Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan F. S. Post

Author:Jonathan F. S. Post [Post, Jonathan F. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191027109
Google: IsU2DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0198717571
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2017-09-20T23:00:00+00:00

Depicting the fall of Troy

A more pointed and revealing series of vocalizations occurs with the ekphrastic episode recounting the Fall of Troy: ‘that she her plaints a little while doth stay, / Pausing for means to mourn some newer way’ (ll. 1364–5). More pointed because the ‘newer way’, marking Shakespeare’s own significant entrance into the emerging literary field of ekphrasis, deliberately sets off the sounds of speech—Lucrece’s voice in particular—against the silence of painting, and more revealing because the epic scale of the ‘well-painted’ action stimulates a stronger, more passionate set of responses in Lucrece than pastoral recollections of Philomela can accomplish. So moved, in fact, is Lucrece by the pictorial representation of Hecuba’s silent woes, in which ‘the painter had anatomized / Time’s ruin, beauty’s wrack, and grim care’s reign’ (ll. 1450–1) that Lucrece intervenes on Hecuba’s behalf and, in effect, assumes a yet larger more active role for herself:

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