A Critical Study Of Shakespeare’s Two Narrative Poems In Terms Of Style

Written respectively in1593and1594, Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems Venusand Adonis and Lucrece are important works by the Bard as a young man. But despite theirimmediate popularity after their publication during the following decades, they have longbeen neglected and underestimated for the past centuries. This is especially the case inChina, where Shakespeare studies has been a hot research field, but where almost noquality research has been done concerning the two long poems. Shakespeare has generallybeen regarded only as a playwright, with his identity as a poet long ignored. Only duringrecent decades have there appeared a serious of important essays and books meant toredeem Shakespeare’s reputation as a great poet. Among all Shakespeare’s poems, thesonnets have already achieved worldwide popularity, while the two narrative poems moreoften than not receive mild praises at best. The causes for this phenomenon are manifold.The highly rhetorical language is not to modern readers’ taste, their simple plot andabundant monologues lead readers to doubt whether they are narrative poems after all, andthe many contradictory elements make people feel puzzled as to what the poems areactually about or whether the poems tell anything meaningful at all. As a result, manypeople just dismiss the poems as empty rhetorical showpieces without any substantialsignificance.What this dissertation has done is to redeem the importance of these two longnarrative poems, and prove that they are great poetic achievements with profoundsignificance instead of mere extravagant demonstration of rhetorical shills. The rhetoricalform, together with other linguistic choices the Bard makes, is a very effective means ofconveying what the poet wants to represent. In order to demonstrate how the language andstyle effectively represent the meaning, an approach of close reading and analyticalanalysis is adopted, so that the interpretation of the poems can be founded on a solid basis.The first part of the dissertation is an introduction which has been devoted to thereason, feasibility and methodology of the research, and a literature review concerning thetwo poems has been conducted. The style of a literary work is how a writer writes the work,and it is the set of his individualistic linguistic choices and the arrangements he makes in the form. The style or the form of a poem is how the poem exists and how the meaning isconveyed. Several of the most important concepts in stylistics that have been used in theresearch are introduced, including foregrounding, deviation, parallelism and etc. It isthrough the analysis of the foregrounded stylistical features of the poems that the reasonsbehind the stylistical choices can be dug out and the meaning and the poet’s purpose get tobe revealed. In the literature review part, various interpretations have been mentioned,including those from the perspectives of sexuality, morality and politics. These researchesprovide good references for the following studies, although some of the viewpoints in themare problematic.Chapter one of the dissertation deals with the phonological traits of the poems in suchaspects as the metrical patterning of sesta rima and rime royal, the use of feminine rhymeand the specific phonetic features respectively in Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. Thestructure of sesta rima creates an overall effect of alternating tension and balance, whichbefits the representation of conflicting and irreconcilable attitudes towards love. Thepatterning of rime royal with an extra fifth line gives a reflective dimension to the stanzathat befits the grave atmosphere of Lucrece. Moreover, the use of feminine rhyme andspecific phonetic features in the poems contribute a lot to the characterization and echo tothe sense of the lines.Chapter two exclusively analyzes the lexical features of the two poems, together witha brief introduction of Elizabethan English. The use of ‘thou’ is a trace of Middle Englishand the mixed use of ‘you’ and ‘thou’ in the two poems is stylistically significant. In Venusand Adonis,‘thou’ indicates Venus’s tender feelings towards Adonis, while ‘you’ used byAdonis to address Venus implies his contempt. However, the use of ‘thou’ and ‘you’ inLucrece is mainly based on the social consciousness and appropriateness. This chapter alsoanalyzes the striking use of neologisms formed by compounding, affixation and functionalconversion, as well as the use of puns and oxymoron as the means of foregrounding. Theyforeground the meaning of the words in connection, enrich the semantic density andeffectively reveal and reinforce the themes of the poems. Also discussed in this chapter isthe topic of lexical congruence, which refers to the fact that words in the poems play withone another. This interrelationship among words in defiance of the syntax follows a logic that reveals the meaning hidden between the lines. The implied significance reflected in thelexical congruence enhances the characterization and reveals the themes of the poems.Chapter three is a discussion of the stylistical traits at the grammatical and syntacticlevel. The foregrounded features discussed in this chapter include tense, sentencecomplexity and length, cross-stanzaic enjambment, schemes of repetition and balance,rhetorical questions and apostrophe. The alternation of the simple present and the simplepast tense in Venus and Adonis represents the two characters as both particular and general,making what happened to them a representation of various states of love. And the tenseshift in Lucrece serves as a device to control the distance between the characters andreaders. The sentence types in the two poems are in keeping with the themes andatmosphere of the poems, as comparatively short and simple sentences befit the bright andnatural world in Venus and Adonis, while long and complicated sentences better representserious social relationships. Various rhetorical figures concerning sentence arrangementserve to represent the characters’ emotions and highlight the theme of the poems.Chapter four addresses the stylistical features at the semantic level. Tropes likemetaphor, simile, symbolism and hyperbole are the distortion of standard language toproduce new ways of expressions. They serve as the mechanism to produce images andprovide the means of representing the themes of the poems. For example, the images ofhunting in Venus and Adonis and those of military attacks in Lucrece are extremelytheme-revealing. The different connotations of the color symbols in the two poems indicatethe disparity between a bright and neutral natural world and a grave and serious humanworld. Moreover, prevalent hyperboles in the poems are not only typical of grand style, butalso laden with thematic significance.Chapter five provides a bird’s eye view of the style of the two poems, and discussessuch features at the comprehensive level as decorum, digression and irony. As a principleof classical rhetoric, the rule of decorum demands that the characters talk and behave incharacter, which explains the erotic language used by Venus when she talks about how theboar killed the youth and the remorseful language used by Tarquin even before he commitsthe crime. Digression is a typical Elizabethan literary practice. The digressions in thepoems like the ones about Adonis’s horse and the Troy war are valid in the framework of the poems and reinforce the themes of the poems, instead of being the distractions andweakness in the poetic structure. Irony is a rhetorical device which foregrounds a disparitynot only between the language and the speaker’s intension, but also between the readers’expectation and what really happens in the work. As a result, the analysis of irony in thetwo poems can tell us how different types of irony reveal the meaning of the poems.All in all, the detailed analysis of the style of Shakespeare’s two narrative poemsdemonstrates that the two poems are respectively about love and society. In Venus andAdonis, conflicting attitudes towards love and various aspects of love are represented bythe specific linguistic choices and the highly rhetorical style. In this poem, the charactersdwell in a pastoral world, where the overall atmosphere is bright and semi-comic, andwhere love and eroticism are considered neutral. Likewise, in Lucrece such social elementsas power, desire, morality, identity and crime are explored and ontologically representedthrough individualistic use of language and specific arrangement in the form. In keepingwith these themes, the tone and atmosphere of this poem are gloomy and contemplative. Inthese poems, Shakespeare does not draw a conclusion or send a specific message preachinghis opinion. What he does is work like a painter to display different aspects of the worldand let the readers watch and understand for themselves. The copious and exuberant styleis how the diversity of the world is presented to the readers, and it helps constantly involvereaders in the process of presentation.