LOOKS OF WAR: EMULATION AND WIT IN VENUS AND ADONIS (1593), BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Abstract

In this essay, I intend to investigate some aspects relating to the emulation of the ancient poets and the production of wit in the poetry of the 16th century, considering a specific reading of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, published for the first time in London, in 1593. In this poem, the emulation of a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is explicit, and defines the place of authority from which diverse rhetorical techniques of amplifying the topics of invention and elocution will be employed in order to produce the poem’s wit. Thus, I intend to discuss how the novelties of subject and poetical style are legitimized, at the same time that the relations of belonging to the ancient authority are rhetorically preserved. In order to do so, I propose to examine, beforehand, a prescriptive text of the time – Francis Meres’ Comparatiue Discourse – so as to investigate how the association of the “new” poets to the ancient authorities is being operated.