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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2007
According to one of the great commonplaces of Shakespeare studies, we owe Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and possibly Shakespeare's first thoughts of the Sonnets to an outbreak of the plague: the city officials of London, ever hostile to the theatres, leapt to close down the playhouses in 1592, leaving Shakespeare to seek alternative ways to earn his living. The plague that closed the theatres is a matter of historical record, and yet its prominence in accounts of the poetic origins of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece betrays a curious hint of embarrassment about the narrative poems. This story of creative origins fuels a critical suspicion that Shakespeare was never entirely at home with a poetic genre that is studded with classical learning and rhetorical artifice; he only fully thrived when the quarantine was lifted and he was able to exchange the legendary and mythological figures of the past for live actors. The Sonnets, which efface their debts to classical models, seem to confirm the point that overt classicism constricted Shakespeare's creative genius. By modern standards, the narrative poems fail where his other genres prosper: they lack the frank charm of the Sonnets and the imaginative scope of the plays. They do, however, win the consolation prize of undeniable historical importance: Venus and Adonis went through nine lifetime editions, while The Rape of Lucrece went through five.
Recent criticism has done much to defend the narrative poems on the grounds of their thematic variety, rhetorical ingenuity, and power to move the minds and senses of readers. Shakespeare’s commitment to classicism, however, has not received a similarly careful re-evaluation. Reasons for such critical neglect are not far to seek. The classicizing imagination has yet to recover fully from two blows dealt by literary history: the neoclassical penchant for regulating literary and dramatic forms (at the expense of invention) and the subsequent rejection of prescriptive traditions in the Romantic period.
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