Poems of Shakespeare

During the Renaissance, there was a new value placed on individualism and personal genius, and the ideal of the Italian Humanists was similarly that of the emancipated man of many-sided genius:

The medieval Christian ideal in which personal identity was largely absorbed in the collective Christian body of souls faded in favor of the more pagan heroic mode--the individual man as adventurer, genius, and rebel (Tarnas 227).

The reference here is to individuals involved in the political life of their city, but it is applicable to other realms as well. The epitome of the Renaissance man was Leonardo da Vinci, whose intellectual energies were brought to bear on a wide variety of areas of human inquiry. Shakespeare fits the mold in a number of ways. Though he did not expand beyond literature, he demonstrated in his writings such a wide knowledge of many different fields that subsequent gene

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sonneteers, the school from which the rebellious Donne played truant (Rylands 93-94). Elements in Venus and Adonis have been derived from Spenser's The Faerie Queene. The mixture of contemporary elements and classical elements was characteristic of the Renaissance. Shakespeare drew on other classical stories for both his poetry and his plays. His The Rape of Lucrece was also from a story in Ovid. This poem also shows a continuity with the Medieval period in its use of the so-called Rhyme Royal stanza, much used by Chaucer. Lucrece, like Venus and Adonis, is said to be a narrative poem, but the story in both cases is less important than the imagery. What was important to Shakespeare was what was elevated in the Renaissance. The telling of such stories in the Middle Ages would probably have been more the occasion for teaching a lesson about religion and behavior than is true of these poems in the Renaissance period: What interested him [Shakespeare] was not so much the story, but its emotional values, the struggle in the heart of Sextus between shame and lust, and the bitter anguish of Lucrece after the perpetration of the outrage. These are in their essence dramatic themes belonging rather to tragedy than to narrative poe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1518
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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