Shakespeare and the Versification of English Drama, 1561-1642 by Tarlinskaja Marina;

Author:Tarlinskaja, Marina; [Marina Tarlinskaja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1746993
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Vickers points out two clumsy rhyming pairs in LC that remind us of Davies’s practice: drawne/sawne (that is, “seen”) in lines 90–91 and the made-up participle lovered (that is, “loved”) rhymed with hovered in lines 319–20. “Lovered,” in Vickers’s words is “a singularly ugly creation” (Vickers 2007b, p. 26).

I have returned to LC to do its versification analysis in more detail. We shall compare it again to dramatic and non-dramatic poetry by Shakespeare, to eight long poems by Davies, and to eight late Elizabethan and early Jacobean lyrical poems, because both Jackson and Vickers consider LC an early Jacobean poem. Shakespeare’s comparative material included the poems Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and the Sonnets, and a selection of his plays circa late 1590s and early 1600s, including the 258 rhymed iambic pentameter lines from All’s Well That Ends Well (1604–05) analyzed separately from the whole play. Davies’s poems and a collection of sonnets composed between 1602 and 1616 include Mirum in Modum 1, An Extasie, Wittes Pilgrimge, Humorous Heauen on Earth, The Paper’s Complaint, Funerall Elegie, The Muses Teares, and Mirum in Modum 2.5 The rhymed lyrical poems by other authors compared to Shakespeare’s and Davies’s works were: George Chapman (1559–1634) Ulysses in Phaeacia (1616?), Michael Drayton (1563–1631) Eclogues IX, X (1593), Emilia Lanyer (1569–1645) The Description of Cooke-ham (1610), John Donne (1572–1631) The Storm and The Calm (1597), Ben Jonson (1572–1634) To Penshurst (1616), John Webster (1580–1634) A Monumental Column: A Funeral Elegy (1612) and William Drummond (1585–1649) Teares, on the Death of Moeliades (1612) (See Tables B.6–B.9).

Because A Lover’s Complaint belongs to the genre of “women’s complaints,” I also analyzed three “complaints” by Edmund Spenser (1591) and Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592). Spenser reintroduced the theme of “complaints,” and it became popular in the 1590s. “Laments” and “complaints” had been, of course, written before Spenser, e.g., Surrey’s A Ladys Lament For Her Lover Overseas, Lady Surrey’s Lament for Her Absent Lord, The Poets Lament for His Lost Boyhood, and others. But in Spenser’s “complaints” the poet deals not with personal events and emotions but with historical facts and setting, prompted by his translation of Joachim Du Bellay’s The Ruines of Rome, 1553, where Du Bellay laments Rome’s contemporary corruption and longingly recollects its ancient grandeur. In Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond the historical setting augments the story of a maiden seduced by a royal lover, King Henry II. The victim of the seduction knows of her guilt, repents her compliance, and without protest drinks the cup of poison offered to her by the jealous queen. In Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece the historical setting is moved back to the times of ancient Rome. The rapist is also royalty, and the victim (“poor,” “pure,” “harmless,” and “unspotted”) is overpowered by the rapist’s force: The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries (line 677). In A Lover’s Complaint the historical setting is omitted, and the plot is an “unhappy love” story. A handsome young man seduces a pure country maid.

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