The Late Mr Shakespeare (29 page)

Have you ever noticed how very queer Mr Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems are?

I mean
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
, both published in this period when the theatres were closed down on account of the plague, both written therefore before his thirtieth birthday.

In the first a mannish woman rapes a womanish man, but he proves impotent.

In the second a man is excited by the idea of his friend’s wife being chaste and rapes her, but the rape gets a bare eight lines out of the whole 1855. Before the rape, the poem lingers in a dream-like way over everything it invokes for our inspection: the doors and locks of the victim’s house, the wind that blows down the corridors, Lucrece’s discarded glove, her bedroom, her ‘yet unstained’ bed, her body’s beauty – five gloating stanzas of the last, including a description of her breasts
like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden yokes unconquered / Save 
of their lord
. After the rape, the poem quickly enters the victim’s mind and becomes her long rhetorical complaint before she kills herself. Although the presentation of the ravisher Tarquin is adequate, it is plain that the poet identifies more easily with the raped woman Lucrece.

I think that in both poems Shakespeare was looking back eleven years or so, towards that summer of 1582, when perhaps he played Adonis/Lucrece to Anne Hathaway’s Venus/Tarquin in the fields of Shottery.

Was Shakespeare raped?

I think it not impossible. His Venus is not Ovid’s Venus. She is not even much of a goddess. She is an older woman having her way with a country boy she has kidnapped.

Venus rapes Adonis, but she doesn’t get what she wants. That much is made apparent at the climax:

Tantalus was punished in Hades by being inflicted with a great thirst and placed up to his chin in water which receded whenever he tried to drink. The last line means there has been no penetration.

Did Shakespeare believe (like his beloved Ovid) that women get more sexual pleasure from the act than men do? Tiresias in the
Metamorphoses
is the type of those who say so. Juno rewarded him with blindness.

The lustful Venus certainly takes control from the start:

Adonis, by contrast, is almost as chaste as Lucrece. Unwilling and obstinate, he takes another 521 lines to succumb in any sort to the blandishments of his ravisher:

A couplet which suggests that their coupling gives her little pleasure, and him none. Notice, too, how the comic effect of such feminine rhymes as are employed
(encounter/he mount her; resisteth/she listeth)
is always to leave Venus looking more than a touch ridiculous.

Before and after the imperfect copulation, the imagery of the poem at many points suggests that fable of Shakespeare’s childhood which had the boy Willy fleeing from his mother, both of them assuming different guises, until she caught him. Venus is likened to an eagle, a wolf, a glutton, a vulture whose lips ‘are conquerors’, a milch doe ‘whose swelling dugs do ache’, and then to falcons (yes, in the plural). Adonis is severally a bird lying tangled in the net, a divedapper (a species of grebe common on the Avon) turning his head this way and that to escape unwanted kisses, a deer, a lily prisoned in a jail of snow, a fleet-foot roe, a ‘froward infant still’d with dandling’,
*
a hare pursued by hounds, a bright star shooting from the sky, and (finally) a purple flower
of which Venus ‘crops the stalk’, noting ‘green-dropping sap’ in ‘the breach’, which sap she compares to tears.

Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.

Venus and Adonis
achieved an immediate and prolonged success with the public in general – sixteen editions of it were called for during the poet’s lifetime. But what was the nature of this success? Why, it was as a kind of aphrodisiac, a drug or preparation inducing venereal desire. It made people ‘burn in love’, as Shakespeare’s disciple John Weever declared in an epigrammatic sonnet. Others spoke frankly of sleeping with it under their pillows, and nuns were said to be using it as an aid to manustupration.

Madam, Pickleherring is
not
making this up as he goes along! I call as witness John Robinson, who in his
Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon
– the second edition, of 1623 – tells us that he managed to get himself engaged as door-keeper of that convent to keep an eye on three cousins of the Earl of Southampton who had taken the veil, and that ‘these ladies, although making parade of chastity, poverty and obedience possess licentious books and when the confessor feels merrily disposed after supper, it is usual for him to read from
Venus and Adonis
or the
Jests of George Peele
, as there are few idle pamphlets printed in England that are not to be found in this house.’ It was no less popular at the Court of Queen Elizabeth. A mad soldier called William Renolds (no relation!) even claimed that it had been published to show the world that the Queen was in love with him. I doubt if she was; and it certainly wasn’t.

None of this is said by way of disapprobation. Both
Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
are sexually arousing, and it would be false to pretend that a part of Mr Shakespeare’s first reputation was not as an erotic writer. Pickleherring is
willing to confess that the first time he read these poems he came across passages that gave him a hard on, and he imagines they made those nuns feel warm and wet. There is nothing wrong with this. I wish a few more readers would admit it. (Thank you, madam! You advance in my respect.)

But, sir, I take your point. There
is
something reprehensible and disgusting about a man taking pleasure in the rape of poor Lucrece, and I
am
ashamed to have done so. At the same time, I insist that Mr Shakespeare’s verse is by no means innocent of such pleasure itself. To say that Lucrece’s breasts are ‘unconquered’ save by her husband is to be an accomplice in the idea of ravishment. It feeds the doubtless horrible male fantasy that all sex is a game of conquest and possession. And I have not forgotten that the poem ends with Lucrece’s suicide, no. As for that, the other one ends with Adonis gored to death by a wild boar, and Venus hanging over
the wide wound that the boar had trench’d / In his soft flank
, staining her face with the boy’s blood, and confessing that if she had boar’s teeth
With kissing him I should have kill’d him first
. Do you suppose that the author of
Othello
was ignorant of the fact that Love and Death are sisters, and pain and pleasure often close allied?

I set out to suggest in this chapter that William Shakespeare was not the dominant partner in his early sexual exchanges with Anne Hathaway, and to argue that in his identification with first Adonis and then Lucrece he might be telling us something of his own feelings with regard to what she may have done to him. Of course, it could be that like many men he found the very notion of a sexually predatory and aggressive female both disturbing and comical, and that he found this notion incarnate in the figure of Venus. All the same, working on my usual principle that what is interesting biographically in Shakespeare’s work is
what the subject does not demand he put there, I will maintain that in such an image as comes in the last line following we certainly do not see any Venus, any Goddess of Love:

That ‘Love’, deeply distress’d, left lying on her back in a Shottery meadow, might even be heard to drum her heels upon the ground in the well-known tantarum way of country girls unsatisfied by their swains. As to identifying Anne Hathaway with Sextus Tarquinius – I do no such foolish thing. Your author merely points out that William Shakespeare participates most keenly in the woman’s role in this particular poem. Perhaps he was never raped. But he felt he had been.

The other thing to say about these two poems is that while both of them are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, there is an observable difference between the two dedications. The first is impersonal but not cold. The second is both personal and warm: ‘What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.’ This difference in tone reflected the development in friendship between poet and patron, but I’ll keep that for my next chapter, which will be all about Southampton.

For the moment, suddenly, my mind is filled up by memory of Mrs Anne Shakespeare coming after me with that birch broom of hers, driving me from New Place and chasing me round the mulberry tree when she caught me in her black silk calimanco. All at once, the notion of her as Tarquin is not so foolish.

So here is the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Baron Titchfield, Earl of Southampton, in a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard. He is twenty summers old – it depicts him at the time of
Venus and Adonis
and of Mr Shakespeare’s first sonnets advising and exhorting him to marry. This is the face of Narcissus.

Under the exquisite arch of the brows the eyes look down, but not in any kind of modesty. They consider the rest of their owner, and are pleased with what they see. The gaze, you might say, is cock-sure. Who’s a pretty boy then?

This is the face that launched a thousand quips, all of them complimentary. It is long and oval, with delicate features, the face of an aristocrat. The long, thin nose is pointed, like a Russian dog’s. It speaks of centuries of sniffing, as well as centuries of in-breeding. The hair is a cascade of love-locks, red-gold, curling. It dangles down over its grower’s left shoulder, falling half-way to his wasp
waist. It makes you want to swing him round the room by it. As for the mouth: two petulant petals pouting in complacent pride? That about covers it.

The lord and owner of this face has rings in his ears. He wears a white satin doublet. He has slashed and padded trunk-hose with, beneath his trunks, a pair of canions. Purple garters embroidered with silver thread hold up his white silk stockings. See, on the table beside him, his plumed helmet. One arm rests lightly on it. His other (gloved) hand rests on his padded hip.

To be honest, Pickleherring never much cared for the Earl of Southampton. You might say I was jealous, reader. Perhaps I was.

My main feeling, though, was straightforward dislike of the man. He was rich and he was a poet-fancier, that’s all. I do not think he cared for poetry, though at one point he was an ardent theatre-goer, spending his time merrily in going to plays every day. What he liked was being seen by the audience. He had his own stool which he perched upon, one leg thrust forward. His habit was to make much fuss with his hair, patting and primping, or powdering his cheeks as he sat. He never even pretended that he was listening. He liked to prop himself against a proscenium door, and kick aside his stool to show off the clock on his stocking. Did I mention that he was left-handed? A further token, if you like, of his aptitude for viciousness. Not that I have anything against left-handed people. But Southampton made a virtue of disconcerting you by holding out his left hand to be kissed.

The young Earl lived for his hair, I always thought. Poets and barbers were much the same to him. In fact, as Mr Shakespeare once told me in a rare unguarded moment,
Southampton took an odd delight in having his hair combed in a measured or rhythmical manner. He would only have it done by dressers who were skilled in the rules of prosody. He claimed that while many take delight in the rubbing of their limbs and the combing of their hair, these exercises would delight much more if the servants at the baths, and all the barbers, were so skilful in the art of poesy that they could express any called-for measure with their fingers. Whether Mr Shakespeare provided his patron with iambic or trochaic combing, I know not. His dactyls may have caused no small delight.

Little or nothing in himself, Southampton wanted immortality through others. At Cambridge, his dissertation was on Fame. Mr Shakespeare claimed that some of the sonnets would give it to him. Alas, this is probably true, though they’re not the best sonnets.

This golden youth was a Papist, and the heir of Papists. His father, a Mary Stuart man, had perished in the Tower. The boy was brought up by his mother, a more worldly creature who groomed him to marry Lord Burghley’s granddaughter, the Lady Elizabeth Vere.

This marriage of convenience, which would have brought together two of England’s greatest houses, never came to pass, despite Lady Southampton’s plots and entreaties and then Mr Shakespeare’s work in the same cause. I have always suspected, by the by, that those first twenty-five sonnets urging Southampton to marry were in fact
commissioned
by Lady Southampton, but I cannot prove it, and I never dared ask their author. (Notice how in the third one he flatters the boy’s mother!) They did not work anyway. The young Earl did not feel like marrying.

He went for women as well as men, mind you. He liked both men and women to adore him. Whether he loved anyone in his life, of either sex or none, I rather doubt.

Many writers sought Southampton’s patronage, not just Shakespeare. It was known he would inherit a fortune on coming of age. (So he did, though Burghley contrived to dock it of
£
5000 on account of the young man’s breach of contract in the matter of Elizabeth Vere.) Besides our hero, others who tried to tap Southampton for funds included Barnabe Barnes, Samuel Daniel, Gervase Markham, Henry Constable, Bartholomew Griffin, George Wither, Richard Barnfield, George Peele, Matthew Gwinne (whose ‘comedy’
Vertumnus
once sent King James to sleep), Arthur Pryce, William Pettie, and George Chapman (who even tried to find a patron in his grocer). Thomas Nashe is known to have written obscene verses for the little charmer, excusing himself by saying that he was only following in Shakespeare’s footsteps. Alas for Nashe, his verses were
so
obscene that they still remain in manuscript. Meanwhile, out in the published world, dedications rained on Southampton’s head, and he got wet.

In Mr Shakespeare’s case, money certainly changed hands.
Venus and Adonis
(or its fame, or its power when recited for a bit of barbering) must have proved sweet to the young Earl’s taste, for by the time of its sequel Southampton was inviting its author to dine at Holborn House, his palatial London residence, and to stay with him at Titchfield in the country. Mr Shakespeare was always reticent regarding it, but I believe that his patron once made him a present of
£
1000 to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to – enough to purchase a fine house
in Stratford, a large number of shares in our Company of actors, and leave some change to spare for playing primero. Southampton played a lot of primero. Gambling of any kind pleased him. He once lost 1800 crowns at a tennis-match in Paris.

It has to be admitted that Shakespeare had something of a weakness regarding aristocrats. He liked them to like him. I could not say why. In Southampton, who was ten years his junior, he found, for a while, a powerful patron who seemed like a friend. No doubt he was flattered and excited to find himself invited into a circle that was like a little court. Here he was, accepted on his own merits by a set that put much store by wit – persons who were worldly wise as well as wealthy, all of them impressed by his gift for puns (I can put it no higher). You can see this reflected in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, a comedy first written to amuse Southampton and his friends. Not all Southampton’s friends were idiots, either. John Florio, the scholar, was his tutor. It was Florio who gave Mr S the seed for his mulberry tree.

Southampton’s patronage of Shakespeare, then, developed quickly into intimacy. But this was a friendship that brought Shakespeare more torment than peace.

I no more want to speak of this than to tell the boring story of the boring Lamberts. Southampton is even more boring. Consider him apart from WS. All his life he sought ‘praise and reputation’ – his own words. He rose and then he fell with his flash friend Essex. He commanded in some fashion the
Garland
on the famous Islands Voyage of ’97, and was even credited with the capture of a Spanish vessel. However (yawn, yawn), he aroused Queen Elizabeth’s fury two years later by accepting the rank of General of the Horse under Essex in Ireland without
royal permission. When Essex tried to capture the Queen and seize power, in 1601, it was Southampton’s London house that was used as a base for the crazy insurrection. You could say this was the worst mistake of a mistaken life. Southampton was tried for treason with Essex, found guilty, and only escaped execution thanks to his Mamma pulling a few strings with Secretary Cecil. No doubt she persuaded him that so pretty a head could not be dangerous.

In his manners, the irksome Earl was always epicene. When he served in the wars in Ireland it is said that he saw most of his active service in bed with a Captain Piers Edmunds. Southampton would ‘cole and hug’ his captain in his arms, and ‘play wantonly’ with him – I quote from a report that was sent to Cecil. To
COLE
or
CULL
is to fondle, as in
CULL-ME-TO-YOU
, which as my wife Jane used to remind me is a country name for the pansy flower. WS may well have been thinking of Southampton and Edmunds when he wrote of Achilles and Patroelus in
Troilus and Cressida
. Something he said to me once led me to understand that Southampton is also Bertram in
All’s Well That Ends Well
, that disagreeable hero, another reason why I do not like the play.

For the rest, I believe Southampton’s part in Shakespeare’s story to be negligible. True, when his patron toyed with studies of the law for a brief while, the poet obligingly fitted out a sonnet in praise of him with a few legal terms remembered from his own days as a
NOVERINT
. Then, when Southampton entertained day-dreams of serving the King of France, his Will-to-boot came up with comedies which transport the spectator to Nerac and the Louvre. Such things are not profound. They belong, like their begetter, to the surface.

This is not to say that William Shakespeare did not take Henry Wriothesley seriously. He did. Too seriously. And he suffered much pain as a consequence. You will learn of that when I tell you about the sonnets, the story behind them, as that concerns Southampton. Not that he was the only one concerned.

For the pretty Earl’s part, Pickleherring is sure that the sonnets were over his head. Beyond him. If he read them at all, that is, which he probably did not, except for the ones that are simply in praise of his beauty.

He died, in 1624, Henry Wriothesley, of a lethargy, having lived in one most of his life, if you ask me.

Oh yes, and Wriothesley should be pronounced as
RIZLEY
. That’s how top people always say it. Rhymes with
GRISLY
.