Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Pembroke, of course, may have influenced the sonneteer at some point, and that cannot be ruled out. But there is no sign that Shakespeare met the future earl in the 1590s, though Michael Brennan's historical research, for instance, takes one close to the milieu of the Pembrokes at Wilton in Wiltshire and to its concerns. 18 No visitor at Wilton, none of its residents, and no one connected with William Herbert or his father suggests that the playwright had anything to do

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  with the family in the 1590s. Lord Herbert was only 13, and not yet living in London, when Venus was printed; there is no guarantee that the opening Sonnets were written first, but they relate in style to the Ovidian poems and early plays, not to the poet's manner late in the decade. Moreover, up to 1594. Shakespeare acknowledges only one poetry-patron. On telling Southampton 'what I have to do is yours' in 1594, he apparently aims to delight that patron in future with something besides Lucrece.

  He is gravely elegant in Sonnets 1-17 -- which, even as they allude to time's ravages and beauty's fading, are truly an actor's lyrics. If something is missed when the Sonnets are recited, they are impressive even then as the most beautiful poems in our language, so truthful that the poet's nasty, ugly, and finally near-insane outlook is not muted or compromised. The Sonnets have been effectively recited, not with any halting emphasis on phrases or images but with whole lines as units of speech. 'The meaning of the line very often resides in the second half', remarks the actor Simon Callow. 19 And at the start, the Poet's misogyny is mild, aristocratic, tactical. Abasing himself, he implies that a lovely, well-born youth needs a wife for childbearing, but not of course for love, wit, wealth, talents, companionship, or anything else she may offer.

  In Shakespeare's time, or soon afterwards, one of these decorous opening lyrics was well liked. More manuscript copies of his Sonnet 2 ('When forty winters') survive from the seventeenth century than do all similar copies of his other lyrics. Whether he or Drayton was the borrower, a line in Drayton Shepheards Garland of 1593 -- 'The timeplow'd furrows in thy fairest field' -- resembles a line in a manuscript of Sonnet 2,

  And trench deep furrows in that lovely field.

  Shakespeare apparently revised this to read,

  And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field. 20

  His image becomes military, and has a military echo of course in Sonnet 16 ('Make war upon this bloody tyrant, time'). It was for military glory, one notes, that the young Southampton yearned; unfortunately Shake-

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  speare (so far as we know) lacked any such military credentials as those of two brave sonneteers who praised the earl: Barnabe Barnes, two years before he wrote his sonnet to Southampton, had joined the army expedition to Dieppe; and Gervase Markham was to have a captaincy in Ireland when Southampton became Essex's General of the Horse.

  In Sonnets 1-17, Shakespeare at any rate does not vaunt his originality. He neither flatters a patron's learning, nor links him with a vain, naïve young man. But in praising mutable human beauty, he tests the language of praise while avoiding panegyric staleness, and so pays tribute to a reader's good taste before pledging loyalty to one of implicitly high rank:

  Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage

  Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,

  To thee I send this written embassage

  To witness duty, not to show my wit;

  Duty so great which wit so poor as mine

  May make seem bare in wanting words to show it. . . .

  (Sonnet 26)

  A 'Lord' of culture might wonder if the tired, well-worn sonnet form could any longer be fresh, a suitable vehicle for a poet's 'wit'. By the 1590s the form was becoming passé. Shakespeare writes with a sense that sonnets are indeed toys, little games in which a mystifying poet (aided, if possible, by a publisher's mystifications) pretends to unlock autobiographical secrets 'consecrated to silence' in an inner self. 21 He derides sonneteers in his plays, and lightly mocks 'wailful sonnets' as early as Two Gentlemen. In a sense he had grown up with sonnets: Wyatt's and Surrey's sonnets were popular in his boyhood. He knew Thomas Watson's versions of some of Petrarch's and Ronsard's sonnets, and Spenser Ruines of Rome, with its pleasant, fairly close versions of Joachim Du Bellay's allusive sonnets on time and the past in Les Antiquités de Rome. Spenser Ruines was of 1591. In that year, Sidney's brilliant sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella appeared, five years after Sidney's death, along with twenty-seven of Daniel's smooth sonnets to Delia in a pirated edition with Nashe's exuberant preface.

  In this ' "Theater of pleasure"', wrote Nashe of the Astrophil lyrics,

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  'the tragicommody of love is performed by starlight' and 'you shall find a paper stage strewed with pearle'. 22

  But in the deluge of English sonnets that followed, the paper-stage became soggy. A new, wittily acerbic poetry of argument by Inns of Court coterie poets with young John Donne at the forefront did not bode well for the sonnet vogue. Daniel in his lyrics to Delia, for example, had offered Shakespeare a good example of a smooth, tonally fine English Petrarchan manner:

  Seeke out some place, and see if any place

  Can give the least release unto thy griefe.

  Autentique shall my verse in time to come,

  When yet th'unborne shall say, 'Loe where she lyes,

  Whose beautie made him speake that else was dombe.' 23

  But Daniel soon despaired over that 'naked' style, and thought of himself as an old-fashioned Elizabethan. Drayton tried to 'harden' his own sonnets in repeated revisions. Even Meres's praise of 'sugred Sonnets' -- sugared meaning smooth or graceful -- would have seemed outmoded to some at Holborn, or in the west of London, by 1598. When Shakespeare's lyrics resurfaced in a second (pirated) edition in 1640, their editor touted them as being no More than 'Serene, cleere and eligantly plaine', and made a virtue of outmodedness. 24

  Well alert to literary fashion, Shakespeare nonetheless found an old lyric genre congenial. He does not invent a new form, but uses the English or Surreyan form which George Gascoigne had defined in ' "Certayne notes of Instruction concerning the making of verse"' in The Posies ( 1575), a revision of A Hundreth sundrie Flowres printed two years earlier: 'some thinke that all Poemes (being short) may be called Sonets', wrote Gascoigne,

  as indeede it is a diminutive worde derived of Sonare, but yet I can beste allowe to call those Sonets whiche are of fouretene lynes, every line conteyning tenne syllables. The firste twelve do ryme in staves of foure lines by crosse meetre, and the last twoo ryming togither do conclude the whole. 25

  Katherine Duncan-Jones thinks that another passage in Gascoigne's 'notes' may have caught Shakespeare's eye. This is likely in view of

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  Sonnet 130 ('My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun'), though such a lyric transforms any suggestion in a source. 'If I should undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman', declared Gascoigne, 'I would neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, &c. For these things are trita & obvia. . . I would undertake to aunswere for any imperfection that shee hath, and thereupon rayse the prayse of hir commendacion.' 26

  Shakespeare borrows from other sonneteers. He even imagines rival poets in Sonnets 78-86, but without evoking Barnes, Markham, Chapman, Marlowe, or any others known to us; his nameless rivals belong to a strategy of praise for a youth who grants access to a truer, purer language than other poets use. The Sonnets are too paradoxical and mixed to be labelled as either 'fictions' and 'literary exercises', or as straightforward 'biographical revelations'. Helen Vendler calls attention to 'the successive intellectual position-taking' which is a feature of them, and yet, as she suggests, what counts is a pressure of inwardness, or the poet's ability to transform idea into intense experience. 27 Certainly these poems take us inside Shakespeare's mind, and the real importance of the Sonnets in his life is that they became a means of developing his artistic sensibility. In this theatre of the mind it is rehearsal time, as he tries out this and that, tests his style,
moods, and perceptions, brings some lyrics to the highest level of his art, or leaves others as simpler experiments. His Sonnets partly account for a new lyricism in his plays, and also for the More individuated verse that he uses to give depth to his dramatis personae, and so, especially in the 1590s, for his stunning progress as a dramatist.

  Most of the first 126 sonnets focus on a lovely youth while painting their speaker's -- or Poet's -- portrait. The topic of childbearing dies away, as the Poet declares love's urgency. He lives for the youth, no one else, and shares a mistress with that gentle thief: 'Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all' (Sonnet 40).

  The lyrics are self-effacing almost to the point of masochism, oddly troubled in emotion under smooth surfaces, and as their syntax

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  becomes More complex they suggest a rather over-responsive author, easily pained, weary of his faults, but unable to endure a friend's disloyalty. Though pleased or touched by simple banalities of nature, and by his mind's eye's image of the youth, he is oddly removed from real people; he feels while observing. Adoring from a distance he is nearly tranquil, or only at the mercy of his intellect's questioning pictures; to be involved closely in reciprocal feeling is to know his own worthlessness along with disquiet, turmoil, or despair. To be sure, despair belongs to the sonnet vogue. Shakespeare's sonnets are More flexible and varying, also More parodying, subtle, and intelligent than those of his rivals. He sees much, holds to rather little, and contradicts nearly everything he can say about time, love, the youth, or the self.

  In no sonnet sequence of the 1590s is there much narrative continuity, and Shakespeare's triangular love-story of a Poet who loves a youth and a Dark Woman (who in their own affair betray him) is a slender one. Far More elaborate than that 'story' are stylistic and thematic links between groups of sonnets. To increase the psychological interest of yearning, the author gives it a homoerotic or, at times, bisexual aspect. Shakespeare delights in sexual ambiguity and his little parable in Sonnet 20 is odd enough (one imagines) to stun the lovely boy's brains. As the Poet's 'master-mistress', the youth is told he was 'first created' as a woman,

  Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,

  And by addition me of thee defeated

  By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

  Nature in her doting at first shows homoerotic feeling, which perhaps seems natural enough to the author, but then, inclined to be heterosexual, she gives 'one thing', or a penis, to the boy, though even after this event the Poet's feelings remain sexual. And if never the boy's possessor, he is 'proud as an enjoyer', as he says with sexual innuendo:

  Now counting best to be with you alone,

  Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure;

  Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,

  And by and by clean starvèd for a look.

  (Sonnet 75)

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  The effect is to universalize his feeling without loss of context, and to picture a deep yearning in all human love, both male and female.

  Instead of describing the youth Shakespeare has the novel aim of writing' an equivalent beauty into his lyrics. So he draws on a lucid simplicity learned from the stage, and on imagery of the seasons, often with irony as his Richard does. He catches the rhythm of nature famously at his best as in Sonnet 18 ('Shall I compare thee') or writes, with less irony and More passion:

  How like a winter hath my absence been

  From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!

  What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,

  What old December's bareness everywhere!

  (Sonnet 97)

  Or he reaches pathos in an opening line, 'From you have I been absent in the spring', and develops it in speaking cadences and severely simple, graphic details. Almost as often multiple meanings coalesce, check, or reinforce each other, as in the variant words, substance, shadow, and shade in Sonnet 53, which has the syntactical clarity of his limpid style. Elsewhere he can include meanings that contradict themselves and find no resolution.

  He also begins to reveal the price he pays to write as he does, and the oddities of his imagination and memory. He exaggerates feeling; but Tudor drama rested on the ability of poets to plumb recesses of motivation that are obscure, and feeling, of every kind, was a guide. He can bring human loss, debilitating grief, and dead and lamented friends to bear on ardour. 'Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts', the lovely boy is told,

  Which I by lacking have supposéd dead,

  And there reigns love, and all love's loving parts,

  And all the friends which I thought buriéd.

  How many a holy and obsequious tear

  Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye

  As interest of the dead, which now appear

  But things removed that hidden in thee lie!

  (Sonnet 31)

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  Even if it is a poetic conceit that the lovely boy is a 'grave' of love, the lines offer an unforced view of memory. For Shakespeare, memory has concentrative and animating effects; those 'supposed' dead or 'thought' buried, as it were, return. They seem reborn, because what was once felt for them is recovered forcefully in memory, and this emotive force has creative uses as in picturing the boy or the fond Poet's ardour. If Shakespeare's memory works in this way, things 'removed' in time or space have startling freshness for him, and his creative resources are immense. Anne Shakespeare is in the Sonnets apparently, since the turmoil of his courtship (for example) is memorially recoverable as he writes of love and betrayal.

  Is the self-effacing artist, in some way, a victim of the imagined being or emotion into which the past momentarily pours? The lovely boy is fickle, but the Poet is obsessed with his own faults, his selfconceit or worn face, 'Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity' (Sonnet 62). 'Being your slave' and 'your vassal', as the Poet repeats, 'O let me suffer' (Sonnets 57-8). Parted from any sight of the youth, he is subject to restless, petty moods, or feels 'outcast' and 'all alone', almost self-despising, and summons up regrets:

  I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

  And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste.

  (Sonnet 30)

  This in the language of patronage may imply that a patron's love or aid is needed for one's well-being; indeed the melancholy in the Sonnets is often conventional -- but their anxiety, restlessness, and sense of time lost are not.

  Death is a promise of stasis and of deliverance from hope, desire, and shame alike. An elegiac note in the Sonnets was to surprise John Keats, but the author's tone is seldom More assured than when he takes up death's law,

  But be contented when that fell arrest

  Without all bail shall carry me away

  (Sonnet 74)

  or church-bells ringing out death, as in plague-time,

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  No longer mourn for me when I am dead

  Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell

  Give warning to the world

  (Sonnet 71)

  or death's bleak, beautiful season with a possible allusion, after all, to 'our ruined monasteries':

  yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

  (Sonnet 73)

  Yet the Poet's odd exhilaration belies any death-wish; he tirelessly forecasts his demise to play on a boy's shallow heart. And images of death work as symbols of thematic integration which the Poet's splendid, varying reflections do not quite achieve: he imagines a time 'When all the breathers of this world are dead' (Sonnet 81) and the lovely boy -- his follies of less account -- will 'live' in lyrics that never deny his beauty. These sonnets rest in no other less ironic truth; and the author perhaps acknowledges the moral failure he sees in their tentativeness, and in his inability to hold fast to anything but a picture of removed, faulty beauty. 'My name be buried where my body is', writes Shakespeare, 'For I am sh
amed by that which I bring forth' (Sonnet 72).

  That would not have hurt him in the eyes of a noble patron, and in Sonnets 127-52 -- mainly to the Dark Woman -- he is implicitly harder on himself. His sexuality is perhaps More overt; he might be obsessed with sexual experience since he has included bawdy puns even in poems on ideal love. In a degrading affair and unable to break off his liaison, the Poet has ruminated nearly to 'madness'. His Dark Woman is a composite portrait, with details of her colouring or eyebrow mourners' echoing Sidney's seventh sonnet to Stella. We hear of her in incongruous reports. She can be 'thy sweet self' -- or she cups her hand over the virginal's jacks prettily -- but in a lightly or ( More often) mordantly joking perspective she is also ugly, with her dun breasts, sallow face, and cosmetics, 'black as hell', dangerous, vile, and whorish, a 'bay where all men ride' with so foul a face as to prove Cupid a blind fool, and love a 'false plague' or self-deceiving disease.

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  As an index of the Poet's rage against himself she is intentionally out of focus, as we might say. 'Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken', the Poet bitterly accuses her; he proposes various frail, temporary objectifications of himself to endure at all. In one of these he is a victim of love's 'fever', longing for More of the disease that agonizes him. In another, he is no More than a phallic drudge.

  'Flesh', he assures his lady,

  rising at thy name doth point out thee

  As his triumphant prize.

  (Sonnet 151)

  Yet as he has violated social codes that properly bind men and women, his isolation remains. Shakespeare's lyrics are not moralistic but tragic, as they take up in these various views of the 'self' the manner in which alienation may influence perception and language. The author may well explore his own sexual nausea, the better to understand Hamlet's, Angelo's, Othello's, or Lear's horror of sexuality. His interests here are at once psychological and social. For Elizabethans adultery implied bastardy and so threatened family succession and the survival of names. Quibbles or puns on the name 'Will' are appropriate. The Poet's name is ' Will'; so is the name of the Dark Lady's husband. Shakespeare mocks the pretended self-revelation of the sonnet vogue by neatly dissociating his own name from 'Will' with allusions to nonexistent persons of that name in proverb and popular riddle. Yet Sonnets 135 and 136, on Will, pick up slang meanings of will as both penis and vagina, and obsessively condemn the adulterer. 'Wilt thou', the Poet obscenely asks his lady,