But if Southampton, far too grand to meddle in person with a backstage squabble, would have sent someone like Florio to do his bidding, how would an earl—at the very pinnacle of the status hierarchy—have come to know Shakespeare in the first place? Here, as usual, the precise link is missing, probably irretrievably, but the social ambiguity of the theater would certainly have helped to make a meeting possible. Players belonged to an entirely different social universe from noblemen, but playhouses decidedly did not: while whores, pickpockets, and shabby apprentices crowded into the pit, aristocrats, smoking their pipes or sniffing pomanders, sat on cushions in the expensive “lords’ rooms” to watch the performances and be watched in turn.
Southampton, described in the early 1590s as “young and fantastical” and easily “carried away,” was evidently one of these theater lovers. As a contemporary observer once wrote, the young earl and his friend the Earl of Rutland “pass the time in London merely in going to plays every day.” On one of these occasions, struck by Shakespeare’s acting in a play or by his gifts as a writer or by his lively good looks, Southampton could easily have gone backstage after the performance to make his acquaintance, or asked a mutual acquaintance to introduce them, or simply and imperiously summoned him to a rendezvous. The likeliest time for their first encounter would have been in 1591 or early 1592, when the earl, having graduated from Cambridge, was attending upon the queen at court and studying law at Gray’s Inn.
Courtiers and law students were among the playhouses’ most enthusiastic patrons, but Southampton may have taken special pleasure in imaginative escape at this particular moment in his life: he was under enormous pressure to marry. The stakes were not sentimental; they were financial, and they were huge. When Southampton was a young child, his parents had a spectacular breakup. His father accused his mother of adultery, and in the wake of their bitter separation, his mother was forbidden ever to see her son again. Then, just shy of Southampton’s eighth birthday, his father died, and the wealthy young heir became the ward of the most powerful man in England, Elizabeth’s lord treasurer, Lord Burghley. The elderly Burghley was reasonably attentive to his ward’s upbringing—he took the boy into his house, hired distinguished tutors to educate him, and then sent him off to Cambridge University at the tender age of twelve—but the whole wardship system was rotten to the core. Its most sinister feature was the guardian’s legal right to negotiate a marriage for his ward. If, upon turning twenty-one, the ward declined the match, he could be liable for substantial damages, to be paid to the family of the rejected party. As it just so happened, Burghley arranged for Southampton to marry his own granddaughter. As it just so happened too, Burghley held the position of Master of the Wards, which meant that he could virtually dictate the fine that would be assessed should Southampton be rash enough to decline. In the event, the young earl did decline, and when he came of age, he was fined the truly staggering sum of five thousand pounds.
Sixteen or seventeen years old when the match was first proposed to him, Southampton refused, declaring that he was averse not to this particular girl but to marriage itself. When it became clear that this was not a passing mood but a fixed resolution, the alarmed kin, foreseeing very clearly the blow to the family fortune, began to increase the pressure. The problem was that the young earl was so enormously rich, and so habitually reckless with his money and land, that the prospect of a substantial loss did not frighten him. He was unaffected too by the displeasure of his guardian and by the urgent pleas of a mother and other more distant relations with whom he had had little or no contact.
In these circumstances, the family, along with Lord Burghley, turned to other tactics. They had to address not Southampton’s material interests—that had failed miserably—but his psyche. That is, the task was somehow to enter Southampton’s innermost spirit, the hidden place from which his aversion to marriage arose, and refashion it. One of the means they chose was poetry.
The strategy was not entirely foolish: the stubborn, self-willed young nobleman, who had received a fine humanistic education, was steeped in poetry and had been brought up to expect that he would in time be a significant patron of the arts. If he would not take counsel from his sober elders, he might conceivably be reached by more indirect, more artful means. In 1591 he was presented with an elegant Latin poem dedicated to him—the first such dedication that he had received. The poem, Narcissus, rehearsed the story of the handsome youth who falls in love with his own reflection in the water and, in a vain attempt to embrace this reflection, drowns. The poem’s author, John Clapham, was one of Burghley’s secretaries, and the application of the monitory lesson to Southampton seems clear enough.
Clapham may have taken it upon himself to warn his master’s ward about the dangers of self-love, but it is more likely that he was charged to do so. The clock was ticking: Southampton was going to turn twenty-one on October 6, 1594. Clapham’s poem suggests that already in 1591 the looming deadline was provoking a search for effective methods of persuasion. And this leads us back to Shakespeare. It is possible that someone, either in the circle of Burghley or in the circle of Southampton’s mother, had taken note of the fact that the young earl was excited by the talents or by the person of an actor who was also a promising poet. Whoever noticed this excitement—and a wealthy nobleman’s slightest inclinations would have been carefully watched—might well have had the clever idea of commissioning the poet to try his hand at persuading the narcissistic, effeminate young earl to marry. Such a commission would help to account for the first 17 of the extraordinary sequence of 154 sonnets that were eventually printed—presumably, though not certainly, with Shakespeare’s approval—many years later.
The opening group of Shakespeare’s sonnets clearly has a specific person in mind: an exceptionally beautiful, “self-willed” (6.13) young man, who has refused to marry and is thus consuming himself “in single life” (9.2). The poet is careful not to press the specificity too far; a direct, identifiable address to the earl would have been presumptuous and indiscreet. Each of the poems has in effect a built-in principle of deniability. That is, if confronted by an irate reader, the poet could always say, “You have misunderstood me and jumped to a false conclusion. I wasn’t referring to him at all.” But if these poems were in fact written for Southampton, as many believe they were, then Shakespeare fully embraced the analysis of the problem articulated in Clapham’s Narcissus: the young man is in love with himself, “contracted,” as the first sonnet tells him plainly, “to thine own bright eyes” (1.5).
Shakespeare’s psychological strategy, however, is the opposite of Clapham’s. He does not tell the fair youth that he should tear himself away from his own reflection and beware of self-love. Rather, he tells him that he is insufficiently self-loving:
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another.
(3.1–2)
By looking longingly at his reflection, in contemplation of his own beauty, the young man will resolve to do in the flesh what he has done by standing in front of the mirror: produce an image of himself. It is through reproduction—“fresh repair”—that a person can truly love himself by projecting himself into the future; only a fool would “be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity” (3.3, 7–8).
As a subject for sonnets, this procreation theme is wildly unusual, perhaps unprecedented. A sonneteer characteristically woos his beloved or laments her coldness or analyzes his own intense passion. He does not tell a young man that in order to make a precise copy of his own exquisite face, he should resolve to reproduce. Had he written sonnets in praise of the young man’s prospective bride, Shakespeare could have held onto at least a semblance of conventionality. He would, in that case, have functioned like one of the painters hired in long-distance marriage negotiations to produce an image of the proposed spouse. But he did nothing of the kind. Though he is urging the youth to eschew masturbation and have sex with a woman—do not “spend
/ Upon thyself,” he writes with striking explicitness, do not have “traffic with thyself alone” (4.1–2, 9)—the identity of the woman, the prospective mother of his child, is apparently a matter of indifference. No woman, he writes, will refuse: “where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” (3.5–16).
The vision of reproduction Shakespeare is offering his young man is not absolutely female-free, but, within the limits of the flesh, it reduces the role of the woman to the barest minimum: a piece of untilled ground that has not yet brought forth ripe ears of corn. The whole project will be spoiled if the child bears any resemblance to its mother, for the goal is to produce a mirror image of the father alone. In the fertile soil of a nameless, faceless breeder—and, if nameless and faceless, why not simply accept the choice that his guardian has already made for him?—the young man will plant the seed of his own perfect beauty. That beauty itself possesses whatever one might hope to find in a woman’s face: “Thou art thy mother’s glass,” the poet tells the young man, “and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime” (3.9–10).
A painting has recently been discovered that is thought to be a portrait of Southampton at the time that Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets were probably written. The image is a startling one because it transforms what had always seemed hyperbolic in the language of the sonnets into something quite literal. The long ringlets, the rosebud mouth, the consciousness of being “the world’s fresh ornament” (1.9), the palpable air of a young man in love with himself, and, above all, the sexual ambiguity make the painting—which had long been mistaken as the image of a woman—serve as a vivid illustration of the qualities Shakespeare was addressing in these exceptionally strange opening sonnets.
The first edition of the entire sequence—a quarto volume bearing the title Shake-speares Sonnets—did not appear until 1609. Shakespeare’s name, appearing in very large type, clearly was expected to sell copies. But while most printed books in this period eagerly trumpeted, through a dedication, an author’s epistle, or some other means, a connection to a powerful patron, this book claimed no clear link and offered no identification of the persons to whom the poems were originally addressed. The publisher’s famous dedication in the first edition—“To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet, wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T.”—does not help. It is not clear whether these words reveal something crucial about Shakespeare or merely about the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, whose initials seem to lay claim to the dedication as his own. And if it were somehow established that Shakespeare, rather than Thorpe, wrote the dedication, it would still not be known whether “W. H.,” the initials of the “only begetter,” slyly reverse those of Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, or refer to someone else—perhaps to William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, who subsequently showed favor to Shakespeare and to whom (along with his brother Philip) the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s works was dedicated. As it happens, in 1597 this wealthy aristocrat, part of a family celebrated for its literary interests, was also being urged to marry. If the opening poems in the sequence seem suited in style to the earlier 1590s, a time for which Southampton is the likeliest candidate, most of the later poems seem on stylistic grounds to date from the late 1590s and the early years of the new century, when Herbert’s case is stronger. Could Shakespeare have, as some scholars have proposed, been addressing both young men in succession, cleverly recycling the love tokens? Could some of those same love tokens have originated as poems addressed to other young men or women whom the poet was wooing? There is no way of achieving any certainty. After generations of feverish research, no one has been able to offer more than guesses, careful or wild, which are immediately countered (often with accompanying snorts of derision) by other guesses.
The 154 sonnets are ordered in such a way as to suggest at least the vague outlines of a story, in which the players include, besides the amorous poet and the beautiful young man, one or more rival poets and a dark lady. The reader is positively encouraged to identify Shakespeare with the speaker. Many love poets of the period used a witty alias as a mask: Philip Sidney called himself “Astrophil”; Spenser was the shepherd “Colin Clout”; Walter Ralegh (whose first name was pronounced “water”), “Ocean.” But there is no mask here; these are, as the title announces, Shake-speare’s Sonnets, and the poet puns repeatedly on his own first name:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
(135.1–2)
One of the startling effects of the best of these poems—a prime reason they have drawn madly fluttering biographical speculations like moths to a flame—is an almost painful intimacy. They seem to offer access to Shakespeare’s most private retreat. But the other figures are carefully shrouded. The reader is clearly not meant to grasp, with any assurance, their actual identities.
Enormous effort has been expended to identify the principal rival poet and the “dark lady.” Was the rival poet Marlowe or Chapman? Was the dark lady the poet Emilia Lanier, former mistress of the lord chamberlain, or the courtier Mary Fitton, or the prostitute known as Lucy Negro? If even to identify the young man of the first seventeen sonnets as Southampton is rash, to attempt to name these other figures is beyond rashness. In part, the problem is an inability, at this distance in time, to answer key questions: Who constituted Shakespeare’s intimate circle in London? Over how long a period of time were these poems written? Did Shakespeare place them in the order in which they were printed? Did he approve their publication? To what degree are the poems directly confessional?
But it is not simply the passage of time that has made the details of the relationship murky. The whole enterprise of writing a sonnet sequence precisely involved drawing a translucent curtain—of one of those gauzy fabrics Elizabethans loved—over the scene, so that only shadowy figures are visible to the public. At the very center of the original title page, beneath Shake-speare’s Sonnets, there are the words “Never before Imprinted.” This prominent announcement (accurate, with two small exceptions, described below) implies that the public has long heard of the existence of these poems but has not until now been able to purchase them. For the writing of sonnets, as contemporary readers well understood, was not normally about getting them into print, where they would simply fall into the hands of anyone who had the money and the interest to buy the book. What mattered was getting the poems at the right moment into the right hands—most obviously, of course, the object of the poet’s passion, but also the intimate (and, in the case of Shakespeare and the aristocratic young man, quite distinct) social circles surrounding both the poet and his beloved.
Sonnet writing was in its most prestigious and defining form the sophisticated game of courtiers. Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey had made it fashionable in the reign of Henry VIII; Sir Philip Sidney had brought it to perfection in the reign of Elizabeth. The challenge of the game was to sound as intimate, self-revealing, and emotionally vulnerable as possible, without actually disclosing anything compromising to anyone outside the innermost circle. In Henry VIII’s court the stakes were particularly high—rumors of adultery swirled around the royal household and could lead to the Tower and the scaffold—but even in less alarming social settings sonnets always carried an air of risk. Sonnets that were too cautious were insipid and would only show the poet to be a bore; sonnets that were too transparent could give mortal offense.
There were circles within circles. Presumably, if the first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets—the sonnets urging the young man to marry and father a child—were written to Southampton, then Southampton constituted the innermost circle: he was the reader who was privileged to know almost everything. But their closest friends would have known something; those in their wider social circles considerably less; those outside this orbit but still within social range something less again; and so on. The p
oet’s true mastery is most fully displayed if those on the outermost edges still find the poems thrilling and revealing, even though they know absolutely nothing about any of the key players, not so much as their names.
By keeping his poems at some remove from the actual, Shakespeare was able both to share them intimately with the young man, who would have been able easily to fill in the missing personal details, and to circulate them safely among readers who could savor their beauty and admire their maker. “The sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare,” wrote one informed observer of the literary scene in 1598, praising “his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.”
Soon the poems started to float free of the group of private friends and take on a life of their own, independent of their immediate circumstances, whatever those circumstances might have been. Versions of two of the sonnets appeared in print in 1599 in an unauthorized collection, The Passionate Pilgrim. By W. Shakespeare, whose publisher, William Jaggard, was clearly trying to profit from the poet’s celebrity. (Of the twenty poems in the collection, only five are actually by Shakespeare.) It is not only a modern misapprehension to think of such poems as “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” as having been written not to a young man but to a woman; already by the 1620s and ’30s the sonnets were being copied out as heterosexual rather than homosexual. And this fluidity, this ability to be imaginatively transformed, seems part of the poet’s own design, a manifestation of his supreme skill at playing this special game.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 25
