Cheney, Patrick. “Authorship and Acting: Plotting Venus and Adonis along the Virgilian Path.” Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. Cheney shows how in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare self-consciously presents himself as a sophisticated poet competing with Marlowe and Spenser “for readership and national authority.”
Dubrow, Heather. “Upon Misprision Growing’: Venus and Adonis.” Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987. Dubrow explores the poem’s formal strategies of characterization. Focusing mainly on Venus, Dubrow argues that Shakespeare transforms the Ovidian mythological poem into a mode “conducive to the creation of complex characters and to the evocation of complex responses to them.”
Hulse, Clarke. Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic, pp. 143–75. Princeton N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981. Hulse examines the “iconographic” technique in Venus and Adonis that enables Shakespeare to hold “conflicting attitudes towards love in an aesthetic balance.” The poem is structured like a formal debate in which one set of images alternates with another without any resolution of the contradiction and with unity provided only “by the repetition of the image itself.”
Kahn, Coppèlia. “Self and Eros in Venus and Adonis.” Centennial Review 4 (1976): 351–71. Rev. and rpt. in Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1981. Kahn views Adonis’s rejection of Venus as “a rite de passage in reverse”: instead of forging an adult sexual identity, Adonis flees from the possibility of intimacy, regressing into narcissistic isolation. His narcissism masks a deep desire for dependence, a wish ultimately fulfilled in his transformation into a flower that Venus nurtures as her child.
Keach, William. “Venus and Adonis.” Elizabethan Erotic Narrative. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977. Examining Shakespeare’s alterations of Ovid’s version of the story, Keach finds “an antithetical, bipartite structure” in Venus and Adonis that organizes the poem’s “tragic parody of the Platonic doctrine that love is the desire for beauty.”
Kolin, Philip C, ed. “Venus and Adonis”: Critical Essays. London: Garland, 1997. Kolin offers a fine introduction on the poem’s critical history and includes at the end a chronological bibliography of criticism; in between are printed thirty essays or substantial excerpts, ranging from Coleridge’s remarks on the poem in 1817 to six new essays commissioned for this volume, including Georgiana Ziegler’s piece tracing the relationship of Shakespeare’s poem to the rich visual tradition surrounding the mythological story.
Muir, Kenneth. “Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?” Shakespeare the Professional and Related Studies. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973. Finding that the poem’s fundamental ambivalence extends even to its “mingling of wit and seriousness,” Muir sees Venus and Adonis neither as praise of chastity nor as a paean to sensuality, but as a self-consciously Ovidian poem, imaginatively engaged with both Venus and Adonis and equally dismissive of Neoplatonic and Puritan arguments for “the denial of the flesh.”
Roberts, Sasha. “Light Literature and Gentleman Readers: Venus and Adonis, Textual Transmission, and the Construction of Poetic Meaning.” Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Roberts uses the unusually rich record of early readers of the poem to show both the diversity of early modern reading practices and the ways in which this most often cited of Shakespeare’s work in the period reveals itself as a poem designed to appeal to readers both unrefined and sophisticated.
Cheney, Patrick. “Publishing the Show: The Rape of Lucrece as Lucanian counter-epic of Empire.” Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. Cheney considers the poem in the context of Titus Andronicus, a play published in the same year as that in which the poem first appeared in print, and sees both as poems interested in a set of political concerns that have their origin in Lucan’s republican epic, The Pharsalia.
Donaldson, Ian. “ ‘A Theme for Disputation’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Donaldson’s book considers the interpretations and transformations of the Lucrece story from Ovid to Giraudoux, and his account of Shakespeare’s treatment focuses on the poem’s movement between the conflicting ethical demands of Roman and Christian perspectives on the action.
Dubrow, Heather. “ ‘Full of Forged Lies’: The Rape of Lucrece.” Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987. Dubrow probes the poem’s elaborate rhetorical surface to discover Shakespeare’s “preoccupation with the moral and psychological issues expressed through—or even raised by—such adornment.”
Hulse, Clarke. Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic, pp. 175–94. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981. Hulse argues for the importance of pictorial elements in the poem in establishing the poem’s characteristic “movement between incident and analysis.” In the tapestry of the fall of Troy, Lucrece sees the analogy between the Trojan fate and her rape, enabling her to recognize her innocence and to demand her revenge through her own vivid portrayal of her suffering.
Kahn, Coppèlia. “The Rape in Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45–72. The focus of Kahn’s essay is on the complex moral, social, and psychological ramifications of Lucrece’s rape. The rigid structure of Rome’s patriarchal society, where chastity is the “only value which gives meaning to her as a Roman wife,” determines her tragic fate. Only by her death can she recreate her “ideal self” and restore Collatine’s honor.
Miola, Robert S. “The Rape of Lucrece: Rome and Romans.” Shakespeare’s Rome. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983. Focusing on the poem’s imagery of Lucrece herself as a city under attack by a barbarian, Miola sees the poem as part of Shakespeare’s ongoing exploration of Rome and Romans, and he finds in Lucrece’s fate—a suicide chosen as an act of Roman honor and piety—the origins of Shakespeare’s disillusioned scrutiny of Roman values.
Roberts, Sasha. “The Malleable Poetic Text: Narrative, Authorship, and the Transmission of Lucrece.” Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Roberts examines the various editions of Lucrece to show how the physical form in which the text circulated worked to control the interpretation of Lucrece, who could be understood either as model of female chastity or as an example of feminine excess.
Vickers, Nancy J. “ ‘The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Vickers examines the language of praise in the poem to discover the limits and dangers of a descriptive rhetoric that “displays” women as part of an aggressive rivalry between men. Her analysis reveals the complex relationship of the poem to its own insight, as it exposes the disturbing implications of rhetorical competition and yet “remains embedded in the descriptive rhetoric it undercuts.”
Ellrodt, Robert. “An Anatomy of ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle.’ ” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 99–110. Ellrodt’s thorough account of the poem’s symbolism and philosophical assumptions leads him to recognize the “originality of Shakespeare’s handling of the Phoenix theme” and his sobering awareness that “truth may seem but cannot be,” for “Love and Constancy are dead.”
Empson, William. “ ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle.’ ” Essays in Criticism 16 (1966): 147–53. Empson suggests that Shakespeare’s poem must be understood in terms of its appearance in an anthology by Robert Chester designed to celebrate the knighting of Sir John Salusbury. He examines the genesis of the anthology as well as the relationship of Shakespeare’s poem to the other poems included in the celebratory collection.
Garber, Marjorie. “Two Birds with One Stone: Lapidary Re-Inscription in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle.’ ” The Upstart Crow 5 (1984): 5–19. Garber sees the poem as triumphing over its conventional subject matter and the restrictions of its occasion through the “highly self-conscious formal structure” and the fusion of elegy and epithalamion that permit its witty subversion of its own formal and logical authority.
Klause, John. “ ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ in its Time.” In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, ed. Thomas Moison and Douglas Bruster. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 2002. Insisting that the poem fits oddly with the other poems in Love’s Martyr, Klause explores the relation of Shakespeare’s poem to the historical circumstances of the volume’s publication, its relation to its literary forebears, its conspicuous use of Catholic terms and premises, and its obvious superiority to the other poems in the volume, so much so that it is “as though he wanted to prove that Love and Constancy and Death were themes too exalted for the fatuous treatment they had been given.”
Matchett, William H. “The Phoenix and the Turtle”: Shakespeare’s Poem and Chester’s “Loues Martyr.” The Hague and Paris: Mouton; New York: Humanities Press, 1965. Matchett provides a patient analysis of the poem’s language and structure before turning to the poem’s literary and historical contexts. He sees the poem as a political allegory about Elizabeth (the Phoenix) and Essex (the Turtle) and finds its terms of praise qualified by the elegiac quality of the threnos and the “insistence” of the final line.
McCoy, Richard. “Love’s Martyrs: Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ and the Sacrificial Sonnets.” Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997. McCoy places the poem in relation to other poems in the collection in which it originally appeared and to a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets in order to clarify both its immediate topical concerns and its less particular “religious quality.”
Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1969. Booth sees the sonnets as being “multiply ordered” by a variety of formal patterns, and he traces their function and interaction as they structure the reader’s experience of the poems.
——, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Edited with Analytic Commentary. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1977. Booth’s edition includes almost 400 pages of commentary on the diction, syntax, idiom, and background of individual sonnets, focusing on the “fusions by which incompatible and contradictory truths are voiced simultaneously.”
Edmondson, Paul, and Stanley Wells. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004. An extremely useful introduction and guide to the Sonnets, exploring topics such as their early publication history, the development of the sonnet form in England, the form and artistry of the individual poems, and the poems’ relation to Shakespeare’s biography.
Fineman, Joel. Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Univ. of California Press, 1986. In this dense and provocative study of the sonnets, Fineman finds in Shakespeare’s complex response to the Renaissance poetry of praise a profound disruption of its idealizing strategies, dependent upon the recognition of a divided self-consciousness and permitting the development of “a genuinely new poetic subjectivity.”
Leishman, J. B. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: Hillary House, 1961. Leishman examines the central themes and strategies of organization in the sonnets and their sources in the classical and Renaissance literary traditions available to Shakespeare.
Melchiori, Giorgio. Shakespeare’s Dramatic Meditations: An Experiment in Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Melchiori’s subtle analysis of sonnets 20, 94, 121, 129, and 146, focusing on the poems’ linguistic, literary, and socio-historical resources, reveals them as “meditations in action,” dramatic engagements with the contradictions and unresolved tensions of their originating idea or emotion.
Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London and Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1979. Muir’s sensible introduction to the sonnets includes a discussion of their date, the text, and the sonnet order, as well as a consideration of their relation to the sonnet tradition and an essay examining the themes and attitudes of the sequence.
Pequigney, Joseph. Such Is My Love: Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985. Pequigney’s interpretation focuses on the drama of human desire articulated by Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, usefully differentiating Renaissance conventions of friendship from the erotic (including homoerotic) relations he finds delineated in the poems.
Schalkwyk, David. Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002. Schalkwyk offers sustained and sensitive readings of the sonnets by considering them in light of the fact that they were written by a playwright engaged in a “social struggle for acceptance and status.” In this light, the poems become not descriptive acts but performative ones, “in which embodied characters seek to transform their circumstances and relationships,” that is, they are not forms of private expression but forms of social interaction, whose language is not essentially different from that of the plays.
Schiffer, James, ed. Shakespeare’s “Sonnets”: Critical Essays. New York and London: Garland Press, 1999. Schiffer assembles a collection of twenty essays (16 written for this volume) that offer a provocative selection of contemporary approaches to the Sonnets. Most of the essays successfully link the poems to a variety of cultural contexts—social, religious, literary, scientific, and formal. Essays by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass both focus on the editing of the Sonnets, showing how so many of the questions that have interested critics are functions of eighteenth-century editors’ decisions about the text but have been taken as Shakespeare’s own, and George T. Wright explores the Sonnets as “unsounded speech” and links this to interior consciousness.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997. In a series of mini-essays, each prefaced by a modernized version as well as a facsimile of the 1609 first printing, Vendler offers a patient and playful reading of all 154 sonnets. She identifies a variety of compositional strategies by which Shakespeare rings changes on the sonnet form and by which Shakespeare shapes emotionally complex and recalcitrant material “into lyrically convincing schemes.”
Bell, Ilona. “ ‘That Which Thou Hast Done’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’ ” Shakespeare’s “Sonnets”: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer. New York and London: Garland Press, 1999. Bell takes seriously the idea that the publication of “A Lover’s Complaint” in the 1609 Sonnets suggests a relation between the poems, and her essay explores the similarities between the voice of the sonnet’s male voice and the female narrator in “A Lover’s Complaint.”
Dubrow, Heather. “ ‘Lending Soft Audience to my Sweet Design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings in Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’ ” Shakespeare Survey 58 (2005): 23–33. Dubrow focuses on the ways in which the poem introduces listening itself as a topic and also on how listeners in the poem reemerge as speakers as a way of asking larger questions about a series of apparent binaries: authors and audiences, stable meanings and fluid significations, and subjects and objects.
Jackson, MacD. P. Shakespeare’s “A Lover’s Complaint”: Its Date and Authenticity. Auckland, N.Z.: Univ. of Auckland Press, 1965. By examining the poem’s vocabulary, phrasing, imagery, stylistic mannerisms, and subject matter, Jackson’s thirty-nine-page pamphlet affirms Shakespeare’s authorship.
Kerrigan, John, ed. Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and Female Complaint. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Kerrigan’s anthology of female complaints places “A Lover’s Complaint” within a neglected subgenre and opens with an extended introduction that focuses on Shakespeare’s relation to this tradition and that shows how Shakespeare’s poem exploits the emotional difficulties and poetic possibilities of confession.
Muir, Kenneth. “ ‘A Lover’s Complaint’: A Reconsideration.” Shakespeare 1564–1964: A Collection of Modern Essays by Various Hands, ed. Edward A. Bloom. Providence, R.I.: Brown Univ. Press, 1964. Muir considers the question of authorship and concludes, on the basis of stylistic as well as bibliographic indications, that the poem was written by Shakespeare, probably sometime near 1600. He also provides an account of the poem’s paired thematic concerns: “the difficulty of distinguishing between appearance and reality” and “the battle of the sexes.”