Shakespeare's Poetry (050627-WiSe 2023/24)

These days, we tend to think of Shakespeare as a playwright. However, to many of his contemporaries, it seemed entirely certain that he would be remembered as a poet. His fellow writer Richard Barnfield, for one, predicted that Shakespeare’s reputation would rest on the quality of his verse: “And Shakespeare, thou whose honey-flowing vein / (Pleasing the world) thy Praises doth obtain / Whose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste) / Thy name in Fame’s immortal Book have placed / Live ever you, at least in fame live ever”. The clergyman and writer Francis Meres declared, in similar terms, that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare”. The aim of this course, then, is to give some attention to Shakespeare the poet. Taking our cue from Barnfield, we will focus on the analysis and interpretation of two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). We will probably round off the discussion by studying a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets.