or compared – Rosalind/Celia, Helena/Hermia, Edgar/Edmund, Leontes/Polixenes –
and many more.
Sexual possessiveness is a theme ofA Midsummer Night’s Dreamand Much Ado.
It becomes more insistent in the ‘problem plays’ and Hamlet,King Lear and Antony
and Cleopatra, and is the subject ofOthello and of half ofThe Winter’s Tale. Among
the many variations of love explored in Twelfth Night there is no serious jealousy; it
is Shakespeare’s last innocent play.The poems
What Shakespeare wrote before he was 26 or 27 does not survive. His best non-
dramatic poems are found in the volume entitled Shake-speares Sonnets, published
in 1609.His sonneteering began in 1593–4, the years in which he also published
Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, lengthy verse-narratives of sexual passion,
modelled on Ovid.
In a tale adapted from the Metamorphoses, Venus pursues the handsome young
Adonis, who is uninterested, preferring to hunt; in which pursuit he is killed. Sexual
desire and love are exemplified and discussed. In a tragic episode from early Roman
history, Tarquin rapes the noble matron Lucretia, who commits suicide. Shakespeare
does not take either story entirely seriously – eloquent speeches fall on deaf ears.
Erotic comedy is more successful in Marlowe’s Hero and Leanderthan in Venus and
Adonis.In the Shakespeare poems, rhetoric calls attention to itself at the expense of
narrative. Resistance to sexual passion is comic in Adonis, admirable in Lucrece, but
the achievement of the latter lies less in the narrative than in the dramatic depiction
of Tarquin’s mental state as he approaches his crime. ‘Tarquin’s ravishing strides’ are
later applied to Mac beth.
The sonnet (see p. 85) carried the medieval doctrines of love into modern
European poetry; the first sonnet in English is found in Chaucer’s Troilus and
Crisey de,and sonnets appear in early Shakespeare plays as love-tokens. The drama-
tist followed the example of other sonneteers in composing his love-sonnets as a
sequence. He had allowed some of them to circulate ‘among his private friends’
before 1598. Their apparently unauthorized publication in 1609 seems not to have
been against his will.
Secrecy was part of the convention of sonneteering, and much in this unconven-
tional sequence is not transparent; yet it projects an (intermittently) intelligible
story. There are 126 sonnets to a fine young man, followed by 26 to a dark woman.
The love-poems to the young lord at first beg him to have children so that his beauty
will not die. The poet then claims that the lovely boy’s beauty will not die since these
poems will keep him alive until the end of time. The man’s physical beauty, it
emerges, is not matched by any beauty of conduct. The poet’s love is ideal and
unselfish, but the addressee coolly exploits the devastating effect of his looks and his
rank. The poet attempts to believe the best, but his unease grows and breaks out in
disgust: ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’. In the twelve-line sonnet 126,
the poet drops his claim that poetry will preserve youthful beauty – and unselfish
love – against Time and death.
If it is a surprise to discover that the Sonnets express an ideal love for a beautiful
man,it would have been more of a surprise for sonnet-readers to find that the poet’s
mistress is neither fair, young, noble, chaste nor admirable. His love for the ‘woman
coloured ill’ is sexual and obsessive. Her sexual favours make her ‘a bay where all126 4 · SHAKESPEARE AND THE DRAMA