Shakespeare

Further suggestions of Shakespeare’s amorousness emerge in a curious doggerel poem, with a prose prologue, entitled Willobie His Avisa. It purports to be written by Henry Willobie, who was related by marriage to a friend of William Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Russell, although the connection may be fortuitous. The poem concerns an innkeeper’s wife, Avisa, who is pursued by several extra-marital suitors. One of them, “H.W,” is helped by a friend named “W.S” or, in a punning reference, “Will.” The relevant portion of the text suggests that “W.S” was possessed by a similar passion. H.W

bewrayeth the secresy of his disease vnto his familiar frend W.S who not long before had tryed the curtesy of the like passion, and was now newly recouered of the like infection; yet finding his frend let bloud in the same vaine, he took pleasure for a tyme to see him bleed … for that he would now secretly laugh at his frends folly, that had giuen occasion not long before vnto others to laugh at his owne.

The writer continues: “in vewing a far off the course of this louing Comedy, he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player.”¹²

It is one of those Elizabethan prose riddles that may admit to several meanings. One theory suggests that the innkeeper’s daughter is in fact an emblem for Elizabeth herself. But the essential situation, of “H.W.” and “W.S” in pursuit of the same young woman, is close enough to the plot of the “Dark Lady” sonnets to suggest parallels. “H.W.” may be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and “W.S” or “Will” or “the old player” may be Shakespeare. The suggestion of lustfulness, and of resulting venereal disease, is also part of the speculation. If there were a “true story” behind the sonnets, this passage would seem to confirm that “W.S” was not immune to the favours of young women. All must remain speculation, however, with the words of the poem’s preface that “there is some thing under these false names and showes that hath bene done truely”.

There were in this period the usual assaults upon Shakespeare’s propensity for plagiarism as well as amorousness. But the charge of plagiarism was formulaic, a ritualised insult in the world of the theatre. Imitation and borrowing were part of the craft of composition. It is the normal story of influence and gradual change. The great eighteenth-century phrenologist, Franz Joseph Gall, believed that the mental organ for robbery was the same as the organ for the formation of dramatic plots; this may be one explanation. It should also be remembered that as an actor Shakespeare was obliged to learn the lines of other dramatists, including those of Marlowe himself, and he may have reproduced them inadvertently. But he had no interest in inventing plots or incidents; for these he went to his multifarious sources, the narratives of which he borrowed wholesale. He would sometimes copy a source line by line, and even word for word, when he knew that he could not surpass it. His interest lay in reimagining events and characters.

But Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations. The phrase “go to thy cold bed and warm thee” occurs in both The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear, it is a small example, but it is indicative of how a particular set of words was retained in his memory over many years. In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him. He will use the same scenario — that, for example, of a father reading the purloined letter of a son — again and again. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona there are anticipations of scenes and events in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It. There are also many scenic and structural parallels between the plays; there are strong resemblances between As You Like It and King Lear, for example, as well as between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation.

CHAPTER 41 Doth Rauish Like Inchaunting Harmonie

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men began performing in June 1594, but before that date Shakespeare had completed his second long narrative poem. The Rape of Lucrece may have been written at Titchfield, while the writer was working under the auspices of the Earl of Southampton, and it is in any case dedicated to the young earl in effusive terms. “The loue I dedicate to your Lordship,” Shakespeare writes, “is without end.” He goes on to claim that “what I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours.” What he had “done” was to compose a poem on the rape of Lucrece, the wife of Collatine, by Sextus Tarquinius. The mythical event is dated 509 BC, and has been used as an explanation for the rise of the Roman Republic. Shakespeare obtained his theme from the Fasti of Ovid and from the Roman history of Livy. They were standard grammar-school texts with which he was well acquainted. There is no direct copying of Ovid’s Latin, however. He takes the plot but not the poetry. This suggests one method by which he worked. He took up a copy of the Fasti, read it quickly, and then put it down without further reference to it. He needed only the raw materials to excite his imagination.

The history is not, however, what interests the poet. Shakespeare is concerned with the play of feeling between the two protagonists, as Tarquin prepares himself to rape the lady and then, after the deed, slinks away. The poem is chiefly remarkable for Lucrece’s sorrowful meditations after the event, in the course of which she determines to kill herself in front of her husband. The energy and fluency of Shakespeare’s verse are again immediately apparent. The poem, like his drama, begins in medias res with a rushing speed and it maintains its dramatic momentum throughout. He even introduces the word “Actor” into the proceedings. Shakespeare renders everything instinct with palpitating life. The Rape of Lucrece is extravagant in diction, elaborate in cadence, filled with paradoxes and oppositions, epithets and exclamations, conceits and images; it has a vaunting rhythm and an arresting rhyme-scheme. It is, in other words, a high-spirited performance in which Shakespeare displays all of his excitement and eloquence. Once more the pleasure of the reader is equalled only by the pleasure of the writer.

The general movement of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse can be characterised as one from formal regularity to irregularity. Rhymes, for example, become much less common. In his later plays, too, he pitches the natural stress of English speech against the melodious form of the iambic pentameter; he introduces parentheses, exclamations and “run on” lines that continue the cadence past its usual conclusion. He will also complete a sentence in the middle of the line, with a caesura, thus imitating the more irregular and disjunctive passages of thought and expression within his characters. There has been traced a characteristic curve in Shakespeare’s composition, a rhythmic evolution that reflects the unceasing development of the music of his being. As Pasternak observed, “rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts”;¹ he composed, and imagined, in cadences; his head was filled with cadences, waiting to be born.