A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Page 24
To shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sings madrigals;
There will we make our peds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies.
To shallow….
Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry.
Melodious birds sing madrigals—
Whenas I sat in Pabylon—
And a thousand vagram posies.
To shallow, etc.
(3.1.16–25)
This kind of direct quotation of another Elizabethan writer—mispronunciations and confusions notwithstanding—is unusual in Shakespeare’s work, and until now in his plays virtually unprecedented. Even before the publication of The Passionate Pilgrim, Marlowe, though dead for six years, was still on Shakespeare’s mind.
THE PUBLICATION OF THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM WOULD AMOUNT TO LITTLE more than a footnote to his career if not for the impact it had upon Shakespeare’s thinking about his stolen sonnets, about Marlowe and the pastoral, and, through both, about As You Like It. After it appeared as the opening poem in The Passionate Pilgrim, Shakespeare went back to “When My Love Swears That She Is Made of Truth” and changed it. The copy Jaggard had got hold of may have introduced a few errors, but the difference between the two versions (especially when compared with the versions of the companion sonnet Jaggard published with it) makes clear that the revisions were Shakespeare’s. While he could have revised it at any time between 1599 and 1609 (when it reappeared in his collected Sonnets), it’s likely that Shakespeare was spurred to make the changes soon after it appeared in print. It’s impossible to know whether Shakespeare saw himself reclaiming a poem that had been untimely ripped from his possession or whether seeing it in print made him see its faults. He didn’t change much, but the cumulative effect is astonishing. Like Michelangelo chiseling free a figure trapped in stone, Shakespeare, with a few well-placed strokes, enables a far more complex poem to emerge. The transformation points the way to a new comic vision, one at the heart of As You Like It.
Shakespeare may well have tinkered with other sonnets over the ten, fifteen, even twenty years between their conception and publication (no surprise, then, that he speaks in Sonnet 17 of his papers “yellowed with their age”). Shakespeare kept close at hand a sheaf of forty or more folded sheets, each sheet with four writing sides, covered with sonnets in various stages of completion (it wasn’t until the early seventeenth century that writers began using single sheets of paper). A handful of the poems that appear in 1609 don’t seem quite finished. Others are so highly polished that a syllable can’t be altered without serious damage to the poem’s architecture. Unlike rival poets like Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel, who also reworked their sonnet sequences over several decades but who chose to publish each successive version, Shakespeare kept his poems in progress private, which suggests that they had a different kind of value for him, filled different creative needs, which included serving as sounding boards, rough drafts for the larger themes and dynamics of his plays.
We know very little about how Shakespeare went about writing—where he liked to write, how much he revised, what was hard for him and what was easy. What evidence we have is from his plays and poems, and one of the few scenes of writing Shakespeare does describe—in Lucrece—includes a healthy share of blotting, a rush of thoughts trying to force their way through at once, and a ruthless insistence on getting it right. It may be the closest we get to Shakespeare’s own writing process, a portrait of the artist at work, the autobiographical “Will” at war with “wit,” trying to control the great press of ideas. Here is Lucrece as she “prepares to write,”
First hovering o’er the paper with her quill.
Conceit and grief an eager combat fight;
What wit sets down is blotted straight with will;
This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill.
Much like a press of people at a door
Throng her inventions, which shall go before.
(1297–1302)
What Shakespeare describes in these lines is not so much writing as intense revision. This fits with what we know about how he tended to work, which was by reworking rather than inventing stories. A glance at the plays he had written so far in 1599 confirms this. The play he was currently writing, As You Like It, recasts the story of Thomas Lodge’s popular Rosalind. Shakespeare had a gift for reading or hearing something and unspringing its unrealized potential. It couldn’t have been easy for him to resist the impulse to improve things as he read or performed another writer’s work. With “When My Love Swears” Shakespeare turned that same severe critical eye—“This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill”—upon his own creation.
First, the version that appeared as the opening poem in The Passionate Pilgrim:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her (though I know she lies)
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unskillful in the world’s false forgeries.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although I know my years be past the best:
I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue,
Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.
But wherefore says my love that she is young?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is a soothing tongue,
And age (in love) loves not to have years told.
Therefore I’ll lie with love, and love with me,
Since that our faults in love thus smothered be.
The premise of the sonnet is straightforward, if a bit cynical: it’s a doomed relationship, built on lies. He knows that she lies to him about being faithful, but he doesn’t challenge her, hoping thereby that she’ll think he’s new to this game. And he lies to her about his age (though he know his “years be past the best”). She’s the bigger liar, though, for she not only lies about fidelity, but also lies about her age (“But wherefore says my love that she is young?”).
The speaker of the sonnet is self-protective, isolated, and comfortably misogynistic. We see the affair from his perspective and his alone. There’s no reciprocity here, only sex and deception. It’s but a small step to the disillusionment and dark anger of Sonnet 129 (“Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action”). The central lines here are those in which we learn that the speaker plays his cards close, giving nothing away. He’s convinced that he’s better at this game than she is: “I, smiling, credit her false-speaking tongue, / Outfacing faults in love with love’s ill rest.” The language here anticipates Hamlet’s bitter words about Claudius’s deception (“smile, and smile, and be a villain” [1.5.108]), with hints as well of Iago-like bluffing, “outfacing” those he deceives.
The most remarkable thing about Shakespeare’s revision of this poem is how much he alters economically. Here’s the revised version as it appeared in the 1609 collected sonnets:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days be past the best:
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue,
On both sides now is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I’ll lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
The first quatrain is largely unchanged, “Unlearned” substituted for “Unskillful” and “subtleties” for “forgeries,” softening the edges a bit, though not much more than that (and replacing words that occur only in the first half of Sha
kespeare’s works with those—“unlearned” and “subtleties” that he preferred later in his career).
The most significant change is also the subtlest. By turning “I know” to “she knows” in line 6, a shared understanding and subjectivity is introduced. We are now witnesses to a lovers’ game, one in which role-playing leads to mutual understanding. As Edward A. Snow (who has written cogently about these poems) observes, it “is the difference between ‘I may be able to deceive her but I can’t deceive myself,’ and ‘I might be able to deceive myself if I weren’t aware of how well she knows me, how obvious the truth of me is to her.’ ” Only in the revised version does the speaker learn to see himself through his lover’s eyes. We’re no longer listening to someone brag about an affair; instead, we’re experiencing the excitement and confusion of what it feels like to be in love.
The crassest pair of lines in the earlier version of the poem (in which the speaker hides behind his mask) is scuttled, replaced by, “Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue, / On both sides now is simple truth suppressed.” This is the heart of the revised poem: simple truth is mutually suppressed so that a greater and more complex truth that the lovers share can thrive, and it is this truth that defines and sustains their love.
Shakespeare also goes back and recasts the lies (in the revised poem things are symmetrical: each lover now tells just one lie). Falsehoods once meant to deceive now appear as both playful and purposeful. As Edward A. Snow concludes, the “earlier version makes us feel the impossibility of the relationship, the later one, its fittingness, its inevitability.” In the version of the poem that appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim the speaker is only fooling himself when he “lies with love”; in the revised version he lies with his beloved in both senses of the word, their playful falsehoods securing their affection. In the new ending, their love is forgiving, not smothering. This sense of mutuality, of merging selves, ring outs in the chiming sounds of the concluding couplet: “She… me… we… be.”
– 11 –
Simple Truth Suppressed
At the heart of As You Like It is the relationship of Orlando and Rosalind, which moves from a love that is self-centered to one that is complex and mutual. Like the revised version of “When My Love Swears,” As You Like It achieves this through role-playing and the suppression of simple truths. What Shakespeare sketches out in the revised sonnet he transfers onto a larger canvas in the play, and the result marks a significant advance in his handling of character and intimacy. Shakespeare manages to create a relationship so emotionally complex that the love feels genuine (even if, paradoxically, he does so by setting up and knocking down literary conventions). We may love Romeo and Juliet and agonize over their fate, but we respond to the intensity, not the complexity, of their feelings. With As You Like It that’s no longer the case; intensity has become a liability. As Rosalind, though deeply in love herself, observes in her devastating put-down of dying for love, it’s just one more lie that lovers tell: “These are all lies. Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.100–101).
Shakespeare lifts a conventional heroine out of a popular story and transforms her into someone we feel we know or want to know. How he does so, and how he then endows her with the ingenuity to educate the “untutored youth” she loves about who she is and what intimacy means, is one of the mysteries of literary creation. This jolt of realism may well have surprised Elizabethans schooled in a drama that until now had only rarely been this naturalistic. Unlike the contemporary praise for Shakespeare’s recent successes in history and tragedy there is only silence regarding As You Like It. The play, one of the most frequently staged today, was not published until the 1623 Folio, and over a century would pass before it was mentioned or staged again. It may well be that Shakespeare made such novel demands upon audiences, introduced so much that was not easily absorbed, that spectators left the Globe unsettled. It was a play not only of its time but also ahead of it.
There’s a great deal going on in As You Like It and on many levels. Ultimately, though, everything in this relatively plotless drama—its political frame, its clown and satirist, its multiple marriages, its gender-bending, its reflections on poetry and pastoral—is subordinate to the story of the central lovers, Orlando and Rosalind. Their relationship is the engine that drives As You Like It and the success or failure of the play turns on how convincingly Shakespeare tells their story.
With the exception of Romeo, Orlando is the most passionate hero Shakespeare had yet created. In the first three hundred lines of the play we see him at the throat of his cruel older brother Oliver (who has withheld his patrimony and formal education) and then, though over-matched, manhandling a champion wrestler. In these opening scenes Orlando speaks as forcefully as he fights. But his eloquence deserts him after he and Rosalind fall in love at first sight. When Rosalind offers him a present, Orlando is so tongue-tied he can’t even thank her. Despite her efforts to keep their flagging conversation alive he still “cannot speak to her.” Orlando may be in love, but at this point he doesn’t have a clue what this love means. If he is to win as extraordinary a heroine as Rosalind—and if audiences are to give the match their blessing—he must be more than in love. He needs to learn what love is as much as what it’s not, and he needs to learn who Rosalind is.
But he goes about it disastrously, seizing on the medium of poetry to express his love. He roams through the Forest of Arden, defacing trees—pinning poems on them and carving Rosalind’s name into their bark. We overhear him as he enters in act, 3 scene 2, partway through a poem, and what we catch are the last ten lines (two quatrains and a couplet) of a Shakespearean sonnet (with its distinctive rhyme scheme, abab cdcd efef gg):
Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love;
And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress’ name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind! These trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.
(3.2.1–10)
It’s wretched stuff. Orlando is a second-rate poet and as yet an inadequate lover. He has no idea that Rosalind is also in the forest, nor does it seem to matter. Only obsessively declaring his love does. Shakespeare’s challenge (and soon Rosalind’s) is to move Orlando beyond this stilted view of love. Shakespeare had included sonnets in Love’s Labors Lost and Romeo and Juliet and had done so as recently as the epilogue to Henry the Fifth. But in the wake of The Passionate Pilgrim, he rarely introduced one into a play again. They only appear in All’s Well (3.4.4–17) and Cymbeline (5.4.93–110); the one in As You Like It is incomplete, missing its first quatrain, discouraging the kind of theft that Jaggard had engaged in.
Orlando cannot help himself and we are subjected to one bad poem after another, the play, like a parody of The Passionate Pilgrim itself, offering an anthology of earnest but terrible love poetry. The worst is a tedious eight-line poem, with a thumping four-stress line made worse by its monotonous rhyming. Rosalind finds it in the woods and enters reading it aloud:
From the east to western Ind,
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth, being mounted on the wind,
Through all the world bears Rosalind.
All the pictures fairest lined
Are but black to Rosalind.
Let no face be kept in mind
But the fair of Rosalind.
(3.2.86–93)
It doesn’t take much to churn out this sort of jog-trot verse, and the fool, Touchstone, who overhears Rosalind reading, cannot resist offering an obscene version of his own, that ends:
Sweetest nut hath sourest rind;
Such a nut is Rosalind.
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love’s prick and Rosalind.
(3.2.107–110)
Shakespeare goes out of his way to make Orlando a hopeless case, desperately in need of a cure for his bad versifying, if not his adolescent lovesickness (mirrored in and fostered by his stale Petrarchism). This passionate pilgrim’s longest and last poem in praise of Rosalind unravels metrically as it reaches its final couplet: