Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

  The Puritans, with their uncouth morals and ignoble minds had of course railed against them, and dwelt on the impropriety of boys disguising as women, and learning to affect the manners and passions of the female sex. Gosson, with his shrill voice, and Prynne, soon to be made earless for many shameful slanders, and others to whom the rare and subtle sense of abstract beauty was denied, had from the pulpit and through pamphlet said foul or foolish things to their dishonour. To Francis Lenton, writing in 1629, what he speaks of as –

  ‘loose action, mimic gesture

  By a poor boy clad in a princely vesture,’

  is but one of many –

  ‘tempting baits of hell

  Which draw more youth unto the damned cell

  Of furious lust, than all the devil could do

  Since he obtained his first overthrow.’

  Deuteronomy was quoted and the ill-digested learning of the period laid under contribution. Even our own time had not appreciated the artistic conditions of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. One of the most brilliant and intellectual actresses of this century had laughed at the idea of a lad of seventeen or eighteen playing Imogen, or Miranda, or Rosalind. ‘How could any youth, however gifted and specially trained, even faintly suggest these fair and noble women to an audience?…One quite pities Shakespeare, who had to put up with seeing his brightest creations marred, misrepresented, and spoiled.’ In his book on ‘Shakespeare’s Predecessors’ Mr. John Addington Symonds also had talked of ‘hobbledehoys’ trying to represent the pathos of Desdemona and Juliet’s passion. Were they right? Are they right? I did not think so then. I do not think so now. Those who remember the Oxford production of the ‘Agamemnon,’ the fine utterance and marble dignity of the Clytemnestra, the romantic and imaginative rendering of the prophetic madness of Cassandra, will not agree with Lady Martin or Mr. Symonds in their strictures on the conditions of the Elizabethan stage.

  Of all the motives of dramatic curiosity used by our great playwrights, there is none more subtle or more fascinating than the ambiguity of the sexes. This idea, invented, as far as an artistic idea can be said to be invented, by Lyly, perfected and made exquisite for us by Shakespeare, seems to me to owe its origin, as it certainly owes it possibility of life-like presentation, to the circumstance that the Elizabethan stage, like the stage of the Greeks, admitted the appearance of no female performers. It is because Lyly was writing for the boy-actors of St. Paul’s that we have the confused sexes and complicated loves of Phillida and Gallathea: it is because Shakespeare was writing for Willie Hughes that Rosalind dons doublet and hose, and calls herself Ganymede, that Viola and Julia put on pages’ dress, that Imogen steals away in male attire. To say that only a woman can portray the passions of a woman, and that therefore no boy can play Rosalind, is to rob, the art of acting of all claim to objectivity, and to assign to the mere accident of sex what properly belongs to imaginative insight and creative energy. Indeed, if sex be an element in artistic creation, it might rather be urged that the delightful combination of wit and romance which characterises so many of Shakespeare’s heroines was at least occasioned if it was not actually caused by the fact that the players of these parts were lads and young men, whose passionate purity, quick mobile fancy, and healthy freedom from sentimentality can hardly fail to have suggested a new and delightful type of girlhood or of womanhood. The very difference of sex between the player and the part he represented must also, as Professor Ward points out, have constituted ‘one more demand upon the imaginative capacities of the spectators,’ and must have kept them from that over-realistic identification of the actor with his rôle, which is one of the weak points in modern theatrical criticism.

  This, too, must be granted, that it was to these boy-actors that we owe the introduction of those lovely lyrics that star the plays of Shakespeare, Dekker, and so many of the dramatists of the period, those ‘snatches of bird-like or god-like song,’ as Mr. Swinburne calls them. For it was out of the choirs of the cathedrals and royal chapels of England that most of these lads came, and from their earliest years they had been trained in the singing of anthems and madrigals, and in all that concerns the subtle art of music. Chosen at first for the beauty of their voices, as well as for a certain comeliness and freshness of appearance, they were then instructed in gesture, dancing, and elocution, and taught to play both tragedies and comedies in the English as well as in the Latin language. Indeed, acting seems to have formed part of the ordinary education of the time, and to have been much studied not merely by the scholars of Eton and Westminster, but also by the students at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, some of whom went afterwards upon the public stage, as is becoming not uncommon in our own day. The great actors, too, had their pupils and apprentices, who were formally bound over to them by legal warrant, to whom they imparted the secrets of their craft, and who were so much valued that we read of Henslowe, one of the managers of the Rose Theatre, buying a trained boy of the name of James Bristowe for eight pieces of gold. The relations that existed between the masters and their pupils seem to have been of the most cordial and affectionate character. Robin Armin was looked upon by Tarlton as his adopted son, and in a will dated ‘the fourth daie of Maie, anno Domini 1605,’ Augustine Phillips, Shakespeare’s dear friend and fellow actor, bequeathed to one of his apprentices his ‘purple cloke, sword, and dagger,’ his ‘base viall,’ and much rich apparel, and to another a sum of money and many beautiful instruments of music, ‘to be delivered unto him at the expiration of his terme of yeres in his indenture of apprenticehood.’ Now and then, when some daring actor kidnapped a boy for the stage, there was an outcry or an investigation. In 1600, for instance, a certain Norfolk gentleman of the name of Henry Clifton came to live in London in order that his son, then about thirteen years of age, might have the opportunity of attending the Bluecoat School, and from a petition which he presented to the Star Chamber, and which has been recently brought to light by Mr. Greenstreet, we learn that as the boy was walking quietly to Christ Church cloister one winter morning he was way-laid by James Robinson, Henry Evans, and Nathaniel Giles, and carried off to the Blackfriars Theatre, ‘amongste a companie of lewde and dissolute mercenarie players,’ as his father calls them, in order that he might be trained ‘in acting of parts in base playes and enterludes.’ Hearing of his son’s misadventure, Mr. Clifton went down at once to the theatre, and demanded his surrender, but ‘the sayd Nathaniel Giles, James Robinson and Henry Evans most arrogantlie then and there answered that they had authoritie sufficient soe to take any noble man’s sonne in this land,’ and handing the young schoolboy ‘a scrolle of paper, conteyning parte of one of their said playes and enterludes,’ commanded him to learn it by heart. Through a warrant issued by Sir John Fortescue, however, the boy was restored to his father the next day, and the Court of Star Chamber seems to have suspended or cancelled Evans’ privileges.

  The fact is that, following a precedent set by Richard III, Elizabeth had issued a commission authorising certain persons to impress into her service all boys who had beautiful voices that they might sing for her in her Chapel Royal, and Nathaniel Giles, her Chief Commissioner, finding that he could deal profitably with the managers of the Globe Theatre, agreed to supply them with personable and graceful lads for the playing of female parts, under colour of taking them for the Queen’s service. The actors, accordingly, had a certain amount of legal warrant on their side, and it is interesting to note that many of the boys whom they carried off from their schools or homes, such as Salathiel Pavy, Nat. Field, and Alvery Trussell, became so fascinated by their new art that they attached themselves permanently to the theatre, and would not leave it.

  Once it seemed as if girls were to take the place of boys upon the stage, and among the christenings chronicled in the registers of St. Giles’, Crippelgate, occurs the following strange and suggestive entry: ‘Comedia, base-born, daughter of Alice Bowker and William Johnson, one of the Queen’s plaiers, 10 Feb. 1589.’ But the child upon
whom such high hopes had been built died at six years of age, and when, later on, some French actresses came over and played at Blackfriars, we learn that they were ‘hissed, hooted, and pippinpelted from the stage.’ I think that, from what I have said above, we need not regret this in any way. The essentially male culture of the English Renaissance found its fullest and most perfect expression by its own method, and in its own manner.

  I remember I used to wonder, at this time, what had been the social position and early life of Willie Hughes before Shakespeare had met him. My investigations into the history of the boy-actors had made me curious of every detail about him. Had he stood in the carved stall of some gilded choir, reading out of a great book painted with square scarlet notes and long black key lines? We know from the Sonnets how clear and pure his voice was, and what skill he had in the art of music. Noble gentlemen, such as the Earl of Leicester and Lord Oxford, had companies of boy-players in their service as part of their household. When Leicester went to the Netherlands in 1585 he brought with him a certain ‘Will’ described as a ‘plaier’. Was this Willie Hughes? Had he acted for Leicester at Kenilworth, and was it there that Shakespeare had first known him? Or was he, like Robin Armin, simply a lad of low degree but possessing some strange beauty and marvellous fascination? It was evident from the early sonnets that when Shakespeare first came across him he had no connection whatsoever with the stage, and that he was not of high birth has already been shewn. I began to think of him not as the delicate chorister of a Royal Chapel, not as a petted minion trained to sing and dance in Leicester’s stately masque, but as some fair-haired English lad whom in one of London’s hurrying streets, or on Windsor’s green silent meadows, Shakespeare had seen and followed, recognising the artistic possibilities that lay hidden in so comely and gracious a form, and divining by a quick and subtle instinct what an actor the lad would make could he be induced to go upon the stage. At this time Willie Hughes’ father was dead, as we learn from Sonnet XIII, and his mother, whose remarkable beauty he is said to have inherited, may have been induced to allow him to become Shakespeare’s apprentice by the fact that boys who played female characters were paid extremely large salaries, larger salaries, indeed, than were given to grown-up actors. Shakespeare’s apprentice, at any rate, we know that he became, and we know what a vital factor he was in the development of Shakespeare’s art. As a rule, a boy-actor’s capacity for representing girlish parts on the stage lasted but for a few years at most. Such characters as Lady Macbeth, Queen Constance and Volumnia, remained of course always within the reach of those who had true dramatic genius and noble presence. Absolute youth was not necessary here, not desirable even. But with Imogen, and Perdita, and Juliet, it was different. ‘Your beard has begun to grow, and I pray God your voice be not cracked,’ says Hamlet mockingly to the boy-actor of the strolling company that came to visit him at Elsinore; and certainly when chins grew rough and voices harsh much of the charm and grace of the performance must have gone. Hence comes Shakespeare’s passionate preoccupation with the youth of Willie Hughes, his terror of old age and wasting years, his wild appeal to time to spare the beauty of his friend:

  ‘Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,

  And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed time,

  To the wide world and all her fading sweets;

  But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:

  O carve not with the hours my Love’s fair brow

  Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;

  Him in thy course untainted do allow

  For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.’

  Time seems to have listened to Shakespeare’s prayers, or perhaps Willie Hughes had the secret of perpetual youth. After three years he is quite unchanged:

  ‘To me, fair friend, you never can be old,

  For as you were when first your eye I eyed,

  Such seems your beauty still. Three winters’ cold

  Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,

  Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned,

  In process of the seasons have I seen,

  Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,

  Since first I saw you fresh which yet are green.’

  More years pass over, and the bloom of his boyhood seems to be still with him. When, in ‘The Tempest,’ Shakespeare, through the lips of Prospero, flung away the wand of his imagination and gave his poetic sovereignty into the weak, graceful hands of Fletcher, it may be that the Miranda who stood wondering by was none other than Willie Hughes himself, and in the last sonnet that his friend addressed to him, the enemy that is feared is not Time but Death.

  ‘O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

  Dost hold time’s fickle glass, his sickle hour;

  Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st

  Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st;

  If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,

  As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,

  She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill

  May Time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.

  Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!

  She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure.

  Her audit, though delay’d, answer’d must be,

  And her quietus is to render thee.’

  4

  IT was not for some weeks after I had begun my study of the subject that I ventured to approach the curious group of Sonnets (CXXVII-CLII) that deal with the dark woman who, like a shadow or thing of evil omen, came across Shakespeare’s great romance, and for a season stood between him and Willie Hughes. They were obviously printed out of their proper place and should have been inserted between Sonnets XXXIII and XL. Psychological and artistic reasons necessitated this change, a change which I hope will be adopted by all future editors, as without it an entirely false impression is conveyed of the nature and final issue of this noble friendship.

  Who was she, this black-browed, olive-skinned woman, with her amorous mouth ‘that Love’s own hand did make,’ her ‘cruel eye,’ and her ‘foul pride,’ her strange skill on the virginals and her false, fascinating nature? An over-curious scholar of our day had seen in her a symbol of the Catholic Church, of that Bride of Christ who is ‘black but comely.’ Professor Minto, following in the footsteps of Henry Brown, had regarded the whole group of Sonnets as simply ‘exercises of skill undertaken in a spirit of wanton defiance and derision of the commonplace.’ Mr Gerald Massey, without any historical proof or probability, had insisted that they were addressed to the celebrated Lady Rich, the Stella of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets, the Philoclea of his ‘Arcadia,’ and that they contained no personal revelation of Shakespeare’s life and love, having been written in Lord Pembroke’s name and at his request. Mr. Tyler had suggested that they referred to one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids-of-honour, by name Mary Fitton. But none of these explanations satisfied the conditions of the problem. The woman that came between Shakespeare and Willie Hughes was a real woman, black-haired, and married, and of evil repute. Lady Rich’s fame was evil enough, it is true, but her hair was of –

  ‘fine threads of finest gold,

  In curled knots man’s thought to hold’,

  and her shoulders like ‘white doves perching.’ She was, as King James said to her lover, Lord Mountjoy, ‘a fair woman with a black soul.’ As for Mary Fitton, we know that she was unmarried in 1601, the time when her amour with Lord Pembroke was discovered, and besides, any theories that connected Lord Pembroke with the Sonnets were, as Cyril Graham had shewn, put entirely out of court by the fact that Lord Pembroke did not come to London till they had been actually written and read by Shakespeare to his friends.

  It was not, however, her name that interested me. I was content to hold with Professor Dowden that ‘To the eyes of no diver among the wrecks of time will that curious talisman gleam.’ What I wanted to discover was the nature of her influence over Shak
espeare, as well as the characteristics of her personality. Two things were certain: she was much older than the poet, and the fascination that she exercised over him was at first purely intellectual. He began by feeling no physical passion for her. ‘I do not love thee with mine eyes,’ he says:

  ‘Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted;

  Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,

  Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited

  To any sensual feast with thee alone.’

  He did not even think her beautiful:

  ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

  Coral is far more red than her lips’ red: