Rival Poet
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[edit] Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets feature several 'characters,' either fictional or real persons. Several theories about them have been expounded, and scholarly debate continues to put forward both conflicting and compelling arguments. One such character is the Rival Poet, whom the author sees as a rival for fame and patronage.
[edit] Possible Candidates
- George Chapman
Chapman was a prominent poet and translator of Homer. Scholars speculate that Shakespeare was familiar with his work, having read part of his translation of the Iliad for his own Troilus and Cressida, a dramatic reworking of Chaucer's epic poem. Chapman himself wrote Ovid's Banquet Of Sense, a metaphysical poem seen as a response to the erotic Venus and Adonis, which incidentally features Shakespeare's most quoted poet, Ovid. The moral tone of Chapman's poem eschews the amatory tone of Shakespeare's, and seeks to instill spiritual seriousness in a work that takes the five senses as its Conceits. Chapman's patrons also moved in the same circles as Shakespeare's; thus Shakespeare may have felt insecure about the stability of his own income versus a talented rival. Chapman was both then and now regarded as being particularly erudite, whereas, as Ben Jonson writes, Shakespeare had 'small Latin and less Greeke.'
- Christopher Marlowe
Marlowe was more highly regarded as a dramatist than a poet((fact)), his chief poetical work, Hero and Leander, remaining incomplete at the time of his death (it was subsequently completed by Chapman). Due to Marlowe's relatively small dramatic output as compared with Shakespeare, it's unlikely that he would have been the subject of Shakespeare's Sonnets, i.e. considered a serious rival.[citation needed]
- Other Candidates
Among others, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Barnabe Barnes, and Gervase Markham have been proposed as identities for the Rival Poet.[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Halliday, pp. 52, 127, 141-2, 303, 463.
[edit] Sources
- Bach, Alice. A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. London, Blackwell, 2006.
- Halliday, F. E. A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964. Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
- Muir, Kenneth. Shakespeare's Sonnets. 1979; reprinted London, Routledge, 2005.
- Wilson, John Dover. Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Introduction for Scholars and Others. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1963.
