Venus and Adonis 1592-3

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

Venus and Adonis
From the summer of 1592 onwards, plague was rife in London so all the theatres were closed to prevent the infection spreading through tightly-packed crowds. A small book was produced in 1593, which turned out to be the most frequently printed work by Shakespeare in his lifetime. Did he write it in 1592-3? Or earlier when he was at school studying Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the origin of the story? Or did he start it earlier and finish it when the theatres were closed? This important volume of poetry, Venus and Adonis, was printed by Richard Field, a neighbour of the Shakespeare family from Bridge Street in Stratford-upon-Avon. Field had set up in London and had a reputation as a scrupulously honest printer with exacting standards. The first edition is printed beautifully.

Images of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, played by Tom Sturridge and Eddie Redmayne in different dramatisations. Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis to this patron.

“The first heir of my invention”
In the dedication to the poem Shakespeare presents Venus and Adonis as “the first heir of my invention” suggesting that either:

• it was the first thing he had ever written
• it was the first thing he had ever printed or
• it was the first thing he wrote that he hoped to make money from

Writing plays was not a lucrative business in Elizabethan and Jacobean England; Shakespeare made his money from being a shareholder of the theatres in which he worked and later from land-owning and property development. Poetry was one of the few ways writers could make money, especially in well-bound short volumes. Venus and Adonis sold like hot cakes. Young people apparently carried the book around with them and no less than 10 editions had been printed by the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, a remarkable number considering the level of literacy at that time. Only one original copy of the first print run survives in the Bodleian library at Oxford.

Rubens, Titian and de Ribera paintings

Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie
The poem tells of the goddess Venus pursuing the young Adonis who would prefer to go hunting the boar. The language is playful, comic, erotic (see lines in sub-heading above) and ultimately moving. The most frequent motifs in the poem are those of hunting, lips and kissing; the build-up of tension between the pair is a model of the will-they, won’t-they convention in comedy. Unusually for the time, the woman is the main protagonist and Venus is a lusty huntress, reveling in her own sexuality, beginning and ending the poem and driving forward the entire story. One of the key themes of Venus and Adonis is making hay while the sun shines, or, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, or carpe diem or, as the Sonnets express time and again, “love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

The poem is written in six line stanzas with a controlled rhyme scheme (ababcc) so the poetry bounces along playfully but is crafted to within an inch of its life.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

"Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies"
Venus uses all her metaphysical wit to try and persuade Adonis to give her a kiss, even fainting at one point. She is assisted by Adonis’s stallion, which gallops off lustily to nuzzle a passing mare, thus giving an illustration to Adonis of how he could behave, almost like the comic sub-plot of a play. In the recent Greg Doran/Little Angel production of the poem at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the horses almost upstaged Venus and Adonis. At the end (spoiler alert) when Adonis dies bleeding from his boar-wounds, Venus’s grief is real and painful and the Venus puppet in the RSC production became expressively heartbroken. The poem was possibly a response to Marlowe’s unbridled and unbuttoned Hero and Leander poem, with Shakespeare’s narrative being more controlled and consciously poetic, but whatever the inspiration (a poetic exercise, a way of making money when the theatres were closed, a poetry-battle with Marlowe, a joyous act of creation) Venus and Adonis cemented Shakespeare’s reputation in his lifetime and contains many elements that define his canon, not least his exploration of love:

Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Elements of the poem reappear in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, not to mention the thematic connection with the Sonnet sequence and the other great narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece which can be seen as this poem’s tragic counterpart and which I’ll blog about in the future.

Photo Credit: RSC (Greg Doran/Little Angel production)

A ball of matter: a happy birthday blog

A cyst, a cyst, my kingdom for a cyst.

Right in the middle of my lower neck.... so I never saw it. Except in photographs. And I lived with the little marble-sized fellah for years. I am sure it was male. It was stubborn. But I lived with it. Patiently. A small ball of matter.

Then it became infected.

And hurt. And grew. And stung. And grew. I felt invaded and diseased. The little blighter started stinging in the night. And when I lay back in the bath, it was like being pricked with a thousand tiny elvish daggers. And we all know what THAT'S like. No-one wants a stingy ball of infected matter in the middle of their back, do they?

The Op

So a skilful surgeon (and his team) decided to excise it in a mini-operation. I admit to being a bit frightened, stripped down to my pants in a sterile operating room hemmed in by four masked medics.  So I breathed.

"I'm going in," said the surgeon. 

"Eeewwww," they all moaned when it was scalpeled. I heard a series of small splashes. 

I asked "Can you keep it for me to see?" 

"NO!!!!" they exclaimed in unison. 

"It's very pus-y and granulated," said the surgeon. "And rather big." 

A kindly male nurse who had the job of holding my gaze to reassure me said "You really DON'T want to see it. Even WE don't want to see it."

If YOU want to see the recovery photos - if you have your own cyst that you are thinking of having removed - or if you have ambitions to work in the NHS - or if you adore Hammer Horror Films or The Walking Dead, then by all means read on; otherwise click here to go to my happy place.

18 Certificate Trigger Warning of medical photographs below: pictures of my naked neck and more cyst ramblings....

Aquacel Ag (Aquacel Silver)

With the help of ex-nurse, Sally, and medical photographer, Emily, and a bevy of compassionate nurses who changed the antibiotic bit of the dressing every other day, the hole in my back healed from the inside out. I gradually recovered.

A part of himself and yet unconnected

Aquacel Silver was the magic ingredient that repaired the flesh and the skin from within. I like to think that all my troubles and woes, all my past sins, all my anxieties and guilty shames were compacted into that little ball of matter, that cyst. As George Orwell wrote in 1984:

From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

Glory Be To The NHS

Well now that little ball of matter has been jettisoned, discarded, exterminated. And the remaining scar is evidence of the healing of all my past wounds. But it was just a cyst. And the NHS removed it. For which I'm super grateful. I hope it doesn't come back. Which it might. But for now it has gone. Thank you, NHS.

Amen.

 

Jackdaw Collaborator

Robber and partner
We know (from academic comparisons and now computer analysis) that chunks of Shakespeare’s work was adapted, sometimes closely (nicked you might say), from the works of other writers: Plutarch, Plautus, Holinshed, Arthur Brooke, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Chaucer to name the most obvious and famous examples. Shakespeare was a jackdaw writer, stealing fragments, adapting plots, robbing motifs and plot devices. We know also that he was a collaborator, working without doubt on some plays with Middleton, Fletcher and George Wilkins. (Possibly Marlowe, Nashe, Peele and Munday too.) (Let me know if you want the evidence for any of the statements in this paragraph….) This doesn’t lessen his achievement in my eyes. Michelin star chefs are not thought rubbish because they use ingredients that have been used before….

Collaborators and writers of Shakespeare's source material

It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it
Stealing from others for creative and artistic reasons is not a cop-out. As one of my favourite writers, Alan Garner, memorably wrote: “Originality is the personal colouring of existing themes.” Shakespeare’s linguistic reputation relates to what he does with his sources, what he does with the language, how he portrays characters in action and how he reveals the themes and issues in stories that thrill, surprise and delight 400 years later. Poor vocabulary, maybe, in comparison with a modern reader; but, oh my, the way he puts those words together.

You taught me language and my profit on’t is
I know how to curse…. 

Shakespeare Apocrypha.... yes, bits of Macbeth were probably not by WS.....

You Taught Me Language....

To Infinity and Beyond - quick number summary

With 200 words – you can survive (toddler language)
With 850 words – you can thrive (competent 8 year old)
2000 words – the total used by the average modern-day Jill or Joe (teenager base words)
With 4000 words – the Janet or John who reads will function successfully (educated teenager base words)
12,000 to 17,000 words – the number of base words used regularly by a modern adult with average intelligence
25,000 words – popular writers with numerous works
50,000 to 75,000 words – ALL the words known by a modern adult including all the plurals, negatives, derivations, declensions and conjugations (for example counting "is," "was" and "wasn't" as well as "be") [Some of these words will never be spoken but they will be understood when seen or heard in context.]

28,829 words....
My big reveal is that Shakespeare in fact used FEWER words than the number known and understood by many educated modern adults. He used over 65,000 words (compared to 75,000 for the highest ranking modern person) if you count all variations. With the help of computer technology, we now know he used 28,829 unique word forms and 12,493 of those words forms occur only once.  Interestingly, the top 100 most frequently occurring words (the same 100 words back in Jacobethan times as in modern times) make up 53.9% of his entire output.  Put another way, 50% of Shakespeare's work is made up of language used by the average modern 2 year old.

Not such a hot shot linguist then?
Anti-Stratfordians sometimes argue that Shakespeare’s lack of a university education is evidence that the son of a glover and a brewer descended from farming stock in the Midlands could not write the works in the First Folio.  But as I have demonstrated above, around 50% of his work is very simple, basic English.