In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  UNCLE HARRY’S DEATH

  Shortly after Christmas 1596 the Greenaways brought bad news from home: a shadow story worthy of social dramas of the day, like Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy. That Christmas, four months or so after the death of Shakespeare’s son, and while he was playing King Henry in his own Henry IV Part 1 at the Swan, a strange drama took place back in Snitterfield with the death of his father’s brother Henry – the poet’s uncle Harry. Henry lived in a house just north of the church, where part of a timber-framed late Tudor farm building still survives, infilled with red brick. It was a farm Shakespeare must have known from childhood. Henry was a cantankerous, obstinate character who was always in trouble. Fined for not taking his oxen to help maintain the common roads and ditches, fined for his refusal to wear a woollen hat in church, and for non-payment of church tithes, he had even found himself excommunicated by the church court back in 1581. Henry was frequently in money trouble. Rescued from a large debt of £20 by his brother John in 1587, he was jailed in 1591, and again in 1596, for failing to pay his debts to two Stratford merchants.

  Uncle Harry died around Christmas Day 1596, and within a couple of hours his house was besieged by creditors. One of them, a local farmer, allegedly entered the house, ‘broke open his coffers and took away divers sums of money’. Ignoring Henry’s distraught widow, Margaret, the farmer led a mare from the stable and helped himself to the corn and hay in the barn. The house was stripped even of movables. Poor Margaret was left on her own in an empty farm with her husband’s corpse; her son James and daughter Lettice (William’s first cousins) had both died before reaching their teens. Margaret passed away six weeks later. They were curious people, the Shakespeare men. William’s three brothers would all die childless. Another family skeleton?

  THE RIDDLE OF THE SONNETS

  On 17 March 1597 there was some good news: the anti-theatre Lord Cobham died, and Lord Hunsdon’s son took over as chamberlain; Shakespeare’s company were reinstated as the Chamberlain’s Men. With less than a month’s notice, they got the call to do a show for the Garter Celebrations at Westminster on 23 April in front of the queen and the Knights of the Garter. Hastily Shakespeare began to put together an entertainment that would later become The Merry Wives of Windsor. But before that day came, his life was again to be shaken to the core. And if his own private verses of this time are to be believed, all his views about himself were challenged in what Shakespeare says was for him ‘a hell of time’.

  It was perhaps around this time – spring 1597 – that Shakespeare was commissioned to write a series of seventeen poems to a young aristocrat. These sonnets, and those that followed, have become the most famous love poems in the English language. They contain acute meditations on love, death, sexual passion, procreation and the transfiguring power of time. But the most extraordinary thing about them is often overlooked. Most of them are to a young man.

  At the heart of the sonnets is a love triangle involving the poet, the lovely boy and the poet’s dark-skinned mistress. They describe his passionate love for the young nobleman, which was possibly non-sexual, even though Shakespeare was consumed with the boy’s physical beauty; his powerful sexual passion for a married woman; and the increasingly frantic denouement as it becomes clear that the young man and the woman are also sleeping with each other. If the sonnets are about real life, they not only reflect on these relationships but possibly also offer a clue to Shakespeare’s own emotional state after his son’s death. But are they about real life? Were the boy and the Dark Lady living people, or literary inventions?

  It is often said that we can’t find out from his works what Shakespeare believed; and to a degree that assertion is true of his plays, which were crafted for their audience. But his poems are different because in most of them he was free to say what he wanted, and the indications are that he did so. A few scholars have dismissed the search for real people in the sonnets as fantasy. But there are strong reasons to think that Shakespeare used his poems as ways of getting things off his chest. In the case of the sonnets, the rawness and self-exposure evident in them, the explicitness about sex, is unbelievable as a mere literary game. Most readers would surely agree that they relate to real-life experience: if they are not autobiographical, it is hard to imagine what is. Shakespeare fell in love with these two people and was shaken by the affair.

  But how can we be sure of their date? The sonnets were not published until 1609. Some of the poems about the boy and the woman, however, must have been written before 1598, because that year Francis Meres intriguingly mentions in his account of contemporary writers that Shakespeare’s ‘sugar’d sonnets’ were circulating among his ‘private’ friends. By the following June the Lancashire poet John Weever had also read some of them in manuscript. Inevitably, some were soon pirated. In 1599 a small volume of poetry called The Passionate Pilgrim ‘By W. Shakespeare’ was published by William Jaggard. The title was an unscrupulous publisher’s con: in fact very little in this mediocre book was by Shakespeare, but it did include three extracts from Love’s Labour’s Lost – and two sonnets from the sequence about the boy and the poet’s mistress.

  Not surprisingly, Shakespeare was angry that the publisher, ‘altogether unknown to him presumed to make so bold with his name’. The offence was perhaps twofold: that ‘private’, intimate verses had been printed which were not intended for publication; and that inferior stuff had been put out under his name. But the affair alerts us to the sensitive nature of the sonnets’ content.

  Initially Shakespeare seems to have thought about responding to the piracy: in 1599 he may have lodged ‘a book of Sonnets’ in the Stationers’ Register, possibly as a holding operation, but then decided not to publish them after all. This furore clearly makes more sense if it took place close to the time of composition: the sonnets were new and faintly scandalous. And this in turn might suggest that a sizeable number of those poems dealing with the boy and the woman had been written by 1598–9 at the latest. As we shall see, the likeliest date is the spring and summer of 1597.

  Verbal and thematic parallels with the plays also point to a date in the late 1590s. So too does the latest computerized linguistic analysis, which suggests that the sonnets are not, as has often been argued, the product of the early 1590s but were written by the mature Shakespeare – a man in his mid-thirties, ruefully jealous of his mistress having sex with her teenage lover, and seeing, as he looked in the mirror, a face soon to be ‘lined with forty winters’. In more than one sonnet we see him as he saw himself: a man who, in Elizabethan terms, was no longer young, but ‘past my best’. So, although the poems are about the boy and the woman, they are also about him: his contemplations, as Yeats put it, are ‘of time which has transfigured me’.

  WHO WAS THE BOY?

  The sonnets reveal that the boy was from a higher class than the poet (self-abnegation and a sense of social inferiority run through the poems). They indicate that he was young, beautiful and much loved, and that his name was probably William. A further clue to his name is offered by the enigmatic dedication of the 1609 published edition to ‘Mr W. H.’, who, says Shakespeare’s publisher, Thomas Thorpe, was ‘the onlie begetter’ of the poems. ‘Begetter’ means ‘parent’ but also ‘sole inspirer’ or ‘origin’, and that is most likely what it means here. As so many of the sonnets to the young nobleman promise that he will live on in the poet’s verses, common sense suggests that it was their inspirer and main subject who was the dedicatee.

  Of the many candidates for the beautiful boy, only two have been taken seriously by modern scholars. The Earl of Southampton, the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, still has many supporters, but his name is not William; his initials are H.W., not W.H.; and there is no evidence for a relationship with Shakespeare later in his life. The new computerized linguistic tests for frequency of early and late words in Shakespeare’s literary output place the first main group of sonnets to the boy (1–60) in the late 1590s, and Sonnets 61–103 p
robably belong around the same time. Sonnets 104–26 date from the late 1590s to 1604, as might be guessed from their apparent references to contemporary events. This dating is supported by internal hints that in his terms the poet was approaching middle age. All this suggests that the first poems in the cycle were new when they came to the attention of literary London in 1598, when they were privately circulated and pirated. If all this is accepted, one candidate for the beautiful boy stands out: William Herbert, born in 1580, who became Earl of Pembroke in 1601, and had first come to court in 1597, around the time of his seventeenth birthday on 8 April.

  Herbert would later be a remarkable patron of drama and learning, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The antiquarian John Aubrey called him ‘the greatest Maecenas to learned Men of any Peer of his time or since’. Herbert was also renowned as a womanizer, but though ‘immoderately given up to women’, as the seventeenth-century historian the Earl of Clarendon wrote, ‘he was not so much transported with beauty and outward allurements as with those advantages of the mind as are manifested in extraordinary wit and knowledge, and administered great pleasure in the conversation’.

  That the seventeen-year-old William Herbert was the boy with whom Shakespeare fell in love is likely for many reasons. First, and most important, is his known closeness to the poet: Shakespeare and Richard Burbage had probably acted for Herberts fathers company back in the early nineties. It was to Herbert and his brother that Shakespeare’s friends dedicated the Folio of his plays after the poet’s death, speaking of the Herberts’ ‘many favours’ to the plays and their author. Additional support comes from the dedication of the 1609 edition of the sonnets to ‘Mr W. H.’. The publisher, Thorpe, made a special effort to cultivate William Herbert at this period, printing translations of St Augustine’s City of God and Epictetus and Hall’s Discovery of the New World, all with admiring dedications to Herbert. This in turn helps explain two mysterious details of the sonnets’ dedication. The first is Thorpe’s line describing himself as the ‘well wishing adventurer in setting forth’, making an analogy between printing and voyaging. If the dedicatee is Herbert, this would be a pointed flattery since only the previous month he had joined the council of the Virginia Company. Then there is the question of Thorpe’s strange wording: why did he call him ‘Mr’ when Herbert in 1609 was an earl? Perhaps the title was meant to have a teasing evasiveness: if so, it looks as if this was picked up by Shakespeare’s old friend Ben Jonson four years later in another dedication to Herbert: ‘I cannot change your title, and have no need of a cipher.’ Jonson would be in the know as far as the sonnets were concerned: and he seems to be suggesting that someone else had published a dedication that had changed Pembroke’s title in order to hide something.

  Final supporting evidence comes from Herbert family interest in these poems. William himself wrote poetry, including some that refers to a dark mistress; other poems were semi-pornographic. Crucially, Pembroke’s verse shows he had read Shakespeare’s sonnets, of which there are many echoes, and in one he quotes ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’. His cousin George Herbert, then a Cambridge undergraduate and an ardent Protestant, wrote to his mother in the winter of 1609, just after the sonnets came out, to say that he was aghast and recoiled from their obscenity. Also revealing are the sonnets of William’s cousin Mary Wroth, who in 1612 had a passionate love affair with him that produced two children. Wroth avidly read Herbert’s papers and composed a sonnet sequence to him in which the influence of Shakespeare’s sonnets is pervasive. In one of these she refers to another poet, calling him an April morning. Given the peculiar importance of April in Shakespeare’s sonnets to the boy, this, from William Herbert’s own cousin and lover, is striking:

  Dear eyes, how well, indeed, you do adorn

  That blessed sphere which gazing souls hold dear,

  The loved place of sought for triumphs, near

  The court of glory, where love’s force was born.

  How may they term you April’s sweetest morn,

  When pleasing looks from those bright lights appear,

  A sun-shine day;

  If, therefore, we accept William Herbert as ‘Mr W. H.’, the young man of the sonnets, it puts Shakespeare back in contact with the greatest literary family in England for whom he had worked in 1592. It might also supply a possible date for the first poems – April 1597. And, most importantly, this would put the start of Shakespeare’s relationship with Herbert in a moment of intense crisis in his own life only months after the death of his own son.

  ‘THY MOTHER’S GLASS’: MARY HERBERT AND THE WILTON ‘ACADEMY’

  Wilton House, the country home of the Herberts in Wiltshire, lay on one of the main routes to the southwest. It was rebuilt after a fire in the mid-seventeenth century, and only the centre part of the original Tudor structure remains; but the idyllic wooded setting along the river Wylye is the same. Such a heavenly ambience was matched by the charm and cultivation of the family. William’s uncle, the poet Philip Sidney, had died heroically in the Dutch wars; Mary, his mother, was one of the most important figures in the patronage of sixteenth-century literature. A poet and translator, Mary had edited and completed her brother’s Arcadia; she had produced an English version of the Psalms, and composed a verse drama on the story of Antony and Cleopatra which Shakespeare would later consult in manuscript. The dedicatee of some thirty books, she was a generous patron of poets and actors, too. The Somerset poet Samuel Daniel had been attached to her circle as poet and tutor for several years. As John Aubrey wrote, ‘Wilton will appear to have been an Academy, as well as Palace, and was (as it were) the Apiarie, to which Men, that were excellent in Arms and Arts, did resort and were carress’t.’ And not just men. Women played a major role in the aristocratic patronage of letters in Tudor England, and it is no coincidence that three of the most interesting female poets of the time – Mary herself, Mary Wroth and Emilia Lanier – have connections with Wilton.

  It had been at Wilton back in 1580–1 that Mary’s brother, Philip Sidney, had written the most famous manifesto for English poetry, An Apologie for Poetry, a plea that imaginative literature should be restored to the high esteem it was held in among the ancients, and that a modern English literature should be created comparable to the best work on the Continent. After Philip’s death, Mary took it upon herself to be his literary executor, and to take on his function as a literary patron. With Daniel already in her entourage, it was perhaps inevitable that a poet of Shakespeare’s repute would attract her attention. In 1597 he was the leading lyric and dramatic poet of the day, author of the great theatrical successes of the moment: Romeo and Juliet and Henry IV Part 1. Perhaps Mary commissioned him to write the first poems in the sequence. At any rate, she seems to be referred to in the third sonnet:

  Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

  Calls back the lovely April of her prime

  From this it might be conjectured that Shakespeare was invited to Wilton by Mary Herbert to write poems urging her son to marry after, earlier in that year, he had rejected the proposed marriage to a woman named Bridget de Vere.

  ‘THE MASTER-MISTRESS OF MY PASSION’

  Clarity over the dedicatee enables us to adduce some fascinating biographical details that offer a real insight into Shakespeare’s inner life. All this hinges on the date of composition. It has long been noted that the first seventeen poems seem to form a group. If so, perhaps they were composed for Herbert’s seventeenth birthday on 8 April 1597, a date whose significance as the first meeting is underlined in later sonnets.

  From the beginning the poet addresses the boy with affection as his ‘love’. The poems urge marriage on the young man, chiding him for self-love and self-absorption, warning him that beauty passes and time destroys. Whilst there is no need to think that all the sonnets were actually sent to the boy, the first seventeen surely were. At the beginning of the relationship, there is a formal distance:

  When I consider every thing tha
t grows

  Holds in perfection but a little moment,

  That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

  Wheron the stars in secret influence comment;

  When I perceive that men as plants increase,

  Cheered and check’d even by the self-same sky;

  Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

  And wear their brave state out of memory;

  Then the conceit of this inconstant stay

  Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,

  Where wasteful time debateth with decay,

  To change your day of youth to sullied night;

  And all in war with Time, for love of you,

  As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

  But after those first seventeen, the poems swiftly take on a passionate tone, as if to a lover:

  Shall I compare thee to a summers day?

  Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

  Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

  And summers lease hath all too short a date:

  He refers to the androgynous beauty of the boy: his fair face, long hair and girlish looks (it should be added that Shakespeare was not the only poet to write of Herbert this way).

  A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted,

  Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

  Although Shakespeare wryly admits that, since nature made the boy male (‘to prick him out’ means both to mark down and to endow with a prick), ‘thy love’s use’ (in the physical consummation of love) will be for the women in his life:

  But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,