FROM POET TO DRAMATIST

Shakespeare was a poet before he was a dramatist. To say this is not merely to remind ourselves that he composed the narrative version of the Venus and Adonis theme before his dramatic version of the no less popular story of Titus Andronicus. The Venus and Adonis belongs to the same date as Titus and I Henry VI (if these are Shakespeare's, as I believe), and, although there have been fewer to love than to praise the poem, no one would deny that it is in its kind a finished work of art, and the two dramas the essays of an apprentice.

The question is not only how the poet was transformed into the dramatist. Poetic drama, like opera, is a peculiar genre commonly composed of warring elements, and one must ask oneself where poetry ends and drama begins. What distinguishes narrative from dramatic blank verse, dramatic speech from rhetoric, lyrical imagery from rhetorical tropes?