Shakespeare as "Poet"

Jack Foley

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

 What does Shakespeare mean by "eternal lines"? Clearly he is talking about his poetry, though the sense of “lineage” is also present. It is by his poetry that Shakespeare believes that not only his friend but he too will be remembered. In Sonnet 55 he writes,

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme....

 As far as we know, when Shakespeare wrote poetry, he published it: publishing seems to have been part of the process of his "lines" becoming "eternal." When we refer to Shakespeare’s “poetry,” we mean the sonnets, of course, but there are also poems such as "The Rape of Lucrece," "Venus and Adonis," "The Phoenix and the Turtle." These are all pieces Shakespeare published, saw through the press. There is no problem with the texts. Shakespeare did not publish his plays, however. They were published after his death, and, as a result, there are problems with some of the texts. Shakespeare’s behavior was scarcely odd: Ben Jonson was one of the few playwrights who actually published his plays. The situation was not unlike that of the present-day television writer. We watch television programs, but it is rare that a script will be published. But the fact that Shakespeare, unlike Ben Jonson, didn't publish his plays at least suggests that he viewed them as a little less than "eternal." He staked his reputation not on the plays but on his published poetry.

Suppose we take that idea and think about it a bit. Suppose the plays were performed for a while and then more or less dropped or lost. Suppose our main source of what Shakespeare was like as a writer was his published poetry. What sort of reputation would he have? This is the opening of "The Rape of Lucrece":

From the besieged Ardea all in post,
Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,
Lust-breathed Tarquin leaves the Roman host,
And to Collatium bears the lightless fire
Which, in pale embers hid, lurks to aspire
And girdle with embracing flames the waist
Of Collatine's fair love, Lucrece the chaste. 

That's not awful but it isn't really very good either. Besides, we don't need it. We have Edmund Spenser, whom Shakespeare is imitating and who did that sort of thing better. The same thing is true of "Venus and Adonis," "The Phoenix and the Turtle," etc. If these works were not by Shakespeare, no one would be reading them today. In fact, many people who believe they have "read Shakespeare" haven't read these poems. True, there are some beautiful sonnets--wonderful, brilliant things--but the sonnets are not all wonderful and brilliant. If the poetry Shakespeare actually published were all that existed for us to read, what would be the status of his "eternal lines"? I don't think we would rate them very high. He might have the reputation of, say, John Donne, whose work sometimes resembles Shakespeare's sonnets; certainly not of Milton. Even if we grant that the sonnets are uniformly magnificent--which they are not--I don't think that would change things very much. Sir Philip Sydney wrote a wonderful sonnet sequence, "Astrophel and Stella." Do people read it? Is Sydney generally thought of as one of the greatest English poets?

What made Shakespeare into the great poet he is were the plays--which Shakespeare never bothered to publish. Why? Did he believe his poetry by itself--his "eternal lines"--would make him one of the greats of English literature? Did he rate his plays lowly? What are the differences between a play and a published poem? Were the plays able to release something in Shakespeare which the poems could not? Did he recognize this something? Finally: Did he become a great poet precisely by turning away from "poetry"?

These are all questions which I think should be raised about Shakespeare and which, as far as I know, haven't been.

Jack Foley