Venus and Adonis (Vol. 33) | Pauline Kiernan (essay date 1995)
Pauline Kiernan (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Death by Rhetorical Trope: Poetry Metamorphosed in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets," in The Review of English Studies, n.s. Vol. XLVI, No. 184, November, 1995, pp. 475-501.
[In this essay, Kiernan attempts to show that in Venus and Adonis Shakespeare explores his poetic identity, as well as his role as a dramatist in literary history, through the use of rhetoric and the narrative form.]
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...
[The entire page is 13151 words long]
Navigate
