Shakespeare: Poems

In linguistics, there is a useful tool called "minimal pairs".  To really understand what a letter, a sound, a word means, one must find two elements that differ by only that one variable.  To extricate the fundamental difference between T and D, for example, one needs a set of words like "cat" and "cad".  To understand the difference between "watch" and "see", one needs a sentence such as "I ___ the television" and observe how the different words change the meaning in that slot, or even better "____ your back in case someone is following you", where one word is possible, and the other not.

In the thriving industry of Shakespearean analysis, I feel that this tool is underused.  No few number of people devote their lives to parsing the sonnets, and trying to discern what his intention was in writing them.  Such inquiry can never bear any fruit;  it can result at most in speculation, in the absence of a minimal pair with which to compare those works.  The question, "What was Shakepeare's relation to the Earl of Southampton?", which is never far from the sonnets, cannot be answered by them definitively.  As in a court of law, intent is notoriously difficult to establish.

Shakespeare's other poems, however, are another matter.  We are not left to the texts themselves to understand them. We have minimal pairs.  We can look at the other accounts from which Shakespeare borrowed these stories, and see what he changed.  It is those points, the elements that are added to or deleted from the source material, that can unlock something that the texts in and of themselves can never answer.  In "The Rape of Lucrece", for example, the vast sections devoted to the thoughts of the rapist Tarquin stand out in contrast to any other account of the story--and especially to Ovid's account, likely Shakespeare's point of reference.  Nearly half of the poem seems dedicated to the inner conflict within this otherwise universally reviled figure.  Shakespeare gives Tarquin and Lucrece equal weight, turning a story of one noble woman into a dichotomy between a helpless beauty, and the savage whose irresistible passion destroyed them both. 

This overlay is especially fruitful in the case of "Venus and Adonis", insofar as Shakespeare's changes are even more drastic.  In the original account, Adonis and Aphrodite (Shakespeare's substitution of the Roman Venus is also revealing) were actual lovers for a long time before his death, and he even chose to stay with her for a third of the year.  Shakespeare flips this entirely on its head.  Not only does Adonis resist the lusty goddess at first, but he dies almost immediately after relenting.  The original myth of love and grief is transformed into a cautionary tale against the dangers of passion.  The roles are reversed, the man in this case a helpless beauty and the woman possessed by lust.  Even the names reveal the focus: savage Rome and beautiful Greece, lust and beauty--the parallel with Lucrece and Tarquin is clear.  

Which brings us to "The Phoenix and the Turtle".  Here we have not only minimal pairs, but a wealth of data.  Shakespeare is explicitly reacting to Robert Chester's "Love's Martyr", and the comparisons between the two would be sufficient for any linguist.  In addition, however, we have six other texts, among them the greatest writers of the time, each reacting to the same poem.  Not only can we infer from what aspects of the text Shakespeare focused on--or especially those he altered--but also from how his reaction differed from those of his peers.  Wouldn't it be lovely if someone would give me a patronage to read and parse them all.  Perhaps someday. 

One liberty taken by Shakespeare, however, is vivid even without the time to overlay the seven texts and scrutinize them in detail.  In Chester's poem, the eponymous birds voluntarily sacrifice themselves to create something even better from the ashes.  Shakespeare is having none of that.  "Leaving no posterity," the birds' death is unequivocal tragedy (59).  Nothing good comes from the meeting of power and beauty.  Not for Lucrece, not for Adonis, and not for the Turtle.  All are destroyed in the process, and  what remains is only to lament.