The Poems

by William Shakespeare

Critical notes and scholarly comments accompany Venus and Adonis, Lucrece, The passionate pilgrim, and The phoenix and the turtle.

Genres: Shakespeare, Poetry

247 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1960

About the author

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Sometime between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner ("sharer") of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men after the ascension of King James VI and I of Scotland to the English throne. At age 49 (around 1613), he appears to have retired to Stratford, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive; this has stimulated considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, his sexuality, his religious beliefs, and even certain fringe theories as to whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
Shakespeare produced most of his known works between 1589 and 1613. His early plays were primarily comedies and histories and are regarded as some of the best works produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until 1608, among them Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, all considered to be among the finest works in the English language. In the last phase of his life, he wrote tragicomedies (also known as romances) and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of Shakespeare's plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. However, in 1623, John Heminge and Henry Condell, two fellow actors and friends of Shakespeare's, published a more definitive text known as the First Folio, a posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's dramatic works that includes 36 of his plays. Its Preface was a prescient poem by Ben Jonson, a former rival of Shakespeare, that hailed Shakespeare with the now famous epithet: "not of an age, but for all time".

Reviews

[Esther]

This is my favorite Shakespearean work so far. Tragic, delicate, and beautiful. Some parts of the poetry felt like listening to a Lana del Rey song 💋✨

[Ilia]

The narrative poems are interesting to me because Shakespeare wrote them to earn money while the theatres were closed because of plague, and when the theatres reopened he came out with three masterpieces that were a level above anything that he had done prior – Richard II, Romeo & Juliet and Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s as if this detour into writing poetry unlocked new abilities for lyricism and depth of character. The poems are still not as good as the plays, which are inherently faster paced and multi-faceted. But there are interesting nuggets to dig into here.

In Venus & Adonis, it is the mystery of why Adonis resists the literal goddess of love. This is a typical gap Shakespeare leaves unexplained so that the audience can fill it in. Is Adonis gay? Asexual? Sexually immature? Preoccupied with a vocation that precludes romantic attachment? Trying to work it out adds to the tension to the poem, which is focused on the unfulfilled desire of a powerful female deity.

Lucrece is longer and heavier going. The structure of first focusing on one character, and then shifting focus and sympathy to another, is a trick Shakespeare would perfect in Richard II, where the audience’s sympathy ends up balanced between Richard and Bolingbroke. In Lucrece, Tarquin is more of a straightforward villain, although his long questioning of his desires is a precursor to Macbeth. The long section where Lucrece studies a painting of the siege of Troy is a reflection of Shakespeare’s dramatic art – where examples from fiction provide parallels for people to unpack their own emotions and situations. An echo of this motif is The Mousetrap in Hamlet, another moment where fiction helps point out the truth.

Tl;dr: Shakespeare’s experiments in these poems did make his plays better.

[Mark]

Introduction was informative and helpful. Appendices containing passages from various sources was much appreciated.