Shakespeare: A Life (29 page)

or workers streaming in from France and the Lowlands. Munday's play
about More's role in the historic riot was meant to be sensational,
but the writing ran into trouble. Revisers were called in, and
Shakespeare's handwriting in
More'
s manuscript has been found in three folio pages known to us, today, as those of 'Hand D'.

'Hand D' -- or Shakespeare, as we think -- writes at speed in a clear,
cursive 'secretary' hand with ease, lack of restraint, and economy of
effort. He dithers confusedly over names, abbreviations, and other
incidentals, and may imagine a scene in life rather than a play on a
stage, not unlike Shakespeare who elsewhere has 'Enter before Angiers'
or 'Citizens upon the walles' as untheatrical stage directions.
³
But 'Hand D' evokes a firm, compassionate Sir Thomas More, who speaks
in a rapid series of images as if the poet were compulsively caught
up in them. The emotive force of an image sets up a rhythm of feeling,
so that the poet follows and fills out More's psyche, but does not
seem to create it; a vivid delineation of 'character' may be too
external a matter to be involved in his aim or process of composing. If
the quill of a theatre-poet could move rapidly, we have little sign of
that speed in our modern texts of Renaissance plays. We punctuate
More's lines to the London rioters rather heavily today:

What do you to your souls
In doing this? O desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands
That you like rebels lift against the peace
Lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet.

What 'Hand D' actually wrote is very quick, with its spontaneity and
harmony all the more evident because the punctuation does not mark out
every breath-pause for the lungs of an Alleyn or Burbage:

what do you to yor sowles
in doing this o desperat as you are
wash your foule mynds wt teares and those same handes
that you lyke rebells lyft against the peace
lift vp for peace, and your vnreuerent knees
make them your feet
⁴

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The writing by 'Hand D' reminds one of Heminges' and Condell's memory
of Shakespeare in the Folio of 1623, as a sure writer of such
'easinesse' his 'mind and hand went together'. Even if it were shown
that he did not write More's speeches, they display just such theatrical
qualities -- rapidity, flow, expressive tone among them -- as we find
in his narrative poems and Sonnets. Thomas More in any case alarmed
the censor's eye of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, who asked for
material that dramatized the insurrection to be narrated instead, and
added for the script's revisers, 'nott otherwise att your own
perrilles [perils]'.
⁵

Despite the work of six 'hands' as poets or scribes, More languished --
and one doubts that it reached the boards of any stage.

Almost as if in response to weariness of the plague, Shakespeare
prepared Venus and Adonis. The erotic poem was ready by spring. With
verve and colour, it plays upon a wide view of time, and reminds one
of how easily Elizabethans imagined vast stretches of time ahead, even
in legal documents. (They hardly needed our science fiction.) In the
month of Shakespeare's birth, one Simon Saunders typically sold a
lease on a 'Crofte' for a term of 2, 995 years. Again, Thomas Sharpham
acquired Devon lands until AD 3607, and John Hodge signed for
property to be his family's until AD 4609, as if our twenty-first
century were a 'tomorrow'.
⁶
Shakespeare's expansive view of time is not unusual, but it appears
to good advantage in his poems. He inscribed Venus and Adonis to the
refined, well-schooled Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton,
and found a Latin epigraph to suit that patron of poets. It reads, in
one version, 'Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, | Fair
Phoebus lead me to the Muses' springs'.
⁷

After that, he appends a letter which suggests he barely knows the
19-year-old earl. As printed by his Stratford acquaintance Richard
Field, then in London, to whom he sold Venus, the letter ends with the
name ' William Shakeƒpeare' -- and the spelling is interesting. Field
probably inserted a neutral e between the two syllables of the last
name -- 'Shak' and 'ƕpeare' -- because, in a Tudor press, both
k
and the long letter ƒ kerned (that is, the
face
of each letter projected beyond the tiny
body
behind it, and when set together such letters bent or broke in printing). None of the poet's six known signatures shows an

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e
in the middle of his last name; but surnames were not thought of as
fixed. Out of habit, or to the extent that he cared, he was perhaps
happy to be 'Shakspere', or 'Shakspeare'.
⁸

'Right Honourable', he writes tactfully within a few weeks of his
twenty-ninth birthday for the earl and other readers of Venus and
Adonis,

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 stronge 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 haue honoured you with some grauer labour. But if the
first heire of my inuention proue deformed, I shall be sorie it had so
noble a god-father: and neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare
it yeeld me still so bad a haruest[.] I leaue it to your Honourable
suruey, and your Honor to your hearts content, which I wish may
alwaies answere your owne wish, and the worlds hopefull expectation.

Your Honors in all dutie, William Shakeƒpeare.

He is newly reborn, as if with a 'first heire' of his brain he begins
his career again, and there is a hint of the muddy Midlands whence he
comes in the allusion to 'so bad a harvest'. Southampton's fashionable
name advertises a work about which the poet has doubts. He follows
Thomas Lodge Scillaes Metamorphosis, lightly, in matters of style.

But his own erotic epyllion or short epic uses light borrowings well.
His Adonis is a prim, amusing child hardly past puberty, with a
niceness and gaucherie that might suit a new boy in an acting troupe.
Adonis fears sex with a 'bashful shame' and maiden 'blush' that make
him seem over-mothered.

Venus appears
as a Shoreditch bordello-madam on the rampage, or at first as a
fleshy, sweaty, pantingly grotesque woman as she lugs Adonis under an
arm or lecherously hungers for his virginal body:

Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust,
And governed him in strength, though not in lust.

(lines 41-2)

His red lips might save England from plague or drive infection from

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the 'dangerous year' (perhaps the year 1592-3) as she tells him passionately, 'that the star-gazers'

having writ on death,
May say the plague is banished by thy breath!

(lines 508-10)

Early readers did not find her comical, but sexually exciting. And
whereas treatments of Ovid's story had shown Venus and Adonis as
mutual lovers, here the goddess is more affecting because her frantic
appeals fall on deaf ears. In this poem she lusts rightfully, as if the
author drew on an early experience of his own with a woman in making
her alarming, then motherly, luscious, sympathetic. There is a deep,
possibly autobiographical, aspect to Shakespeare's fascination for the
sexual initiatives of women -- as in Titania's farcical but compelling
wooing of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or Rosalind's wooing of
Orlando in As You Like It, or Helena's pursuit of Bertram in All's
Well. The poet hardly wrote to make an earl give up bachelorhood, but
in line with his procreative Sonnets 1-17, he has Venus argue for a
begetting of children. After Adonis's horse bolts off to breed with a
mare, Venus gets the boy into a coital position, hanging with plump arms
round his neck till he falls on her belly, and she on her back:

Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.

(lines 595-6)

But he is not 'pricked' just then for her delight, in a phrase of
Sonnet 20, and next day a boar's priapic tusks nuzzle in his groin.

Venus weeps angry tears at his death. In her vision of misery for all
lovers and her flight to the skies, the poet hints at what she
bequeaths, to us, on earth -- a miasma of sexual guilt, betrayal, and
nagging torment which, in effect, Shakespeare takes up in the Sonnets.

Licensed on 18 April 1593, Venus and Adonis had a delayed debut, but
Richard Field, who bought the work outright, printed it by midSeptember
and sold its very marketable copyright to John Harrison the next June.
The poem's painterly appeal, sensual quality, and smart

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pace ensured its success with courtiers and students; it had gone
through at least six editions by 1599, and within a year of its
publication Thomas Edwards, Michael Drayton, and Thomas Heywood (all
in works licensed between October 1593 and May 1594) alluded to it in
verses of their own.
⁹

One consequence was that Shakespeare's name became More familiar in
literary London. Dramatists and other poets knew one another, and
Venus would have been noticed by those in Southampton's circle.
Patronage networks were fluid and fragile, but distant informants
could affect a poet's career. Southampton, as we know, came to court
with the poet Fulke Greville -- whose father had become honorary
recorder of Stratford-upon-Avon, after aiding bailiffs and aldermen
when John Shakespeare was going to 'halls'. We do not know this, but
it is possible that Southampton had heard a little of Shakespeare from
the younger Fulke Greville -- no mean judge of the talented -- and felt
the more disposed to be encouraging.

It is certain that with poets such as Drayton and Heywood astir over
Venus and Adonis its author was talked about, and that he received a
mark of the young lord's favour. The earl gave what Shakespeare simply
calls a 'warrant' of his 'disposition', which, as vague as that is,
implies a sign of approval. With a chance to learn More of him, what
did Shakespeare -- around the autumn of 1593, or, at any rate, before
the next spring -- find in the young ' Henrie Wriothesley, Earle of
Southampton and Baron of Titchfield'?

For the earl's family, the very hour of his birth was affecting and
memorable, and yet -- born at 3 a.m. on 6 October 1573 -- he was the
fine product of an unhappy match. Much that Shakespeare either heard
about or would have been quick to notice, such as the young man's love
of action, art, and drama, or his self-display and ambition, his
homoerotic friendships, and his highly strung, rather unreckoning,
temperament, must surely have had causes in his upbringing. His father
was a fervent Catholic, imprisoned more than once for treason, and
his mother a beautiful, sentimental, rather silly person who was said
to have taken a commoner as a lover.

As a boy, Henry Wriothesley had been a go-between for his parents.
Then, when forcibly parted from his mother, he developed a deep

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suspicion of women -- and he was to turn often to male friends for
stimulus or affection. Nearly 8 when his father died, he became third
Earl of Southampton, and a ward of the Queen's powerful Lord Treasurer
-- Lord Burghley -- who trained him superbly at a school for young
noblemen at Cecil House in London's Strand. Having met other royal
wards, including perhaps his future hero the Earl of Essex, he went on
at the early age of 12 to St John's College, Cambridge. His guardian
also thought that the law might be useful, and enrolled him at Gray's
Inn.

But the comely, refined earl,
who took his MA degree at 16, hardly had time for law-books at Holborn
-- though his own Southampton House was near Gray's. He came to
revels at Gray's Inn at about the time The Comedy of Errors was staged
there; yet he mainly glittered at court. He was with the Queen at
Oxford when, as a poet put it, 'his mouth yet blooms with tender
down'. For a time, he was to see 'plaies every Day', and delight in
Lord Strange's younger brother, who wrote playscripts.

But Shakespeare at the time of Venus would have found him in hot
water. Ordered by Burghley to wed the latter's granddaughter Lady
Elizabeth Vere whose father was the Earl of Oxford, the young man
baulked. That alliance might happily have cleared him of a papist taint;
his mother's own Catholic crimes, on manuscript evidence, were
hardly worse than her appeal to free an 'olde poor woman' charged (it
seems) with recusancy,
¹⁰
but his father's link with a regicidal plot had led to the Tower.

Still the boy refused to wed; and the law held that if an heir would
not marry 'at the request of his lord', on coming of age he must pay
him what 'any would have given for the marriage'.
¹¹
The earl faced paying a stupendous fine (said to be £5, 000) on
turning 21 in October 1594. Hence it was to a rather plucky nobleman
that Shakespeare pledged love 'without end' (in his letter with
Lucrece) and wrote 'what I have to do is yours, being part in all I
have, devoted yours'. Southampton was becoming an exhibit. He enhanced
a slender, lightly built form with delicate fabrics; his clinging
white silk doublet, dancing hat-feathers, and purple garters could be
offset by a lovely tress of auburn hair falling to the breast. Was he
homosexual? The

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