Shakespearean Stanzas? Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, and Complaint

• Published in: ELH 2021-03, Vol.88 (1), p.1-26
• Main Authors: Scott-Baumann, Elizabeth, Burton, Ben
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Allegory; Allusion; Ambiguity; Artistic representation (Imitation); Authorship; Biographies; British & Irish literature; Compositional styles; English literature; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Gender; Imagery; Literary canon; Literary criticism; Literary devices; Literary influences; Names; Narrative techniques; Narratives; Poetics; Poetry; Politics; Prose; Readers; Rhetoric; Rhyme; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Sonnets; Writers
• ISSN: 0013-8304; 1080-6547; 1080-6547
• DOI: 10.1353/elh.2021.0005

In her influential work, Caroline Levine has adopted from design theory the term "affordances," meaning "potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs," and deployed it for literary forms. In these terms, we might explore the affordances of a certain stanza form and whether these change in relation to, for example, the gender of the writer or (in the case of Venus and Adonis and Lucrece) the speaker. Another of Dolven's definitions of style is the way a poem asks the reader to imagine the process of making it. In his idiosyncratic yet often revealing theory of poetry, George Puttenham developed a threefold sense of form: rhetorical style ("ornament"), genre ("kind"), and stanza ("proportion"). By calling on Puttenham's definition we can get closer to Dolven's stylistic question "how," closer to understanding Shakespeare's craft in terms of his borrowing and adaptation (rather than invention) of forms. Puttenham's "proportion" encompasses rhyme and rhyme scheme, metre, stanzaic composition and shape. It is a critical element of what we now consider poetic "form," but its importance to the meaning of Shakespeare's poems has been neglected relative to their rhetoric and imagery (Puttenham's "ornament"), genre (Puttenham's "kind"), and their politics. According to many scholars, the association extends back to the publication of Shakespeare's poem in 1593. Gullio recites almost verbatim Venus's opening speech from stanza 2. This stanza is dropped in among couplets and prose, drawing attention to this appropriation from Shakespeare's poem. William Jaggard's 1599 collection The Passionate Pilgrim, a work marketed on its Shakespearean style, includes poems that are about the characters Venus and Adonis as well as four which seem to have been inserted on the basis of being in the VA stanza. These poems suggest a connection being made between Shakespeare and the sixain stanza: if you were trying to imitate Shakespeare, you chose to write in these sixains.