In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  In several sonnets to the woman he puns on his own name and Herbert’s. For example, in 135 he plays on a proverb (‘Every woman will have her will’). Here Shakespeare’s manuscript perhaps instructed the printer to emphasize his compulsively-obsessively clever punning on the word ‘will’ (meaning what is wanted; mental resolve; shall; his own name; the boy’s name; and the male and female sex organs, as in ‘willy’ today). The spelling here is modernized, but the italics and capitalization may well be his:

  Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,

  And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.

  More than enough am I that vex thee still,

  To thy sweet will making addition thus.

  Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious.

  Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?

  Shall will in others seem right gracious,

  And in my will no fair acceptance shine?

  The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,

  And in abundance addeth to his store;

  So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will

  One will of mine to make thy large Will more.

  Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;

  Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

  There is nothing else quite like this in the poetry of Shakespeare’s day: private, anguished, guilt-racked, obscene. Alongside his class anxiety are both spiritual anxiety and male anxiety about erections and ‘willies’. His self-view – as a man in a male-dominated society – and even his sexual potency are dependent on, and yet threatened by, her female power; and he hates himself for it.

  SHADOW TEXTS: WHYTHORNE’S LOVE AFFAIRS AND MALE ANXIETY

  These kinds of male anxieties are evident also in other writing of the time: particularly revealing in the context of the sonnets is the autobiography of the musician Thomas Whythorne. A private text not intended for publication, it contains many parallels, especially when describing the courtly world of musicians and artists in which men of Shakespeare’s background mixed with women of a higher class. Whythorne suggests we can see the sonnets, for all their literary artifice, as poems that began as private responses to a painful, confusing real-life situation.

  The shy Whythorne was, like Shakespeare, a gentleman but not of high rank. This handsome, sensitive and talented musician, desperate in his affection at various times for a city widow, a courtly gentlewoman and a serving gentlewoman, reveals the heated atmosphere and erotic charge of the Elizabethan court and its artistic fringes. In Whythorne’s world, men and women write sonnets to each other as gambits in love, just as Shakespeare’s characters do. They read sonnets, send sonnets to each other and write them privately to get things off their chest.

  Whythorne tells the tale of a married woman at court, of higher status, who falls in love with him. In a scene straight out of a Shakespeare play, she ‘caused a chest of mine to be removed out of the chamber where I was accustomed to lie … and to be brought into a chamber so nigh her own chamber as she might have come from one to the other when she list without any suspicion. This chamber I was then placed in Then one day she took occasion to come alone into my chamber to see the marks of my sheets ….’ (obviously, to see if he had a lover). But, says Whythorne, ‘I was thoroughly determined that whatsoever came of it I would by God’s grace never defile her wedlocked bed.’ One remembers Shakespeare’s remarks on breaking his own bed vows. Here and elsewhere Whythorne is writing of a real situation that asks us to see literature not just as artistic creation but as a response to real life.

  His most graphic and interesting portrait is of the woman he loved most: a courtly woman who boasted of her power over men, how ‘by a frown she could make them go pale, and by a smile feel joy again’. This is Whythorne speaking of his own ‘Dark Woman’:

  Having been sometime a courtier, and well experienced in the affairs of the world, with a great wit and a jolly, ready tongue to utter her fancy and mind, she took pleasure many times to talk and discourse of the things she had knowledge of by experience: as sometimes of religions, she would argue in matters of controversy in religion; sometimes of profane matters Sometimes she would touch upon the city, with the grades of the citizens, and not leave untouched the fineness of the delicate dames and the nice wives of the city. Sometimes she would talk of the Court, with the bravery and vanities thereof, and of the crouching and dissimulation, with the bazzios de los manos [hand kissing] that are there used by one courtier to another; and sometimes she would talk of the courting of ladies and gentlewomen by the gallants and cavaliers; and sometimes would talk pleasantly of the love that is made and used in all these places between men and women …

  This world of ‘bravery and vanities’, one imagines, was precisely the world of Shakespeare’s proud mistress.

  SHADOW LIVES: EMILIA LANIER AND THE WOMAN’S CASE

  So who was she? The subject of poems, a well-known musical gentlewoman, the mistress of nobles, she moved on the fringes of high society with her two Wills, the one a nobleman, the other a writer and actor. Distinguished by her dark skin, according to the poet she was, in some unexplained way, perceived by the world to be ‘unworthy’. Despite many guesses, the identity of Shakespeare’s lover remains a mystery. But if the sonnets are autobiographical and she was a real person, we probably do not have far to look to find her in the very small world of theatrical and musical society in late 1590s’ London.

  Just such a woman moved in Shakespeare’s circle at precisely that time. She first appears in the consultation books of Simon Forman in May 1597. A well-known ‘astrological’ physician, later mocked by Jonson in his play The Alchemist, Forman was highly sought after. Part doctor, part analyst and part soothsayer, his clientele was mainly lower-class but he also saw musicians, theatre people and aristocrats, and among his clients that year were the wives of Shakespeare’s colleagues Richard Burbage, Augustine Philips and Richard Cowley, Shakespeare’s printer Richard Field, Philip Henslowe, and even Shakespeare’s future landlady Mrs Mountjoy. Forman’s still largely unpublished notebooks give a wonderfully vivid portrait of the Elizabethan world: its ambition and class envy, its struggle for money and patronage, its medical knowledge and superstition, and the sexual habits of the time. The contents of the notebook that runs from May 1597 until the autumn of that year, probably the very period of the writing of the sonnets to the woman, are tantalizing.

  On 17 May a courtly gentlewoman went to Forman’s house in Philpot Lane near London Bridge. Her name was Emilia Lanier and she was seeking advice about her husband’s prospects of advancement. Alfonso Lanier was from a French musical family, one of the queen’s musicians; but at this moment he was about to leave his wife for several months, to accompany the Earl of Essex on his expedition to the Azores to attack the Spanish treasure fleet on its return from South America.

  Her small talk was of preferment, class and sex. Like many of Forman’s patients, Mrs Lanier wanted to know the future. Would her husband be promoted? On the 25th she came again and revealed much more about herself. She told Forman she was twenty-four (actually she was twenty-eight). She was the daughter of Baptista Bassano from Bishopsgate – a member of the famous family of royal musicians, who had come from Venice in Henry VIII’s day. Some years earlier she had been the mistress of the chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, who until his death the previous summer had been the patron of Shakespeare’s company. Hunsdon, she told Forman, ‘had loved her well and kept her and did maintain her long’. However, in the manner of the upper classes, when she became pregnant by him, she was married ‘for colour’ [for appearance’s sake] to Alfonso Lanier in October 1592. Whether she continued to be Hunsdon’s mistress is not clear. Evidently young Emilia Bassano had been well known at court; now she lived with her husband, her four-year-old son Henry and her servants near the court in Longditch, Westminster. In a first hint of her lingering bitterness about her treatment by the patriarchal system that ruled the court, Forman notes ‘it seemeth she had ill fortune in
her youth’.

  On 3 June Emilia returned with direct questions. Would her husband ‘have the suit’? She was hoping for social advancement (it soon becomes clear that she loved the aristocracy and pursued it with disarming frankness). She revealed she was about twelve weeks pregnant and was worried by pains in her left side: she had previously had miscarriages, she said, ‘many false conceptions’. Forman was intrigued by her. ‘She is high minded’ he jotted down in his notes. ‘She hath some thing in the mind she would have done for her. She can hardly keep secret. She was very brave in youth …’ ‘Brave’, also used by Whythorne of his courtly women, meant splendid, showy, finely dressed. In other words she was a striking woman, like those depicted in paintings of Elizabeth’s courtly festivities.

  Mrs Lanier’s court connections were wide: her kinsmen, the Bassanos and Ferraboscos, were the most important musical families there. Forman recorded that ‘she hath been favoured much of her Majesty and of many noble men, and hath great gifts and been much made of. And a noble man that is dead hath loved her well and kept her and did maintain her long.’ To be ‘favoured of many noble men’ in that society meant she had taken them as lovers. Lord Hunsdon had been in his late sixties. For him a beautiful young mistress was a badge of power and masculinity – a trophy. At court, such women had semi-official status.

  To be able to move in such a world Lanier must have been well educated and accomplished in poetry and music, as befitted a gentlewoman (she had probably been a ward in the household of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent, a patroness of poetry, whom she later referred to as the ‘mistress of my youth, the noble guide of my ungoverned days’). From her late teens, Lanier had been part of the cult of youth at Elizabeth’s court, where the now ageing queen ‘danced six or seven galliards a morning, besides music and singing’ accompanied by talented young gentlewomen on the virginals. In this very sexualized atmosphere the beautiful young women of the court, like Lanier, cut quite a dash, as was described by Nashe in his famous pamphlet ‘Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’ of 1593:

  Gorgeous ladies of the Court … their eyes framed to move and bewitch [like] angels painted in church windows with glorious golden fronts beset with sunbeams … their breasts they embusk up on high, and their round roseate buds immodestly lay forth to show there is fruit to be hoped. They show the swellings of their mind in the swellings and plumpings out of their apparel ….

  That’s what it meant to be ‘brave’. Many years later, living ‘clos’d up in Sorowes Cell’, Emilia would recall with exhilaration the thrilling power of her self-image in the days when ‘great Elizaes favour blest my youth’.

  On 16 June she returned once more to Forman. By now her husband may have been preparing for the voyage – Essex’s fleet was due to depart on 10 July. Impecunious, desperately seeking advancement (‘in hope to be knighted’, she says), he had enrolled as one of Walter Ralegh’s gentleman volunteers. Now she wanted to know ‘whether her husband shall come to any preferment before he come again or no, and how he shall speed’. But she was not happy in her marriage. She told Forman she was receiving an annual pension of £40 from Hunsdon’s estate and possessed many jewels that he had given her, and had another allowance left to her by her father, but Alfonso had frittered it away. ‘Her husband has dealt hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is now very needy and in debt.’ Gender and class antagonisms and anxieties are bubbling under the surface here. Forman, fascinated, cast another horoscope and made more notes (which are not always easy to follow, but the gist is clear): ‘She shall be a lady or attain to some great dignity. He shall speed well and be knighted hardly but get little substance. And the time shall come she shall rise two degrees. But hardly by this man. But it seems he will not live two years after he come home. And yet there shall some good fortune fall on her in short time.’

  Her pregnancy was now causing her much pain and she had morning sickness: ‘the foetus kicks not’, noted Forman after examining her. He gave her a purgative to procure a miscarriage, which took place a few days later. No wonder she was bitter. She had been at the very centre of things; but now her husband had left her in a parlous state and she had lost another baby. Perhaps this experience helps to account for the streak of anger and coldness in her, especially towards men.

  Her next recorded visit to Philpot Street was ten weeks later, on 2 September. Her question was ‘whether she shall be a lady, and how she shall speed’. Forman cast another chart. From her questions, and given the continued absence of her husband, one might wonder whether she had become involved with someone else. On the 11th she consulted Forman again, and this time, excited by her looks, her personality and her ‘history’, he tried to have sex with her (as he frequently did with female patients in exchange for waiving his fees). Emilia refused. Eventually she did sleep with him, but did not allow him to have intercourse, though Forman ‘felt all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often’. At this point, in his only specific detail about her physical appearance, Forman noted that (like Shakespeare’s Imogen in Cymbeline) she had a mole below her throat.

  Lanier’s husband came back some time some time after the end of October. The fleet had encountered many problems and been nearly wrecked on the Goodwin Sands: one ship in particular, the Andrew, was in the news that month (and that autumn Shakespeare would mention it in his new script, The Merchant of Venice). But there was to be no promotion. Some time later Forman added to Alfonso’s horoscope that ‘he was not knighted, nor worthy thereof’. Under Emilia’s he also said that ‘she shall not, nor was not now worthy thereof’.

  SHAKESPEARE’S MISTRESS?

  It’s a fascinating tale, especially revealing for the intimate insight it gives into social exchanges, sexual habits, and class and gender jealousies in Shakespeare’s circle at this time. For, of course, given his patients, Forman’s consulting room was part of Shakespeare’s circle. And what of Lanier herself? Favoured by the queen, admired by many lords, the mistress of Hunsdon: was she part of Shakespeare’s circle too?

  When Forman’s diary was examined in detail for the first time thirty years ago, it was indeed suggested that she was Shakespeare’s mistress. The Dark Lady’s attributes in the poems after all might have applied to more than one woman in 1590s’ London, but surely not that many. The suggestion, however, was not well received by those scholars who were reluctant to allow real people into Shakespeare’s private life, and who sought to separate the works from the author’s life and times. Feminist critics also objected to Lanier appearing as an appendage, a sex object of the male poet. A generation later, the situation is very different. Lanier is accepted in her own right: her poetry is taught on university courses, published in modern editions and in anthologies of women’s writing of the period. Now it is time to pose the question again. Shakespeare’s London was, after all, a very small world.

  Coming from a family of royal musicians Emilia Lanier, née Bassano, was no doubt musically accomplished herself; it was customary in such families to train daughters as well as sons. They were people of high standing in London’s courtly and artistic society, including the theatre world. But most interesting are the Bassanos’ origins, for they were Jews. At least two of her uncles also married Jewesses, and although they conformed as Catholics in Venice and as Protestants in London, they retained a consciousness of their Jewishness. (This would not have been a bar at court – the queen herself had a Jewish lady-in-waiting.) The Bassanos’ forebears worked in silk: their coat of arms was a mulberry tree – morus in Latin, which also means ‘Moor’. They must have been dark-skinned, for when two of Emilia’s cousins appeared in a London court case they were described as ‘black men’, which is how one might expect Sephardi Jews from northern Italy to appear to Londoners. In Elizabethan eyes, then, Lanier, although outwardly conforming and baptizing her children into the Protestant Church, was doubly an outsider: of Jewish descent and with the looks of a ‘Moor’.

  Shakespeare must have known her, for she had
been the mistress of his patron. Although Lord Hunsdon only became patron of his company in 1594, prior to that he had been responsible for court performances at which royal players and musicians would have been familiar figures. Shakespeare could hardly have been unaware of the mistress of such a powerful man. It is also now known that Lanier later knew Ben Jonson, who worked with her kinsmen on his masques. Even more intriguingly, her mother, Margaret Johnson, had a nephew named Robert, who would later become a royal lutenist and collaborate with Shakespeare, writing music for several plays, starting in 1609, the year of the publication of the sonnets.

  So both before and after 1597, Mrs Lanier had close connections with Shakespeare’s circle. Indeed, she looks and sounds startlingly like the woman in the sonnets. Here, one must confess, we enter the realm of diverting speculation rather than that of verifiable historical fact, but if she is that woman, then Shakespeare’s remarks on her skin colour and unconventional beauty take on a peculiar significance, as do the poet’s references to her ‘unworthiness’ on which he took pity, and to her unspecified foreignness. Even the dates fit: Lanier’s husband was away from July until the end of October 1597, when it is possible that at least some of the sonnets to the woman were written. What makes her even more interesting is that she later became the first woman in England to publish a volume of poetry, which was registered in 1610 soon after Shakespeare’s sonnets came into print. In its preface she lectures women who are not loyal to other women (‘leave such folly’, she says, ‘to evill-disposed men’). And she bitterly castigates men for their inconstancy and their habitual and unthinking unkindness to women: ‘Forgetting they were born of woman, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred.’ And here, from a long religious poem, is Lanier’s protofeminist manifesto on the rights of women: