A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  How and under what auspices his poetry was published mattered a great deal to Shakespeare, especially early on in his career. He had carefully seen Venus and Adonis into print in 1593; a year later he showed similar care in publishing Lucrece, this, too, handsomely produced by his friend Richard Field. But in the ensuing five years he hadn’t published a single poem, including any of his sonnets. He had begun writing sonnets around 1590, well before he turned his hand to the two long narrative poems, and he would continue writing and revising them for many years. Other than sharing his sonnets with a select few, Shakespeare guarded them closely—so closely that not a single commonplace book or manuscript collection from the 1590s records even one of them. We can only assume that he made clear to his friends that the poems shouldn’t circulate, and, except for those that appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim, they would remain under wraps until a sequence of 154 of them were published in 1609.

  As disconcerting as it must have been to see his poetry surreptitiously published—along with poems that weren’t even his—there was little Shakespeare could do about it. In Elizabethan England publishers, not authors, held copyright. The publisher of The Passionate Pilgrim was William Jaggard, famous to posterity for helping to produce the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays. But that was a quarter century later. In 1599, Jaggard was at the beginning of his career, already keen on, though apparently unknown to, Shakespeare. He had somehow got hold of two of Shakespeare’s sonnets that were in circulation: “When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth” and “Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair.” With this provocative pair of sonnets in hand, Jaggard then filched three other irregular sonnets (spoken by young gallants, all three of them second-rate poets) from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost, which had just appeared in print.

  Five of Shakespeare’s poems did not stretch far enough to warrant a whole book—nor enough to generate a decent profit, since there were rules about how much he could charge for a book (no more than a penny for every two sheets of text). So Jaggard padded things out by beginning each brief poem on a fresh page, leaving most of the reverse sides of the pages blank and adding fifteen other poems of varying lengths (the Elizabethan definition of a sonnet was fairly elastic). Four of these were about the erotic encounters of Venus and Adonis. Jaggard must have hoped, reasonably enough, that they might pass for Shakespeare’s. He also went out of his way to put the real thing at the front of the volume. Four of the first five sonnets are unquestionably Shakespeare’s, so that hesitant buyers flipping through the opening pages would be reassured that they were getting what they paid for.

  Jaggard put The Passionate Pilgrim up for sale at William Leake’s bookshop rather than his own shop near the Royal Exchange. While it could cut into his profits, the move offered a veneer of legitimacy for the unauthorized volume. Leake had recently acquired the rights to sell Shakespeare’s best-selling Venus and Adonis, now in its fifth edition. To the unsuspecting consumer it looked as if Leake had cornered the market on Shakespeare’s amorous poetry. The strategy worked. Not only did The Passionate Pilgrim sell out and quickly go into a second edition before the end of 1599, but its brisk sales also boosted those of Venus and Adonis, which for the first time ever went through two editions in a calendar year. The Passionate Pilgrim was so popular that it was nearly read out of existence: just fragments of a single copy of the first edition (rediscovered only in 1920) and a couple of copies of the second 1599 edition survive.

  Londoners with a few shillings to spare now had access to what until now only a privileged few had previously enjoyed. They were also as free to gossip about the sonnets’ intimate (if fictional) biographical details, for these teasingly allusive poems almost beg for that sort of response. Who were the man and “ill-colored” woman—the two loves “of comfort and despair”—with whom the poet was sexually entangled? If word of the book spread far enough, Shakespeare may have had a bit of explaining to do the next time he went home to his wife in Stratford.

  It’s likely that Shakespeare went to see for himself what the book was doing at Leake’s bookshop, at the least to discover who was behind it. He was no stranger to London’s book world and must have been a familiar presence in the bookshops. There’s no way that Shakespeare could have bought or borrowed even a fraction of the books that went into the making of his plays. Besides his main sources for his British histories and Roman tragedies, which he probably owned—Holinshed’s Chronicles and Plutarch’s Lives—he drew on hundreds of other works. From what we know of Shakespeare’s insatiable appetite for books, no patron’s collection—assuming that Shakespeare had access to one or more—could have accommodated his curiosity and range. London’s bookshops were by necessity Shakespeare’s working libraries, and he must have spent a good many hours browsing there, moving from one seller’s wares to the next (since, unlike today, each bookseller had a distinctive stock), either jotting down ideas in a commonplace book or storing them away in his prodigious actor’s memory. Between his responsibilities vetting potential plays for the Chamberlain’s Men’s repertory and his time spent paging through recently published books, it’s hard to imagine anyone in London more alert to the latest literary trends.

  The one surviving anecdote that links Shakespeare with London’s bookshops dates from 1599. Around this time another widely read Elizabethan, George Buc—government servant, member of Parliament, writer, and theatergoer—sought out Shakespeare’s advice about the authorship of an anonymous play he had recently purchased. Like everyone in the theater world, Shakespeare knew that Buc was next in line for Edmund Tilney’s job as master of the revels, so we can assume he would have done his best to help him. Buc was also one of the first serious collectors of Elizabethan drama. And though Buc’s play collection has since broken up, scholars have identified his handwriting in copies of sixteen plays now scattered in archives around the world. How many other quartos from Buc’s collection survive, unmarked or unexamined, is anybody’s guess. We know from his marginalia that Buc purchased at least four old plays belatedly published in 1599: Alphonsus King of Aragon, Edward I, Sir Clymon and Clamydes, and George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. While all were published anonymously, Buc was well enough informed to write on their title pages that Robert Greene was the author of Alphonsus and George Peele of Sir Clymon and Edward I. He was stumped, though, by George a Greene. The group of plays overlaps with those Shakespeare may have consulted this year—for in the course of writing As You Like It, he probably looked at the depictions of Robin Hood in George a Greene and Edward I, and may have lifted the name of the old shepherd Corin from Clymon and Clamydes. In the course of 1599, Buc and Shakespeare may have crossed paths at London’s bookstalls on more than one occasion.

  After purchasing George a Greene at Cuthbert Burby’s shop near the Royal Exchange, Buc went about finding out who wrote it, at which point he either ran into or sought out Shakespeare. Shakespeare recalled that the play had been written by a minister, though at this point his memory failed him: he couldn’t remember the minister’s name. The oversight was excusable. It had been over a decade since the play was first staged. But Shakespeare did volunteer an unusual bit of information: the minister had acted in it himself, playing the pinner’s part. A grateful Buc scribbled on the play’s title page his findings: “Written by….….….……a minister, who acted the pinner’s part in it himself. Teste [i.e., witnessed by] W. Shakespeare.” He’d have to fill in that blank another time. Their conversation probably took place near the Royal Exchange, though it may as well have occurred after a performance at the Curtain or Globe or at a court performance. The story suggests not only that plays were becoming valued as printed texts to be read and collected but also that dramatic authorship was beginning to matter—at just the moment that Shakespeare was coming into his own.

  Jaggard’s title—The Passionate Pilgrim—says a good deal about the target audience for a book by “W. Shakespeare.” He was exploiting a market as much as he was creating one
. The title deliberately echoes the language of Romeo and Juliet’s romantic first encounter, where the young lovers speak, touch, then kiss, in the course of sharing a sonnet. While Romeo addresses his beloved in the well-worn language of the Petrarchan lover, the division of the sonnet between the young man and the usually silent object of his love offers a new twist. The lovers’ shared sonnet begins with each speaking in quatrains, Romeo, the passionate pilgrim, going first:

  If I profane with my unworthiest hand

  This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

  My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

  To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

  To which Juliet replies:

  Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

  Which mannerly devotion show in this;

  For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

  And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

  (1.5.94–101)

  The title appealed to those who could not get enough of the passionate language of Romeo and Juliet. Writers at the time joked about young men who slept with a copy of Venus and Adonis under their pillows and about others who rifled Shakespeare’s work for pickup lines. Just a year earlier John Marston had mocked young men about town from whose “lips… doth flow / Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.” It was a stock joke, retailed in a university play performed at Cambridge in late 1599 called The Return from Parnassus, Part One, in which one character predicts that another is sure to plagiarize Shakespeare: “We shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theaters.” He’s right. A moment later that character tries to pass off romantic lines from Romeo and Juliet as his own. In case anybody missed the point, when Jaggard published a third edition of Shakespeare’s Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, he advertised on the title page that the volume contained “Certain Amorous Sonnets.”

  Because of Jaggard’s clever packaging, most readers of The Passionate Pilgrim assumed that the entire volume was by Shakespeare. And admirers of Shakespeare continued to believe this for the next two hundred years. Not until the nineteenth century would skeptical researchers reassign half of the lyrics in The Passionate Pilgrim to other poets. Today, ten of its poems still remain unattributed. The case is still occasionally made for Shakespeare’s authorship of the four poems about Venus and Adonis. As scholars who have made headlines in recent years for claiming that Shakespeare wrote such poems as “Shall I Die” and the “Funeral Elegy” would grudgingly admit, it’s surprisingly hard to distinguish Shakespeare on an off day from one of his imitators on a very good one. Some of the greatest names in the history of Shakespeare criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Malone, Theobald, Furnivall, Dyce, Collier, Dowden, and Halliwell-Phillipps—maintained that most of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were Shakespeare’s. We can only assume that, except for a small coterie of poets and their admirers, few in 1599 would have known better or thought otherwise.

  Some writers might have been flattered by Jaggard’s gambit. Not Shakespeare, who was offended by what Jaggard had done and let it be known; the publication of The Passionate Pilgrim would only make it more difficult to undo the reputation as poet of the “heart robbing line.” Our source is his fellow poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood (whose work was later stolen by the unscrupulous Jaggard and passed off as Shakespeare’s to flesh out the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim). At that time Heywood complained loudly about this “manifest injury”—he wanted to make it clear that it was Jaggard, not he, who was guilty of theft. Heywood recalled that Shakespeare himself had suffered similar treatment at Jaggard’s hands when The Passionate Pilgrim was first published: Shakespeare, he writes, was “much offended with M. Jaggard (that altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.”

  As Shakespeare thumbed through the volume that bore his name, it’s hard to know what would have offended him most. Was it the shock of seeing his sonnets there—and, by implication, possible evidence of betrayal by a friend who had surrendered them to Jaggard? Or would he have been more irritated by the yanking out of context of the three intentionally bad poems from Love’s Labor’s Lost? The weakest of these appears as the fifth poem in the collection, and is served up in limping alexandrines. The first eight lines are enough to give the gist:

  If Love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?

  O, never faith could hold, if not to beauty vowed:

  Though to my self forsworn, to thee I’ll constant prove,

  Those thoughts to me like oaks, to thee like osiers bowed.

  Study his bias leaves, and makes his book thine eyes,

  Where all those pleasures live, that art can comprehend.

  If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice:

  Well learned is that tongue that well can thee commend.

  As Polonius might have said at this point, “This is too long” (and had he read the third poem, also lifted from Love’s Labor’s Lost, he might have called “vapor-vow” an “odious phrase”). Shakespeare had written “If Love Make Me Forsworn” for the young gallant Berowne, and, to further deflate its effect, had the poem read aloud not by the lover himself but by a curate. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare appreciated the irony of life imitating art, for in the play, too, the sonnet ends up in the wrong hands, having “accidentally… miscarried” (4.2.138).

  Rather than offering the dazzling linguistic virtuosity of what would come to be known as a “Shakespearean” sonnet—just the kind of verbal play readers had encountered in the opening two poems of The Passionate Pilgrim—Berowne’s effort simply rehearses stale Petrarchan conceits. In Love’s Labor’s Lost Shakespeare left no doubt about how weak a poem it is and the best thing any of those onstage can find to praise about it is the writer’s penmanship. Shakespeare was left to wonder which was worse: readers dismissing it as one of his weaker efforts or, alternatively, thoroughly enjoying its conventional style and hoping he’d write more like it?

  It was one thing for Shakespeare to be confused with second-raters; it was another, and a much more uncomfortable experience, to have a poem arguably better than any that he had ever published ascribed to him:

  Live with me and be my love,

  And we will all the pleasures prove

  That hills and valleys, dales and fields,

  And all the craggy mountains yield.

  There we will sit upon the rocks,

  And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

  By shallow rivers, by whose falls

  Melodious birds sing madrigals.

  There will I make thee a bed of roses,

  With a thousand fragrant posies,

  A cap of flowers and a kirtle

  Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

  Even in this abbreviated version, “Live with Me and Be My Love” is one of the finest expression of pastoral in English poetry, its vision so precarious that it cries out for a response or refutation. And contemporary poets, including Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne, and Henry Petowe, responded in these ways. Nowadays, we know that Christopher Marlowe wrote these extraordinary lines and that Ralegh was reputedly the author of the most famous response, a stanza of which is appended to the lyric in The Passionate Pilgrim:

  If that the world and love were young,

  And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,

  These pretty pleasures might me move,

  To live with thee and be thy love.

  But in 1599, neither poem had been published or attributed. Only a year later, in the rival collection England’s Helicon was Marlowe’s poem correctly attributed (while Ralegh’s was signed “Ignoto”—unknown). But for most readers of The Passionate Pilgrim, the attribution to Shakespeare the amorous poet made good sense, and support for Shakespeare’s authorship of “Live with Me and Be My Love” lingered into the nineteenth century.

  Shakespeare himself was keenly aware of Marlowe’s authorship. He was also familiar with Mar
lowe’s own send-up of it in the wildly popular The Jew of Malta, where an exaggerated version of this innocent pastoral fantasy is recited by Ithamore, a slave and a villain, while lying in the lap of a prostitute, Bellamira:

  The meads, the orchards, and the primrose lanes,

  Instead of sedge and reed, bear sugar-canes:

  Thou in those groves, by Dis above,

  Shalt live with me and be my love.

  (4.2.101–4)

  Marlowe had not only invented the perfect pastoral, he had shown how easily its fragile vision could be parodied.

  Shakespeare himself had offered his own tribute to the poem just a year earlier in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where lines from “Live with Me” are delivered in a slightly garbled version in the thick Welsh accent of Parson Evans. Evans is nervously waiting to fight a duel and his mind drifts helplessly from Marlowe’s love lyric to the despairing lines of Psalm 137: