by Robert Nye
As promised in Chapter Seventeen (the one where I first told you about the room where I am writing this book) I will now give you all that remains in my possession of Love’s Labour’s Won. As you will see, this consists entirely of Helena’s speeches, as I remember them, and as I had written them out for my learning. Where they fit into All’s Well That Ends Well, as it stands now, I cannot exactly remember. That play, to speak plainly, is a spatchcock. It was never popular with the public, nor was Helena a favourite part of mine.
As to the clever place where I conceal this treasure – would it surprise you, sir, to look under your nose? The best place to hide anything is out in the open. Therefore, I keep all that is left of Love’s Labour’s Won in that envelope there on the mantelpiece. Yes, madam, that one, propped beside my clock, which (as you say) you had not even noticed. Here, hand me the pages down, and I will speak them for you …
First, Helena remembers her childhood in Narbonne, the hot south-land where her father was a physician:
’Twas ever summer in my dandled days
But sometime when the sky grew tired with heat
Slow thundry raindrops came, O it rained kisses
To cool my ear with whispers.
Then quickly flowers were jewels and moss was treasure
And long laburnam dripped like melting gold
And in the interstices of the stones
Small snails and lizards, spiders and black toads
Slid their wet scales against the cavern walls
Into the business of the flooded day.
First there was murmur in the tops of trees
Where the sky moved to ease the spate of rain,
Which though you could not see the branches tossed
To lay your hand upon the unmoved trunk
You knew the coming splendour of the storm,
And found the whole world water.
Great rivers grew where little trickles ran
And swans sat on them, cygnets in their wings,
And tall flamingoes beat against the wind
To find a higher perch above the surge.
All round me in the trees were watching eyes
As small things shivered for the wind and rain
And saw their masters ruffled from their lairs
Shake angry paws and pick fastidious ways
To proper earth where they could sit and lord it,
Letting the storm borrow their wilderness
And waiting for its idle strength to spend.
Which, when it had, the sun unburst his heat
And drew the vapours steaming from the ground
And with his stupid vapour hung the air
Till everything became itself again.
Among their drying stones the lizards lurked
And from the hill the lions swung their way,
Drooping their heads and blinking in a dream
As if the sky had never touched their peace.
Then, after they had passed, I saw a man –
A figure made of stone who stood whereat
That torrent had splashed down, sudden and strong.
Thinking I saw him move I held my breath
But he was stone and still and blind as silence.
And all around him in the working grass
The insects hummed, and birds’ wings rushed again,
And all the noises heard themselves once more.
This next little excised passage came where Helena made her entrance in Scene 3 of the first Act, just after her guardian the Countess has spoken of love as ‘this thorn’ which belongs to ‘our rose of youth’. No doubt the speech is too abrupt and not a little obscure, but (again) I think that its excision takes sympathy away from Helena who as she exists in All’s Well That Ends Well lacks the essential dash of poetic feeling that’s necessary to her deeds. Without lines like these, her pursuit of Bertram, and her use of the bed-trick, can strike the audience as repellent.
Anyway, picking up the image just expressed by the Countess of Rousillon, Bertram’s mother, in Love’s Labour’s Won I had to say as Helena:
A counterfeit of silence is the rose –
For it’s substantial fire, a patient palace
Listening to ghosts, a sorrow in sunlight.
Then there is this, which must come from Act IV, when Helena is in the widow’s house in Florence, about to perform her trick on Bertram:
Far, far from such festivity of flesh
I dream in ignorance of sanctuary,
Night-compassed.
How may the swarming sun the hive of flesh
Exhaust our quintessential sense, madam?
All men are strangers! O rivers, rivers,
Solve in your too bright burden of reflection
The hubbub of an overhanging noon,
And by your volubility hush up
The synonyms of Echo.
Where this came in, God only knows, but I consider it a shame to have lost so much imagery of pretty fishes, which again adds beauty to the part of Helena:
Those rainbow waters vellumy
Are all the pages of my book:
A kind of prick-fish, stickleback,
And ticklish trout in the binding.
Roach, bleak, loach, minnow, pickerel –
A perch voracious for her own blind eyes
In the frowsty primer of my blindness.
Lavish as gudgeon, the dropsical carp
Came at my call, to troll the sun
Through nibbling nets of moss, or dusk,
Wounded with tench.
And – exhalations smouldering the far water –
The swans drift down on me with Lethe in their wings.
I have this written out as verse, but it may be prose. Here, with your permission, I might mention a private theory of my own – namely, that there are several passages given to female characters in Shakespeare which have been taken for prose but which sound, in fact, quite new and original verse-rhythms. The later speeches of Lady Macbeth, for example, which are printed in the Folio as prose, are to my ear really verse, and very fine verse at that. When I spoke them I delivered them always in measure, and Mr Shakespeare never stopped me. Those lines drawn out in monosyllabic feet seem to me as wonderfully effective as any he wrote. The speeches in the sleep-walking scene, for instance, if spoken as verse, have a very great majesty.
You have had enough of Love’s Labour’s Won, have you, friends?
Very well, then. But just one speech more, before I put the sheets back in the envelope. This must surely belong at the end, where in All’s Well Helena never seems to have sufficient to say to Bertram to make it true in any sense that all ends well:
Helena (to Bertram)
Do not suppose I love you less because
My heart beats words to cheat the meaning out
Of love I cannot cheat so beat with words.
I have had carnal knowledge of the night
And move within the rose’s jurisdiction.
Because I lack wet willow’s simple touch
Do not suppose I love you overmuch.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Was Shakespeare raped?
Have you ever noticed how very queer Mr Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems are?
I mean Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both published in this period when the theatres were closed down on account of the plague, both written therefore before his thirtieth birthday.
In the first a mannish woman rapes a womanish man, but he proves impotent.
In the second a man is excited by the idea of his friend’s wife being chaste and rapes her, but the rape gets a bare eight lines out of the whole 1855. Before the rape, the poem lingers in a dream-like way over everything it invokes for our inspection: the doors and locks of the victim’s house, the wind that blows down the corridors, Lucrece’s discarded glove, her bedroom, her ‘yet unstained’ bed, her body’s beauty – five gloating stanzas of the last, including a description of
her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden yokes unconquered / Save of their lord. After the rape, the poem quickly enters the victim’s mind and becomes her long rhetorical complaint before she kills herself. Although the presentation of the ravisher Tarquin is adequate, it is plain that the poet identifies more easily with the raped woman Lucrece.
I think that in both poems Shakespeare was looking back eleven years or so, towards that summer of 1582, when perhaps he played Adonis/Lucrece to Anne Hathaway’s Venus/Tarquin in the fields of Shottery.
Was Shakespeare raped?
I think it not impossible. His Venus is not Ovid’s Venus. She is not even much of a goddess. She is an older woman having her way with a country boy she has kidnapped.
Venus rapes Adonis, but she doesn’t get what she wants. That much is made apparent at the climax:
Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter:
All is imaginary she doth prove,
He will not manage her, although he mount her;
That worse than Tantalus’ is her annoy,
To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.
Tantalus was punished in Hades by being inflicted with a great thirst and placed up to his chin in water which receded whenever he tried to drink. The last line means there has been no penetration.
Did Shakespeare believe (like his beloved Ovid) that women get more sexual pleasure from the act than men do? Tiresias in the Metamorphoses is the type of those who say so. Juno rewarded him with blindness.
The lustful Venus certainly takes control from the start:
Backward she push’d him, as she would be thrust,
And govern’d him in strength, though not in lust.
Adonis, by contrast, is almost as chaste as Lucrece. Unwilling and obstinate, he takes another 521 lines to succumb in any sort to the blandishments of his ravisher:
He now obeys and now no more resisteth,
While she takes all she can, not all she listeth.
A couplet which suggests that their coupling gives her little pleasure, and him none. Notice, too, how the comic effect of such feminine rhymes as are employed (encounter/he mount her; resisteth/she listeth) is always to leave Venus looking more than a touch ridiculous.
Before and after the imperfect copulation, the imagery of the poem at many points suggests that fable of Shakespeare’s childhood which had the boy Willy fleeing from his mother, both of them assuming different guises, until she caught him. Venus is likened to an eagle, a wolf, a glutton, a vulture whose lips ‘are conquerors’, a milch doe ‘whose swelling dugs do ache’, and then to falcons (yes, in the plural). Adonis is severally a bird lying tangled in the net, a divedapper (a species of grebe common on the Avon) turning his head this way and that to escape unwanted kisses, a deer, a lily prisoned in a jail of snow, a fleet-foot roe, a ‘froward infant still’d with dandling’,* a hare pursued by hounds, a bright star shooting from the sky, and (finally) a purple flower of which Venus ‘crops the stalk’, noting ‘green-dropping sap’ in ‘the breach’, which sap she compares to tears.
Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.
Venus and Adonis achieved an immediate and prolonged success with the public in general – sixteen editions of it were called for during the poet’s lifetime. But what was the nature of this success? Why, it was as a kind of aphrodisiac, a drug or preparation inducing venereal desire. It made people ‘burn in love’, as Shakespeare’s disciple John Weever declared in an epigrammatic sonnet. Others spoke frankly of sleeping with it under their pillows, and nuns were said to be using it as an aid to manustupration.
Madam, Pickleherring is not making this up as he goes along! I call as witness John Robinson, who in his Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon – the second edition, of 1623 – tells us that he managed to get himself engaged as door-keeper of that convent to keep an eye on three cousins of the Earl of Southampton who had taken the veil, and that ‘these ladies, although making parade of chastity, poverty and obedience possess licentious books and when the confessor feels merrily disposed after supper, it is usual for him to read from Venus and Adonis or the Jests of George Peele, as there are few idle pamphlets printed in England that are not to be found in this house.’ It was no less popular at the Court of Queen Elizabeth. A mad soldier called William Renolds (no relation!) even claimed that it had been published to show the world that the Queen was in love with him. I doubt if she was; and it certainly wasn’t.
None of this is said by way of disapprobation. Both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are sexually arousing, and it would be false to pretend that a part of Mr Shakespeare’s first reputation was not as an erotic writer. Pickleherring is willing to confess that the first time he read these poems he came across passages that gave him a hard on, and he imagines they made those nuns feel warm and wet. There is nothing wrong with this. I wish a few more readers would admit it. (Thank you, madam! You advance in my respect.)
But, sir, I take your point. There is something reprehensible and disgusting about a man taking pleasure in the rape of poor Lucrece, and I am ashamed to have done so. At the same time, I insist that Mr Shakespeare’s verse is by no means innocent of such pleasure itself. To say that Lucrece’s breasts are ‘unconquered’ save by her husband is to be an accomplice in the idea of ravishment. It feeds the doubtless horrible male fantasy that all sex is a game of conquest and possession. And I have not forgotten that the poem ends with Lucrece’s suicide, no. As for that, the other one ends with Adonis gored to death by a wild boar, and Venus hanging over the wide wound that the boar had trench’d / In his soft flank, staining her face with the boy’s blood, and confessing that if she had boar’s teeth With kissing him I should have kill’d him first. Do you suppose that the author of Othello was ignorant of the fact that Love and Death are sisters, and pain and pleasure often close allied?
I set out to suggest in this chapter that William Shakespeare was not the dominant partner in his early sexual exchanges with Anne Hathaway, and to argue that in his identification with first Adonis and then Lucrece he might be telling us something of his own feelings with regard to what she may have done to him. Of course, it could be that like many men he found the very notion of a sexually predatory and aggressive female both disturbing and comical, and that he found this notion incarnate in the figure of Venus. All the same, working on my usual principle that what is interesting biographically in Shakespeare’s work is what the subject does not demand he put there, I will maintain that in such an image as comes in the last line following we certainly do not see any Venus, any Goddess of Love:
With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast
And homeward through the dark lawnd runs apace;
Leaves Love upon her back, deeply distress’d.
That ‘Love’, deeply distress’d, left lying on her back in a Shottery meadow, might even be heard to drum her heels upon the ground in the well-known tantarum way of country girls unsatisfied by their swains. As to identifying Anne Hathaway with Sextus Tarquinius – I do no such foolish thing. Your author merely points out that William Shakespeare participates most keenly in the woman’s role in this particular poem. Perhaps he was never raped. But he felt he had been.
The other thing to say about these two poems is that while both of them are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, there is an observable difference between the two dedications. The first is impersonal but not cold. The second is both personal and warm: ‘What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.’ This difference in tone reflected the development in friendship between poet and patron, but I’ll keep that for my next chapter, which will be all about Southampton.
For the moment, suddenly, my mind is filled up by memory of Mrs Anne Shakespeare coming after me with that birch broom of hers, driving me from New Place and chasing me round the mul
berry tree when she caught me in her black silk calimanco. All at once, the notion of her as Tarquin is not so foolish.
* An allusion to Mary Arden’s playing with her son?
Chapter Sixty-Nine
All about Rizley
So here is the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Baron Titchfield, Earl of Southampton, in a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard. He is twenty summers old – it depicts him at the time of Venus and Adonis and of Mr Shakespeare’s first sonnets advising and exhorting him to marry. This is the face of Narcissus.
Under the exquisite arch of the brows the eyes look down, but not in any kind of modesty. They consider the rest of their owner, and are pleased with what they see. The gaze, you might say, is cock-sure. Who’s a pretty boy then?
This is the face that launched a thousand quips, all of them complimentary. It is long and oval, with delicate features, the face of an aristocrat. The long, thin nose is pointed, like a Russian dog’s. It speaks of centuries of sniffing, as well as centuries of in-breeding. The hair is a cascade of love-locks, red-gold, curling. It dangles down over its grower’s left shoulder, falling half-way to his wasp waist. It makes you want to swing him round the room by it. As for the mouth: two petulant petals pouting in complacent pride? That about covers it.
The lord and owner of this face has rings in his ears. He wears a white satin doublet. He has slashed and padded trunk-hose with, beneath his trunks, a pair of canions. Purple garters embroidered with silver thread hold up his white silk stockings. See, on the table beside him, his plumed helmet. One arm rests lightly on it. His other (gloved) hand rests on his padded hip.
To be honest, Pickleherring never much cared for the Earl of Southampton. You might say I was jealous, reader. Perhaps I was.
