Shakespeare (33 page)

I
t the beginning
of 1593 Pembroke’s Men resumed playing at the Theatre. Shakespeare’s early plays were part of their repertory. The playbooks or official texts of
Titus Andronicus, The True Tragedy of the Duke of York
and
The Taming of a Shrew
, when they were eventually published in volume form, all advertise the fact that these plays were “sundry times acted by the Right honourable the Earle of Pembrook his seruants.” In the playbooks of
The True Tragedie
and
The First Part of the Contention
there are very precise stage-directions that suggest the intervention of the author.

But they could not have performed in London for very long. On 21 January, as a result of an epidemic of the plague, the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor ordering him to prohibit “all plays, baiting of bears, bulls, bowling and any other like occasions to assemble any numbers of people together.” So Shakespeare and his companions were obliged once more to leave the capital. They travelled west to Ludlow, part of the Earl of Pembroke’s territory, by way of places such as Bath and Bewdley. At Bath they received 16 shillings, less 2 shillings’ recompense for a bow they had broken. Perhaps it was one of those mentioned in the stage direction of
The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke
, “Enter two keepers with bows and arrows.” In Bewdley they were awarded 20 shillings as “my Lord President his players.” The Earl of Pembroke was known officially as President of Wales. In Ludlow
they received the same sum, but were also granted “a quart of white wine and sugar.” In Shrewsbury it was advertised that “my Lord President’s players” were “coming to this town”; here they received no less than 40 shillings.

When they returned to London later in 1593 they were less fortunate. The Theatre, and the other playhouses, were still closed by “the sickness.” It was late June, or early July, and the summer heat was approaching. In this year the epidemic disorder killed fifteen thousand Londoners, more than one-tenth of the population. While on tour in Bath, Edward Alleyn wrote to his wife instructing her “every evening throwe water before your dore and in your bakesid [back of the house] and haue in your windowes good store of rue and herbe of grace.”
¹

Something else was happening in London. Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the streets. On 5 May a bitterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional writers. So the authors of these “lewd and malicious libels” were to be arrested and examined; if they refused to confess “you shal by auctorities hereof put them to the torture in Bridewel, and by th’extremitie thereof.”
²
One of the first arrested was the author of
The Spanish Tragedy
, Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named Christopher Marlowe as a blasphemer. It has been suggested that the entire affair was an elaborate trap by the authorities to snare Kyd and, through Kyd, to detain Marlowe himself.
³
Marlowe was called and examined by the Privy Council for two days; he was then released, on condition that he reported daily to their lordships. Ten days later he was dead, stabbed through the eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year. It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of players. One of their leading playwrights had been killed, in most suspicious circumstances, and another had been tortured almost to death at the instigation of the Privy Council. It was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the plague and the closure of the theatres.

But there was one other consideration for Shakespeare. The death of Marlowe occurred while he was on tour with Pembroke’s Men, but the report reached him soon enough. This was for him a climactic event. The dramatic
poet whom he most admired and imitated was dead. To put it more bluntly, his principal competitor was dead. From this time forward he would have a clear run. It is perhaps not surprising that his great lyrical plays—
Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost
and
Richard
II—emerge in the succeeding four years. In these plays he exorcises, and surpasses, Marlowe’s poetical spirit. The untimely death of Marlowe left Shakespeare as the principal playwright of note in late sixteenth-century London.

The continuation of the plague throughout the summer, however, obliged Pembroke’s Men to tour again. They sold their text of Marlowe’s
Edward the Second to
a stationer, William Jones, no doubt to raise a modest but necessary sum. The sensation of his death might encourage sales. Then they travelled into the south of England, where they played at Rye for the relatively small sum of 13
s
4
d
. They came back to London in August, and disbanded. They were bankrupt and could no longer cover their costs. On 28 September Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn, who was also still “on the road”: “As for my lord of Pembroke’s, which you desire to know where they may be, they are all at home, and have been this five or six weeks; for they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and were fain to pawn the apparel.”
⁴

So Shakespeare was out of employment. But it is not to be believed that such an enterprising and energetic young man would remain idle for very long. With the closure of the theatres at the beginning of the year he must already have been considering the future. Who could tell if, or when, the plague would abate? Would the doors of the London theatres be closed for ever? He must have given serious thought to a possible change in the direction of his career, since in this period he began work on a long poem. From an early stage, too, he may have had in mind the possible benefits accruing from a wealthy patron. Such a patron might offer him employment, in the lean time of the theatres, as well as gifts. Thus in the summer of 1593 his old Stratford acquaintance, Richard Field, published a volume entitled
Venus and Adonis
. It was priced at about 6 pence, and sold at the sign of the White Greyhound in the haunt of booksellers at Paul’s Churchyard. Field’s shop was no doubt Shakespeare’s haunt, also, where he would have found the new books of the day—among them George Puttenham’s
The Arte of English Poesie
. That treatise had recommended the six-line stanza for English narrative poems, precisely the form that Shakespeare employed in
Venus and Adonis
. In Field’s shop he would have seen fresh copies of Plutarch’s
Lives
as translated
by Sir Thomas North but, equally significantly, he would have been able to read and perhaps to borrow Field’s new edition of Ovid. He took two lines from that poet as his epigraph for
Venus and Adonis
. The little shop in Paul’s Churchyard, smelling of ink and paper, helped to give birth to one of the most fluent and eloquent of all English narrative poems.

No author was named on its title-page, but its dedication was signed “Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare”; the dedicatee himself was a young nobleman by the name of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. This dedication is the first example of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic prose to have survived.

The first sentence alone reveals his mastery of cadence and of emphasis.

He continues by calling this poem “the first heire of my inuention.” None of his plays had yet been published under his own name, and anonymous play-books would certainly not count as evidence of his “invention.” He seems, curiously enough, to distance himself from his career in the theatre. His epigraph from Ovid begins with the phrase
“Vilia miretur vulgus”
which, in Marlowe’s translation, reads “Let base-conceited wits admire vile things.”
“Vilia”
can also mean “common shows,” of which the public drama was a notable example in sixteenth-century London. Shakespeare says that he will be led by Apollo to the springs of the Muses, thus severing his connection with the
“vilia”
of the playhouses. Biographers have suggested that the lines represent a certain ambiguity, or uncertainty, about his role as a playwright and actor. Neither was, after all, the profession of a gentleman. But it is more likely that Shakespeare was indulging in special pleading. With the dedication to
Venus and Adonis
he was simply entering his new role as poet, and aspirant to noble patronage, by means of a flourish. He was making a good impression. And it should never be forgotten that, throughout his life, Shakespeare remained very much an actor assuming the necessary or congenial part.

Southampton was then twenty years old, having completed the formalities
of an education at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and at Gray’s Inn. He came from a noble Catholic family but, on the death of his father, he had become a ward of Lord Burghley the Lord Treasurer. At the age of sixteen he had been repeatedly pressed to marry Burghley’s granddaughter, but had refused.
Venus and Adonis
, the story of the unwelcome wooing of a pretty boy by an older woman, might even have been conceived for Southampton. It might be seen as a follow-up to a poem entitled
Narcissus
, in which one of Burghley’s secretaries had indirectly chided Southampton for his solitary state. The young lord might plausibly be identified with Adonis because by common consent he was as beautiful as he was learned, although the magnitude of both qualities was no doubt exaggerated by the panegyrists of the time. Noble youths were always deemed more attractive than their less wellborn counterparts. Like many young Elizabethans of noble descent Southampton’s generosity of spirit (and of his means) was matched by instability and passionate temper; the queen herself commented that he was “one whose counsel can be of little, and experience of less use.”
⁵

The traffic of favours went in both directions. The dedication of
Venus and Adonis
to Southampton, and its subsequent enormous popularity, helped to create an image of the young man as a patron of learning and of poetry. In the year following its publication, for example, Nashe alluded to him as “a dere lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.”
⁶
In the heated world of court favour and court intrigue, such a reputation did Southampton no harm at all.

The poem is part of a genre of erotic narrative poems largely taken out of Ovid. Shakespeare would have read about the ill-starred pair in the first part of Spenser’s
Fairie Queene
, published three years before, and of course Marlowe’s
Hero and Leander had
been circulating in manuscript for a similar period. Lodge had published
Glaucus and Scilla
, and Drayton was about to offer
Endimion and Phoebe
to the world. The works of Shakespeare should not be taken out of their context, since it is there they acquire their true meaning. He borrowed the stanzaic form from Lodge, and may have found his theme in Marlowe, but he wrote the poem in part to emphasise his learning. One of his principal sources, therefore, was Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
. As with the composition of
The Comedy of Errors
, he wished to demonstrate that he could deploy classical sources with as much brilliance as Marlowe or, even, as Spenser. The attack by Greene upon him, satirising him as a country bumpkin, may in part have provoked his invention. But he was still not averse to outright stealing from other places. The description of the horse of Adonis,
often cited as a testimony to Shakespeare’s knowledge of equine matters, is cribbed almost verbatim from a translation by Joshua Sylvester of
Divine Weekes and Workes
by Guillaume du Bartas.

Venus and Adonis
was immensely popular. Only one copy of the 1593 edition survives; the first print-run had been read literally to disintegration. There were no fewer than eleven editions over the next twenty-five years, and there may have been other reprints that have simply vanished. It was in his lifetime far more popular than any of his plays, and did more to secure his literary reputation than any drama. His instinct to compose such a narrative poem, especially at a time of theatrical dearth, was undoubtedly the right one.

It is in essence a dramatic narrative that, like Shakespeare’s plays, hovers between comic and serious matter. Half the lines are conceived as dialogue or dramatic oratory. The confrontation between the lascivious Venus and the frigid Adonis becomes the subject of quintessential English pantomime:

But the farce is succeeded by the solemn obsequies on the dead boy. Shakespeare cannot stay with one mood for very long. It repays reading aloud, and in Chaucerian fashion it may have been performed by Shakespeare as a private entertainment. It moves rapidly and energetically; Shakespeare is both adept and nimble, attentive and consoling. It was remarkable for what was known as its wantonness. Although it was not half as pornographic as some of the poems then being circulated in manuscript, it earned a rebuke from John Davies as “bawdy Geare.”
⁷
Thomas Middleton included it in a list of “wanton pamphlets” and a contemporary versifier suggested that

Venus and Adonis
is a poem concerning overpowering lust for a young male, considerably more passionate even than Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice
, and it seems obvious to the reader that Shakespeare took great delight and pleasure in writing it. Erotic literature is perhaps the one genre in which the author’s personal tastes and preoccupations are vital to its success and effectiveness. But at the same time it would be unwise to attribute such feelings
of personal passion to Shakespeare. He is eloquent, of course, but he is also detached. Passion is an element within his repertory of effects. The reader is given the curious impression that the author is there and yet not there. To feel so much, and yet be able to mock that feeling—that is the mark of a sublime intellect. It is perhaps also why the poem has often been considered as an extension of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. There has never been a more fluent, or more artful, English writer.