Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Your Honors in all dutie, William Shakeƒpeare.

  He is newly reborn, as if with a 'first heire' of his brain he begins his career again, and there is a hint of the muddy Midlands whence he comes in the allusion to 'so bad a harvest'. Southampton's fashionable name advertises a work about which the poet has doubts. He follows Thomas Lodge Scillaes Metamorphosis, lightly, in matters of style.

  But his own erotic epyllion or short epic uses light borrowings well. His Adonis is a prim, amusing child hardly past puberty, with a niceness and gaucherie that might suit a new boy in an acting troupe. Adonis fears sex with a 'bashful shame' and maiden 'blush' that make him seem over-mothered.

  Venus appears as a Shoreditch bordello-madam on the rampage, or at first as a fleshy, sweaty, pantingly grotesque woman as she lugs Adonis under an arm or lecherously hungers for his virginal body:

  Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust,

  And governed him in strength, though not in lust.

  (lines 41-2)

  His red lips might save England from plague or drive infection from

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  the 'dangerous year' (perhaps the year 1592-3) as she tells him passionately, 'that the star-gazers'

  having writ on death,

  May say the plague is banished by thy breath!

  (lines 508-10)

  Early readers did not find her comical, but sexually exciting. And whereas treatments of Ovid's story had shown Venus and Adonis as mutual lovers, here the goddess is more affecting because her frantic appeals fall on deaf ears. In this poem she lusts rightfully, as if the author drew on an early experience of his own with a woman in making her alarming, then motherly, luscious, sympathetic. There is a deep, possibly autobiographical, aspect to Shakespeare's fascination for the sexual initiatives of women -- as in Titania's farcical but compelling wooing of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Rosalind's wooing of Orlando in As You Like It, or Helena's pursuit of Bertram in All's Well. The poet hardly wrote to make an earl give up bachelorhood, but in line with his procreative Sonnets 1-17, he has Venus argue for a begetting of children. After Adonis's horse bolts off to breed with a mare, Venus gets the boy into a coital position, hanging with plump arms round his neck till he falls on her belly, and she on her back:

  Now is she in the very lists of love,

  Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.

  (lines 595-6)

  But he is not 'pricked' just then for her delight, in a phrase of Sonnet 20, and next day a boar's priapic tusks nuzzle in his groin.

  Venus weeps angry tears at his death. In her vision of misery for all lovers and her flight to the skies, the poet hints at what she bequeaths, to us, on earth -- a miasma of sexual guilt, betrayal, and nagging torment which, in effect, Shakespeare takes up in the Sonnets.

  Licensed on 18 April 1593, Venus and Adonis had a delayed debut, but Richard Field, who bought the work outright, printed it by midSeptember and sold its very marketable copyright to John Harrison the next June. The poem's painterly appeal, sensual quality, and smart

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  pace ensured its success with courtiers and students; it had gone through at least six editions by 1599, and within a year of its publication Thomas Edwards, Michael Drayton, and Thomas Heywood (all in works licensed between October 1593 and May 1594) alluded to it in verses of their own. 9

  One consequence was that Shakespeare's name became More familiar in literary London. Dramatists and other poets knew one another, and Venus would have been noticed by those in Southampton's circle. Patronage networks were fluid and fragile, but distant informants could affect a poet's career. Southampton, as we know, came to court with the poet Fulke Greville -- whose father had become honorary recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, after aiding bailiffs and aldermen when John Shakespeare was going to 'halls'. We do not know this, but it is possible that Southampton had heard a little of Shakespeare from the younger Fulke Greville -- no mean judge of the talented -- and felt the more disposed to be encouraging.

  It is certain that with poets such as Drayton and Heywood astir over Venus and Adonis its author was talked about, and that he received a mark of the young lord's favour. The earl gave what Shakespeare simply calls a 'warrant' of his 'disposition', which, as vague as that is, implies a sign of approval. With a chance to learn More of him, what did Shakespeare -- around the autumn of 1593, or, at any rate, before the next spring -- find in the young ' Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield'?

  For the earl's family, the very hour of his birth was affecting and memorable, and yet -- born at 3 a.m. on 6 October 1573 -- he was the fine product of an unhappy match. Much that Shakespeare either heard about or would have been quick to notice, such as the young man's love of action, art, and drama, or his self-display and ambition, his homoerotic friendships, and his highly strung, rather unreckoning, temperament, must surely have had causes in his upbringing. His father was a fervent Catholic, imprisoned more than once for treason, and his mother a beautiful, sentimental, rather silly person who was said to have taken a commoner as a lover.

  As a boy, Henry Wriothesley had been a go-between for his parents. Then, when forcibly parted from his mother, he developed a deep

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  suspicion of women -- and he was to turn often to male friends for stimulus or affection. Nearly 8 when his father died, he became third Earl of Southampton, and a ward of the Queen's powerful Lord Treasurer -- Lord Burghley -- who trained him superbly at a school for young noblemen at Cecil House in London's Strand. Having met other royal wards, including perhaps his future hero the Earl of Essex, he went on at the early age of 12 to St John's College, Cambridge. His guardian also thought that the law might be useful, and enrolled him at Gray's Inn.

  But the comely, refined earl, who took his MA degree at 16, hardly had time for law-books at Holborn -- though his own Southampton House was near Gray's. He came to revels at Gray's Inn at about the time The Comedy of Errors was staged there; yet he mainly glittered at court. He was with the Queen at Oxford when, as a poet put it, 'his mouth yet blooms with tender down'. For a time, he was to see 'plaies every Day', and delight in Lord Strange's younger brother, who wrote playscripts.

  But Shakespeare at the time of Venus would have found him in hot water. Ordered by Burghley to wed the latter's granddaughter Lady Elizabeth Vere whose father was the Earl of Oxford, the young man baulked. That alliance might happily have cleared him of a papist taint; his mother's own Catholic crimes, on manuscript evidence, were hardly worse than her appeal to free an 'olde poor woman' charged (it seems) with recusancy, 10 but his father's link with a regicidal plot had led to the Tower.

  Still the boy refused to wed; and the law held that if an heir would not marry 'at the request of his lord', on coming of age he must pay him what 'any would have given for the marriage'. 11 The earl faced paying a stupendous fine (said to be £5, 000) on turning 21 in October 1594. Hence it was to a rather plucky nobleman that Shakespeare pledged love 'without end' (in his letter with Lucrece) and wrote 'what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours'. Southampton was becoming an exhibit. He enhanced a slender, lightly built form with delicate fabrics; his clinging white silk doublet, dancing hat-feathers, and purple garters could be offset by a lovely tress of auburn hair falling to the breast. Was he homosexual? The

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  unreliable William Reynolds, who was perhaps schizophrenic, wrote later that Southampton slept in a tent in Ireland with Piers Edmondes, a brother officer, and 'the earle Sowthamton would cole and huge [embrace and hug] him in his armes and play wantonly with him'. 12 Reynolds expected to be believed, but even if we dismiss that report, there are signs enough that the young earl preferred bisexual or homosexual friends.

  Buggery was a crime, but close, very affectionate friendships between males were much respected in this period. Male friends might desire with honour to be together always, and so the Cambridge tomb of the dramatist Thomas Legge signals h
is love for a man: 'Junxit amor vivos sic jungat terra sepultos' ('Love joined them living and so may the same earth link them in death'). 13 The Sonnets show Shakespeare's understanding of homoerotic feeling. He admired a patron who seemed, to many, to be Sir Philip Sidney's possible heir in valour and art. At least at the fringes of Southampton's set were Michael Drayton and his close friend Richard Barnfield, who wrote homoerotic lyrics. Barnfield had been at Brasenose College, Oxford -as had Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sonnet alluding to Southampton's lovely eyes. Gervase Markham in a sonnet praised the young earl's 'well-tun'd' sweet voice. Barnes and the poet Daniel were close friends of the earl's great tutor John Florio (who was to translate Montaigne Essays).

  At little cost as a rule, Southampton sweetly encouraged such writers, and Nashe complimented him justly, if flippantly, in the dedication of The Unfortunate Traveller in 1594: 'A dere lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.' It is not clear that the cherishing earl really entertained poets at his Titchfield estate in Hampshire, but here Shakespeare is said to have found the name 'Gobbo' for Shylock's servant. 14 However that may be, he soon dedicated a new poem to his patron.

  The erotic subject of Lucretia or Lucrece, her rape and suicide, obviously intrigued Shakespeare -- and this may be the 'graver labour' he had promised Southampton in 1593. His new poem's seriousness itself compliments the earl. This lady's Roman name had been synonymous with marital virtue since the Middle Ages, although her

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  death troubled Christian piety. In Lucrece, Shakespeare freshly reworks her story in the 'complaint' tradition, using the rhyme royal of Daniel's recent The Complaint of Rosamond, and wrings pathos from the helpless exposure to Tarquin's savagery of Lucrece's white bosom's 'blue veins' and 'round turrets'.

  Tarquin's tense, interesting, rationalizing debate with himself foreshadows the psychic terrain of Macbeth. The rapist disappears, as shattered as the lady's husband Collatine whose boasting of her virtues implicates him in the rape. But the benefit of the subject lay in chances it gave Shakespeare to plumb tragic feeling and effects. Minimizing outward action, he gives himself access to Lucrece's mind after the violation and so explores her agony, inanition, and self-accusing doubts. He might be a viewer in a plague-ridden city, musing on pain as he takes up tragic picturing:

  To see sad sights moves more than hear them told,

  For then the eye interprets to the ear

  The heavy motion that it doth behold,

  When every part a part of woe doth bear.

  (lines 1324-7)

  Lucrece is a work of great technical innovation and of much aesthetic appeal. It has the inward force of a spiritual 'retreat' in its spaciousness, slowness, and graphic depiction of mental suffering even in a dramatic context that is barely viable; the reader's mind fixes on an epitome of the fall of mankind and has time to contemplate it. Here, too, as Hallett Smith has said, is 'an examination of what constitutes tragedy and an explanation of how it operates'. 15 Or at least in the sunlight of an earl's eye, the author pursues his interests. A dozen or More passages echo imagery or phrasing in his Titus, and here he looks into the rationale for such a play.

  Even so, his design is slightly compromised, and one might think that he had been anxious to show his fitness to talk with the learned. The heroine's set-pieces, such as her denunciations of Night, Time, and Opportunity, show rhetorical agility, but lose her own accent -- a dozen other speakers in Tudor poems might have said them -- and easily detachable stanzas were to appeal to Elizabethan anthologizers.

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  In England's Parnassus ( 1600) Robert Allott selected thirty-nine passages from Lucrece (he took fewer from all the author's plays then in print) and a mere twenty-six from Venus, and John Bodenham Belvedere ( 1600) used ninety-one from Lucrece, only thirty-four from the more prurient Venus.

  Printed in 1594 as Lucrece -- later as The Rape of Lucrece from Field's early running-titles -- the poem as a whole was marginally less popular than its predecessor, if More instructive for the author, and went into six known editions in his own lifetime.

  Inscribing Lucrece to Southampton, Shakespeare is less reserved, More intimate in tone than before. 'Right Honourable', he begins around the spring of 1594,

  The loue I dedicate to your Lordship is without end: whereof this Pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous Moiety. The warrant I haue of your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my vntutored Lines makes it assured of acceptance.

  All of his poems, written and unwritten, are to be for the earl's honour:

  What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duety would shew greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship; To whom I wish long life still lengthned with all happinesse.

  Your Lordships in all duety.

  William Shakeƒpeare.

  Yet certainly a large, unbridgeable social gap divided the young, keen earl from an actor who wrote verse. Class consciousness in the age was very acute; Southampton for instance saw plays with his friend, the Earl of Rutland, but Ben Jonson remarked that one day, when he was at Lady Rutland's table, 'her husband comming in, accused her that she keept table to poets'. 16 Shakespeare was not a narrowly calculating man, but a hopeful enthusiast eager to improve his social credentials; in effect his dedicatory letters acknowledge a gap between himself and the earl, but they also make use of the young man. So far he had been rather limited by actors' demands, haste in

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  production, and shifting public taste as he served up playscripts to be changed as occasion required; he had to plunge boldly ahead of himself, touching on topics he might later develop. Actors and playwrights felt time pressing them, but, to the eye of many an observer, the nobility lived at another pace. Imaginatively, it was as a leisurely sonnet-writer that Stratford's poet most nearly entered his patron's privileged, less mercenary, world.

  Sonnet-writing had come into vogue among courtly poets, even as it appealed for a while at the law Inns. Having tried his hand at them, Shakespeare wrote sonnets over the years for private perusal. In this mode, he had a certain freedom denied a dramatist, in that he could allow himself to fail. Keeping his sonnets out of print, he might revise them or abandon them as he wished. In fact his Sonnets 138 and 144 were published without his authority and in what appear to be early drafts in a curious volume, The Passionate Pilgrim. The work's first edition now exists only in eleven leaves in the Folger Library, but we know that its second edition was printed by Thomas Judson for William Jaggard in 1599.

  In 1598 Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's 'sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends' 17 -- without saying who the lucky readers were. Recent evidence suggests that the 'friends' were rather few. At some point, he settled upon a plan of contrasts for a series, with one group of sonnets to be about an admirable love for a youth, and another group to be about uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion. The myth that Shakespeare's nameless Young Man and Dark Lady had exact counterparts in his life only began in the late eighteenth century. The Sonnets -- which profoundly explore love -are replete with bawdy puns and sexual jokes; the lyrics about adultery, for example, include allusions of a discreet sort to the vagina, and much plainer ones to the rising and failing penis. For years he had little to gain by printing his lyrics, and it is, of course, possible that he felt that intimate Sonnets with bawdy wit, carnal imagery, and exposés of lust might have troubled Mary Shakespeare, if she, or a literate neighbour at Stratford, saw a volume of them. He had the feelings of others at home to consider, and yet when well into his forties, he perhaps found reasons to publish his lyrics (a matter best judged in view of his

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  life in 1608-9). Time changes circumstances, and at last a series of 154 numbered sonnets with his narrative A Lover's Complaint appeared under the irreproachable city imprint of George Eld, for the publisher Thomas Thorpe, soon after
the volume was registered in 1609.

  The sonneteer

  The order in which he penned the Sonnets is unknown; but those to the lovely youth increase in syntactical complexity and were hardly begun later than 1593 or 1594. He appears to have started with a few, well-tried themes, before turning to some of the guilt and anguish he knew.

  It is likely that he took up for his youthful patron's eyes the theme of begetting children. In urging a young man to beget heirs in Sonnets 1-17, he echoes his Venus, which has a 'warrant' of Southampton's favour.

  In the sonnet vogue of the 1590s, poets tried to hint of dark, personal secrets in their lyrics. With artful verve Shakespeare himself played the game, and no one has ever complained that his Sonnets leave us with too few riddles and problems. I shall solve no puzzle here and advance no major theory, but it is worth glancing at a difficult matter at first -- did he write lyrics to please a nobleman other than Henry Wriothesley?

  If he did, the most probable candidate is young William Herbert, who was born at Wilton on 8 April 1580, and became third Earl of Pembroke in January 1601. He and his brother Philip were to have the large Folio of 1623 dedicated to them. By coincidence, in 1597 this boy's nervous parents urged him to marry another child of the Earl of Oxford and granddaughter of Lord Burghley -- Bridget Vere.