Shakespeare (50 page)

Emilia Lanier was certainly well known to Shakespeare. She was the young mistress of Lord Hunsdon who had been the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and was also related to Robert Johnson, a musician who collaborated with the dramatist on several occasions. She was a poet, too, who at a later date dedicated one of her volumes to the Countess of Pembroke. Born Emilia Bassano, she was the illegitimate daughter of Baptist Bassano, one of a Jewish family from Venice who had become the court musicians. He had died early and, in her youth, Emilia had become the ward of the Countess of Kent before attending court where she “had been favoured much of Her Majesty and many noblemen.” Among those noblemen was the old Lord Hunsdon, fifty years her senior; but, when she became pregnant, she was married off “for colour” to a “minstrel”
⁷
named Alphonse Lanier.

Members of the Bassano family accompanied the performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the royal palaces. They were dark-skinned Venetians, and some of Emilia’s relatives were described as “black men.” It may not be entirely coincidental, therefore, that Shakespeare wrote a play about a Jewish family in Venice and that one of the central characters is named as Bassanio. Here we may remark upon Shakespeare’s manner of invention. Baptist Bassano is split into two. He becomes Shylock, the Venetian Jewish merchant, and also the Venetian Bassanio. Shakespeare loved the process of self-division. There may of course be some association, too, with
Othello
, also set in
Venice. And there is the connection already noted with Rosaline of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
who is described as being “black as ebony.”

Emilia Lanier née Bassano appears most clearly in the historical record by way of the journals of Simon Forman, the Elizabethan magus whom she consulted over the fortunes of her husband. It is also clear that the good doctor seduced her, and that he was neither the first nor the last to do so. It cannot be known if she ever became Shakespeare’s lover and, even if she was, whether she is memorialised as the faithless lady of the sonnets. There is, however, one suggestive detail. Simon Forman notes that Emilia Lanier has a mole below her throat; in
Cymbeline
Shakespeare describes a mole under the breast of the beautiful (and chaste) Imogen.

I
nstead of speculating
about the personages addressed, it is more appropriate to speculate about the speaker. In the only sense that matters Shakespeare addresses the sonnets to himself; his muse here is midwife rather than mother. That is why he continually transforms his love of a person to love of an idea or essence. The poems themselves are maintained within a very direct form of address, a piercing eloquence that is controlled, convincing and fluent. They show great strength of mind, well ordered and well sorted. They display enormous self-confidence as well as inordinate cleverness. The speaker is heavily addicted to puns. There is the occasional tincture of false modesty, but the tone is generally enterprising and bold. The speaker takes a great deal of pride in his performance, and is insistent that his poetry will confer everlasting fame. The poems represent a narrator who is sexually alert and eager, but who is also capable of intense infatuation and no less extreme sexual jealousy. This is not necessarily William Shakespeare; it is William Shakespeare as poet.

It would be wrong to argue, of course, that the plethora of outside parallels means that there is no parallel at all. It is certainly possible that elements of Shakespeare’s emotional life entered the poems just as they entered the plays. We may note, for example, the strain of keen competitiveness within his nature. He seems to have been charged by the prospect of literary challenge and by the presence of literary rivalry. It is most plausible, then, that
he invented or concocted the idea of a rival poet as a spur to his invention; the idea of “a better spirit” gave him a sense of limitation which he could then transcend.

It is interesting that throughout his career he never once praised a fellow dramatist. He was highly ambitious, energetic and resourceful. Who else would have conceived of the great range of history plays at such a young age? In his earlier plays he thrived upon parody of the fashionable authors, such as Marlowe and Lyly, which can of course be interpreted as a form of aggression. He was very good at creating slyly or openly aggressive characters, such as Richard III and Iago. It is intriguing that much of the dialogue in his plays takes the form of competition or contest of wit. There is much scorn and impatience, anger and fretfulness, in the sonnets. Shakespeare was spurred on by his predecessors, by his “sources,” in the continuing pursuit of mastery. It should be added that Shakespeare did not become the most eminent dramatist in London by chance or accident; he actively wished for it.

This may have some connection with another persistent tone in the sonnets, where the narrator seems to be essentially a solitary. It is significant that the “beloved,” if one existed, is never mentioned by name—especially given the fact that Shakespeare assures him that he will be rendered immortal. Shakespeare wanted the world to honour and remember his love rather than any recipient of it. In the sonnets Shakespeare is musing essentially upon the true nature of the selfhood. His subject was his own self, and in that cunning and witty solipsism others were lovable in so far as they loved him.

We may recall Aubrey’s remark that, in Shoreditch, he declined to join the “debauchery” of his colleagues. For most of his professional life he lived in lodgings, away from his family. No letters survive. He may have written very few. There are few reminiscences of him and he was of course singularly reticent about himself. Was he shy, or reserved, or aloof? One or all of these terms may fit his being in the world. We have also found him by report to be amorous, witty, fastidious and fluent. There is no necessary discrepancy. It should be recalled that he played his own role in the world with supreme success; he invested with great joyfulness those characters who, like Falstaff, create and re-create themselves for any conceivable situation.

It is also the mark of his powerful presence, and authority, that he is utterly and uniquely “Shakespearian” in all of the themes and moods inherent within the sonnets. This may sound like the merest commonplace, but it is a phenomenon worthy of contemplation. There is no other writer quite with his consistent and continuing identity through comedy and tragedy, verse
and prose, romance and history. He plagiarises himself; he parodies himself. His plangent words in the sonnets on love and obsession echo those of Richard II immured in prison; whenever Shakespeare is inclined towards meditation, he reverts to the idiom of that player-king. There are so many echoes of
Twelfth Night
in the sonnets that the strident figure of the man/woman Viola might almost be considered to be the master/mistress of the sequence.

There is a phrase in the 121st sonnet, the words of which echo through his plays, “I am that I am.” It is of course a repetition of God’s words to Moses on Mount Horeb. But the phrase may also be compared to Iago’s remark that “I am not what I am.” Shakespeare is both everything and nothing. He is many and yet no one. It might almost be a definition of the creative principle itself, which is essentially a principle of organisation without values or ideals. Virginia Woolf described Shakespeare as “serenely absent-present”
¹
and that strange counterpoise seems to summarise the evanescent yet ubiquitous shape of his genius in his works. His presence is conspicuous by its absence. He had an excess of selflessness, a negative so deep that it became a positive. This may have been at first a matter of instinct, or of vital necessity, but at some point it became part of a deliberate pattern.

There is, therefore, the mystery of his invisibility, his self-effacement and self-depreciation. We may plausibly imagine that he accommodated himself to every situation and to every person whom he encountered. He had no “morality” in the conventional sense, since morals are determined by dislike and antipathy. There is nothing of personal vanity or personal eccentricity about him.

In his sonnets, too, there is the occasional element of self-abasement and even self-disgust. It is the key to part of the meaning of the sequence. Knowing himself guilty, he was drawn to those who would hurt him. And then, baffled by that injury (even if it were only indifference), he seeks solace in thought. For most of his life he was Shakespeare the player rather than Shakespeare the gentleman, and the taint of the public theatre never completely left him. In the 110th sonnet the narrator regrets that he has “made my selfe a motley to the view,” and in the following sonnet he laments “that my name receiues a brand” from the element in which he works. There are many critics who have therefore detected in Shakespeare a revulsion from the stage and a distaste for the business of writing, and acting in, plays. One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theatre. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative.

This is particularly true of his later plays. How much this was a commonplace of the age, and how much a reflection of Shakespeare’s true attitude, is difficult to discern. It may have been a piece of rhythmic grumbling, not to be taken very seriously. If we assume it to be genuine, it is one of the indications of his divided self. If he felt scorn, he felt at the same time what it was to be scorned.

The poems to his “black mistress” contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama. There is a hint of homosexual passion in
The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello
and elsewhere—a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also the veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the “Dark Lady.” Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo. The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick, energetic, ambiguous, amoral. From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms. He outrivals Chaucer and the eighteenth century novelists in his command of smut and bawdry. He is the most salacious of all the Elizabethan dramatists, in an area where there was already stiff competition. There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang.
²
There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina, among them “ruff,” “scut,” “crack,” “lock,” “salmon’s tail” and “clack dish.” There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery and fellatio. In
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Armado declares that he allows his royal master “with his royall finger thus” to “dallie with my excrement” (1700).

Shakespeare is never more lively, or more alert, or more witty, than in dealing with sexual matters. They are such a pervasive presence that they quite overshadow the ending of
The Merchant of Venice
, for example, where a number of obscene puns dominate the closing dialogue. The English crowd has always enjoyed sexual farce and obscenity, and he knew that such comedy would please the spectators of both “higher” and “lower” sort. But in his plays sexual puns and sexual allusions are more than just a dramatic device; they are part of the very fabric and texture of his language. His writing is quick with sexual meanings.

It could be argued that this is in part the sexual expressiveness of a celibate, or a faithful if absent husband, but common sense suggests otherwise. The printed reminiscences (or gossip) of his contemporaries strongly indicate that he had a reputation for philandering. He may have been “pricked
out,” as he puts it, for women’s pleasure in a world where sex itself was a dark and dangerous force. The writer of the sonnets seems to have been touched by the fear and horror of venereal disease, and some biographers have even suggested that Shakespeare himself died from a related venereal condition. Nothing in Shakespeare’s life or character would exclude the possibility.

The Elizabethan age was one of great and open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace. It has been recorded that, out of a population of forty thousand adults in the county of Essex, some fifteen thousand were brought before the church courts for sexual offences in the period between 1558 and 1603.
³
This is an astonishingly high number, and can only reflect upon the even more obvious opportunities and attractions of the city.

It was not always a clean or hygienic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed. It was in many respects a short and furtive act, a mere spilling of animal spirits. In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in
Measure for Measure
and in
King Lear
, in
Timon of Athens
and in
Troilus and Cressida
. This is of course a function of the plot, and cannot be taken as an expression of Shakespeare’s opinions on the matter (assuming that he had any at all), but it is a mirror of the reality all around him.