From the Elephant's Back: Collected Essays & Travel Writings

by Lawrence Durrell

What can we learn about the fair youth and the dark lady from the sonnets, if we follow up the enigmatic hints with which the text abounds? Mr. W.H. was fair, truthful, faithful, and young—indeed a paragon of virtue. He was rather better bred than the poet, who seems to have been indebted to him both intellectually as well as socially. Shakespeare represents himself as a somewhat rough and gauche country boy whose “rude ignorance” profits from this acquaintance, as do his “untutored” poems. He is also conscious of his low social position and hopes to better his fortunes in order to be more worthy of his friendship for W.H. who incidentally is likened in beauty to Adonis (mark this) as well as Helen and Sappho. Among the images, the “phoenix” and the “tiger” also put in a brief appearance. The sonnets record several partings, several betrayals, several quarrels and reconciliations. Shakespeare seems conscious of his greater age, and of what he calls his “tanned antiquity.” He is perhaps somewhat shy of his baldness—at any rate he hates wigs, “the spoils of sepulchers.” There are also hints of some scandal which caused the poet unhappiness. Worse still there is a rival for the affections of W.H. who is a poet—a much greater poet than Shakespeare himself: or so he says. Among the key-images which occur more than once is the word “hue” (which meant both complexion and beauty); and pouncing on this, Oscar Wilde[22] developed his theory of the young actor Will Hughes whom Shakespeare is supposed to have loved. It is ingenious as a theory, and may not have been far from the truth. There are some punning sonnets addressed to the dark lady which do lead one to believe that Mr. W.H.’s first name, like Shakespeare’s, was “William.” And as a matter of fact Sir Sidney Lee[23] does mention that there was a musician called William Hughes at this time; but unfortunately we know nothing about him. To this theory we must concede quite a number of references in the sonnets to music which might indeed suggest that the boy was a musician. But in the light of our present knowledge all is surmise. On the other hand it is worth bearing in mind that all Shakespeare’s women were played by boys on the stage, even Juliet and Cleopatra, and also that (faithful Taurus) he belonged to the same company throughout his whole professional career, so that he was, to a certain extent, nearly always writing with his actors in mind—a luck that only dramatists attached to a particular company can enjoy. If only we had a firm text upon which to work we might be bolder in our analysis of his women but alas: from day to day the scholars are making new discoveries. We still do not know how much of Kyd’s work is buried in Hamlet, nor how much of Lear has remained from the older version which Shakespeare retouched. This is why I am trying to keep, as far as is possible, to the text of the poems which seem relatively reliable.

  The points which seem of most importance in the sonnets do not seem to me to be those which are concerned with the actual identity of the subjects—though of course they provide most of the detectivestory interest for the scholar. The insistence on certain lines of thought like W.H.’s hypothetical child and his fairness compared to the darkness and wickedness of his seducer seem to me more fruitful. Indeed as far as the imagery goes the counterpoint between “fair” and “dark,” as well as its secondary moral undertone in “fair” and “foul” seem to me to be as important as anything else; they seem, so to speak, the obsessional points in this long sequence of marvelous love-poems. To extend the associations even further would be to counterpoint the “ideal” love of W.H. against the harsher “real” love of the dark woman. Certainly the sonnets to her seem permeated with a strangely sexual flavor, full as they are of doubts, recoils, disgust….Even, one might say, insults. If the first love-relationship is an idyll, the second triangular one is an inferno.

  Now at some time during—even perhaps while—these sonnets were taking form in Shakespeare’s private notebooks, to which presumably only W.H. had access,[24] he constructed, polished, and published the two long narrative poems which he dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, and on which his public fame as a poet was first based. These we may fairly take as being aimed to secure patronage. They say so in their dedications. Indeed from the dedication to Lucrece it would already seem that with the first poem Shakespeare has secured the attention of his patron. He promises him all his future work, as every good Taurus would! But what of the themes of these two public poems? Would it be permissible to consider their general plots in the light of what we know, in this century, about the analysis of dreams? I think it would; but it would also be as well to remind the reader who finds a Freudian paper-chase through the images and allegories of our poet either distasteful or ridiculous that Freud himself, that modest genius, presented his findings in the most tentative way, as fruitful hypotheses merely, not as cast iron facts. Moreover it was he who, writing of Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky, said: “Before the mystery of the creative act psychoanalysis lays down her arms”;[25] and indeed in later years when Thornton Wilder[26] told him that many of his discoveries had been anticipated by the poets he replied: “But of course. The poets have always known them.” This said, let us turn to Venus and Adonis.

  But of course the first thing to be said is that Shakespeare took his idea from Lodge’s Glaucus and Scilla,[27] and once again this illustrates a fundamental point about his work. He regarded it much as an actor regards his own, in the sense that the actor is only concerned with his execution, his performance of a part. He is content if “his” Hamlet is the greatest one; he does not ask for a new Hamlet every time. So Shakespeare behaves much more like an interpreter than a creator; if dissatisfied with an existing play he re-wrote it, improved on it. He did not bother to try and invent new themes—a Taurus cannot anyway. He took an existing idea and transformed it, impregnated it with his own genius.

  What is interesting about his version of Venus and Adonis is not only the choice of title but also the fact that it so closely echoes many of the themes contained in the first sequence of the sonnets—those addressed to W.H. In fact Adonis himself is described in roughly the same terms by Shakespeare’s tutelary goddess, Venus, as the male subject of the sonnets.

  Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,

  More white and red than doves or roses are.[28]

  All the way through this rather long-winded attempt to seduce the youth we come upon the same basic themes with which the sonnets have acquainted us. Venus keeps reminding Adonis that “By law of Nature thou art bound to breed.” One of the main themes of the W.H. poems is once more reworked here, and with many echoes from the sonnets. But poor Venus can make little headway against the youth. She describes herself thus:

  Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn,

  To love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn.[29]

  In other words the poem is a sort of allegorized version of the first half of the sonnets; the goddess uses all the same blandishments, including the central leitmotiv which concerns procreation as being the only justification of physical beauty. It is not hard to be convinced that we have here a stilted and formalized statement of the same situation, only this time presented in terms of a conscious poetic effort. It is a brilliantly cold exteriorization of the old theme, but this time aimed at a public patron. I do not think it too far fetched to suspect this protean artist of being able to present both subjective and objective views of his central preoccupations at this time, and to write these two narrative-poems about problems with which he had dealt privately in the sonnets. There is a very strong similarity between Venus invoking Adonis and Shakespeare invoking Mr. W.H. But here, incidentally, the Freudian could bring some solace to the quivering puritan, for as far as we can see the blandishments of Venus have no effect at all on Adonis, who like a healthy British boy much prefers hunting, shooting, and fishing to more specialized amatory exploits. In fact the goddess is left holding the anemone which sprang from his blood. Shakespeare’s reputation has been saved by psychoanalysis. As for the anemone there is some confusion among Elizabethan writers, including Shakespeare. In some places the flower is described as a “rose.” (One is instantly reminded of Hamlet, who is de
scribed as “the expectancy and rose…”[30])

  But if this narrative poem represents in my view an extension and elaboration of the situation concerning W.H., where does the dark lady come in? She is certainly not present here. Perhaps it would be worth turning our attention to the poem which immediately followed Venus and Adonis? Dare we suspect that the situation described here—the rape of a “fond fair and true” woman by the ravisher Tarquin[31] has any bearing on the second sequence of sonnets. Only if we accept the fact that in dream analysis we should keep an eye out for material which has been displaced as well as for the ordinary substitution of opposites; Lucrece, treated in this context would yield both, for the fair youth, the paragon of all the virtues appears now to have become a fair Roman matron, ravished by the dark (“foul”) Tarquin, the embodiment of dreadful lust. How could a Roman matron become fair? Nevertheless…

  This heraldry in Lucrece’ face was seen

  Argued by beauty’s red and virtue’s white:

  Of either colour was the other queen…[32]

  It is not the only reference but it will serve. As for Tarquin the references to “blackness” in the moral sense are too numerous not to be noticed. “Black lust, dishonour, shame, misgoverning” cries Lucrece: and after the dark deed has been committed she adds: “My sable ground of sin I will not paint.”[33] In other words Lucrece has now usurped the colours of Adonis, and Tarquin those of the dark lady of the sonnets who ravishes her against her will!

  Of the dark lady herself, as portrayed in the sonnets, we know very little indeed beyond the fact that her darkness impressed Shakespeare and that she was hopelessly unfaithful to both men. Some scholars, impressed by the references to her colouring, have even gone as far as to suggest that she may actually have been a negress. This is largely due I think to the line. “If wires be black, black wires grow on thy head.” Myself I think this is a misunderstanding based on the word “wires” which meant musical strings to the Elizabethan. In Spenser you find, for example, blonde hair described as “golden wyre.”[34] As for the darkness of the lady, we do know that darkness of colouring was unfashionable in Elizabethan times, and that gentlemen appeared, then as now, to prefer blondes. It does not even seem to matter what sort of blondes. Sidney addresses two poetic heroines with black eyes and gold hair, though he does not tell us how this was achieved without the aid of science. This may be what Shakespeare means when he writes to the dark lady: “I never saw that you did painting need.”

  But dark the lady certainly was, and Shakespeare unluckily does not specify how this came to be; he didn’t use, like Marston,[35] the early form of our “brunette”; nor does he seem to distinguish clearly between a negro darkness and the tawny colour of the Arab or Gypsy type. Of his dark lady he says mockingly: “If snow be white why then her breasts are dun.” But this is not very helpful; it is curious too that he shows no partiality for the words “sooty” and “dusky” which were in common poetic usage, nor for “tawny” which I have found applied to gypsies, and also to the colour of leather and tobacco. Needless to say the scholars have made numberless attempts to penetrate the mystery of the dark lady; some have unearthed a real negress called Lucy Negro, others have suggested a real gypsy—and London abounded in those brilliant magpies during this period. They were known as “Egyptians” because they were believed to come from Egypt. The vagaries and instabilities of Cleopatra show that in creating her character Shakespeare had a gypsy in mind and not a negress.

  But if we must abandon the attempt to discover the identity of W.H. and the dark lady (for here scholarship must have the last word) there is no need to dismiss the fair-dark counterpoint which enables us, in terms of the imagery, to look a little way into the story behind the sonnets. It does seem clear that Shakespeare had some special reason to be interested in the darkness of skin, and certainly in some of his plays one finds references which awaken our interest, particularly of course, in those in which he was dealing with dark characters, as for example the two Moors Othello and Aaron. In the case of Othello there is the faintest echo of the Lucrece-Tarquin situation—this time with Desdemona (fair fond and true) playing the role once allotted to Lucrece. Iago calls Othello “old black ram” and “the lascivious Moor,” while Brabantio mentions

  the sooty bosom

  O such a thing as though, to fear, not to delight.[36]

  Aaron, in Titus Andronicus, offers an equally interesting set of references in the context of colour; for he, a swarthy Moor like Othello, finds no more impediment to his love on the grounds of colour than this coeval. Both Desdemona and Queen Tamora accept their swarthy husbands without demur; but the latter is troubled by the colour of Aaron’s child! When she asks him to make away with it this hardened brute behaves with much nobility. The nurse who brings him the child thinks it “loathesome as a toad,” but Aaron calls it “sweet blossom” and asks “Is black so base a hue?” Indeed he defends dark skin in lines which are virtually echoes from the sonnets.

  Coal black is better than another hue,

  In that it scorns to bear another hue.[37]

  People with dark skins cannot blush! This appears to be the poet’s impression, and he mentions the fact more than once.

  The plays, though they are so rich in references, do not of course allow us to carry this kind of enquiry very far. Few of Shakespeare’s characters are his own; most are projections of himself based upon existing creations. “By Heavens!” says the King in Love’s Labours Lost to Biron, “Thy love is black as ebony!” The knight’s response is interesting, though spoken half in jest:

  Is ebony like her? Oh wood divine!

  A wife of such wood were felicity…

  No face is fair that is not full so black.[38]

  I believe that a careful study of the key images from the sonnets could present us with many fruitful hypotheses about our poet; and if I were a scholar I should hunt down many of these tantalising metaphors—crow, dove, phoenix, lily, rose, anemone, tiger—and follow my enquiry through to the plays. But there is no space to provide more than a tentative sketch of my imagined subject, and I would prefer to revert to yet another poem—this time The Phoenix and The Turtle, which appeared in print when the poet was thirty-eight years old, that is to say already in mid-career.

  One of the things we know as being characteristic of him was a disinclination to write vers de société in an age when almost every poet felt his duty to write odes, dedicatory verses, epithalamia, and so on, in order to curry favour with the great. Today publishers ask writers to give them a “blurb” for the cover of a new book; the Elizabethan version of a “blurb” was a set of commendatory verses affixed to the front of a new book. Poets regarded this as quite normal, but apart from a lovely sonnet printed before a book by his friend Florio,[39] Shakespeare does not seem to have followed tradition; in fact he wrote nothing on the death of Elizabeth or the accession of James. Now this was remarked by this contemporaries, and he was even mildly reproved in print for it.

  This strange poem which he contributed to an anthology by invitation is not a piracy; presumably, then, he found the theme a congenial one upon which to work. Certainly there was no money to be made out of Love’s Martyr, as the anthology was called. The compiler, Robert Chester,[40] invited a number of poets to write on the same theme, and several famous Elizabethans contributed to the compilation. The title poems by Chester himself is too obscure and rambling to yield anything but insoluble mysteries, but the subject matter of this verse-contest is most interesting. The poets were asked to treat the chaste love of a phoenix, which represented a woman, for a turtle, representing a man; they are consumed in the flames of the Arabian pyre, and from their ashes arises a new phoenix—perfect love.

  Shakespeare’s contribution, like many of the others in this book has been found extremely obscure and the scholars hardly mention it any more, despairing of finding its true meaning. But it seems to me that here once more I find echoes of the subject-matter of the sonnets, the counterpoin
t of W.H. and the dark lady—only now they are transmuted into metaphysical creatures, no longer man and woman so much as female phoenix and male turtle. Shakespeare calls them, magnificently the “Co-supreme and stars of love.” He describes their obsequies.

  So they loved as loved in twain

  Had the essence but in one;

  Two distincts, divisions none;

  Number there in love was slain.

  So between them love did shine,

  That the turtle saw his right

  Flaming in the phoenix’ sight;

  Either was the other’s mine.

  Property was thus appalled

  That the self was not the same;

  Single nature’s double name,

  Neither two nor one was called.[41]

  Here too we will find a reference to the “treble-dated” crow (perhaps a misprint for “fated”?) And for my part the famous “death-divining swan” calls up the memory of Lucrece once more:

  And now this pale swan in her watery nest

  Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending.

  “Few words” quoth she “shall fit the trespass best,

  Where no excuse can give the fault amending.”[42]

  Lucrece also refers to the phoenix when she declares: “So of fame’s ashes shall my fame be bred.” If one can broadly accept this rather daring identification of the short Threnos for the dead lovers which closes, The Phoenix and The Turtle is doubly moving, particularly with is reference (once more!) to posterity.

  Death is now the phoenix nest

  And the turtle’s loyal breast

  To eternity doth rest.

  Leaving no posterity;

  ’Twas not their infirmity,

  It was married chastity.

  Truth may seem but cannot be;

  Beauty brag but ’tis not she;

  Truth and beauty buried.

  To this urn let those repair

  That are either true or fair;

  For these dead birds sigh a prayer.[43]