My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  I wrote a piece for the Guardian on the occasion of the BBC broadcast of the Padel version.

  Michael Kustow, then Associate Director of the National Theatre, telephoned me one day, nearly fifteen years ago, to ask if I’d be interested in performing a new version of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It was one, he said, which not only revealed an extraordinary, complex background story which seemed to account for some of the mysterious, half-submerged allusions in the verse, but – more importantly – made more sense of the poems as poems than any previous reordering. My head reeled, not just from excitement (these were sensational claims) but from ignorance. I scarcely knew more than half a dozen sonnets, and to be truthful, no more than the first lines, which seemed somehow to make up a sort of ghostly sonnet on their own:

  When I do count the clock that tells the time,

  Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  When most I wink then do mine eyes best see;

  My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.

  They sat there, those one hundred and fifty-four poems, in their own separate volume, seeming to have little to do with the man who wrote the plays that are for me and every English actor the unavoidable mine down which we all must go sooner or later if we are to come to terms with our language, our craft and ourselves. But we know so very little about that man. Kustow’s call offered the chance of dispelling some of that ignorance – maybe of meeting the man Shakespeare face to face.

  I set to reading all one hundred and fifty-four poems as printed in the poet’s lifetime, and emerged with some confusion, a confusion I shared with virtually everyone who has read the Sonnets through. To whom are they addressed? To two people at least. What is the betrayal spoken of in a number of them? Whence this overwhelming sense of rejection? What is the marriage so ardently desired?

  It’s impossible not to feel that somewhere behind these, for the most part unconnected, poems is some experience, a hidden story involving the young man to whom the majority of them are addressed, the woman to whom a smaller number belong, and the poet himself.

  The young man and the woman are vividly characterised: he aloof, glacial, young, beautiful, aristocratic; she earthy, passionate, teasing, tormenting, dark-haired, dark-eyed. There is an interesting difference in the descriptions: though desired, she is excoriated for her temperament, her behaviour (‘forbear to turn thine eyes aside’), even her face. He, on the other hand, is uncritically adored. Set down as a paragon, possessing every virtue, physical, intellectual, moral, he is never described, except, significantly, in the famous elliptical sonnet ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, in which his face is said to be inexpressive, his thinking inscrutable.

  The person who jumps out at you from the pages is The Poet himself: feeling himself to be old, ugly, unloved, unworthy of love, tormented by base desires and crucified by ecstatic aspiration, passing through almost pathological states of emotional experience, to positions of defiance, resignation and, finally, tranquillity. All this glimpsed by flashes of lightning in a fog of confusion produced by impossible juxtapositions, impenetrable syntax, contemporary references and even, on rare occasions, very poor verse.

  The sequence that Kustow had been sent was devised by a psychoanalyst and teacher of classics, Dr John Padel. Hypnotised, like so many before him, by the enigma presented by the 1609 edition, he became convinced that there had to be some unifying matrix, a way of looking at the poems that made a sensible whole. He started to find patterns in the separate poems, subtle unities of resonance, common metaphors. As if playing with pieces of mosaic, then standing back to look at the whole pattern, Padel saw not merely a general pattern, but a precise organisation of units within the collection.

  It seemed that almost without exception the Sonnets had been written in groups of either three or four, and that these they made up single poems, to be spoken as one. The four-sonnet poems and three-sonnet poems were part of larger patterns – the first seventeen poems are four groups of four plus an epilogue; the ‘Dark Lady’ poems a sort of prologue of one group of three sonnets, followed by six groups of three, eighteen sonnets in all. And so on. Elizabethan fascination with numerology is well attested, but no one suspected it here. So what? Apart from antiquarian interest, what does it matter?

  Firstly, Padel’s sequence made sense of the poems from a poetic perspective; the groups hung together, illuminating each other. He had in effect discovered, as he claimed in the title of his book on the subject, New Poems By Shakespeare. Secondly, they enabled Padel to reconstruct the background story. Like others before him he identified Mr W. H. as William Herbert, eldest son of the Earl of Pembroke, and postulated a sequence of events whereby Shakespeare was commissioned by the young man’s mother, the sister of the poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney, to write a series of poems for the young man encouraging him to get married. From this commission grew a relationship, essentially that of poet and patron, which furthered the Countess of Pembroke’s project of getting her son married, but also developed an intense dynamic of its own: the poet introduces his patron to his mistress, the so-called Dark Lady, and the two of them, to the poet’s despair, have an affair. When this burns out, the poet and the patron resume their relationship; finally, it cools, but over a number of years Shakespeare continues to send Pembroke (as he now was) sequences of sonnets in which the central event becomes the war waged by the poet against time. His verse, he claims, will defy time’s ravages. He was right.

  Padel’s work is an extraordinary illumination of a corner of the Elizabethan world: the relationship of poet to patron, and of verse to life. Only another scholar could refute or confirm it as a definitive context for the sonnets. For me as an actor, the order, right or wrong, offers two things: firstly, an astonishing dramatic text, previously only perceived as a series of lyrical or philosophical meditations; secondly, an insight into Shakespeare’s creativity.

  What started out as a commission, conventionally conceived and executed, became a personal experience of an overwhelming kind, in which art and life were in constant dialectical interplay. Shakespeare invents the young man, and reinvents himself, the ‘I’ of the poems. These creations then begin to lead an independent life, and the drama of Shakespeare’s relationship with W. H., touching from point to point the actual but different reality, was worked out to its conclusion. Shakespeare found himself entering irresistibly into an imagined experience which brought him close to the very nature of beauty and love, probing – inevitably – the questions of time and self posed by love’s simultaneous intimation of infinity and mortality. The poems celebrate this paradox and resolve it: they commemorate the experienced beauty and are themselves beautiful and enduring: they defy time and transcend self.

  In all this, one sees the relation of the poet to reality. It seems characteristic of Shakespeare’s art that he is able to empathise, to enter the mind and heart of his creations to the extent that he almost obliterates himself. It is an actor’s method and the Sonnets – in this new version – reveal it in its purest form.

  I had a powerfully personal response to the emotional states described. What Shakespeare feels for the young man addressed in so many of the poems was an uncannily precise rendition of the intense and often self-lacerating feelings I had entertained for various unattainable young men over the years. Intuitively, my view was that Shakespeare and Mr W. H. never had sex with each other (they so often speak of distance, and of inequality). But the poems chart an emotional experience that encompasses a great deal that is instantly recognisable to a gay man. I wrote the following for the Evening Standard, which at the time (1990) seemed to see me as their unofficial correspondent on gay matters.

  Was Shakespeare gay? This simple – if, until very recently, unthinkable – proposition begs two large questions: what do we mean by ‘gay’, and what do we mean by ‘Shakespeare’?

  Shakespeare is the unassailable fortress of our culture. Around his name grew up, first, on a modest scale in the eighteent
h, then, comprehensively in the nineteenth centuries, an aura of godlike genius. All the splendour, the grandeur, the despair and the exultation of human life seem to be there. It was only the moral tone which was found wanting. No matter! Here is Dr Thomas Bowdler, ready with his blue pencil, to delete the offending phrases. There is, it is found, altogether too much of the sexual element in the plays. This is suppressed, and pageant supplied in its place.

  There is always, thank God, the love poetry, the exquisite, tender, and largely chaste verse, guaranteed to bring no more than a slight blush to a maiden’s cheek. The Sonnets, for example, with their unforgettable first lines: ‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’, ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments’, ‘O thou my lovely boy –’ Hold on. What’s this? O thou my lovely boy? These love poems seem – it’s pretty unavoidable, in fact – to be addressed, for at least two-thirds of the volume, to a young man, in terms of growing passion. ‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage.’ ‘A woman’s face… hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.’ And the young man in question is being addressed directly, personally by The Poet – W. S. – the Swan of Avon – the Bard. Unnatural vice in the master-poet-philosopher of all time? Outrageous suggestion! Ignore it, as beneath contempt; or, better still, change the pronouns. He for she, her for him. Of course! It was all a terrible typographical error.

  But of course it wasn’t. And it’s the only document we have that seems to be in any way autobiographical. ‘With this key,’ said Wordsworth, ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart.’

  There is no doubt of the intensity of his feelings for the young man. The playful admiration, growing infatuation, anguished sense of unworthiness; pain of betrayal and final renunciation (‘Farewell – thou art too dear for my possessing’) chart the typical trajectory of the state of being hopelessly in love. The hopelessness comes, not from the fact that they are both men, but from differences in their circumstances: the object of the poet’s passion young, beautiful, well-connected; the poet himself old (he was all of thirty-seven!), unlovely and a member of a despised profession: he was an actor, for God’s sake!

  However, we have to tread carefully before we make any categorical assumptions. Intense – cauterising – though the emotions may be, and focused so strongly on the physical beauty of the young man, do they really speak of sexual love? A large number of the remaining third of the sequence are addressed to Shakespeare’s mistress, the famous and equally unknown Dark Lady, and the nature of these poems is quite different. They reek of sex, and the mixed emotions, mingling desire and disgust, which intense carnality so often brings. At a certain point in the (deliberately?) complicated sequence, it seems that Mr W. H. and Shakespeare’s mistress have been to bed together, affording the poet some sort of masochistic pleasure. He forgives them both. This story, enigmatic though in some ways it seems, is the stuff of modern life: it could be the subject of a novel by Iris Murdoch.

  But it still leaves unanswered the question: was Shakespeare gay? What we want to know, I suppose, is: did Shakespeare go to bed with men? Once again, we need to tread cautiously. The past, as L. P. Hartley famously observed, is another country: they do things differently there. Which brings us to the other question: what do we mean by ‘gay’?

  In the last twenty years, a great deal more research has been conducted into the nature of the Elizabethans’ sex lives. One thing is clear: the idea of exclusive homosexuality, men or women who only have sex with their own kind, was completely unknown. If anything, desire of one man for another (there are few accounts of women desiring women) was regarded as a surplus, an overflow, of sexuality. Not content with women alone, some over-sexed men, Elizabethans believed, found it necessary to work out their libidos on other men and, indeed, boys, and this excessive appetite was understood and dealt with quite leniently. Sodomy was a capital offence, but the legal records of the time reveal very few instances of the law’s penalty being exacted.

  The romantic love of a man for man, or a boy, was something else altogether. Saturated as educated Elizabethans were in Greek literature, Plato and Homer, in the stories of the love of warriors like Achilles and Hercules for Patroclus and Hylas, of the god Jove’s love for Ganymede or the philosopher Socrates for Alcibiades, they were acutely aware of the power of men’s love for each other. This was part of life, part of human nature, and the myths defined and idealised this love, which is certainly a part, a large part, of gay love as we understand it. Was sex part of it too, as it is for us? The jury of scholars is still out on this. Maybe; maybe not. We just don’t know.

  Certainly the Elizabethan ideal of male beauty was very far from ours. The miniatures of Hilliard and Oliver reveal the softness, the flowing lines of men’s clothes, emphasising their fine calves, their slim waists, their broad graceful shoulders. Codpieces glamorise their manly parts. Tumbling ringlets adorn their brows, earrings hang in their ears; they stand gracefully, pliantly. A feeling of androgyny hovers over them. But these men were soldiers, politicians, statesmen. The women, by contrast, have all their natural lineaments contradicted. Their breasts are flattened, their nether regions hidden under vast tents of dresses, their faces blocked out with make-up, their eyebrows plucked, their foreheads huge under the severe line of their wigs. No, the men were the romantic figures, without a question, and they responded to each other accordingly, in terms courtly and chivalrous, easily addressing each other as ‘lover’.

  And yet: this still doesn’t mean that we should assume that they were ‘gay’ – involved in physical-emotional relationships with each other. A sense of each other’s beauty is no guarantee that they had sex together. What it did mean was that sex was not compartmentalised, rigidly defined; it was all around them. And Shakespeare responded, as he responded to every impulse he ever had, with a dramatist’s vividness. Like the Roman playwright Terence, nothing human was alien to him, and thus throughout the plays we find passages (Antonio in Twelfth Night, for example) where the love of a man for another man is given noble and powerful expression. The Victorians were right: Shakespeare’s work contains the whole world. But, as Hamlet remarked, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than their philosophy dreamed of.

  A Shakespearean leading role at the National beckoned for a moment. John Wood was playing Richard III, and when he had to leave the company to fulfil another engagement there was talk of my taking over from him. Olivier’s film performance was still burned on my consciousness, but of course I longed to have a go at it. For one reason or another, the run of the play ended when John left, and the world was deprived of my Richard. Later I played the part on radio – an interesting challenge: how do you convey the hump? The experience taught me that I have nothing interesting to say on the subject of psychopathic regicides, but I also learned something about the nature of my own ambition. You can’t even begin to play Richard unless you intend to throw down the gauntlet and demand attention. It’s a part for someone who intends to be a contender. I found myself oddly reluctant to enter the ring.

  Towards the end of 1980, my contract at the National was coming to an end. Elijah Moshinsky was directing All’s Well That Ends Well for BBC television; he asked me to play Parolles. This was irresistible. I knew, though, that they intended to keep Amadeus in the repertory at the National, and that I would have to talk to Peter Hall about it. Elijah gave me a piece of advice: ‘Go in wanting nothing,’ he said, then added: ‘Don’t try and play chess with Peter. If you think you’re six moves ahead, he’s twenty.’

  I had always had a very pleasant relationship with Peter, often visiting him in his office for little chats, in the course of which he had spoken with extraordinary candour about his work and his life. Once, he had asked me to play Montano in Othello. ‘Who?’ I had said. ‘Indeed,’ he had replied. ‘And when your friends come to see the play, they will say, “Why did you take the part?” And the only answer you will be able to give them will be, “Because Pet
er Hall asked me to do it”.’ I asked for an hour or so to think about it, then phoned and said no. ‘Ah well,’ sighed the great pragmatist, ‘I had to try, didn’t I?’ I was sure our little chat about Parolles would be just the same. I booked an appointment with Peter, breezed in and told him that I’d been offered the job and that I’d like to go, please.

  What happened next took me aback. A large tear rolled down his cheek. ‘My dear friend,’ he said. ‘We must have failed you very badly. I thought you were happy here?’ ‘Yes, very happy, but –’ I spluttered. ‘No, you have to go. Of course you do. But – may I give you some advice? – not till you’ve done a play-carrying part in the Olivier. Then you can go. Then you must go. But not before. How ironic, though, that you should come to see me at this very moment.’ ‘In what way?’ ‘I was talking to Tom Stoppard just before you came in. I’ve just put the phone down, in fact. I was asking him to adapt a play by Nestroy for you – you know who Nestroy is?’ ‘Yes, yes, he wrote Einen Jux will er sich machen. Thornton Wilder based The Matchmaker on it, didn’t he?’ ‘Of course, I knew I could rely on you to know this wonderful writer. Well, I have just asked Tom to do a version of the play for you. To be done in the Olivier, with you finally carrying a play in this auditorium you have so made your own. In – let me see –’ he consulted his calendar – ‘yes, in six months’ time.’ ‘Peter,’ I said, barely able to speak from excitement, ‘this changes everything.’ ‘Does that mean you’ll stay?’ he said with a charming smile, sunshine breaking through clouds. ‘Of course, of course. Of COURSE.’ I skipped out, and a week or so later we signed the extension of my contract. Shortly after that, I had a very nice card from Stoppard saying that he’d seen As You Like It, and much enjoyed it, and I wrote back to him and said how much I was looking forward to the Nestroy. A week after that, I bumped into him at the Evening Standard Awards, and he said, ‘Who’s Nestroy?’