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"In discussing Shakespeare's Sonnets and narrative poems, this book focuses on their sceptical cast of thought, on their concern with what wisdom might be in human conduct and with how far human conduct might be governable by wisdom, and on their preoccupation with knowing, inventing, or reinventing the past. It focuses on their exploration of the relations among self-knowledge, sexuality, and death, as well as on their ambiguous figuring of gender. In doing so it considers the relations between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse, and, in particular, that of his contemporaries; it also considers the relations between Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse and his plays (Iii) Tarquin, Lucrece and Collatine(iv) The rape of Lucrece; (v) Lucrece, Troy and Brutus; Chapter 3 Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-19: The Young Man, the Poet and Father Time; (i) Introduction. Petrarch, Sidney and the Elizabethan sonnet; (ii) Narcissus called to account; (iii) The economy of nature, Father Time and the wisdom of Narcissus; Chapter 4 Shakespeare's Sonnets 20-126: The Poet, the Young Man, Androgyny and Friendship; (i) Introduction. Narcissus and Adonis; (ii) Sonnet 20. Fictions and discourses; (iii) Desire and its discontents; (iv) Losing and keeping. Chapter 5 Shakespeare's Sonnets 127-154: The Poet, the Dark Lady and the Young Man(i) Fictions of beauty; (ii) The divided self, misogyny and friendship; (iii) Ending with Cupid; Conclusion; Index. Cover; Half Title; Title Page; Copyright Page; Table of Contents; Dedication; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Chapter 1 Venus and Adonis; (i) The minor epic. Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis; (ii) The poem's narrator. Venus and the multiplicity, the otherness of love; (iii) Venus and metamorphosis; (iv) Adonis the rhetorician. Adonis, Narcissus and metamorphosis; (v) Adonis, the narrator and the male gaze. Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Donne's 'Elegy 19'; Chapter 2 Lucrece; (i) Versions of the Lucretia story by Ovid, Livy, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Gower; (ii) Genres. Offering new interpretations of the Sonnets and narrative poems, the book highlights their sensitivity to the paradoxicality and elusiveness of human experience. It is the first comprehensive study of the Sonnets and narrative poems for over a decade."--Jacket
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