Playing Fields or Killing Fields: Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets

In a chorus for his 1935 playThe Dog Beneath the Skin, W.H. Auden explored the differences between human beings and animals, and the differences between privileged human beings, on the one hand, and, on the other, everyone else:

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The Hunter's waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf
Unable to predict the fall . . .
But what shall men do, who can whistle tunes by heart,
Knows to the bar when death shall cut him short like the cry of the shearwater?
We will show you what he has done.
How comely are his places of refuge and the tabernacles of his peace,
The new books upon the morning table, the lawns and the afternoon terraces!
Here are the playing-fields where he may forget his ignorance. . . . ¹

Humankind's "playing-fields" are, for Auden, places of refuge from the knowledge of death, and of death's proximity. For the privileged and the literate, such playing fields have always included "new books," and especially, perhaps, new books of amorous literature, such as Shakespeare's poems and Sonnets proclaimed themselves to be. The epigraph to Venus and Adonis labels it as a poem not for the vulgar "general," those playgoing multitudes who had recently flocked to Edward Alleyn's Rose Theatre in Southwark to see John Talbot's battles against the French, but for the learned and knowledgeable. The poem's title page is a door leading to an elite site of high inspiration drawn from pure Castalian springs:

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flauus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

—translated from Ovid by Marlowe as

Let base-conceited witts admire vilde things,
Faire Phoebus lead me to the Muses springs. ²

Educated readers, sporting themselves within such carefully fenced playing fields as Venusand Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece,and Shake-speares Sonnets, could for a while forget their own painful "ignorance" of the proximity of death.

For the earliest readers of these poems, it was particularly desirable to find escape, for death was all around them. They must have hoped to forget the severe plague in London that closed the playhouses and compromised the economic and social life of the City. The years in which Shakespeare's three volumes of non-dramatic verse were published—1593, 1594, and 1609—were marked by outbreaks of plague, and all three publications in this sense relate to "love in time of plague." Yet plague is mentioned very little in any of them. There are barely more than half a dozen occurrences of the word in the sum total of over 6,000 lines. Almost incidentally, it appears, Venus claims that the freshness of Adonis's lips ought to have the power "To drive infection from the dangerous year: / That the star-gazers, having writ on death, / May say, the plague is banish'd by thy breath" (ll. 508-10). Yet this is no more than an amorous play of fancy, just one among the many hyperboles with which the goddess of love attempts to beguile the mortal boy by means of flattering rhetoric, while signally failing to do so. Venus's later allusion to "Life-poisoning pestilence" (l. 740) is slipped almost unnoticed into a catalogue of the "maladies" that she claims have been visited on mortals by her fellow goddess Diana out of spite against human beauty. In Shakespeare's poem, Adonis was not merely a character in classical mythology but a primitive pagan deity identified with vegetation and the seasonal cycles of death and rebirth. In the poem's conclusion it would have been possible for Shakespeare to draw on the classical tradition of pastoral elegy and to celebrate the apotheosis of Adonis as a spirit of renewal and fecundity. Adonis's tutelary status could have been explicitly applied to the topical theme of plague. But this was not the treatment Shakespeare chose.

Two allusions to plague in a single...