of the poet, etc., evil in form of lust, betrayal or selfishness. There are similarities between these sonnets and the medieval European courtly love tradition, above all in the sonnets to his friend. Shakespeare presents an innovative use of this

tradition since he skilfully manipulates the three distinctive features of this tradition: humility (it is in the own essence of the courtly love, always dishonourable); adultery (the rival poet); and religion of love. The fourth one, courtesity, is omitted given the absence of a lady herself in The Sonnets. Style The internal poetic structure of The Sonnets is especially rhetorical, although they offer a significant organizational variety. Shakespeare assimilated splendidly the rhetorical art, as we can see in his works, to such an extent that often art is confused with nature, achieving his own poetic inspiration. He applied rhetorical and stylistic techniques of composition to his sonnets. They (given its quality of imaginative literature written in verse and in vernacular) have the ability of persuading or moving. Therefore, they allow the rhetorical method of composition, addressed to a popular audience. He had the conscience of a heterogeneous audience composed by aristocracy, intellectuals and also the masses. The caesura can appear in the middle of the verse line after the second or the third foot dividing it into two almost equal hemistiches. The enjambement does not appear much in The Sonnets. The phonological wealth constitutes one of the most outstanding stylistic aspects of The Sonnets, because the linguistic interest in the Elizabethan period was focused on sound aspects: its phonological resources usually go beyond the verse line, linking the different lines of a quatrain or even two quatrains between them. Therefore, the most prevailing rhetorical resources are alliteration, consonance, assonance, vowel harmony, among others. Shakespeare's language is the result of his interaction between the state of the language of his time, which was very different to Modern English because lots of words have changed its meaning and for other reasons, and his particular use of it. Most of the vocabulary is simple, composed by monosyllabic Saxon terms and also polysyllabic Latin ones. The Sonnets' language is mainly poetical due to the abundance of rhetoric resources. Nevertheless, the impression it produces to the reader is one of naturalness, even conversational. They came together two different styles: the rhetorical and eloquent one and the simple and direct one. When he is reproducing the negative dimension of human love or the devastating effects of the pass of time, he usually uses the direct or simple style. At that time, there was an intention to elevate the language and also increase its vocabulary, both were permanent features of the Elizabethan literature; and Shakespeare was particularly praised in the first one. The main methods he used for this task were the use of borrowings, composition from existing terms and the use of the pun. CONTROVERSIES IN THE SONNETS Ana (When written, printed with his approval, whos the Dark-Lady, Rival poet) (Homosexualitu) The dedication The problem of the dedication has been much studied. Who is this Mr. W.H.? It is very accepted that the recipient was the Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesly, as in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, although it is hardly a convincing explanation. Others think that this dedication was not for the inspirer of the poems but for the procurer of the poems, who furnish Thorpe with copy since begetter in Elizabethan English may mean procurer as well as inspirer. Continuity of the Sonnets The Sonnets have had other problems, and one of them is their continuity, some scholars have give a solution to the problem with a reordering of the sonnets to from a narration, but this is not very followed. It is true that some continuities are evident, and we can find paired poems as poems on insomnia (27-8), the four elements (44-5), emotional slavery

(57-8) (see) and there are also several points at which an initial But or Thus locks a sonnet into the argument of its predecessor. Other characteristics knit the poems together as a rhythm, a rhyme, a quirk of syntax or an echoing image; for example the verbal echo of the most famous four sonnets (106-9) (comparison), which in these reordering had been separated, so, it is thought that they dont need to be reordered because when words are not echoic, the images are tied, or the argumentative cast is consistent, etc. A biographical reading, as we understand it now, it is not the best way of reading for these sonnets. Shakespeare stands behind the first person as Sidney in Astrophil and Stellasometimes near the poetic I, sometimes farther off, but never without some degree of rhetorical projection, they are not autobiographical in a psychological mode. But this is not surprising, autobiography hardly existed in the 16 th century England and what there were related only deeds and opinions, not inward thought and emotion, this does not occur until 17 th century with the keeping of diaries. In the sonnet 107, we can distinguish a punctual period of time. (example) The eclipse of the mortal moon is doubtless Elizabeth. The meaning of this has been said to be that Elizabeth survived a serious illness in 1699-1600. It is also said that it links public and private emotion, remarking congruence between the poets love life and the mood of the nation after the accession of James I in 1603. Because of this, the poem has played a crucial role in attempts to date the Sonnets.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
1957. 1965. 1986 1938. SHAKESPEARE, W., The Sonnets, and a Lover's Complaint, ed. The New Penguin; Aylesbury, Bucks, 1986. SHAKESPEARE, W., The narrative poems, ed. Penguin Books, Great Britain, 1959. WILLIAMS C., A Short Life of Shakespeare with Sources, ed. Oxford, London 1933. www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xRapeLucr.html www.phoenixandturtle.net ROSEMBLUM, J., Shakespeare, an annotated bibliography, ed. The Magill Bibliographies, California, 1992. SHAKESPEARE, W., The Sonnets, ed. Anagrama, Barcelona, 1974. SHAKESPEARE, W., The Poems, ed. Cambridge, London, 1966. SHAKESPEARE, W., The Rape of Lucrece, ed. The New Penguin Shakespeare; Bungay, Suffock, 1971. SHAKESPEARE, W., The Sonnets, and a Lovers Complaint, ed. Penguin Books; London, ONEGA, S., ed. Estudios Literarios Ingleses. Renacimiento y Barroco , ed. Ctedra, Madrid, HERRSTEIN, B., Discussions of Shakespeares Sonnets, ed. Health and Company, Boston, BULLOUGH, G., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare , ed. Columbia, London,