Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 74

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A year after the issue of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ in 1594, Shakespeare published another poem in like vein, but far more mature in temper and execution. The digression (ll. 939–59) on the destroying power of Time, especially, is in an exalted key of meditation which is not sounded in the earlier poem. The metre, too, is changed; seven-line stanzas (Chaucer’s rhyme royal, a b a b b c c) take the place of six-line stanzas. The second poem was entered in the ‘Stationers’ Registers’ on May 9, 1594, under the title of ‘A Booke intitled the Ravyshement of Lucrece,’ and was published in the same year under the title ‘Lucrece.’ Richard Field printed it, and John Harrison published and sold it at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard. The classical story of Lucretia’s ravishment and suicide is briefly recorded in Ovid’s ‘Fasti,’ but Chaucer had retold it in his ‘Legend of Good Women,’ and Shakespeare must have read it there. Again, in topic and metre, the poem reflected a contemporary poet’s work. Samuel Daniel’s ‘Complaint of Rosamond,’ with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to ‘Lucrece’ in even closer relation than Lodge’s ‘Scilla,’ with its six-line stanza, to ‘Venus and Adonis.’ The pathetic accents of Shakespeare’s heroine are those of Daniel’s heroine purified and glorified. [77a] The passage on Time is elaborated from one in Watson’s ‘Passionate Centurie of Love’ (No. lxxvii.) [77b] Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first. He addressed him in terms of devoted friendship, which were not uncommon at the time in communications between patrons and poets, but suggest that Shakespeare’s relations with the brilliant young nobleman had grown closer since he dedicated ‘Venus and Adonis’ to him in colder language a year before. ‘The love I dedicate to your lordship,’ Shakespeare wrote in the opening pages of ‘Lucrece,’ ‘is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety … What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.’