In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

  PROTECTION AND GRIEF

  It may be that in response to the passions unleashed here, the Herbert family temporarily broke off their relationship with Shakespeare. His references to shame and public censure suggest that his feelings for the boy had become embarrassingly public. But that this passionate friendship endured and developed into one that was close and affectionate is demonstrated by other poems in the collection spread over the next few years up to 1604. That it began with a great deal of projection is shown by Sonnet 53, a fascinating and revealing poem in which Shakespeare talks frankly about the multiple personas he has projected on to Herbert’s androgynous figure. He compares the ‘millions of strange shadows’, images from poetry and drama – male and female – that he sees in Herbert’s face and form. ‘Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit/Is poorly imitated after you,’ he writes, and then imagines the young man dressed in women’s clothes (like a boy in the theatre) as Helen of Troy, ‘and you in Grecian tires are painted new’ (that is, in female headdress). He admits he is turned on by the thought of the boy dressed as a girl; but at the same time, with characteristic self-awareness, he admits that this passion is also, to a degree, projection.

  However, many of the sonnets after the first seventeen are imbued with a surprisingly desperate sense of loss and death. Shakespeare speaks of the ‘torture’ of sleepless nights, a life where ‘My grief lies onward and my joy behind’. This is a poet desperate with love or loss, as if something has snapped inside him:

  What potions have I drunk of siren tears

  Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within

  He tells us he is ‘With time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn’, and this is underlined by several allusions to his age. Strangely, though, looking at the face of the lovely boy, the poet refers to fatherhood as a source of anguished regret. Shakespeare, of course, was old enough to be the boy’s father, but this does not explain his pointed description of himself as a ‘decrepit father made lame by fortune’s dearest spite’. He seems to be telling us that he has suffered a blow of the most intimate and hurtful kind that fortune could deal out to a father. And the blow is not to do with the boy:

  Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

  That time will come and take my love away

  This thought is as a death.

  Conscious that he has reached a mid-point in his life, Shakespeare speaks of his love with an intense passion loaded with a heavy, and terrible, sense of loss.

  For if you were by my unkindness shaken

  As I by yours, y’have passed a hell of time

  Shakespeare’s ‘true sorrow’ is usually explained as a response to his separation from the boy, but this cannot be the whole story. Whilst the early sonnets can be read as homosexual poems, in this light his affection and admiration for the boy take on a more complex and problematic colour. For his love is absolute, intense, overwhelming, in the way a father feels for a child. And the first sonnets, urging the boy to have a son, were, so it now appears, written only eight months after the death of his own son.

  ‘HE WAS BUT ONE HOUR MINE’

  From the start the sonnets are death-obsessed, articulating an almost frantic defence of the need to procreate and have sons in one’s own image. Several later sonnets to the boy are explicitly about weeping, sleeplessness and grief. It is really not doing Shakespeare justice if we do not take his words at face value. By the time of the multi-layered punning of the enigmatic Sonnet 33, these meanings and subtexts are piled on top of each other with riveting assurance and agonized feeling:

  Full many a glorious morning have I seen

  Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

  Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

  Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

  Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

  With ugly rack on his celestial face,

  And from the forlorn world his visage hide,

  Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:

  Even so my sun one early morn did shine

  With all triumphant splendour on my brow;

  But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,

  The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.

  Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

  Suns of the world may stain, when heaven’s sun staineth.

  The sonnet is based on a proverb, ‘The morning sun never lasts the whole day’, with hints at a turn of phrase still used in modern English – to be ‘under a cloud’. The poem is not merely about physical separation but also about loss, both personal and metaphysical. ‘Disgrace’ in Elizabethan English meant disfigurement, loss of beauty or grace, as well as having the modern sense of disgrace. ‘Staineth’ suggests loss of colour and lustre, and even the idea of sustaining a moral blot, an eclipse; the Stainers’ company dyed, or stained cloth; the verb ‘to stain’ also had transitive meanings – to take one colour away with another, but also to outshine or deprive lesser luminaries of their light. But here the image system takes on a religious connotation. ‘Suns of the world’ are also ‘sons’, mortals, humans; so ‘heaven’s sun’ is the sun in the sky, but with the inevitable suggestion of heaven’s son, Jesus; all of which floods the poem with vague but anguished suggestions of the incarnation and the crucifixion.

  It is hard to imagine that poetry of this intensity is only about separation from the beautiful young nobleman, however much loved. Shakespeare here seems to be running together the loss of the young man, the loss of his own sun/son and the loss of God’s son. It would not have escaped an Elizabethan reader that the number of the sonnet, 33, was Jesus’s age at the time of the crucifixion. (Coincidentally or not, it was also Shakespeare’s age in 1597.)

  The sonnets have been the subject of many bizarre theories but it is surely inconceivable, if this sonnet was written in 1597, that it is not also about his son. This interpretation is suggested too by the image of the poet’s sun/son shining ‘in triumphant splendour’ on his brow, for the brow was the place that, to an Elizabethan, showed the transparency of fatherhood. It was the seat of a father’s pride in his issue and its legitimacy. If the dating is right, a modern psychologist would certainly be interested in Shakespeare’s passionate, almost desperate, love for a seventeen-year-old in the year after his son’s death. In today’s terms, it was very adaptive, a kind of transference. It was a way of coping with crushing grief.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE?

  ON 28 JULY 1597, in the middle of all the traumas in the poet’s private life, London theatres were closed by the authorities and remained dark until October. Pressure on the players had been exacerbated by a scandal over a seditious play, The Isle of Dogs, whose authors, including Ben Jonson, found themselves in jail, face to face with the psychopathic Topcliffe and the sinister Poley. Perhaps this is the time alluded to in Sonnet 66 when Shakespeare speaks of his art being ‘tongue-tied by authority’. In August his company began a long tour from Kent to Bristol, perhaps the context of the miserable journeys Shakespeare describes in the sonnets, lamenting his separation from the boy. At any rate, one might guess that it was at this time that he wrote a number of private poems, seeking temporary consolation for his various griefs.

  People do strange things at such times: some live for the moment; for others, certainties are shaken; marriages can break up, and even religious people can feel that life is meaningless. The sonnets are in part self-analysis in response to just this kind of emotional upheaval. And now, married for nearly fifteen years and living apart from his forty-year-old wife, Shakespeare writes about a love affair with a married woman, which has left him wounded and exposed; all the more galling for a man who, as he has admitted, was so reticent about his inner life. And where his feelings for the boy were of passionate love, although apparently not physically consummated, the affair with the woman was a sexual passion. It is time to look at the third
character in the triangle of the sonnets: the enigmatic Dark Lady.

  SEX AND THE CITY

  It might be thought inevitable that a man who had lived apart from his wife for ten years would have affairs. The theatre is a sexy business with many pleasures and many temptations. Certainly the thought of those beautiful boy actors with their painted eyes, rustling in silk skirts, got Puritan preachers hot under the collar. The Elizabethans were very up-front about sex. For instance, when the astrologer and physician Simon Forman attended the State Opening of Parliament in 1597, and struck up a conversation with a gentlewoman serving at court, Joan Harrington, she went home and slept with him the same day. Women were part of the theatre audience: they too liked seeing boys as girls, and if they took a fancy to a leading actor, so be it. A law student’s diary from 1602 repeats a story, possibly apocryphal, that Shakespeare bamboozled Burbage out of a well-to-do groupie who wanted to bed the star lead. John Aubrey, on the other hand, says Shakespeare would not be ‘debauched’ (that is, go to brothels); and that, when asked to do so, ‘writ he was in pain’ (that is, said he was ill). And perhaps a practised womanizer is unlikely to have displayed the anguished reaction to infidelity expressed in the sonnets. From which it might appear that Shakespeare was in love.

  THE DARK LADY

  Many of the first 126 sonnets appear to be to the young man. But some of those poems reveal that the young man is sleeping with the poet’s mistress. Then, starting with Sonnet 127, there is a sequence of poems to the woman herself. Their language is at times tender, at times misogynist and abusive. He complains that she has a ‘steel-bosom’, is disdainful, tyrannous and unkind; although, he admits:

  And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

  As any she belied with false compare

  The details he gives about her are few. Unconventionally beautiful, she has black hair and eyes and is very dark-complexioned. She is married. She has had other lovers, including lords. She is well known (‘the world knows’) and there are some hints that she is of higher social standing than Shakespeare. Sonnet 150 mysteriously suggests that there was something about her condition or status that had engaged his sympathy, that her ‘unworthiness aroused pity in me’. As for how the affair started, in Sonnet 134 he seems to say that he asked the young man ‘surety like to write for me’ – that is, to approach her as a proxy wooer, and that the woman had then pursued the young man, his friend, who ‘came debtor for my sake’. For this Shakespeare blames himself: ‘So him I lose through my unkind abuse’. In other words, he feels he has injured his friend by wrongfully using him as a go-between.

  Shakespeare and the woman then begin a passionate sexual relationship. Her husband is evidently away, for on occasion the poet visits her at home, where he sees her playing the virginals. But he soon discovers that she is also sleeping with the young man. The poet says he loves her ‘dearly’, but bitterly regrets her power over him, which he sees as manipulative and controlling. He becomes a slave to her dominating personality, her beauty and her sexual power.

  The so-called Dark Lady has proved a tempting pitfall to biographers, and some would think it unwise to read the sonnets so literally. But again, if we take them as a mainly private record of real events and emotions, however much reshaped as poetry for publication, then Shakespeare’s mistress must have been a real woman who moved in the societies of the theatre and the court, yet was in some way an outsider because of her colour and background. But who was she?

  ‘BLACK IS FAIR’

  First, what does he mean by calling her black, a very complicated word in Elizabethan literature, where it can even be used as a euphemism for Catholic? Shakespeare explicitly says he is overturning literary convention (‘I have seen roses damasked, red and white/But no such roses see I in her cheeks’). His mistress, he says, does not conform to the sonneteers’ stereotype of a beautiful woman. In her face and her body (‘her breasts are dun’) she is ‘coloured ill’. This emphasis is so pronounced throughout the poems that it is difficult simply to dismiss it, as some have done, as a literary conceit. It suggests that, whatever her background, the woman was what an Elizabethan would have called a Moor. And if she was a dark-skinned musician, known in theatrical and noble circles, then the strong likelihood is that she was of Levantine or Italian origin, and most likely Venetian – the Bassanos and the Ferraboscos, the main musical families in Elizabethan London, were both from Venice.

  The date of Shakespeare’s affair, as we have seen, is suggested by the appearance of two sonnets to the woman in the collection pirated in 1599; perhaps they were among the poems circulated among his ‘private’ friends the previous year. This again is supported by modern computer analysis of their vocabulary. Sonnets 127–54, the poems to the woman, include the very early marriage sonnet, 145; but their main period of composition is broadly in the late 1590s, with some revision through to 1603–4. Of course it is always possible that some were written earlier and have been reworked, but as it stands, the sequence comes from the late nineties. If the identification of the boy as William Herbert is correct, the affair most likely took place in the summer of 1597, when Shakespeare was thirty-three. This fits very well with verbal parallels with his plays of that time, and even perhaps with his allusion to his art being ‘tongue-tied by authority’, which suggests the period when the theatres were closed between July and October. This impression is reinforced by Shakespeare’s references to his own age, which are underscored even more than in the sonnets to the boy. As he says to the woman, ‘you know I am past my best’ (a feeling perhaps accentuated, if the Folio portrait is at all accurate, by his premature balding: Elizabethan men were vain about their hair). So these are the poems not of the man in his late twenties who knew Southampton, but of a man around Dante’s age when he wrote the Inferno: nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita – in the middle of our life’s road.

  SEX, GUILT AND MALE ANXIETY

  The affair with the Dark Lady troubled Shakespeare deeply and he says he lost his reason: in the poems to her, the linking of sex and guilt is particularly pronounced. This seems to be as characteristic of his personality as his obsession with aggression and violence. To judge by the way he depicts men’s and women’s relationships in his plays, Shakespeare believed in the ideal of fidelity and a spiritual dimension to human love. Such ideas were widely canvassed and debated at the time, as in John Case’s remarkable book on equality in Christian marriage. Shakespeare was a Bible-reading Christian, married at eighteen and possibly so far faithful – otherwise why should the affair have traumatized him so? His consuming sexual passion for a married woman fills him with guilt. He has broken his ‘bed vows’ to his wife Anne, as the other woman has to her husband. The sense of ageing with which the poems are shot through helps us understand their melancholy edge and self-flagellation. Shakespeare’s sexual jealousy has a subtext of his own physical decline and anxiety about his sexual performance.

  A sensitive, imaginative and supremely intelligent man, Shakespeare lived in a patriarchal society that shaped him and his attitudes. Drawn to both men and women, he seems to have believed in the possibility of true friendship and companionship between men and women, an equality articulated many times in his plays, as in Emilia’s famous speech in Othello. In the greater intimacy of the sonnets, though, there are strong hints that he believes passionate friendship between men to be on a higher plane than their relationships with women. Shakespeare is drawn by the power of female sexuality, but at the same time threatened by it. And the disgust evident in his language has been seen by some critics – not all of them women – as misogynistic. This is perhaps where the scandal of the sonnets lay to an Elizabethan audience – not (as for early modern readers) in his love for the young man, but in the image of a powerful woman in sexual control.

  From our perspective, the sonnets about the Dark Lady seem a classic male response to overwhelming grief: he throws himself into an all-consuming affair with a dangerous married woman, and in the poems this awakes
all the old emotions and beliefs he was brought up with. Themes such as the corrupting power of lust on the soul, guilt and infidelity run through the later sonnets, which are all the more explicable if Shakespeare’s upbringing was Catholic:

  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action; and till action, lust

  Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

  Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

  Enjoy’d no sooner, but despised straight;

  Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

  Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,

  On purpose laid to make the taker mad:

  Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,

  Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

  A bliss in proof, – and prov’d, a very woe;

  Before, a joy propos’d; behind, a dream:

  All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

  To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

  These were the sentiments of much Elizabethan poetry, religious or otherwise. Thomas Watson, for instance, wrote of love as a ‘bayt for soules’; for Robert Southwell ‘Beauty is a bayt that, swallowed, choakes … A light that eyes to murdring sightes provokes.’

  It has been all too easy to see these sonnets as secular poems: in fact a strong religious sense pervades them, especially in those about lust and the soul, such as the almost medieval 146: ‘Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth’. But perhaps they also contain an element of parody: employing religious imagery for an obsessive sexual relationship might have caused offence to some contemporary religious readers, but it is typical of Shakespeare’s habit of situating himself between opposed thought worlds. In the end it is this that makes him such a modern mind, despite his roots in late medieval Christianity.