It is relatively static, with too much argument to make it inherently pleasurable reading. It is a narrative poem in six-line stanzas, mixing classical mythology with surprisingly (and incongruously) detailed descriptions of country life, designed to illustrate the story of the seduction of the beautiful youth Adonis by the comically desperate aging goddess Venus. Venus and Adonis appealed to the taste of young aristocrats such as the earl of Southampton to whom it was dedicated. In his first venture into public poetry, Shakespeare chose to work within the generic constraints of the fashionable Ovidian verse romance. Part of their greatness, however, lies in their power to be read again and again in later ages, and to raise compellingly, even unanswerably, more than merely literary questions. They are love lyrics, and clearly grow from the social, erotic, and literary contexts of his age. Shakespeare’s occasional poems are unquestionably minor, interesting primarily because he wrote them his sonnets, on the other hand, constitute perhaps the language’s greatest collection of lyrics. What he achieved within this shared framework, however, goes far beyond any other collection of poems in the age. In short, Shakespeare’s nondramatic poems grow out of and articulate the strains of the 1590’s, when, like many ambitious writers and intellectuals on the fringe of the court, Shakespeare clearly needed to find a language in which to speak-and that was, necessarily, given to him by the court. Although the power of the sonnets goes far beyond their sociocultural roots, Shakespeare nevertheless adopts the culturally inferior role of the petitioner for favor, and there is an undercurrent of social and economic powerlessness in the sonnets, especially when a rival poet seems likely to supplant the poet. ![]() When Shakespeare briefly turned to Ovidian romance in the 1590’s and, belatedly, probably also in the 1590’s, to the fashion for sonnets, he moved closer to the cultural and literary dominance of the court’s taste-to the fashionable modes of Ovid, Petrarch, and Neoplatonism-and to the need for patron-age. The theater, despite its partial depend-ency on court favor, achieved through its material products (the script and the performance) a relative autonomy in comparison with the central court arts of poetry, prose fiction, and the propagandistic masque. All over Europe, even if belatedly in England, the courts of the Renaissance nation-states conducted an intense campaign to use the arts to further their power. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) great advantages as a writer was that, as a dramatist working in the public theater, he was afforded a degree of autonomy from the cultural dominance of the court, his age’s most powerful institution.
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