Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (review)

Professor Cheney's project is not merely to pay concentrated attention to Shakespeare's non-dramatic works, but to restore them to what he feels is their rightful place in the canon. The identification of Shakespeare as primarily a "man of the theatre" is mistaken, according to Cheney, a misleading characterization first perpetrated by the editors of the First Folio, who did not include in it the Sonnets or the other non-dramatic work. Most subsequent editions have perpetuated the Folio's emphases; even if the poems are included, they tend to be printed last as a kind of supplement. If readers confronted the poems first, it would become clear that Shakespeare was consistently portraying himself as a "poet-playwright," a new kind of literary figure in the English Renaissance, whose non-dramatic verse was of equal importance with his plays in defining him as an author.

It requires something of an uphill battle to sustain this argument. The first problem is the obvious one of quantity, the sheer preponderance of the dramatic output. Cheney mentions this, of course, but tends to deflect it by pointing to what nobody would deny: the poetic elements in the plays themselves. The plays, however, though often mentioned, are not the primary focus of the book. The quality of the poems presents another issue. The Sonnets need no defenders and both "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece" have admirers, but it is harder to make the case for "A Lover's Complaint," and most of the non-dramatic works still seem "minor" in the Shakespearean context, despite Professor Cheney's insistence on their centrality. The poems printed in The Passionate Pilgrim are a special problem, dealt with at some length in the book, because few of them were written by Shakespeare. It seems generally agreed that the printer, William Jaggard, was trying to cash in on Shakespeare's fame by attributing the volume to him, and a contemporary reports that the writer himself was "much offended" by this theft of his name. But again, Professor Cheney is undeterred in defining the volume as important in the presentation of the figure of the poet-playwright: "Whether they [the poems] are the young Shakespeare or the counterfeit Shakespeare, they are still Shakespeare, for the simple reason that even in the worst case they are Shakespeare intertexts" (164, italics his).

The models for Shakespeare's authorial program, according to Cheney, were those of Virgil and Ovid as they were mediated in sixteenth-century England by Spenser and Marlowe. Spenser announced his Virgilian progression from pastoral to epic when he wrote at the start of the Faerie Queene that he was changing his "oaten reeds" for "trumpets stern." The project was associated by both Virgil and Spenser with reason, morality, and the glorification of the imperial state. The countervailing Ovidian progression from lyric to tragedy, for which Marlowe was the sixteenth-century proponent in England, was more subversive, exalting sensuality and flux. Shakespeare positioned himself among these four classical and contemporary writers, completing (in the case of the "Ovid/Marlowe dynamic") a trajectory that Ovid himself mentioned but failed to carry out, and that Marlowe himself only partially completed (214).

Professor Cheney is on strongest ground in identifying the Ovidian materials that abound, of course, in Shakespeare, as well as the presence of Virgilian allusions and echoes of his two contemporaries. He shows how pervasive theatrical language and gestures are in the non-dramatic works, to demonstrate that Shakespeare integrated the two genres more than is sometimes thought. But it is still difficult to see the classical authorial program, or even an amalgamation of two competing ones, as plans deliberately followed by Shakespeare. Just as the career progression from lesser to larger genres works better for Virgil than for Ovid (only two lines of whose tragedy Medea survived into the Renaissance), so it works better for Spenser than for Shakespeare, who was famously reticent...