by Bill Bryson
In the same year that Shakespeare’s mother died, the King’s Men finally secured permission to open the Blackfriars Theatre. The Blackfriars became the template from which all subsequent indoor theaters evolved, and so ultimately was more important to posterity than the Globe. It held only about six hundred people, but it was more profitable than the Globe because the price of admission was high: sixpence for even the cheapest seat. This was good news for Shakespeare, who had a one-sixth interest in the operation. The smaller theater also permitted a greater intimacy in voice and even in music-strings and woodwinds rather than trumpet blasts.
Windows admitted some light, but candles provided most of the illumination. Spectators could, for an additional fee, sit on the stage-something not permitted at the Globe. With stage seating, audience members could show off their finery to maximum effect, and the practice was lucrative; but it contained an obvious risk of distraction. Stephen Greenblatt relates an occasion in which a nobleman who had secured a perch on the stage spied a friend entering across the way and strode through the performance to greet him. When rebuked by an actor for his thoughtlessness, the nobleman slapped the impertinent fellow and the audience rioted.
Apart from the stage itself, the best seats were in the pit (or so it is presumed) because the hanging candelabra must at least partly have obscured the view of those sitting higher up. With the Blackfriars up and running, the Globe closed for the winter.
On May 20, 1609, a quarto volume titled Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Never Before Imprinted, went on sale, priced at 5 pence. The publisher was one Thomas Thorpe; this was slightly unexpected, as he possessed neither a press nor retail premises. What he did have, however, were the sonnets. Where he got them, and what William Shakespeare made of his having them, can only be guessed at. We have no record of Shakespeare’s making any public reaction to the sonnets’ publication.*
“Probably more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world,” said W. H. Auden, correctly. We know virtually nothing for certain about them-when they were written, to whom they were addressed, under what circumstances they came to be published, whether they are assembled in even remotely the correct order.
In some critics’ view, the sonnets are the very summit of Shakespeare’s achievement. “No poet has ever found more linguistic forms by which to replicate human responses than Shakespeare in the Sonnets,” wrote the Harvard professor Helen Vendler in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. “The greater sonnets achieve an effortless combination of imaginative reach with high technical invention…a quintessence of grace.”
Certainly they contain some of his most celebrated lines, as in the opening quatrain to Sonnet 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
What is unusual about these lines, and many others of an even more direct and candid nature, is that the person they praise is not a woman but a man. The extraordinary fact is that Shakespeare, creator of the tenderest and most moving scenes of heterosexual affection in play after play, became with the sonnets English literary history’s sublimest gay poet.
Sonnets had had a brief but spectacular vogue, set off by Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591, but by 1609 they were largely out of fashion, and this doubtless helps to explain why Shakespeare’s volume was not more commercially successful. Though his two long poems sold well, the sonnets seem to have attracted comparatively little notice and were reprinted only once in the century of their publication.
As published, the 154 sonnets are divided into two unequal parts: 1 to 126, which address a beauteous young man (or possibly even men), traditionally known as the fair youth, with whom the poet is candidly infatuated; and 127 to 154, which address a “dark lady” (though at no point is she actually so called) who has been unfaithful to him with the adored fellow in Sonnets 1 to 126. (At the risk of becoming parenthetically annoying, it is perhaps worth noting that Sonnet 126 is not strictly a sonnet but a collection of rhymed couplets.) There is also a shadowy figure known often as “the rival poet.” The volume also included, as a kind of coda, an unrelated poem, not in sonnet form, called A Lover’s Complaint. It has many words (eighty-eight by one count) not found elsewhere in Shakespeare, leading some to suspect that it is not really his.
Many authorities believe that Shakespeare was alarmed and surprised-“horrified” in Auden’s view-to find the sonnets in print. Sonnets are normally celebrations of love, but these were often full of self-loathing and great bitterness. Many were also arrestingly homoerotic, with references to “my lovely boy,” “the master mistress of my passion,” “Lord of my love,” “thou mine, I thine,” and other such bold and dangerously unorthodox declarations. It was irregular, to say the least, to address a love poem to someone of the same sex. The king’s behavior at court notwithstanding, homosexuality was not a sanctioned activity in Stuart England and sodomy was still technically a capital offense (though the rarity of prosecutions suggests that it was quietly tolerated).
Nearly everything about the sonnets is slightly odd, starting with the dedication, which has bewildered and animated scholars almost since the moment of publication. It reads: “To the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr W.H. all happinesse and that eternitie promised by our ever-living poet, wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth.” It is signed “T.T”.-which is reasonably taken to be Thomas Thorpe-but who is the enigmatic “Mr W.H.”? One candidate, suggested surprisingly often, is Henry Wriothesley, with his initials reversed (for reasons no one has ever remotely made sound convincing). Another is William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, whose initials are at least in order and who had a Shakespeare connection: Heminges and Condell would dedicate the First Folio to him and his brother fourteen years later.
The problem with either of these candidates is that they were both aristocratic, while the dedicatee is addressed here as “Mr.” It has been suggested that Thorpe may not have known any better, but in fact Thorpe addressed Pembroke directly in a separate volume in the same year and did so with the usual obsequious flourishes: “To the Right Honourable, William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain to his Majesty, one of his most honourable Privy Council, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, etc…” Thorpe knew how to address a noble. A more prosaic likelihood is that “Mr W.H.” was a stationer named William Hall, who, like Thorpe, specialized in unauthorized productions.
A separate matter of contention is whether the “onlie begetter” is the person being addressed in the sonnets or simply the one who procured the text-whether he supplied the inspiration or merely the manuscript. Most authorities think the latter, but the dedication is vague to the point of real oddness. “Indeed,” Schoenbaum wrote, “the entire dedication…is so syntactically ambiguous as to defeat any possibility of consensus among interpreters.”
We don’t know when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, but he employed sonnets in Love’s Labour’s Lost- one of his very earliest plays by some reckonings-and in Romeo and Juliet, where a conversation between the two lovers is ingeniously (and movingly) rendered in sonnet form. So the sonnet as a poetic expression was certainly on his mind in the early to mid-1590s, at about the time he might have had a relationship with Southampton (assuming he had one). But dating the sonnets is an exceedingly tricky business. A single line in Sonnet 107 (“The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured”) has been taken to signify at least five separate historic occurrences: an eclipse, the death of the queen, an illness of the queen, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or a reading from a horoscope. Other sonnets seem to have been written earlier still. Sonnet 145 contains a pun on the name “Hathaway” (“‘I hate’ from hate away she threw”), which suggests that he may have written it in Stratford when he was in cou
rting mode. If Sonnet 145 is indeed really autobiographical, it also makes clear that Shakespeare was not an innocent seduced by an older woman, but was rebuffed and had to work hard to win her heart.
The sonnets have driven scholars to the point of distraction because they are so frankly confessional in tone and yet so opaque. The first seventeen all urge the subject to marry, prompting biographers to wonder if they weren’t directed at Southampton, who was, as we know, a most reluctant bridegroom. The poems press the fair youth to propagate so that his beauty is passed on-an approach that might well have appealed both to Southampton ’s vanity and to his sense of his genealogical responsibilities as an aristocrat. One suggestion is that Shakespeare was commissioned (by Burleigh or Southampton ’s mother or both) to write the poems, and that during the course of this transaction he met and fell for Southampton and the so-called dark lady.
It is an appealing scenario but one based on nothing but a chain of hopeful suppositions. We have no evidence that Shakespeare had even a formal acquaintance with Southampton, much less a panting one. It must also be said that the few specific references to appearance in the sonnets don’t always sit comfortably with the known facts. Southampton, for example, was inordinately proud of his auburn hair, yet the admired character in Shakespeare has “golden tresses.”
Looking for biography-Shakespeare’s or anyone’s-in the sonnets is almost certainly an exercise in futility. In fact, we don’t actually know that the first 126 sonnets are all addressed to the same young man-or indeed that in every instance the person is a man. Many of the sonnets do not indicate the sex of the person being addressed. It is only because they have been published as a sequence-probably an unauthorized one-that we take them to be connected.
“If we take the ‘I’ in every sonnet to be stable, that’s an enormous conceit,” Paul Edmondson of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and coauthor with Stanley Wells of the book Shakespeare’s Sonnets told me on a visit to Stratford. “People tend too easily to suppose they are printed as written. We just don’t know that. Also, the ‘I’ doesn’t have to be Shakespeare’s own voice; there might be lots of different imaginary ‘I’s. Many of the conclusions about gender are based simply on context and placement.” He notes that only twenty of the sonnets can conclusively be said to concern a male subject and just seven a female.
The dark lady is no less doubtful. A. L. Rowse-who, it must be said, never allowed an absence of certainty to get in the way of a conclusion-in 1973 identified the dark lady as Emilia Bassano, daughter of one of the queen’s musicians, and, with a certain thrust of literary jaw, asserted that his conclusions “cannot be impugned, for they are the answer,” even though they are unsupported by anything that might reasonably be termed proof. Another oft-mentioned candidate was Mary Fitton, mistress of the Earl of Pembroke. But again some imagery in the text-“her breasts are dun;…/ black wires grow on her head”-suggests someone darker still.
We will almost certainly never know for sure, and in any case we perhaps don’t need to. Auden for one believed that knowing would add nothing to the poems’ satisfactions. “Though it seems to me rather silly to spend much time on conjectures which cannot be proved true or false,” he wrote, “what I really object to is their illusion that, if they were successful, if the identity of the Friend, the Dark Lady, the Rival Poet, etc., could be established beyond doubt, this would in any way illuminate our understanding of the sonnets themselves.”
The matter of Shakespeare’s sexuality-both that he had some and that it might have been pointed in a wayward direction-has caused trouble for his admirers ever since. One early editor of the sonnets solved the problem simply by making all the masculine pronouns feminine, at a stroke banishing any hint of controversy. Predictably, the Victorians suffered the acutest anxieties. Many went into a kind of obstinate denial and persuaded themselves that the sonnets were simply “poetical exercises” or “professional trials of skill,” as the biographer Sidney Lee termed them, arguing that Shakespeare had written them in a number of assumed voices, “probably at the suggestion of the author’s intimate associates.” Thus, any reference to longing to caress a fellow was Shakespeare writing in a female voice, as a demonstration of his versatility and genius. Shakespeare’s real friendships, Lee insisted, were of “the healthy manly type” and any alternative interpretation “casts a slur on the dignity of the poet’s name which scarcely bears discussion.”
Discomfort lasted well into the twentieth century. Marchette Chute, in a popular biography of 1949, relegated all discussion of the sonnets to a brief appendix in which she explained: “The Renaissance used the violent, sensuous terms for friendship between men that later generations reserved for sexual love. Shakespeare’s use of terms like ‘master-mistress’ sounds abnormal to the ears of the twentieth century, but it did not sound so at the end of the sixteenth.” And that was as close as she or most other biographers cared to get to the matter. The historian Will Durant as recently as 1961 noted that Sonnet 20 contained “an erotic play on words” but could not bring himself to share specifics.
We needn’t be so blushing. The lines he alludes to are: “But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, / Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.” Most critics believe that these lines indicate that Shakespeare’s attachment to the fair youth was never consummated. But as Stanley Wells notes, “If Shakespeare himself did not, in the fullest sense of the word, love a man, he certainly understood the feelings of those who do.”
Perhaps the biggest question of all is, if he didn’t write them for publication, what were they for? The sonnets represent a huge amount of work, possibly over a period of years, and at the highest level of creation. Were they really meant not to be shared? Sonnet 54 boasts:
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.
Did Shakespeare really believe that a sonnet scratched on paper and hidden away in a folder or drawer would outlast marble? Perhaps it all was an elaborate conceit or private amusement. More than for any other writer, Shakespeare’s words stand separate from his life. This was a man so good at disguising his feelings that we can’t ever be sure that he had any. We know that Shakespeare used words to powerful effect, and we may reasonably presume that he had feelings. What we don’t know, and can barely even guess at, is where the two intersected.
In his later years Shakespeare began to collaborate-probably with George Wilkins in about 1608 on Pericles and with John Fletcher on The Two Noble Kinsmen, Henry VIII (or All Is True), and the lost play The History of Cardenio, all first performed around 1613. Wilkins was, on the face of it, an exceedingly unappealing character. He ran an inn and brothel and was constantly in trouble with the law-once for kicking a pregnant woman in the belly and on another occasion for beating and stamping upon a woman named Judith Walton. But he was also an author of distinction, writing plays successfully on his own-his Miseries of Enforced Marriage was performed by the King’s Men in 1607-and in collaboration. All that is known of his relationship with Shakespeare is that they were fellow lodgers for a time at the Mountjoy residence.
Fletcher was of a more refined background altogether. Fifteen years younger than Shakespeare, he was the son of a bishop of London (who had, among other distinctions, been the presiding cleric at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots). Fletcher’s father was for a time a favorite of Queen Elizabeth’s, but after his first wife died he earned the queen’s displeasure with a hasty remarriage and was banished from court. He died in some financial distress.
Young Fletcher was educated at Cambridge. As a playwright-and indeed as a person-he was most intimately associated with Francis Beaumont, with whom he enjoyed a strikingly singular relationship. From 1607 to 1613 they were virtually inseparable. They slept in the same bed, shared a mistress, and even dressed identically, according to John Aubrey. During this period they cowrote ten or so plays, including The Maid’s Tragedy and the very successful A King and No K
ing. But then Beaumont abruptly married, and the partnership just as abruptly ceased. Fletcher went on to collaborate with many others, notably Philip Massinger and William Rowley.
Nothing is known of the relationship between Shakespeare and Fletcher. It may well be that they worked separately, or it may be that Fletcher was given unfinished manuscripts to complete after Shakespeare’s retirement. Wells, however, thinks that the careful flow of the plays suggests they worked together closely.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, though almost certainly performed while Shakespeare was still alive, is unknown before 1634, when it was published with a title page attributing it jointly to Fletcher and Shakespeare. Henry VIII and Cardenio are also ascribed to Fletcher and Shakespeare jointly. Cardenio was based on a character in Don Quixote and was never published, it seems, though it was registered for publication in 1653 as being by “Mr Fletcher and Shakespeare.” A manuscript copy of the play is thought to have been held by a museum in Covent Garden, London, but unfortunately the museum went up in flames in 1808 and took the manuscript with it. Fletcher died in 1625 of the plague and was buried with-literally with-his fellow playwright and sometime collaborator Massinger. Today they lie in the chancel of Southwark Cathedral beside the grave of Shakespeare’s young brother Edmund.
Shakespeare may also have collaborated much earlier on Edward III, published anonymously in 1596. Some authorities think at least some of the play is Shakespeare’s, though the matter is much in dispute. Timon of Athens was probably written with Thomas Middleton. Stanley Wells suggests a date of 1605, while stressing that it is very uncertain. George Peele is also mentioned often as a probable collaborator on Titus Andronicus.
