True model of a most lascivious leatcher.8
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.
Venus and Adonis became particularly popular among the students of the universities and of the Inns, who read it individually or perhaps even in groups. In 1601 Gabriel Harvey could still write that “the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis”. He was by no means the anonymous or unremarked writer he is often assumed as being. Venus and Adonis itself became almost a byword for poetry itself. In Peek’s Merry Conceited Jests the tapster of the inn at Pie Corner was “much given to poetry, for he had ingrossed the Knight of the Sunne, Venus and Adonis, and other pamphlets.” It was called “the best book in the world,”9 and a play of 1608, The Dumb Knight, has the following dialogue. “I pray you, sir, what book do you read?” “A book that never an orator’s clerk in this kingdom but is beholden unto; it is called, Maid’s Philosophy, or Venus and Adonis”. We may say, with some certainty, that Shakespeare now was one of the most famous poets in the country. He was not the faceless man in the crowd, or the unnoticed stranger in a corner of the inn.
CHAPTER 36
The Hath a Mint of Phrases
in His Braine
Shakespeare and Southampton could have met in, or through, the playhouse. Southampton became a regular attender of plays. Indeed it seems to have been his principal London recreation. There were other connections. In the year after the publication of Venus and Adonis Southampton’s mother, the Countess of Southampton, married Sir Thomas Heneage; Heneage was Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, and therefore responsible for arranging payment for the players at court. It is a tenuous connection, perhaps, but in the small and overcrowded world of the English court an interesting one.
The poet and the earl might also have met through the ministrations of Lord Strange; Southampton was an intimate friend of Lord Strange’s younger brother, who was himself an amateur playwright. What could be more natural than that the young earl should be introduced to the most promising author of the day? And one, too, whom he had seen act? Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton were also part of that group of Catholic sympathisers which Lord Burghley suspected, and indeed Southampton was considered by many to be “the great hope of Catholic resistance.”1 Shakespeare was well adapted to such a group. The young earl was also, by a complicated set of circumstances, related by marriage to the Ardens of Stratford. Shakespeare could therefore have claimed a further connection. It is also intriguing to note that Southampton’s erstwhile spiritual adviser, the poet and Jesuit Robert Southwell, was also related to the Arden family. It has plausibly been suggested that Shakespeare read, and copied from, some of Southwell’s poetry. A poem by Southwell, “Saint Peter’s Complaint,” was preceded by an epistle “To my worthy good cousin, Master W.S” from “Your loving cousin, R.S.” There are affinities and unwritten alliances that are now largely hidden from view.
There is also a possibility that they met through the agency of Southampton’s tutor in French and Italian, John Florio. Florio, born in London, was the child of Protestant refugees out of Italy. He was an excellent linguist, a capable scholar, and a somewhat censorious lover of the drama; he professed that he was living in a “stirring time, and pregnant prime of inuention when euerie bramble is fruitefull.”2 This “stirring time” was Shakespeare’s time. Florio also translated Montaigne into English, and in that work provided phrases and allusions for King Lear and The Tempest. Now all but forgotten, Florio was a contemporary of great significance to Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s comedies of this period are Italianate in setting, if not in sentiment, and their atmosphere can plausibly be attributed to the influence of Florio upon the dramatist eleven years his junior. There are occasions when Shakespeare seems to evince so specific a knowledge of Italy that it is believed by some that he must have travelled to that country in his youthful days. But, again, the presence of Florio may account for that knowledge. Florio helped other dramatists also. In the preliminaries to his Volpone, set in Venice, Ben Jonson wrote an autograph dedication to Florio “the ayde of his Muses.” Florio also possessed a great library, filled with Italian books. We need look no further for the Italian sources that have been identified in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare borrowed many phrases and images from Florio’s Italian dictionary, A World of Words-” it were labour lost to speak of love,” Florio writes — and he may have composed an introductory sonnet to Florio’s Second Frutes, published in 1591. Florio is one of those somewhat elusive figures who appear from time to time in Shakespeare’s biography, whose significance is out of all proportion to their visibility.
There are many connections, then, between Shakespeare and Southampton. That they did meet is certain. Shakespeare’s second dedication to Southampton, in The Rape of Lucrece, is sure evidence of greater intimacy. It has also been assumed that he addressed his sonnets to some noble youth, but the case is more uncertain. One recently discovered portrait does nothing to resolve the controversy over the matter. It was painted in the early 1590s and shows a young person dressed in a somewhat effeminate manner complete with rouge, lipstick, a double earring and a long tress of hair. For many years it was mistitled as a portrait of “Lady Norton,” but in more recent times it has been identified as a portrait of Southampton. If Southampton were in fact the recipient of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, as some have suggested, then his androgynous appearance might afford some reason for the poet’s attentions.
There is also the possibility that for a short time in 1593 Shakespeare became secretary to Southampton. There is a comic scene in Edward the Third, between the king and his private secretary, which suggests the ironic presence of some shared experience. He may have worked for the young nobleman at Southampton House, along Chancery Lane, but there are many scholars who have found buried allusions to the family estate at Titchfield in Hampshire in the texts of the plays of this period.3 It would have been more sensible and appropriate to have removed to the country at the time of plague in London. It may have been here that Shakespeare wrote his second long narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that was dedicated to Southampton.
It was not at all unusual for young writers to be pressed into the service of noblemen. Thomas Kyd had for a while become secretary to the Earl of Sussex; Lyly had been secretary to the Earl of Oxford, and Spenser had been in similar employment with the Bishop of Rochester. In fact at a later date Southampton enlisted the poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood into his household in precisely that role. Shakespeare’s own employment is an un-provable hypothesis, but it does no violence to the chronology or to Shakespeare’s known expertise in matters of composition and handwriting. He would have made an excellent secretary.