Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (review)

This is an ambitious and challenging book, which offers to make us rethink the whole shape of Shakespeare's career. It concentrates largely on the poems (i.e., the nondramatic verse, but also songs and other discrete poetry within the plays), though it never loses touch with the wider pattern of Shakespeare's writing. As Patrick Cheney puts it himself:

The book concentrates on the poems, but unlike previous studies of this topic, it discusses all of the poems as a corpus in its own right, and does so not by severing the poems from the plays, but precisely by embedding them within Shakespeare's career as a playwright, actor, and shareholder in a theatre company. The effect, I hope, is to form a more complex, accurate, and complete view of Shakespearean authorship than recent criticism allows. Such a view does not reduce Shakespeare's production of poetry to an "interlude" in his theatrical career. (3–4)

Cheney's argument advances on three fronts simultaneously. First, he examines the publication of the nondramatic verse in its individual volumes (Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, Love's Martyr, and Shake-speares Sonnets [with A Lover's Complaint]) in the light of recent studies in the history of the book and the materiality of the text. Second, he is concerned to establish the model of an Ovidian poet-playwright as a distinctive mode of authorship, which emerged in the late sixteenth century, encompassing notably Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. And third, he wants to locate these issues among national and European debates about authorship, in which the key anxiety-inducing figure is Spenser. Hence the title: "I wish to alert readers to my primary project: the full, original, and compound form of Shakespearean authorship in a national setting" (10). The project is in fact so multifaceted that it cannot be contained in this single book: "The first volume . . . introduces the general argument and specifies it primarily through the poems. The second will summarize the argument and specify it primarily through the plays" (8).

The thread of the argument that relates to the materiality of the texts is in some ways the boldest and clearest. Cheney takes his cue from John Benson's 1640 Poems: Written By Wil. Shake-speare. Gent., which he shows to be a volume designed to complement Heminge and Condell's 1623 Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies (the First Folio) and to counterbalance the actors' exclusive concentration on dramatic texts with a volume that, despite the absence of the already-popular Venus and Lucrece, was plainly meant to advance Shakespeare's claims as a significant writer in a variety of verse modes. Benson's volume failed, however, to make much of a mark. As a result, even when eighteenth-century editors began to include poems in their Shakespeare editions, they tended to be tucked away at the back of the volumes, an appendage to the primary definition of Shakespearean authorship, which was—and, as Cheney laments, still is—as a theater-poet ("In Shakespeare studies today, life is drama in the theatre" [71]).

To counteract what he sees as this unwarranted orthodoxy, Cheney insists on looking at the poetry in the contexts of its publication, avoiding biographical questions of patronage (Venus, Lucrece), piracy (Passionate Pilgrim), commissioned writing (Love's Martyr), or unauthorized printing (The Sonnets). What he discerns is a consistent pattern or definition of poetic authorship throughout the career, one neither an afterthought to nor at odds with that of theatrical authorship, but a complement to it. He does not presume to intuit Shakespeare's personal intentions in any of these publications, but he invokes the authority of recent editorial scholarship—especially that of Colin Burrow, Katherine Duncan-Jones, John Roe, and John Kerrigan—to suppose an author engaged with poems throughout his career. He is fiercely dismissive of "one of the most stubborn yet unexamined staples of Shakespearean biography...