His two poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrèce, are to be attributed to this same literary taste for favorite models. These poems received much praise from contemporaries, but are so far from the "greater Shakespeare," that they might almost appear not to be his, always, that is to say, if the greater Shakespeare be turned into a rigidly historical and conventional personage. Their literary origin is evident, not only to those who know well the English literature of the period of the Renaissance (when Marlowe was composing Hero and Leander), but yet more to those versed in the Italian literature of the same period, where the themes of the two little poems were in great favour. As regards the first of these, Giambattista Marino, who was destined to expand it into a long and celebrated poem, was already born at Naples. Shakespeare here flaunts his virtuosity like our Italian composers of melodious and voluptuous octaves, revelling in a wealth of flowery image phrase, in his abundant, rhetorical capacity and in a formal beauty which contains something of aesthetic voluptuousness.
The Sonnets are also based upon Italian models, where we find exhortations addressed to admired youth set upon a pinnacle, similar to those that passed between Venus and Adonis. The beautiful youth, posing as Adonis, and treated like him, became very common in our lyric poetry of the time of Marino, in the seventeenth century, as were also love sonnets addressed to ladies, possessing some peculiar characteristic, such as red hair or a dark complexion, or even something different or unfamiliar in their beauty, such as too lofty or too diminutive a stature.
Notwithstanding this literary tendency in his inspiration, Shakespeare does not cease to be a poet, because he is never altogether able to separate himself from himself, everywhere he infuses his own thoughts and modes of feeling, those harmonies, peculiar to himself, those movements of the soul, so delicate and so profound. This has endowed the Sonnets with the aspect of a biographical mystery, of a poem containing some hidden moral and philosophical sense. When we read verses such as these:
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses.
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made....
we feel the commonplace of literature, revived with lyric emotion. Note too in the Sonnets their pensiveness, their exquisite moral tone, their wealth of psychological allusions, in which we often recognise the poet of the great plays. Sometimes there echoes in them that malediction of the chains of pleasure, which will afterwards become Anthony and Cleopatra[1]; at others we hear Hamlet, tormented and perplexed; yet more often we catch glimpses of reality as appearance and appearance as reality, as in the Dream or the Tempest. The truth is that the soul of Shakespeare, poured into a fixed and therefore inadequate mould, his lyrical impulse confined to the epigrammatic, cause the poetry to flow together there, but deny to it complete expansion and unfolding. To note but one example, the celebrated sonnet LXVI ("Tired with all these for restful death I cry"), is in the manner of Hamlet, but developed analytically, by means of enumerations and parallelisms, and in obedience to literary usage, and is obliged to terminate on the cadence of a madrigal, in the last rhymed couplet. The soft, flexible verse of the early Venus and Adonis is also free of Marino's cold ingenuity, of his external sonority and melody, and is inspired rather with a sense of voluptuousness, a grace, an elegance, which recall at times the stanzas of Politian:
The night of sorrow now is turned to day;
Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth,
Like the fair sun, when in his fresh array
He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth:
And as the bright sun glorifies the sky,
So is her face illumined with her eye.
In Shakespeare is nothing of the cold literary exercise; he takes a vivid interest even in the play of fancy, in the bringing about of marvellous coincidences, of unexpected meetings, in the romantic and the idyllic. He loves all these things, composing them for his own enjoyment and fondling them with the magic of his style. He cannot of course make them what they are not, he cannot change their intimate qualities into something different from what they are; he cannot destroy their externality, since they came to him from without. What he can and does put into them is above all their attractiveness as images. For this reason, the poetry that we find here is of necessity rather superficial and tenuous, far more so than the poetry of the love dramas, where his powers have a wider scope for observation, for reflexion and for meditation upon human affections.
What has been said above as to the inventions and fables, which serve as a decorative background to certain of the comedies of love, is also applicable to these romantic and idyllic plays, in which the decorative background takes the first place and becomes the principal theme. For the rest, it goes without saying that the plots or decorations referred to are also to be included (as has been done) in the present argument, because it turns upon the different motives of Shakespeare's poetry, not upon the works that are materially distinct, where several motives usually meet and are sometimes so very loosely connected, as to form no more intimate a unity than the rather capricious one, of general tone.
A sense of unreality is therefore diffused upon the romantic plays, not of falsity, but just of unreality, such as we experience in the play of fancy, when we recount a fairy tale, well aware that it is a fairy tale, yet greatly enjoying the passage to and fro before us of the prince, the beauty, the ogre and the fairy. A proof of this is to be found in the summary treatment of the characters and the turning-points or crises of the action, the easy pardoning and making of peace, and the bizarre expedients adopted to bring the intrigue to an end. Instances of the second sort are the adventure of the lion in the Forest of Arden the reconciliation of the two enemy brothers in As You Like It, the dream of Posthumus in Cymbeline, the advent of the bear and the ship-wreck in the Winter's Tale, and the like. And as regards summary treatment, where could we find a more off-hand Iago than the Hyacinth of Cymbeline, guilty of the most audacious and perverse betrayals, as though by chance, yet later on, when he, confesses his sins, he is forgiven and starts again, so far as we can see, a gentleman and perfect knight. We do not speak of Posthumus, of Cloten, of King Cymbeline and of so many personages in this and others of the romantic plays. The wicked turn out to be all the more harmless, the greater their wickedness; the good are good nunc et semper, without intermission, exactly as introduced at the beginning of the play; the most desperate situations, the most terrible passes, are speedily and completely overcome, or one foresees that they will be overcome. Here romance has no intention whatever of ending unhappily or in pensive sadness; it wishes to stimulate the imagination, but at the same time to keep it agile and happy and to leave it contented. Indeed, in those rare cases when we do meet with painful or terrible motives, which are not easily overcome in the course of the imaginative development of the work, we are sensible of being slightly jarred, and this is perhaps the reason for that "displeasure," which such fine judges as Coleridge note in Measure for Measure, so rich, nevertheless, in splendid passages, worthy of Shakespeare. Not only does this comedy verge upon tragedy, but here and there it becomes immersed in it, vainly attempting to return to the light romantic vein and end like a fairy story, with everyone happy.
Another element which adds to the imaginative unreality and the gay lightsomeness of the romantic dramas, is to be found in the clown, the burlesque incidents, which abound in all of them: Malvolio and Uncle Toby in Twelfth Night, Parolles in All's Well, the watch in Much Ado and so on. Certain personages also, who might seem to be characters, such as the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It or Autolycus in the Winter's Tale, are treated rather as character studies.