Shakespeare and the ‘Ordinary’ Word

Summary

Analysing Shakespeare’s development as a poet, George Rylands has said: “He was first an Elizabethan poet and it is of this stuff [i.e. the sonnets of Petrarch, the Pléiade, Lyly, etc.] that Elizabethan poetry was made.” That is undeniably the case; but Rylands goes on to say:

In the two following passages there is hardly a distinguishing mark. Both are Elizabethan:

At last the golden Oriental gate

Of greatest heaven gan to open fair,

And Phoebus fresh as a bridegroom to his mate

Came dancing forth shaking his golden hair.

See how the morning opes her golden gates,

And takes her farewell of the glorious sun,

How well resembles it the prime of youth

Trimmed like a younker prancing to his love.

The first is Spenser, the second the young Shakespeare; and although Shakespeare is a little freer in movement and cannot resist transforming Phoebus Apollo into an Elizabethan gallant, the idiom is the same.

It is true that the rhetorical texture (of a neo-classic, decorative kind) of the two passages is the same. There are, however, and in spite of the striking verbal parallels, more distinguishing marks than Rylands perhaps had space to enumerate. In the first place, Spenser would appear to be more conscious that he is addressing a cultivated audience. His poetry, therefore, is deliberately reminiscent and sophisticated in a way which Shakespeare largely abandoned when he turned to the theatre.