The Columbia History of British Poetry (38 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 159
contenting." Motivated by both love and jealousy, he next secludes her in a palace set in a maze which he alone can enter by means of a clew of thread (like Theseus and Ariadne) and in which she becomes the "Minotaur of shame." His jealous queen manages to penetrate this labyrinth and compels Rosamond to take poison; the king then has her buried in state in a nunnery. Since even the marble of her tomb is subject to decay, only the poet's words can redeem her fame, but, in a unique inversion of the immortality topos, they, too, will be forgotten in later agesa forecast that accords with the poet's own historical perspective.
Daniel's complaint was immediately popular with his contemporaries (and the story itself remained current as a literary topic through the eighteenth century). His verse conveys the pathos of her situation with a certain gravity of expression"For tight cares speak, when mighty griefs are dumb"; his skillful use of submerged metaphors"thy King, thy Love, /. . . showers down gold and treasure from above"; and "the golden balls cast down before me"subtly recalls to his readers the fates of Danae and Atalanta.
Shakespeare was among the contemporaries who reponded to Daniel's complaint, as is shown by echoes of the poem in
Romeo and Juliet
and by the publication in 1594 of Shakespeare's own example of the genre
The Rape of Lucrece
. In
Lucrece
, however, Shakespeare departed from the post mortem evocation of the
Mirror
figures by focusing on their shifting psychological states. A short preamble drawing upon his two sourcesOvid and Livyprovides the necessary information about Tarquin's earlier visit to Lucrece in the company of her husband Collatine, at which time he was first "inflamed" by her beauty. The poem can now begin in media res, with Tarquin hastening on his second visit to Lucrece, spurred on by Collatine's unwise vaunting of her chastity. Having been hospitably received, Tarquin in the dead of night prepares to assault his hostess, though delaying long enough to weigh the issue of his "frozen" conscience against his "burning" desirein what he terms a "disputation"in this the first of many set passages. Despite Lucrece's prayers and persuasions, Tarquin remains unrelenting. Significantly, the poet allots only one stanza to the sexual act itself; his concern is depicting motivation and response.
Like other writers in the genre, Shakespeare fills out the poem with passages of rhetoric, employing a technique familiar to his readers and one designed to elicit their admirationthus Lucrece's numerous apos-
 
Page 160
trophes to and declamations on Night, Time, Opportunity, and her long excursus on the Fall of Troy. Recognizing at last that this "smoke of words" is a useless remedy, Lucrece resolves to die lest she produce a "bastard graff " (an explanation that escaped St. Augustine's attention when he asked why she should be praised if adulterous, why should she die if chaste). Revenge on Tarquin is part of her motive, concern for her good name is also part: "So of shame's ashes shall my fame be bred." Both were achieved to varying degreesthe first by the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome; the second by the persistent appeal of her story through the centuries.
Written within a few years of the appearance of Shakespeare's complaint, although not published until 1600, the youthful Thomas Middleton's
Ghost of Lucrece
provided a sequel. Its moral derivation from the
Mirror
is indicated by a single line"Call up the Ghost of gor'd Lucretia!"while its passionate, often bombastic, language accords with the new turn-of-the-century style. A latent concern with dramatic form is shown in his use of a prologue, epilogue, and theatrical terms as with Lucretia's assertion at the outset: "The actor he, and I the tragedy; / The stage am I, and he the history."
Concurrent with the rise of the complaint form was that of the
epyllion
a short epic presenting an erotic mythological narrative dressed in a lush Italianate style. It had been somewhat tentatively introduced in 1589 by Thomas Lodge with his
Scylla's Metamorphosis
tentatively in that he needed to supplement his small volume with sonnets and a satire. Nonetheless, Lodge's epyllion introduces a number of elements that later writers were to exploit; thus on its publication there was a new genre in the making.
The kernel of the story is taken from Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, but Lodge shifts the locale to the river Isis, perhaps an indication that he had begun the poem while still a student at Oxford. The poet, grieving because of unrequited love, encounters the seagod Glaucus, who is grieving even more desperately for the same reason. Such personalizing and localizing of scene and situation became a common technique (which Daniel, for example, adapted to the complaint form in his
Rosamond
). For Glaucus, a wonder soon unfolds: a troop of nymphs appear, who, on hearing his complaint, recount a litany of other loversamong them "the sweet Arcadian boy" and "Venus starting at her love-mate's cry." Thanks to the intervention of Cupid, Glaucus is freed of his infatuation and the disdainful Scylla is, in turn, compelled to become an
 
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unrequited lover. By introducing the echo motif, the poet intensifies Scylla's complaint (the retaliation perhaps of a suffering sonneteer). Scylla's fervid reaction to her plight results in her monstrous metamorphosis, which prompts the poet's concluding injunction to ladies to yield to faithful lovers.
In essaying this new form, Lodge exploits the element of
inventio
the first of the five parts of rhetoricwhich readers as well as writers learned in school and university and which late Elizabethans were to apply not only to the selection of a topic but also to its treatment. The use of verbal wit, fanciful ornamentation, and metrical virtuosity served to bring about the new poetic level of the 1590s. As late as 1589 nothing had been published quite as appealing to eye and ear as Lodge's verse in sixainsa form deemed most suitable for matters of love. This is his description of the arrival of Venus:
Upon her head she bare that gorgeous crown
Wherein the poor Amyntas is a star;
Her lovely locks her bosom hung adown
(Those nets that first insnar'd the god of war:)
  Delicious lovely shine her pretty eyes,
  And on her cheeks carnation clouds arise;
The stately robe she ware upon her back
Was lily white, wherein with coloured silk
Her nymphs had blaz'd the young Adonis wrack
And Leda's rape by swan as white as milk,
  And on her lap her lovely son was placed,
  Whose beauty all his mother's pomp defaced.
Poets were quick to follow Lodge's example and select other erotic figures for their narratives. Of these the most influential exemplars were the two sestiads of Christopher Marlowe's
Hero and Leander
(1593?; first extant edition, 1598) and Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis
.
Although an account of Venus and Adonis appears in Ovid's
Metamorphoses
, Shakespeare exploits a Renaissance, not an Ovidian, element in focusing on the young hunter's reluctance to be wooed even by the goddess of love. This wooing she performs with élan, providing a catalogue of her many charms and the pragmatic argument (familiar from the sonnets) of his duty to reproduce in kind: "By law of nature thou art bound to breed." Despite her continued "arguments," a fainting spell, and a fallen embrace"he on her belly . . . she on her back"Adonis
 
Page 162
remains unmoved by her "idle over-handled theme," abruptly rejecting her argument that love is based on beauty: "You do it for increase: O strange excuse, / When reason is the bawd to lust's abuse!" Exclaiming then that love has fled the earth, Adonis unwittingly forecasts the end of the poem.
After Adonis leaves to hunt the boar, Venus sings a woeful ditty, "How love is wise in folly, foolish witty" (which Chapman may have recalled in Corynna's song in
The Banquet of Sense
) where "loving proves . . . our wisdom, folly." On discovering Adonis's gored body, Venus offers a lament prophesying the many ills that will henceforth attend on love. Plucking the checkered purple flower that has sprung up from his body and "weary of the world," she is conveyed through empty skies.
The poem exhibits its author's virtuosity in handling rhetorical techniques, ranging from hyperbole to aphorism to extravagant conceit; these are offset by realistic passages (such as the episode of the stallion pursuing the mare) and comic touches (even Adonis is moved to smile at Venus's fervency). Yet a serious note is struck in the emphasis on love as a means to arrest the evanescence of beautyif love is dead, "black Chaos comes again."
While
Venus and Adonis
is also written in sixains,
Hero and Leander
is in coupletsfrequently end-stopped but sometimes racing along for a half-dozen lines in a rapid narrative flow. By studding the poems with aphorisms, hyperbolic conceits, and witty oxymorons, Marlowe exploits the ironic situation of a novice lover wooing a "nun" sworn to the "priesthood" of Venus. The occasion is the feast of "rose-cheek'd" Adonis; the site a temple of Venus, which the poet describes in lavish detailincluding a run-through of mythological figures who have also responded to the compulsion of love:
The walls were of discoloured jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved, and o'rehead,
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread;
Where by one hand, light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other, wine from grapes out-wrung,
Of crystal shining fair, the pavement was,
The town of Sestos call'd it Venus glass,
There might you see the gods in sundry shapes,
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes:
For know, that underneath this radiant floor,
Was Danae's statue in a brazen tower,

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