The Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Poems (review)

Although sixteen editions of Venus and Adonis and eight editions of The Rape of Lucrece appeared before 1640, in the subsequent centuries Shakespeare’s narrative poems have often been as neglected as the friends who Adonis claims await his arrival. One reason these texts typically have not attracted the critical attention lavished on their author’s sonnets, as Colin Burrow aptly suggests, is that the narrative poetry is “long on rhetoric, void of biography.”¹ Since about 1980, however, conflicting professional values have complicated critical responses to the narrative poems, justifying the longstanding tendency to overlook them and encouraging intense scrutiny. On the one hand, a widespread predisposition among Shakespeareans to privilege drama over lyric—a habit that at its most polemical and pernicious conflates lyric poetry, New Critical analysis, and aesthetic hermeticism in a conveniently hypostasized version of the bad old days—has supported continuing neglect. Yet on the other hand, the focus on gender in both poems and on republicanism in The Rape of Lucrece has led many critics to examine these narratives more closely, while a flurry of interest in “A Lover’s Complaint” has stirred study of the other nondramatic poems as well. The volume at hand and two other recent scholarly editions—Burrow’s The Complete Sonnets and Poems and a revised edition of John Roe’s volume—are poised to intensify and extend attention to this section of Shakespeare’s oeuvre.²

The fine edition edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen is literally and intellectually hefty. A companion to Duncan-Jones’s Arden3 edition of the sonnets and “A Lover’s Complaint,”³ it opens on an introduction of more than one hundred pages that devotes particular attention to literary and cultural sources and analogues, contemporary reception, and afterlife. The introduction is followed by the texts of the clearly canonical poems, accompanied by comprehensive glosses and by the texts of attributed poems, with unusually thorough and impressively learned evaluations of their authorship. The three appendices provide textual analyses that are considerably more substantial than their counterparts in other scholarly editions of these poems, lengthy excerpts from principal sources, and a photographic facsimile of the entire volume in which the poem sometimes known as “The Phoenix and the Turtle” appears.

Shakespeare’s Poems maintains the high standards of the Arden series in many ways, firmly establishing this book among the principal scholarly editions for the poems it contains. Among its many contributions is its thorough and often very original research. Rather than merely rounding up the usual suspects, its editors interpret these poems in relation to a wide range of materials, from literary texts like the work of Robert Parry⁴ to cultural writings such as The Noble Art of Venery, emblems, and woodcuts. This extensive work on visual analogues and sources, which extends earlier discussions in Roe’s volume and Ian Donaldson’s The Rapes of Lucretia, will be of particular interest to critics today, given the contemporary turn to visuality.⁵ Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen are not, of course, the first to link “Love’s Martyr” to the life of John Salusbury, but here too their thoroughness generates some new interpretations, such as their disagreement with the common assumption of a marital subtext. Another result of the scholarship impelling this volume is its editors’ strong case that one of the shorter poems—the epitaph on the Stanley tomb in Tong, Shropshire—is by Shakespeare himself.

Among the book’s other principal strengths is its emphasis on cultural contexts, including some that have been underestimated by other critics. Despite Burrow’s insistence that we should stop positing the plague as the “onlie begettor” of the narrative poems, Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen powerfully and persuasively argue that the plague influenced these texts in often-overlooked ways, as in references to infection, which reflect a common belief that sexual sins were among the sources of plague. Other offerings include...