ABSTRACT

One of Ralph Crane's hallmarks was a heavy use of punctuation, whereas William Shakespeare, in common with many poets, probably punctuated quite lightly. Poets tend to rely on the more intrinsic features of their craft – the line length itself, and carefully crafted rhetorical structures – to provide the necessary pointers. In Cymbeline, the Gentleman's contrasting image of Posthumus as a fair 'outward' but an intangible 'within' is given physical form throughout the play by a number of hollow receptacles: the 'empty purse'; the trunk; the cave; and the enclosures of ring and bracelet. Andrew Gurr suggests that the reference is to the construction of the man-of-war, The Prince Royal. The very melodiousness of the word 'Philomel' and its prettifying use in poetry serves to disguise or deny the horrific reality of Witty Ovid's story. Ovid was probably, indeed, the classical poet with whom Shakespeare most closely identified.