Shakespeare: A Life (32 page)

As an index of the Poet's rage against himself she is intentionally out
of focus, as we might say. 'Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken',
the Poet bitterly accuses her; he proposes various frail, temporary
objectifications of himself to endure at all. In one of these he is a
victim of love's 'fever', longing for More of the disease that agonizes
him. In another, he is no More than a phallic drudge.

'Flesh', he assures his lady,

rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize.

(Sonnet 151)

Yet as he has violated social codes that properly bind men and women,
his isolation remains. Shakespeare's lyrics are not moralistic but
tragic, as they take up in these various views of the 'self' the
manner in which alienation may influence perception and language. The
author may well explore his own sexual nausea, the better to
understand Hamlet's, Angelo's, Othello's, or Lear's horror of sexuality.
His interests here are at once psychological and social. For
Elizabethans adultery implied bastardy and so threatened family
succession and the survival of names. Quibbles or puns on the name
'Will' are appropriate. The Poet's name is ' Will'; so is the name of
the Dark Lady's husband. Shakespeare mocks the pretended
self-revelation of the sonnet vogue by neatly dissociating his
own
name from 'Will' with allusions to nonexistent persons of that name in
proverb and popular riddle. Yet Sonnets 135 and 136, on Will, pick up
slang meanings of will as both penis and vagina, and obsessively
condemn the adulterer. 'Wilt thou', the Poet obscenely asks his lady,

whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

(Sonnet 135)

Still, the author avoids moralizing even in his fine sonnet on lust. Here he echoes a pun on
waist/waste
which Barnabe Barnes had developed in the same volume (of 1593) in
which he praised the Earl of Southampton. For Shakespeare, a 'waste of
shame' implies a 'shameful waist'. In modern editions of the Sonnets,
grammatical punctua-

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tion may abet the clarity of this great discourse on lust, but
Shakespeare's intimacy of tone is perhaps More apparent in the text of
1609:

Th'expence of Spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is perjurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Savage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust,
Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt,
On purpose layd to make the taker mad.
Made In pursut and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest, to have extreame,
A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo,
Before a joy proposd behind a dreame,
All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well,
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

(Sonnet 129)

If the Sonnets were set from his manuscript, he may have written' In
pursut and in possession so', and then inserted 'Made' (for 'Mad') in
line 9 without changing the capital letter of the next word.
²⁸
Quick and flowing as this poem is, its vision of lust is nightmarish.
Developing his art typically by pressing situations to extremes, he
etches the bleakest side of passion. He pictures a sexual reality that
other sonneteers of the 1590s fail to show, and ends his series with
two wry, ironic sonnets on venereal disease.

By the time Lucrece was printed in 1594, the theatre offered some
illusion of hope for a few actors as plague abated. Among playwrights
active just before the epidemic, few survived it for long. John Lyly
lived on unproductively and sat as MP for one 'pocket borough' after
another. Greene was gone; Peele and Nashe had only a few years left.
Lodge was about to renounce the theatre. Kyd dragged out his last
months in squalor, and on 30 May 1593 at Deptford -- along the river

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south-east of the capital -- Marlowe had been killed in a knife-fight
with three of the scum of the government's intelligence network (
Ingram Friser, Robert Poley, and Nicholas Skeres).

Shakespeare's soft-voiced, glittering patron now faced paying a fine
to Burghley, and another vast fee to get his estates out of wardship. In
November 1594, the young earl was leasing out part of Southampton
House, and a few years later selling off five of his manors, including
Portsea and Bighton -- the last to relatives of the poet George Wither.
He did little else tangibly for poets, and in fact the young earl was
not well placed to offer great sums of money, a semi-permanent
household office, a sinecure, or other large benefits of patronage. The
myth that he once gave Shakespeare £1, 000 for a 'Purchase' was
invented by Sir William Davenant, and strained even the credulity of
Rowe (who noted it in 1709).

But
having used the earl's fashionable name, Shakespeare in Venus and
Lucrece had offset the slurs of Greene and advertised his worth as a
poet who pleased beyond the public stage. He might yet attract
political patronage, and early in the spring of 1594 he could not have
been certain of his way ahead.

Throwing in his own political lot with the brash, vigorous Earl of
Essex, Southampton began to offer a lively spectacle. Railing at the
Burghley-Cecil faction in government and quietly scheming for James
VI's succession, the Earl of Essex was drawing Puritan and Catholic
followers alike. In 1599 he set sail to crush the Earl of Tyrone's or
'the O'Neill's' rebellion in Ireland and took along as his cavalry
general Southampton -- who, just lately, had offended the Queen by
seducing and marrying one of her doll-like Maids of Honour. In the most
cautious patriotic way Shakespeare spoke out. In his only clear,
specific allusion to a contemporary (and extra-dramatic) event, he has
the Chorus in Act V of Henry Vcomment on the Earl of Essex's possible
return from the Irish bogs.

Had not
Londoners cheered King Harry after a rain of arrows at Agincourt? (Not
that the famous use of arrows and stakes against the French cavalry
is explicit in the play.) 'As, by a lower but high-loving likelihood',
says the Chorus, with imperfect faith in the Earl of Essex's military
luck,

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Were now the General of our gracious Empress -
As in good time he may -- from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broaché on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him! Much More, and much More cause,
Did they this Harry.

(V.O. 29-35)

This is no propaganda for Essex and Southampton -- and Shakespeare's
doubt about their expedition was prophetic. After the débâcle of the
army overseas, Southampton, Rutland and his brother, and a few other
rash romantics joined the Earl of Essex in a rebellion against the
Queen in 1601. But Londoners failed to rise against her, and Essex was
executed. Southampton luckily was merely imprisoned in the Tower --
with his cat for company.

Finally,
when nearly retired from the stage, Shakespeare gave a very slight
sign of his feeling for the Essex conspirators -- and indirectly for his
former patron -- by devising an
impresa
for Southampton's friend the sixth Earl of Rutland. Such
imprese
were insignia, with mottoes and allegorical designs, usually painted
on banners or paper shields. Shakespeare was paid 44s. for devising
the work, his friend Burbage the same amount for painting it, and
Rutland carried the insignia at a tourney, on 24. March, to mark King
James's Accession Day in 1613.

These
late, almost nostalgic, gestures are indicative at least of
Shakespeare's regard for the fate of the Essex faction. No doubt his
caution was prudent, but it was also a sign of his wish to keep his
poise, his freedom of enquiry into political motives. And that much is
evident in his King John, a play which may date from around 1593-4 or
a little later. King John has a relation to the Sonnets and to
Lucrece's style, but the date or dates of its composition are in
dispute and it could be a revised play, originally written before its
author had read the anonymous, crude, anti-Catholic drama The
Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England which was printed in two
parts in 1591.

Shakespeare, in his
play, in effect looks at modern political motives by taking up a
thirteenth-century subject. King John, in defying the

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pope, seemed a hero to Elizabethan Protestants. In the play he is weak
and wavering, living in a world of deceit and compromise in which
religion itself is political. Significantly the play offended Catholics,
and William Sankey SJ, on the authority of the Holy Office, was to
censor much of it in the 1640s for students at an English college in
Spain. Shakespeare's papal legate Cardinal Pandolf has a grand subtle
intellect and is by no means corrupt, but he is worldly, cynical, and
capable of political blackmail on behalf of the pope.

The play's boldly sardonic, developing hero -- the Bastard Falconbridge
-- begins as a self-interested adventurer equipped in his rough and
ready way for survival. He might be an ideal play-actor, ready to
serve, detached from events, observant, and not inhibited. As the
play's moral agent he is sensitive to politics as an arena of deceit,
chance, treachery, self-delusion, and cowardice, and he interestingly
rails against the refinement of court circles in a manner that might
imply effeteness and ineptitude in Shakespeare's own patron.

The yearning at the root of King John -- and conveyed by the Bastard --
is for a blameless, wise ruler in a just commonwealth; this is set
against the realities of viciousness, weakness, and guile in the
political world. The play's portraits are at once subtle and given in
highly rhetorical and somewhat overwrought verse. King John might have
suited a weary, if well disciplined, troupe on the road, since it
nearly 'acts' itself and demands unusual restraint. Its portrait of
Constance, the mother of King John's victim, young Arthur, reminds one
of the technical experiment of Lucrece. And its Bastard's patriotism
is thoughtful and questioning, at least partly because the author has
tested his own paradoxes of attitude as a sonneteer.

Though distanced from pieties of his upbringing, Shakespeare had not
lost his Christian faith, or his belief in the worth of his nation
under its Queen. He sympathized with Catholics, but he shows King John
cowed by the pope's legate. Cardinal Pandolf tells the king with
reference to the French threat to England:

It was my breath that blew this tempest up,
Upon your stubborn usage of the Pope,
And since you are a gentle convertite,

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My tongue shall hush again this storm of war
And make fair weather in your blust'ring land.

(v. i. 17-21)

The Bastard, however, has another counsel for a confused, enfeebled
king. 'But wherefore do you droop? Why look you sad?' Falconbridge
tells John,

Away, and glisten like the god of war
When he intendeth to become the field.
Show boldness and aspiring confidence.

(v. i. 44, 54-6)
²⁹

Such an antidote to discouragement seems meant for a weary company, as
well as a king. King John's overall form is poorer than in its best
scenes, and the play is not a strong one. But its Bastard speaks with
hard-won authority, and suggests an author who knows the pain of
plague-time and the struggle of actors to endure.

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I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream.

( Falstaff, 1 Henry IV)

In the bleak, cold spring of 1594, plague abated in southern England
and players returned under grey skies to London. Few people could
remember such an odd, dismal spring. The past two years had punished the
acting troupes; none had thrived on the road and plague had brought
total chaos to the entertainment world. Pembroke's men had broken up
and had sold their playbooks, which thus came into print like debris
from a sinking ship. Keen to advertise themselves, it seems, and stay
afloat, other troupes released plays for publication. Hertford's small
troupe faltered, and after losing their own patron, Sussex's men
disbanded. Then, on 16 April, Ferdinando Lord Strange (lately fifth
Earl of Derby) died in such bizarre circumstances that it was rumoured
he had been poisoned, as likely he was, and his death, a few months
after that of the Earl of Sussex, meant the theatre had lost two of
its keenest patrons. Ferdinando's troupe performed in the name of his
widow, the Dowager Countess Alice -- who will concern us -- but his
death was like a bad omen. Cold skies, moreover, foretold a poor grain
harvest (the first of four utterly disastrous annual failures) with
rising prices and new hardships.

So
far, Shakespeare had kept his options open: in the letter accompanying
Lucrece he looks ahead to writing poems, not more dramas, while
implying he will accept patronage. In May the government interfered --
as if a giant were regrouping the children in a vast urban

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sandlot -- and set up a kind of theatrical monopoly in London. That
would give him a new chance; but biographers have underestimated his
real situation, just as they neglect the difficulties faced by his new
troupe in the mid-1590s. In some ways, his troubles only deepened as
his career became more settled. Once committed to the theatre, he was
unlikely to write another Venus or or Lucrece; and it was unlikely that
any stage drama could have the status of such works. He cut himself
off from the hope that is implicit in his two letters to Southampton,
and a curious, cold sense of loss and disappointment runs in his
Sonnets. Whatever he did, he might be less than respectable in a
Midlands town; but the low status of actors was an old ache, a
grievance felt by colleagues such as Phillips and Pope, and not the
worst of his problems. Some dissatisfaction with himself saved him from
complacency, while quickening his intellectual life; he adjusted with
some cunning to a milieu he felt he had to accept to earn his
livelihood. But the financial outlook of his new company was uncertain;
he had nothing else to fall back upon, and might return home with
nothing. If he had followed the path of his Titus playbook and gone with
Burbage from Lord Strange's company, after May 1591, into Pembroke's,
and then Sussex's, he had been obliged to do so to survive; in later
years his fidelity to one troupe would be unique among poets. Yet that
loyalty is no sign of his contentment, and there are underlying
complications in his ambiguous writing to suggest that he opposed his
vocation as much as he accepted it. He subverted many norms of the
theatre and defied his medium as he made use of a compromised way of
life in 1595 and 1596; he mocked popular assumptions even in his first
great mythic plays Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream,
before creating a radical, ebullient mocker in Falstaff and virtually
turning English history on its head. How did his new situation come
about, and how did his new duties really affect him?

Certainly in the plague, old James Burbage, as proprietor of the
empty Shoreditch Theater, had not been quite idle. In good times, as
recent evidence shows, Burbage broke city trade-laws in his manner of
selling fruit, nuts, and drink to playgoers. He was fined, indicted, and
banned from catering. Yet even when the Theater was shut he sold
food illegally at Holywell Street, despite summonses from the

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