Shakespeare: A Life (30 page)

unreliable William Reynolds, who was perhaps schizophrenic, wrote
later that Southampton slept in a tent in Ireland with Piers Edmondes,
a brother officer, and 'the earle Sowthamton would cole and huge
[embrace and hug] him in his armes and play wantonly
with him'.
¹²
Reynolds expected to be believed, but even if we dismiss that report,
there are signs enough that the young earl preferred bisexual or
homosexual friends.

Buggery was a
crime, but close, very affectionate friendships between males were
much respected in this period. Male friends might desire with honour
to be together always, and so the Cambridge tomb of the dramatist Thomas
Legge signals his love for a man: '
Junxit amor vivos sic jungat terra sepultos'
('Love joined them living and so may the same earth link them in death').
¹³
The Sonnets show Shakespeare's understanding of homoerotic feeling.
He admired a patron who seemed, to many, to be Sir Philip Sidney's
possible heir in valour and art. At least at the fringes of
Southampton's set were Michael Drayton and his close friend Richard
Barnfield, who wrote homoerotic lyrics. Barnfield had been at
Brasenose College, Oxford -as had Barnabe Barnes, who wrote a sonnet
alluding to Southampton's lovely eyes. Gervase Markham in a sonnet
praised the young earl's 'well-tun'd' sweet voice. Barnes and the poet
Daniel were close friends of the earl's great tutor John Florio (who
was to translate Montaigne Essays).

At little cost as a rule, Southampton sweetly encouraged such writers,
and Nashe complimented him justly, if flippantly, in the dedication of
The Unfortunate Traveller in 1594: 'A dere lover and cherisher you
are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.' It is not
clear that the cherishing earl really entertained poets at his
Titchfield estate in Hampshire, but here Shakespeare is said to have
found the name 'Gobbo' for Shylock's servant.
¹⁴
However that may be, he soon dedicated a new poem to his patron.

The erotic subject of Lucretia or Lucrece, her rape and suicide,
obviously intrigued Shakespeare -- and this may be the 'graver labour'
he had promised Southampton in 1593. His new poem's seriousness
itself compliments the earl. This lady's Roman name had been synonymous
with marital virtue since the Middle Ages, although her

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death troubled Christian piety. In Lucrece, Shakespeare freshly
reworks her story in the 'complaint' tradition, using the rhyme royal
of Daniel's recent The Complaint of Rosamond, and wrings pathos from
the helpless exposure to Tarquin's savagery of Lucrece's white bosom's
'blue veins' and 'round turrets'.

Tarquin's tense, interesting, rationalizing debate with himself
foreshadows the psychic terrain of Macbeth. The rapist disappears, as
shattered as the lady's husband Collatine whose boasting of her virtues
implicates him in the rape. But the benefit of the subject lay in
chances it gave Shakespeare to plumb tragic feeling and effects.
Minimizing outward action, he gives himself access to Lucrece's mind
after the violation and so explores her agony, inanition, and
self-accusing doubts. He might be a viewer in a plague-ridden city,
musing on pain as he takes up tragic picturing:

To see sad sights moves more than hear them told,
For then the eye interprets to the ear
The heavy motion that it doth behold,
When every part a part of woe doth bear.

(lines 1324-7)

Lucrece is a work of great technical innovation and of much aesthetic
appeal. It has the inward force of a spiritual 'retreat' in its
spaciousness, slowness, and graphic depiction of mental suffering even
in a dramatic context that is barely viable; the reader's mind fixes
on an epitome of the fall of mankind and has time to contemplate it.
Here, too, as Hallett Smith has said, is 'an examination of what
constitutes tragedy and an explanation of how it operates'.
¹⁵
Or at least in the sunlight of an earl's eye, the author pursues his
interests. A dozen or More passages echo imagery or phrasing in his
Titus, and here he looks into the rationale for such a play.

Even so, his design is slightly compromised, and one might think that
he had been anxious to show his fitness to talk with the learned. The
heroine's set-pieces, such as her denunciations of Night, Time, and
Opportunity, show rhetorical agility, but lose her own accent -- a
dozen other speakers in Tudor poems might have said them -- and easily
detachable stanzas were to appeal to Elizabethan anthologizers.

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In England's Parnassus ( 1600) Robert Allott selected thirty-nine
passages from Lucrece (he took fewer from all the author's plays then in
print) and a mere twenty-six from Venus, and John Bodenham
Belvedere ( 1600) used ninety-one from Lucrece, only thirty-four from
the more prurient Venus.

Printed in
1594 as Lucrece -- later as The Rape of Lucrece from Field's early
running-titles -- the poem as a whole was marginally less popular than
its predecessor, if More instructive for the author, and went into
six known editions in his own lifetime.

Inscribing Lucrece to Southampton, Shakespeare is less reserved, More
intimate in tone than before. 'Right Honourable', he begins around
the spring of 1594,

The
loue I dedicate to your Lordship is without end: whereof this Pamphlet
without beginning is but a superfluous Moiety. The warrant I haue of
your Honourable disposition, not the worth of my vntutored Lines makes
it assured of acceptance.

All of his poems, written and unwritten, are to be for the earl's honour:

What I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in
all I haue, deuoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duety would shew
greater, meane time, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship; To whom I
wish long life still lengthned with all happinesse.

Your Lordships in all duety.

William Shakeƒpeare.

Yet certainly a large, unbridgeable social gap divided the young,
keen earl from an actor who wrote verse. Class consciousness in the
age was very acute; Southampton for instance saw plays with his
friend, the Earl of Rutland, but Ben Jonson remarked that one day,
when he was at Lady Rutland's table, 'her husband comming in, accused
her that she keept table to poets'.
¹⁶
Shakespeare was not a narrowly calculating man, but a hopeful
enthusiast eager to improve his social credentials; in effect his
dedicatory letters acknowledge a gap between himself and the earl, but
they also make use of the young man. So far he had been rather
limited by actors' demands, haste in

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production, and shifting public taste as he served up playscripts to be
changed as occasion required; he had to plunge boldly ahead of
himself, touching on topics he might later develop. Actors and
playwrights felt time pressing them, but, to the eye of many an
observer, the nobility lived at another pace. Imaginatively, it was as
a leisurely sonnet-writer that Stratford's poet most nearly entered
his patron's privileged, less mercenary, world.

Sonnet-writing had come into vogue among courtly poets, even as it
appealed for a while at the law Inns. Having tried his hand at them,
Shakespeare wrote sonnets over the years for private perusal. In this
mode, he had a certain freedom denied a dramatist, in that he could
allow himself to fail. Keeping his sonnets out of print, he might revise
them or abandon them as he wished. In fact his Sonnets 138 and 144
were published without his authority and in what appear to be early
drafts in a curious volume, The Passionate Pilgrim. The work's first
edition now exists only in eleven leaves in the Folger Library, but we
know that its second edition was printed by Thomas Judson for William
Jaggard in 1599.

In 1598 Francis Meres referred to Shakespeare's 'sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends'
¹⁷
-- without saying who the lucky readers were. Recent evidence
suggests that the 'friends' were rather few. At some point, he settled
upon a plan of contrasts for a series, with one group of sonnets to
be about an admirable love for a youth, and another group to be about
uncontrollable lust for a married woman of dark complexion. The myth
that Shakespeare's nameless Young Man and Dark Lady had exact
counterparts in his life only began in the late eighteenth century.
The Sonnets -- which profoundly explore love -are replete with bawdy
puns and sexual jokes; the lyrics about adultery, for example, include
allusions of a discreet sort to the vagina, and much plainer ones to
the rising and failing penis. For years he had little to gain by
printing his lyrics, and it is, of course, possible that he felt that
intimate Sonnets with bawdy wit, carnal imagery, and exposés of lust
might have troubled Mary Shakespeare, if she, or a literate neighbour at
Stratford, saw a volume of them. He had the feelings of others at
home to consider, and yet when well into his forties, he perhaps found
reasons to publish his lyrics (a matter best judged in view of his

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life in 1608-9). Time changes circumstances, and at last a series of
154 numbered sonnets with his narrative A Lover's Complaint appeared
under the irreproachable city imprint of George Eld, for the publisher
Thomas Thorpe, soon after the volume was registered in 1609.

The order in which he penned the Sonnets is unknown; but those to the
lovely youth increase in syntactical complexity and were hardly begun
later than 1593 or 1594. He appears to have started with a few,
well-tried themes, before turning to some of the guilt and anguish he
knew.

It is likely that he took up
for his youthful patron's eyes the theme of begetting children. In
urging a young man to beget heirs in Sonnets 1-17, he echoes his Venus,
which has a 'warrant' of Southampton's favour.

In the sonnet vogue of the 1590s, poets tried to hint of dark, personal
secrets in their lyrics. With artful verve Shakespeare himself played
the game, and no one has ever complained that his Sonnets leave us
with too few riddles and problems. I shall solve no puzzle here and
advance no major theory, but it is worth glancing at a difficult
matter at first -- did he write lyrics to please a nobleman other than
Henry Wriothesley?

If he did, the
most probable candidate is young William Herbert, who was born at
Wilton on 8 April 1580, and became third Earl of Pembroke in January
1601. He and his brother Philip were to have the large Folio of 1623
dedicated to them. By coincidence, in 1597 this boy's nervous parents
urged
him
to marry another child of the Earl of Oxford and granddaughter of Lord Burghley -- Bridget Vere.

Pembroke, of course, may have influenced the sonneteer at some point,
and that cannot be ruled out. But there is no sign that Shakespeare met
the future earl in the 1590s, though Michael Brennan's historical
research, for instance, takes one close to the milieu of the Pembrokes
at Wilton in Wiltshire and to its concerns.
¹⁸
No visitor at Wilton, none of its residents, and no one connected
with William Herbert or his father suggests that the playwright had
anything to do

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with the family in the 1590s. Lord Herbert was only 13, and not yet
living in London, when Venus was printed; there is no guarantee that
the opening Sonnets were written first, but they relate in style to the
Ovidian poems and early plays, not to the poet's manner late in the
decade. Moreover, up to 1594. Shakespeare acknowledges only one
poetry-patron. On telling Southampton 'what I have to do is yours' in
1594, he apparently aims to delight that patron in future with something
besides Lucrece.

He is gravely
elegant in Sonnets 1-17 -- which, even as they allude to time's
ravages and beauty's fading, are truly an actor's lyrics. If something
is missed when the Sonnets are recited, they are impressive even then
as the most beautiful poems in our language, so truthful that the
poet's nasty, ugly, and finally near-insane outlook is not muted or
compromised. The Sonnets have been effectively recited, not with any
halting emphasis on phrases or images but with whole lines as units of
speech. 'The meaning of the line very often resides in the second
half', remarks the actor Simon Callow.
¹⁹
And at the start, the Poet's misogyny is mild, aristocratic, tactical.
Abasing himself, he implies that a lovely, well-born youth needs a
wife for childbearing, but not of course for love, wit, wealth,
talents, companionship, or anything else she may offer.

In Shakespeare's time, or soon afterwards, one of these decorous
opening lyrics was well liked. More manuscript copies of his Sonnet 2
('When forty winters') survive from the seventeenth century than do
all similar copies of his other lyrics. Whether he or Drayton was the
borrower, a line in Drayton Shepheards Garland of 1593 -- 'The
timeplow'd furrows in thy fairest field' -- resembles a line in a
manuscript of Sonnet 2,

And trench deep furrows in that lovely field.

Shakespeare apparently revised this to read,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field.
²⁰

His image becomes military, and has a military echo of course in Sonnet
16 ('Make war upon this bloody tyrant, time'). It was for military
glory, one notes, that the young Southampton yearned; unfortunately
Shake-

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