WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, EMILIA LANYER
When drama began to be printed, blank verse was an ugly medium. Printers did their best to set it out prettily but got little enough thanks for their labors. Not wholly unconnected with this, some of my predecessors harbored bad feelings about William Shakespeare. About the work and the way it broke upon the world. Not about the man, born in the same year as Marlowe yet somehow seeming his junior and his apprentice. The great painter William Turner once said of Thomas Girtin, who died at twenty-seven, “Had Tommy Girtin lived, I should have starved.” But Girtin died, Marlowe died; and Turner lived, Shakespeare lived. Laurels are awarded accordingly. When the First Folio of the complete plays was planned, Richard Field, who had printed the bard’s Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece in 1594, stood aside because he didn’t like the theater (the audiences were so unruly and the weather at times inclement); besides, he reflected, the texts of the plays proposed were so corrupt that it would have been dishonest to serve them up; it was not Shakespeare. So much for the wages of integrity: the plays were served up, and he was not at table to savor a portion of the profits. When I see the text of a Shakespeare play I think of Richard Field, getting by on pamphlets and jobbing printing, while a series of corruptions in the name of his friend the poet spun out in unstoppable circulation, to benefit his competitors.
The First Folio was published by a temporary syndicate in 1623. Two printers produced it, William and Isaac Jaggard. Three publishers were responsible, Smethwicke, Aspley and Blount, working with the acting company that owned Shakespeare’s manuscripts. The price was high at 20s., but the book consisted of nearly 1,000 pages, and prices were rising at the time. Shakespeare had been dead seven years. His widow and family saw no benefit from what was to be, after the Bible, the greatest book ever published in English. If only they had done a better job with the editing! When I see the tomes in libraries I want to get them out from under the glass and mark in the corrections: misprints, poor formats, even erroneous attributions.
The greatest poet of the age—the greatest poet of all time, for all his corruptions—inspires in publishers and in other writers a kind of vertigo. For Donald Davie Shakespeare represents “a vast area of the English language and the English imagination which is as it were ‘charged,’ radio-active: a territory where we dare not travel at all often or at all extensively, for fear of being mortally infected, in the sense of being overborne, so that we cease to speak with our own voices and produce only puny echoes of the great voice which long ago took over that whole terrain for its own.” This is true of the plays. But had Shakespeare produced only the epyllia, the Sonnets and the occasional poems, we’d have a more proportioned view of him, smaller in scale than Jonson, Donne, Spenser and Marlowe. The poems are excellent, but it is the language and vision of the plays that dazzles. The slightly absurd scenario of Venus and Adonis, the excesses of Lucrece and the uneven brilliance of the Sonnets would not by themselves have changed the world. Venus and Adonis was, it’s true, Shakespeare’s most successful poem. By the time he died, ten editions had been published, and six followed in the two decades after his death. There was money in that large, bossy, blowsy goddess almost eating alive the pretty lad. Nowadays it is read because it is by Shakespeare. And Lucrece, with its cruel eloquence, its harsh tracing of one of the most brutal tales of rape in the classical repertory, while better balanced and constructed, touches unreflectingly on matters that require a less restrained psychology than the poet can provide. The movement from sublime to ridiculous is swift, as in the stanza where Lucrece’s father and husband vie with one another in hating Tarquin the ravager:
Yet sometime Tarquin was pronouncèd plain,
But through his teeth, as if the name he tore,
This windy tempest, till it blow up rain,
Held back his sorrow’s tide, to make it more.
At last it rains, and busy winds give o’er,
Then son and father weep with equal strife,
Who should weep most for daughter or for wife.
In Ted Hughes the epyllia have a passionate modern advocate and expositor, who reads them as a key to Shakespeare’s work. But there are problems in the poetry that no amount of explication can resolve. Not least of these is the closing couplets in the different stanza forms of Venus and Lucrece, each stanza rising to epithetic closure. Concluding couplets, like the refrain or tag phrase in a ballad, are an automatic “release”; such formally predictable “releases” can cease to be effective because they are expected. In narrative poems they can seriously impede the progress of the story.
The epyllia are poetry made out of poetry. The Sonnets—though they employ many conventions—are poetry apparently made out of the life, much as the plays are written out of the life of England and London at the time. Aubrey takes us to the heart of Shakespeare’s London. “Near [the Bear Garden] was a Theatre, known by the name of the GLOBE Play-House, to which Beaumont, Fletcher, and Philip Massinger belonged and wrote for; and though the most eminent Place for Tragedies, Comedies, and Interludes, was, because of its Situation, only used in the hot Summer Months.” He takes us by the arm and steers us on: “Not far from this Place were the Asparagus-Gardens, and Pimblico-Path, where were fine walks, cool Arbours, &c. much used by the Citizens of London and their Families, and both mentioned by the Comedians at the Beginning of 1600; ‘To walk to Pimblico’ became Proverbial for a Man handsomely drest; as these walks were frequented by none else.” Much nearer the playhouse another form of entertainment was available. “Next the Bear-Garden on this Bank was formerly the Bordello, or Stewes, so called from the severall licensed Houses for the Entertainment of lewd Persons, in which were Women prepared for all Comers. The Knights Templars were notable wenchers.” The “Stewes” had various privileges confirmed by the court and numerous regulations honored more in the breach than the observance. They were occasionally closed down. In 1506 there were eighteen houses; Henry VII closed them and they were reopened with twelve. In 1546 they were shut again “by Sound of Trumpet”—“by King Henry VIII, whose tender Conscience startled at such scandalous and open Lewdness.” Henry, tutored by John Skelton, may have overcome his aversion. “These Houses were distinguished by several Signs painted on their Fronts, as, a Boar’s Head, The Crane, the Cardinal’s Hat, the Swan, the Bell, the Crosse-Keys, the Popes Head, and the Gun.” In Shakespeare’s day the neighborhood was not Mayfair, that’s certain. The stewes were owned by the church.
This is a story about poetry, not drama or literal prostitution; the plays I’ll leave to someone else. I’m concerned with “the rest,” a handful of works that the poet took most seriously: the epyllia Richard Field published, the 154 Sonnets and “The Phoenix and the Turtle.” I could add songs from the plays, but once you dip into a drama, where do you stop? A monologue is like an aria, a description can be like a whole pastoral or satire. And which songs are Shakespeare’s, which did he pull out of Anon.’s bran tub? Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love’s Labours Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest all include detachable songs, but the plays snared them and that’s where they belong.
Shakespeare is so much at the heart—is the heart—of this story that even by skirting around him we take his measure. Apart from his genius, Shakespeare had some real advantages. The world for him was new, as it had been for Chaucer. There were the navigators’ discoveries, there was the rising power of the monarch, new industry, new learning. The daily world was fuller, too: Aubrey tells us how cherries came to England under Henry VIII (from Flanders); but not until Elizabeth’s time did hops arrive in Kent. Beer of a sort came in under Henry VIII, along with turkeys: “Greeke, Heresie, Turkey-cocks, and Beer, / Came into England all in a year.” No fishmongers existed inland; most estates had fishponds or kept fish in the moat for fasting days. Carrots “were first sown at Beckington, in Somersetshire,” and turnips in the early seventeenth century came from Wales; early on all cabbages were imported from Holland. The catalogues of flora and fauna that occur not only in Shakespeare but in the works of other writers are records as much of novelty as heritage. And new things kept coming in the seventeenth century: “clovergrass” was brought in out of Brabant or Flanders; pines and fir trees were first planted in England in the 1640s, and the first canals were built. Tabby cats came in and replaced “the common English Catt,” which “was white with some blewish piedness: sc. a gallipot blew. The race or breed of them are now almost lost.” Also the modern brown rat supplanted the black rat, which had carried the plague. Under Charles II gardens bloomed in England. Jasmine and laurel were added to our shrubberies.
To the advantages of a new world, Shakespeare could add the advantages of a singularly complicated personal libido. “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” a lament and metamorphosis first published in Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr in 1601, sounds a little like the incantations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Let the bird of loudest lay
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feathered king:
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Nothing should mar the melancholy requiem of turtle dove and phoenix, perfect but ill-assorted in their love:
So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distinct, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
It is as if Shakespeare was toying with a mystery like the Trinity, in which three are one and one is three.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
’Twixt the turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix’ sight;
Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
The love is immortalized, but without issue, as between two whose different natures are overwhelmed by an almost metaphysical affection. The poem, like Marvell’s “My love is of a birth,” does not develop: it grows by accretion, assertion. So strange is the subject, so strange the affection, that it can only be affirmed. Language is uneasy with it: “Either was the other’s mine.”
This passionate disparity is at the heart of all of Shakespeare’s poems and some of the plays. The Sonnets have attracted a critical literature second in vastness only to that on Hamlet, and so various that at times it seems the critics are discussing works entirely unrelated. They contain a mystery, and the critic-as-sleuth is much in evidence. Unlike sonnets by his contemporaries, none of these poems has a traced “source” in Italian or elsewhere; most seem to emerge from an actual occasion, an occasion not concealed, yet sufficiently clouded to make it impossible to say for sure what or whom it refers to. Setting these veiled occasions side by side can yield a diversity of plots: a Dark Lady, a Young Man, now noble, now common, now chaste, now desired, possessed and lost. All we can say for sure is that desire waxes and wanes, time passes. Here certainly, the critic says, are hidden meanings; and where meanings are hidden, a key is hidden too. Only, Shakespeare is a subtle twister. Each sleuth-critic finds a key, and each finds a different and partial treasure. A. L. Rowse found his key, affirming that Shakespeare’s mistress was the poet Emilia Lanyer (1569–1645), illegitimate daughter of an Italian royal musician and also an intimate of the astrologer Simon Forman, who gives a brief picture of a brave, cunning operator. Her 1611 volume of poems includes ten dedications and cleverly celebrates the Dowager Countess of Cumberland, the poet’s particular quarry, in company with Christ and biblical heroines. The words she attributes to Eve are the first clear glimmer of English feminism in verse. Eve may—almost innocently—have handed Adam the apple; but Adam’s sons crucified, in the bright light of day and reason, Jesus Christ. “This sin of yours hath no excuse, or end.”
There is a further mystery: Who is “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W.H.” to whom the poet (or the publisher?) wishes “all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet”? The T.T. who signs the dedication is Thomas Thorpe, publisher-printer in 1609 of the poems: W.H. may have been his friend, who procured the manuscript, or Shakespeare’s lover, or a common acquaintance—William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (dedicatee of the two epyllia)? William Hervey, Southampton’s stepfather, getting the poet to encourage his stepson to marry? Much passionate energy is expended on a riddle without a definitive answer. Thomas Thorpe was a mischievous printer. I suspect he knew what he was doing: no title page in history has been more pored over.
In 1598, Francis Meres compiled a catalogue of English writers of the day and lists Shakespeare’s “sugred sonnets among his private friends”—kept private, perhaps, because of their subject matter. Two of the sonnets, 138 and 144, were printed by William Jaggard in 1599 in The Passionate Pilgrim, a miscellany erroneously attributed to Shakespeare. After three editions the error was corrected. The whole sequence was published by one G. Eld for Thomas Thorpe in 1609. Only thirteen copies of this remarkably reliable quarto survive. Did Shakespeare see it through press? Was it withdrawn from circulation? We can assert no more than what survives on paper. Are the poems written early or late? W. H. Auden believes them early; it seems more likely, given that so many refer to the youth of the young man and the age of the courting poet, and given the theme of time and competition for the beloved between established writers, that they are in large part the product of the poet who was edging his way through The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar and Twelfth Night (1596–1600) to Hamlet (1601).
There is not a linear plot to the sequence of the sonnets. There are “runs,” but they break off; other “runs” begin. Is it a series of sequences, or a miscellany of them? Some editors reorder the poems without success. Sonnets 1–126 are addressed to a young man or men; the remainder to a Dark (-haired) Lady. There may be a triangle (or two): the beloveds perhaps have a relationship as well. The poems are charged with passionate ambiguities.
Those who read the poems as a sonnet sequence were for a long while baffled. The Sonnets were neglected, or virtually so, until 1780, when they were dusted down and reedited. They did not immediately appeal, but gradually, during the nineteenth century, they caught fire—fitfully, like wet kindling. Wordsworth, Keats, Hazlitt and Landor failed to appreciate them. Those who love them properly are fewer than those who enjoy them. Those who love them properly are fewer than those who enjoy arguing about them. W. H. Auden argues (credibly) that “he wrote them... as one writes a diary, for himself alone, with no thought of a public.” T. S. Eliot suggests that like Hamlet they are “full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localise.” Now the public clambers over them, prurient, with several dozen authoritative guides.
Shakespeare’s life is so nearly erased that it is no help in elucidating the verse. Aubrey, writing only a couple of generations after his death, misinforms us that Shakespeare’s “father was a Butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a Speech.” He contrasts the excellence of Shakespeare as an actor with Jonson, who “was never a good Actor, but an excellent Instructor.”
Drama could be profitable: this discovery coincided with “the coming into the field of the first pupils of the new grammar schools of Edward VI,” men who did not resent or distrust commerce and entrepreneurship. A new class of “mental adventurers,” the classically educated sons of merchants, made the running. Marlowe was the son of a cobbler, Shakespeare of a prosperous glove maker of Stratford-on-Avon, where the poet was born in 1564. Both were provincials, one educated at the grammar school at Stratford, the other at King’s School, Canterbury. They were harbingers of the social change that would culminate in the Commonwealth.
One of Shakespeare’s advantages was an apparent disadvantage. He was not university-trained. “When Shakespeare attempts to be learned like Marlowe, he is not very clever.” That is part of the problem with his epyllia. But Ford Madox Ford reminds us that he had “another world to which he could retire; because of that he was a greater poet than either Jonson or Marlowe, whose minds were limited by their university-training to find illustrations, telles quelles, from illustrations already used in the Greek or Latin classics. It was the difference between founding a drawing on a lay figure and drawing or painting from a keen and delighting memory.” Sidney advises: “Look in thy heart and write.” In the Sonnets, Shakespeare takes Sidney’s counsel without the platonizing the great courtier intended. The heart he looks into is singularly complex and troubled, and the poems he writes from this impure “I” are as full of life as the plays.