Shakespeare

by Shakespeare

  But there was one other consideration for Shakespeare. The death of Marlowe occurred while he was on tour with Pembroke’s Men, but the report reached him soon enough. This was for him a climactic event. The dramatic poet whom he most admired and imitated was dead. To put it more bluntly, his principal competitor was dead. From this time forward he would have a clear run. It is perhaps not surprising that his great lyrical plays-Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard II – emerge in the succeeding four years. In these plays he exorcises, and surpasses, Marlowe’s poetical spirit. The untimely death of Marlowe left Shakespeare as the principal playwright of note in late sixteenth-century London.

  The continuation of the plague throughout the summer, however, obliged Pembroke’s Men to tour again. They sold their text of Marlowe’s Edward the Second to a stationer, William Jones, no doubt to raise a modest but necessary sum. The sensation of his death might encourage sales. Then they travelled into the south of England, where they played at Rye for the relatively small sum of 13s 4d. They came back to London in August, and disbanded. They were bankrupt and could no longer cover their costs. On 28 September Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn, who was also still “on the road”: “As for my lord of Pembroke’s, which you desire to know where they may be, they are all at home, and have been this five or six weeks; for they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and were fain to pawn the apparel.”4

  So Shakespeare was out of employment. But it is not to be believed that such an enterprising and energetic young man would remain idle for very long. With the closure of the theatres at the beginning of the year he must already have been considering the future. Who could tell if, or when, the plague would abate? Would the doors of the London theatres be closed for ever? He must have given serious thought to a possible change in the direction of his career, since in this period he began work on a long poem. From an early stage, too, he may have had in mind the possible benefits accruing from a wealthy patron. Such a patron might offer him employment, in the lean time of the theatres, as well as gifts. Thus in the summer of 1593 his old Stratford acquaintance, Richard Field, published a volume entitled Venus and Adonis. It was priced at about 6 pence, and sold at the sign of the White Greyhound in the haunt of booksellers at Paul’s Churchyard. Field’s shop was no doubt Shakespeare’s haunt, also, where he would have found the new books of the day – among them George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. That treatise had recommended the six-line stanza for English narrative poems, precisely the form that Shakespeare employed in Venus and Adonis. In Field’s shop he would have seen fresh copies of Plutarch’s Lives as translated by Sir Thomas North but, equally significantly, he would have been able to read and perhaps to borrow Field’s new edition of Ovid. He took two lines from that poet as his epigraph for Venus and Adonis. The little shop in Paul’s Churchyard, smelling of ink and paper, helped to give birth to one of the most fluent and eloquent of all English narrative poems.

  No author was named on its title-page, but its dedication was signed “Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare”; the dedicatee himself was a young nobleman by the name of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. This dedication is the first example of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic prose to have survived.

  The first sentence alone reveals his mastery of cadence and of emphasis.

  Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till I have honoured you with some grauer labour.

  He continues by calling this poem “the first heire of my inuention.” None of his plays had yet been published under his own name, and anonymous play-books would certainly not count as evidence of his “invention.” He seems, curiously enough, to distance himself from his career in the theatre. His epigraph from Ovid begins with the phrase “Vilia miretur vulgus” which, in Marlowe’s translation, reads “Let base-conceited wits admire vile things.” “Vilia” can also mean “common shows,” of which the public drama was a notable example in sixteenth-century London. Shakespeare says that he will be led by Apollo to the springs of the Muses, thus severing his connection with the “vilia” of the playhouses. Biographers have suggested that the lines represent a certain ambiguity, or uncertainty, about his role as a playwright and actor. Neither was, after all, the profession of a gentleman. But it is more likely that Shakespeare was indulging in special pleading. With the dedication to Venus and Adonis he was simply entering his new role as poet, and aspirant to noble patronage, by means of a flourish. He was making a good impression. And it should never be forgotten that, throughout his life, Shakespeare remained very much an actor assuming the necessary or congenial part.

  Southampton was then twenty years old, having completed the formalities of an education at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at Gray’s Inn. He came from a noble Catholic family but, on the death of his father, he had become a ward of Lord Burghley the Lord Treasurer. At the age of sixteen he had been repeatedly pressed to marry Burghley’s granddaughter, but had refused. Venus and Adonis, the story of the unwelcome wooing of a pretty boy by an older woman, might even have been conceived for Southampton. It might be seen as a follow-up to a poem entitled Narcissus, in which one of Burghley’s secretaries had indirectly chided Southampton for his solitary state. The young lord might plausibly be identified with Adonis because by common consent he was as beautiful as he was learned, although the magnitude of both qualities was no doubt exaggerated by the panegyrists of the time. Noble youths were always deemed more attractive than their less wellborn counterparts. Like many young Elizabethans of noble descent Southampton’s generosity of spirit (and of his means) was matched by instability and passionate temper; the queen herself commented that he was “one whose counsel can be of little, and experience of less use.”5

  The traffic of favours went in both directions. The dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton, and its subsequent enormous popularity, helped to create an image of the young man as a patron of learning and of poetry. In the year following its publication, for example, Nashe alluded to him as “a dere lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.”6 In the heated world of court favour and court intrigue, such a reputation did Southampton no harm at all.

  The poem is part of a genre of erotic narrative poems largely taken out of Ovid. Shakespeare would have read about the ill-starred pair in the first part of Spenser’s Fairie Queene, published three years before, and of course Marlowe’s Hero and Leander had been circulating in manuscript for a similar period. Lodge had published Glaucus and Scilla, and Drayton was about to offer Endimion and Phoebe to the world. The works of Shakespeare should not be taken out of their context, since it is there they acquire their true meaning. He borrowed the stanzaic form from Lodge, and may have found his theme in Marlowe, but he wrote the poem in part to emphasise his learning. One of his principal sources, therefore, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses. As with the composition of The Comedy of Errors, he wished to demonstrate that he could deploy classical sources with as much brilliance as Marlowe or, even, as Spenser. The attack by Greene upon him, satirising him as a country bumpkin, may in part have provoked his invention. But he was still not averse to outright stealing from other places. The description of the horse of Adonis, often cited as a testimony to Shakespeare’s knowledge of equine matters, is cribbed almost verbatim from a translation by Joshua Sylvester of Divine Weekes and Workes by Guillaume du Bartas.

  Venus and Adonis was immensely popular. Only one copy of the 1593 edition survives; the first print-run had been read literally to disintegration. There were no fewer than eleven editions over the next twenty-five years, and there may have been other reprints that have simply vanished. It was in his lifetime far more popular than any of hi
s plays, and did more to secure his literary reputation than any drama. His instinct to compose such a narrative poem, especially at a time of theatrical dearth, was undoubtedly the right one.

  It is in essence a dramatic narrative that, like Shakespeare’s plays, hovers between comic and serious matter. Half the lines are conceived as dialogue or dramatic oratory. The confrontation between the lascivious Venus and the frigid Adonis becomes the subject of quintessential English pantomime:

  She sincketh downe, still hanging by his necke,

  He on her belly fall’s, she on her backe.

  But the farce is succeeded by the solemn obsequies on the dead boy. Shakespeare cannot stay with one mood for very long. It repays reading aloud, and in Chaucerian fashion it may have been performed by Shakespeare as a private entertainment. It moves rapidly and energetically; Shakespeare is both adept and nimble, attentive and consoling. It was remarkable for what was known as its wantonness. Although it was not half as pornographic as some of the poems then being circulated in manuscript, it earned a rebuke from John Davies as “bawdy Geare.”7 Thomas Middleton included it in a list of “wanton pamphlets” and a contemporary versifier suggested that

  Who list read lust there’s Venus and Adonis

  True model of a most lascivious leatcher.8

  Venus and Adonis is a poem concerning overpowering lust for a young male, considerably more passionate even than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and it seems obvious to the reader that Shakespeare took great delight and pleasure in writing it. Erotic literature is perhaps the one genre in which the author’s personal tastes and preoccupations are vital to its success and effectiveness. But at the same time it would be unwise to attribute such feelings of personal passion to Shakespeare. He is eloquent, of course, but he is also detached. Passion is an element within his repertory of effects. The reader is given the curious impression that the author is there and yet not there. To feel so much, and yet be able to mock that feeling – that is the mark of a sublime intellect. It is perhaps also why the poem has often been considered as an extension of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. There has never been a more fluent, or more artful, English writer.

  Venus and Adonis became particularly popular among the students of the universities and of the Inns, who read it individually or perhaps even in groups. In 1601 Gabriel Harvey could still write that “the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis”. He was by no means the anonymous or unremarked writer he is often assumed as being. Venus and Adonis itself became almost a byword for poetry itself. In Peek’s Merry Conceited Jests the tapster of the inn at Pie Corner was “much given to poetry, for he had ingrossed the Knight of the Sunne, Venus and Adonis, and other pamphlets.” It was called “the best book in the world,”9 and a play of 1608, The Dumb Knight, has the following dialogue. “I pray you, sir, what book do you read?” “A book that never an orator’s clerk in this kingdom but is beholden unto; it is called, Maid’s Philosophy, or Venus and Adonis”. We may say, with some certainty, that Shakespeare now was one of the most famous poets in the country. He was not the faceless man in the crowd, or the unnoticed stranger in a corner of the inn.

  CHAPTER 36

  The Hath a Mint of Phrases

  in His Braine

  Shakespeare and Southampton could have met in, or through, the playhouse. Southampton became a regular attender of plays. Indeed it seems to have been his principal London recreation. There were other connections. In the year after the publication of Venus and Adonis Southampton’s mother, the Countess of Southampton, married Sir Thomas Heneage; Heneage was Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, and therefore responsible for arranging payment for the players at court. It is a tenuous connection, perhaps, but in the small and overcrowded world of the English court an interesting one.

  The poet and the earl might also have met through the ministrations of Lord Strange; Southampton was an intimate friend of Lord Strange’s younger brother, who was himself an amateur playwright. What could be more natural than that the young earl should be introduced to the most promising author of the day? And one, too, whom he had seen act? Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton were also part of that group of Catholic sympathisers which Lord Burghley suspected, and indeed Southampton was considered by many to be “the great hope of Catholic resistance.”1 Shakespeare was well adapted to such a group. The young earl was also, by a complicated set of circumstances, related by marriage to the Ardens of Stratford. Shakespeare could therefore have claimed a further connection. It is also intriguing to note that Southampton’s erstwhile spiritual adviser, the poet and Jesuit Robert Southwell, was also related to the Arden family. It has plausibly been suggested that Shakespeare read, and copied from, some of Southwell’s poetry. A poem by Southwell, “Saint Peter’s Complaint,” was preceded by an epistle “To my worthy good cousin, Master W.S” from “Your loving cousin, R.S.” There are affinities and unwritten alliances that are now largely hidden from view.

  There is also a possibility that they met through the agency of Southampton’s tutor in French and Italian, John Florio. Florio, born in London, was the child of Protestant refugees out of Italy. He was an excellent linguist, a capable scholar, and a somewhat censorious lover of the drama; he professed that he was living in a “stirring time, and pregnant prime of inuention when euerie bramble is fruitefull.”2 This “stirring time” was Shakespeare’s time. Florio also translated Montaigne into English, and in that work provided phrases and allusions for King Lear and The Tempest. Now all but forgotten, Florio was a contemporary of great significance to Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s comedies of this period are Italianate in setting, if not in sentiment, and their atmosphere can plausibly be attributed to the influence of Florio upon the dramatist eleven years his junior. There are occasions when Shakespeare seems to evince so specific a knowledge of Italy that it is believed by some that he must have travelled to that country in his youthful days. But, again, the presence of Florio may account for that knowledge. Florio helped other dramatists also. In the preliminaries to his Volpone, set in Venice, Ben Jonson wrote an autograph dedication to Florio “the ayde of his Muses.” Florio also possessed a great library, filled with Italian books. We need look no further for the Italian sources that have been identified in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare borrowed many phrases and images from Florio’s Italian dictionary, A World of Words-” it were labour lost to speak of love,” Florio writes – and he may have composed an introductory sonnet to Florio’s Second Frutes, published in 1591. Florio is one of those somewhat elusive figures who appear from time to time in Shakespeare’s biography, whose significance is out of all proportion to their visibility.

  There are many connections, then, between Shakespeare and Southampton. That they did meet is certain. Shakespeare’s second dedication to Southampton, in The Rape of Lucrece, is sure evidence of greater intimacy. It has also been assumed that he addressed his sonnets to some noble youth, but the case is more uncertain. One recently discovered portrait does nothing to resolve the controversy over the matter. It was painted in the early 1590s and shows a young person dressed in a somewhat effeminate manner complete with rouge, lipstick, a double earring and a long tress of hair. For many years it was mistitled as a portrait of “Lady Norton,” but in more recent times it has been identified as a portrait of Southampton. If Southampton were in fact the recipient of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, as some have suggested, then his androgynous appearance might afford some reason for the poet’s attentions.

  There is also the possibility that for a short time in 1593 Shakespeare became secretary to Southampton. There is a comic scene in Edward the Third, between the king and his private secretary, which suggests the ironic presence of some shared experience. He may have worked for the young nobleman at Southampton House, along Chancery Lane, but there are many scholars who have found buried allusions to the family estate at Titchfield in Hampshire in the texts of the plays of this period.3 It would have been more sensib
le and appropriate to have removed to the country at the time of plague in London. It may have been here that Shakespeare wrote his second long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that was dedicated to Southampton.

  It was not at all unusual for young writers to be pressed into the service of noblemen. Thomas Kyd had for a while become secretary to the Earl of Sussex; Lyly had been secretary to the Earl of Oxford, and Spenser had been in similar employment with the Bishop of Rochester. In fact at a later date Southampton enlisted the poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood into his household in precisely that role. Shakespeare’s own employment is an un-provable hypothesis, but it does no violence to the chronology or to Shakespeare’s known expertise in matters of composition and handwriting. He would have made an excellent secretary.

  It is a matter of historical record that, at a dinner in Oxford in 1593, Southampton sat with the four principal patrons of the English theatre – the Earl of Essex, Lord Strange, the Earl of Pembroke and the Lord Admiral Howard. No account of Elizabethan society, or the Elizabethan theatre, can omit this almost claustrophobic sense of belonging. That claustrophobia, or closeness of association, is echoed in a play that Shakespeare wrote during this period. Love’s Labour’s Lost is something of a puzzle. It seems in part to be a satire on some of Shakespeare’s more notable contemporaries, and is so highly allusive and ironic that it hardly seems designed for the public playhouses. It has sometimes been assumed that it was commissioned in some sense by Southampton, and there has even been speculation that it was first performed in Southampton House or at Titchfield. In a ground-plan for Titchfield House there is an upstairs chamber designated as the “Playhouse Room,” just to the left of the main entrance.