An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems (review)

Venus and Adonis consists of 199 six-line stanzas or 1194 lines. Why did Shakespeare not write one more stanza, giving 200 stanzas and 1200 lines, and thus creating a satisfying sense of formal completeness? Peter Hyland's answer to this question is that 'the poem is about frustration' (p. 68): Venus's erotic desire remains unsatisfied and the tragic ending frustrates the expectations raised by the poem's comic playfulness. Hyland's book contains many stimulating observations of this kind.

Hyland begins by setting Shakespeare's non-dramatic poems within their social, cultural, and economic context, outlining the position of the early modern writer in a hierarchical society, where poets and playwrights depended on aristocratic patrons. He doubts that the shift in tone between the dedications to Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece signals increased intimacy with Southampton. Yet, in Lucrece, 'The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end… What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours': does any other commoner-poet publicly declare 'love' of an earl in such terms? Excellent chapters on 'The Art of Poetry' and 'Shakespeare and Ovidian Poetry' follow, before Hyland offers detailed accounts of each of the two narrative poems. He shows that readers have simplified the complexity of the play of voices, including the narrator's, in Venus and Adonis. He refuses to reduce it to the allegorical or the moralistic, locating within the art of the poem itself the contradictions that have generated such diverse interpretations. One minor point: Hyland sees the 'Look when… so' construction as a matter of the speaker's drawing attention to his own 'cleverness at creating analogies' (p. 77), but 'Look when' and 'Look how' are idioms meaning little more than 'Just as', and in 'Look what a horse should have he did not lack', 'Look what' means 'That which'.

Hyland also offers a subtle, nuanced account of The Rape of Lucrece, considering the sources, the reactions of various readers, and the issues they have raised. Pointing out that 'Shakespeare was obliged to embrace the essentially irreconcilable pagan and Christian readings' of Lucrece's suicide (on which he makes some acute remarks), Hyland explores how the poet 'set his individual stamp on the story' as he entered the 'disturbed state of mind of each of his main characters' and examined 'the public or communal ramifications of private action', where Tarquin the tyrant and Tarquin the rapist are each aspects of the will to dominate (pp. 106, 109).

Hyland is also judicious on Shakespeare's Sonnets. He describes the whole sonneteering convention and provides a cautious discussion of such 'problems' as their date of composition, Thomas Thorpe's dedication, the Quarto order, and the limits of autobiographical approaches. He does not believe that the Sonnets tell us anything about Shakespeare's sexual orientation. His close reading of Sonnet 1 stresses its ambivalence, and those that immediately follow are seen as being as much about property as about propagation, and as revealing 'a deep permeation of the language and value of morality and nature… by the language and values of commerce' (p. 157). Viewing the Sonnets as fictions, uttered by a constructed 'speaker', he shows how Shakespeare's poetic strategy works in such 'black mistress' sonnets as 130, 135, and 136. In a section on 'Time's Tyranny and the Poet's Pen' Hyland writes: 'The problem with the claim that poetry confers a kind of immortality is that it is essentially a literary trick', and the Sonnets 'are ironically aware of the deception (and self-deception) they are trying to perpetrate' (p. 183). True – as Woody Allen protested, 'I don't want to be immortal through my art, I want to be immortal through not dying', and the verse registers the distinction. But to my ear the line 'My love shall in my verse ever live young' is by no means 'metrically limp', thus undermining...