Aspects of technique in some Elizabethan shorter narrative poems, with special reference to Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and Lucrece, and Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe

Abstract

This thesis has two aims. The first is to give an unbiased hearing to certain shorter narrative poems of the 1590s, considering their achievement primarily on their own terms. The poems present difficulties because of their marked artificiality. Chapter I is therefore an approach to them by the consideration of some contemporary attitudes to poetry, art and descriptive technique, whilst Chapter II examines the poems' relation to certain traditions and art-forms which influenced them. Chapter III is an examination of the use of description in the poems, and the implications of their narrative technique. Chapter IV contains a detailed study of the four major poems of the genre, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, and Drayton's Endimion and Phoebe.The second, and related, aim is to display the genre's role in establishing poetry as an art independent of the moralists' demands, and in asserting the right of the English poet to create fictions freely. The poems had the capacity to do these things because of their particular nature, and because of their position in the literary and social scene of the time. Their success came from the way the poets drew on the established achievements and prerogatives of the painter, cultivating admiration both forillusionistic effects and for the penetrating perception which apprehends the essence of the subject represented. At the same time, in the genre as a whole, the poets undertook what was denied the painter, the portrayal of the mind and its existence in time, thereby establishing the rights and distinctive excellence of poetry.