The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry (review)

It comes as a surprise to many that Shakespeare was first recognized in his own age for his achievements in poetry rather than drama. His narrative poems were carefully produced and published in print form, and indeed they put him on the early modern bestseller lists. It has taken us centuries to catch up with the readers of his own times, and this Companion brings the poetry into the mainstream of the Shakespeare canon.

The tripartite volume, ably edited by Patrick Cheney, includes sections on the historical-contextual background of Shakespeare's poetry, on the individual poems, and on the development of critical approaches. In the first section, William J. Kennedy offers a brief sketch of the literary milieu, moving from the influence of Ovid and Virgil to that of Petrarch and, most notably, Spenser, demonstrating that Shakespeare always adopted the role of "an active reader who absorbed the major poetic currents of his time" (21). Next, John Roe provides a general assessment of Shakespeare's rhetoric, style, and poetic form, concentrating on the two major narrative poems and focusing on some broad rhetorical aspects of division, copia, and antithesis. In the final chapter of this section, "Print and Manuscript," Lukas Erne provides a persuasive survey of the pros and cons of print versus manuscript. The choice of publication medium was a major influence on how the poems were received, and Shakespeare's choice of one or the other "bespeaks not only the audience the writer was addressing but also the social persona he was trying to self-fashion" (55). Erne shows how Shakespeare became increasingly sophisticated in his use of these different means of publication.

The second section focuses on the individual poems. Coppelia Kahn, in a succinct overview of Venus and Adonis, discusses the Ovidian influences, as well as the modifications and additions which Shakespeare makes to his sources. In her discussion of The Rape of Lucrece, Catherine Belsey acknowledges the ubiquity of the Tarquin and Lucrece story in early modern culture and in Shakespeare's plays, while she explains the lack of a modern mind/body dichotomy in the poem's treatment of shame and its consequences for Lucrece, and ultimately for the society in which she suffered. James P. Bednarz leads us carefully through the labyrinthine publication (and marketing) history of The Passionate Pilgrim, only part of which Shakespeare authored, and the short lyric, "The Phoenix and the Turtle," which he considers a "curious fable of the phoenix and turtle's ideal act of mutual recognition" (121). In these three chapters, the scholars are appropriately tentative in their interpretive statements, recognizing the limits of our historical knowledge as well as the current critical emphasis on multiple perspectives. Michael Schoenfeldt's discussion of the sonnets is the most explicative in this section, predominantly focusing on the later sonnets about friendship and the dark lady, and showing how the whole sequence is weighted toward the vicissitudes of love which produce moral uncertainty and suffering. The sonnets prove to be "a kind of lyric chiaroscuro," which conveys "a frequently despairing account of human relationships" (141, 139). Katherine Rowe's chapter on A Lover's Complaint accepts Shakespeare as author and goes on to explore the use of rhetorical rewording of devices commonly found in the confessional complaint. Recognizing recent scholarship on early modern emotions, she discusses the many variations of the blazon in the poem, with implications reverberating through the speakers, listeners, and readers of the poem.

The last section examines the broader cultural and artistic influences on the poetry, its performative intertextualities, and its reception and influence. Andrew Hadfield explains the political allegorical possibilities in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and finds limited religious allusions in the sonnets. Danielle Clarke persuasively argues the ways in which the poems "reveal a preoccupation with the relationship between oratorical power and...