By Peter Hyland
An creation to Shakespeare's Poems presents a full of life and trained exam of Shakespeare's non-dramatic poetry: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; the Sonnets; and diverse minor poems, together with a few just recently attributed to Shakespeare. Peter Hyland locates Shakespeare as a sceptical voice in the turbulent social context during which Elizabethan expert poets needed to paintings, and relates his poems to the tastes, values and political pressures of his time. Hyland additionally explores how Shakespeare's poetry will be of curiosity to twenty-first century readers.
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Extra info for An Introduction to Shakespeare's Poems
Sample text
As a member of an acting company he was already inside the structure of patronage, since the companies were employed in noble households. It is possible that in his early years in London he worked with the Earl of Leicester’s Men or Lord Strange’s Men. Although this employment obliged the companies to entertain the important guests of their noble patrons, its most beneficial effect was to protect them against legal persecution, since without it actors were defined by the law as vagabonds. The dependency of the acting companies on this kind of patronage was legal rather than financial, however, because most of their income came from the public playhouses.
For the writer who wanted to be a beneficiary of court patronage, some commitment to its values was necessary, and some degree of compromise was impossible to avoid. At the same time, without patronage there could not have been the great explosion of literature that characterized the Elizabethan age. Within Elizabeth’s court a number of powerful figures had control over patronage, most notably two members of the Cecil family, William, Lord Burghley, and Robert, Earl of Salisbury, but their interests were almost exclusively political.
The court was the central marketplace for patronage and a magnet for the ambitious of all ranks. 4 Amongst these lesser mortals there were always writers. Given the subservient and inhibited position of the writer in such a relationship, the obvious question to suggest itself here concerns what today we like to think of as ‘artistic freedom of expression’: what freedom can an artist have if he is competing against others for the favour of the powerful? Undeniably, the system imposed constraints, though I might note in passing that in modern societies support for artists often comes in the form of grants from foundations and government agencies, and often these grants are limited by specific 26 An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems guidelines about the moral or political content of artifacts.