> Notice the prominence of "I" in Shakespeare. (It's #20 in Spenser.) And
> it's not just because Shakespeare is writing drama either. In "Venus and
> Adonis," "I" is still the tenth most common word; in "Lucrece," it's
> #14. Even in narrative, Shakespeare seems to think in the first person.
> That's hardly surprising, and there are lots of authors who do the same.
> What's interesting to me is that Spenser doesn't.
Hi David,
Is this another way of noticing that Spenser uses comparatively less than
usual direct speech, say, than Shakespeare (even in his poetry)? Or
perhaps another way of saying that Shakespeare writes 'dramatic poetry'? I
would be interested to see comparable numbers, if they can be achieved, on
Marlowe, Sidney, Ralegh, Daniel, Drayton, and Jonson. And perhaps on
Donne. And maybe on Gascoigne. And possibly on Skelton.
One of the things that Christopher Burlinson and I have noticed, in
editing Ralph Knevet's Supplement of The Faery Queene (1635), is that
Knevet uses considerably more direct speech than Spenser. Indeed, the
poem's knights and ladies and villains are talking to one another almost
constantly. This seems to be part and parcel of Knevet's shift from a
moral to a political allegory, that is, part of an attempt to historicize
and socialize his matter. As he promises in his subtitle his poem provides
a supplement wherein are 'allegorically described Affaires both military
and ciuill of these times'. Spenser's (emphatic) interest in and
deployment of history in his poetry is tempered by his moral and
metaphysical intentions, which perhaps push the visual more to the fore in
his writing, and dreamily mute the voices of direct speech. Knevet by
contrast tends to push the historical to the front, so much so that he can
barely keep track of his own speech marks. In this sense Knevet is much
more exclusively a poet of 'Affaires' than is Spenser.
az
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