Death by Rhetorical Trope: Poetry Metamorphosed in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets | Death by Rhetorical Trope: Poetry Metamorphosed in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets
Death by Rhetorical Trope: Poetry Metamorphosed in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets
Pauline Kiernan
Shakespeare's careful insistence that Venus and Adonis is 'the first heir of my invention' has been frequently explained away as the playwright's attempt to dismiss the worth of his dramatic achievements to date, fearful of offending the poem's dedicatee by a reference to his vulgar craft. According to this view, the narrative poems published in 1593 and 1594 become testimony to a quickly abandoned flirtation with literary, as distinct from dramatic, ambitions, and are taken to represent either a desire to begin a new career as a narrative poet or an enforced momentary departure from a lifelong commitment to dramatic art.1
The practical reason offered by most commentators that the poems were written in a period of enforced idleness when the theatres were closed, as a precaution against the plague, between August 1592 and...
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