From the Elephant's Back

by Lawrence Durrell

  The scholars are right, of course, when they warn us against the danger of trying to deduce biographical facts about Shakespeare from stray hints in his plays—for despite the ardent and painstaking work of generations of experts, the canon is still in a state of inextricable confusion, not only as regards accurate chronology but also concerning the actual extent of his collaboration with others.

  When he died, no less that twenty-one plays were still in manuscript, locked up presumably as part of the property of the playhouse in which he was a partner. The first complete collection was issued seven years after his death by two of his stage associates. He did not supervise this great Folio volume.[8] Many of these plays are retouched versions of old plays by other men which have now disappeared. All save two are based on plots taken from others’ books. He was a great borrower, imitator, copier, and collaborator. He appears not to have been at all inventive. Yet in the midst of all this confusion and doubt there is a…something, a Voice which is completely and authentically his own. In poetic range, melody, and orchestration his work is unique, unequalled even in that age of giants.

  Who was he? It is strange to know so much about him and yet to find him an enigma. We do in fact know more about him than about any other Elizabethan writer, yet we do not know the interesting things. It is rather like trying to study the destiny of someone from the stubs in his cheque-book. He has successfully buried himself under the immense reticence of his art. Even the world-weary smiling face of the only certain portrait gives little away; in colour he suggests someone who had perhaps some Welsh blood in his veins. Perhaps like his admired Montaigne[9] he had a Jewish strain in him? We cannot be certain. Everything is surmise, every new portrait must be, in the nature of things, a personal adventure.

  But though the plays are not the happiest of hunting grounds for clues as to what he was really like, the poetic productions might seem safer ground, since at least we can be certain that these are all his own work. The two long verse-narratives, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, show signs of careful preparation for the press. The first came out when he was twenty-nine, the second a year later; they were both best-sellers and established his poetic reputation once and for all. Moreover they went on selling all through his life and beyond it—the first passing through seventeen editions between 1593 and 1675. But it was the stage that made him rich, not poetry; starting from humble origins, the son of a wool merchant in Stratford, he enjoyed a meteoric career both as an actor and as a playwright.

  We can be less certain of the famous sonnets which were pirated and yet…nobody reading them could believe they were not by Shakespeare; moreover, even in an age of sonnet sequences, they are extraordinarily unlike any other production. Whatever the scholars say, they are not just exercises in a form or poems written to secure a needed patronage. Finally, it is quite impossible to believe that they do not refer to actual people and events, though who the people may have been and when the events took place is another matter. It is as well to take up a definite position on this vexing matter right away so that those who reject this view of them may be spared the trouble of reading further.

  And the young man who wrote them? At eighteen he had married in haste to a woman eight years his senior; she bore him three children, two girls and a boy. At the age of twenty-nine he emerges in London as an actor and a writer of fame. At thirty-three he was rich enough to indulge in what appears to have been a ruling passion—he began to invest in property in and around Stratford. At thirty-four he bought one of the largest houses in Stratford.[10] His father died when he was thirty-eight, his mother when he was forty-five. His twelve-year-old son died when he was thirty-three. He is presumed to have retired to Stratford about the age of forty-five to live the life of a country gentleman and supply the stage with two plays a year. It is clear that we are dealing with a genius who is at the same time gifted with a streak of peasant tenacity and a sound business instinct. This, then, is the bare frame of the picture. What of the subject?

  I would like to try and sketch the probable temperament of this young countryman in terms which Dr. John Dee[11] (the eminent astrologer and alchemist of the day) might have found reasonable and plausible. The scholar will smile at the mention of the word “astrology,” as he has every right to do; but would Shakespeare have smiled? Despite the skepticism of many of the intelligent men on the subject, the age itself was deeply permeated by a belief in the stars. Shakespeare’s own plays illustrate the point. Moreover even Elizabeth herself had no hesitation in consulting Dr. John Dee about such matters. It is not impossible that at some time the young Shakespeare might have had his chart drawn for him, and heard his character discussed. What would the venerable doctor have told him?

  He was born in Taurus, most probably on St. George’s Day, that of the patron saint of England. The general characteristics of the sign, according to this regretfully imprecise pseudo-science would certainly square with everything we know about Shakespeare’s habits and temperament. The dominating factors (Dr. Dee might have remarked) were intensely practical ones; a tremendous passion for ownership of lands and goods, a keen eye for material gain, and excellent judgement in everything to do with material advancement, and inexhaustible industry and application, and a strong fidelity to old ties. Shakespeare’s ruling planet was Venus, and the good goddess must have brought him the gifts of charm and physical beauty, mixed perhaps with a troubling sensuality, perhaps even uxoriousness. Altogether a formidable combination of positive qualities for a young man starting a career in an entirely new industry—which is what the Elizabethan stage was in 1590. But on the debit side of the account would be other compensating defects; social timidity and a vein of native obtuseness, of stupidity. Taurus, so entirely free of capriciousness, replaces intuition and imaginative power by obdurate industry. He was obviously not a clever man; he invented nothing, borrowed everything. But whatever this great Original touched turned to magic. He was a sort of sorcerer.

  It is in the sonnets that I believe we can come closest to him, can actually overlook a situation in the language. It is clear that they were not intended for publication. They were pirated when he was forty-six and probably issued when he was away from London. He would never have let them go to press with a semi-literate dedication signed by a book-seller’s jackal. Moreover while there is much to support the theory that they are addressed to the Earl of Southampton[12] (patron of the two early verse-narratives) the whole case comes apart when we are faced with this obscure dedication, for nobody would address an eminent nobleman publicly in this way, either in Shakespeare’s day or in our own.

  TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF.

  THESE. ENSVING. SONNETS. MR. W.H. ALL. HAPPINESS.

  AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.

  PROMISED.

  BY.

  OVR. EVERLIVING. POET.

  WISHETH.

  THE. WELL-WISHING.

  ADVENTVRER. IN.

  SETTING.

  FORTH.

  T.T.

  It seems gibberish, and many brilliant theories have been advanced to explain it. In my view the original dedication is the first three lines. The rest was added by the pirate. The word “begetter” suggests Shakespeare very strongly. It chimes with the main theme of the sonnets themselves, and one could also point out in passing that he describes Venus and Adonis in his dedication to Southampton as “the first heir” of his invention. Shakespeare seems to have quite a strong obsession about “begetting”; it is a good Taurine trait. Indeed in these passionate sonnets to the “fair youth” he seems far more concerned to see him become the “onlie begetter” of a child than actually to possess him: just as he seems in his life to have been far more concerned to establish himself and his family in Stratford than to bicker over literary honours.

  Neither the identity of W.H. nor that of the dark lady has been discovered, despite the numerous hints and clues contained in the poems. Scholarship has tended to excessive reserve about the question of Shakespeare’s apparent homosexual
ity as betrayed by the first group of sonnets to the “fair youth,” though the poet himself does not bother to equivocate when he comes to describe his friend.

  A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted

  Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

  A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

  With shifting change, as is false woman’s fashion;

  An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

  Gilding the object where upon it gazeth;

  A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

  Which steals men’s eyes and womans’ souls amazeth;

  And for a woman wert thou first created;[13]

  Till Nature, as she wroght thee, fell a-doting,

  And by addition me of thee defeated,

  By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

  But since she pricked thee out for womens’ pleasure,

  Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.[14]

  The truth is that we are facing this great poet not only across a gulf of years but also across a gulf in our national moeurs, for though the suppurating sore of Puritanism-Protestantism dribbled on all through the reigns of Elizabeth and James, these people were still by heritage Renaissance men. Passion was an absolute value for them, they respected its laws; and side by side with it they accorded full value to extremes of idealism which today would seem exaggerated. Since Cromwell[15] both passion and love have been more or less relegated to the domain of pathology or the police-court. Certainly in our age a sonnet as passionate and apparently as explicit as the one quoted above would have excited the gravest suspicions of homosexuality in its author. But if the passion expressed appears unequivocal so also does the self-abnegation of it in the last few lines. An Elizabethan would have been puzzled by our angle of vision—which is indeed a profane one; he lived in an age when men were as finely dressed as women, experts in rings, perfume, and brilliant clothes. Marlowe, for example, was almost aggressively homosexual in his attitude if we are to believe (not only the subject-matter of a play or two) the scraps of his tavern-conversation transcribed by two Government spies. “All who care not for tobacco and boys are fools,” he says in good round Elizabethan.[16] These words ring sourly in the ear of the prude. They excite a timid prurience all too characteristic of the age, but one which has nothing to do with Elizabethan values. Spenser, in the notes to his “Shepherd’s Calendar” supplies an interesting defense of boy-love on the Greek pattern, but he expressly denies that sensual passion plays any part in it.[17] In the case of the sonnets we could easily make a fair case both for and against the theory of Shakespeare’s apparent homosexuality in the matter of Mr. W.H. But surely this has no meaning for those who are concerned with the values of art. The Elizabethans excelled in grotesque exaggerations of the sensibility; they ranged heroically between extremes of the idealism in which they believed and the realism of their daily lives. The sonnets are touching reminders from a forgotten age that to love someone deeply—to love them, as it were, beyond the grave while you are still alive with them—is also, in a paradoxical sort of way to try and free them from love, from the shackles of love’s particularity, its greed and exclusiveness. The true lover, in this extreme sense, tries to encompass everything, even the betrayals (which are no betrayals at all) in order to give the psyche of the beloved person a chance to grow its own bright phoenix plumage. Real love, whether mixed with passional love or not, has this quality of selflessness. That is why we love women, for they embody it; and Shakespeare’s women are full of it. It surely is a wicked limitation in our view of art to spend our time pondering about the sexual relations of Petrarch and Laura, wondering whether Emily Brontë was led astray by a clergyman, or speculating whether Dante would have been better advised to imitate Humbert Humbert with his Lolita.[18] Moreover in the case of the great artist, the artist of the universal scale, we are dealing with someone who was extending the range of his human understanding and insight to a point where he might be considered as much a woman as a man. His bisexual psyche[19] has been allowed to exfoliate, to extend itself abnormally to the very limits of his capacity for human sympathy. In terms of ordinary life this immense range of psycho-sexual sympathy might turn out in the virtual impotence of a Kierkegaard.[20] But let us leave the field of conduct to the moralists and consider only, in this sonnet, the passionate self-abnegation of the poet towards his friend; his recognition that Mr. W.H. must one day find himself as a man through “women’s” pleasure. Indeed in the whole of the sequence devoted to W.H. he is urged to create a boy-child in his own likeness; this is held up to him as an ideal which must be fulfilled if he is to justify his own exceptional beauty. And how touchingly naïve is the poet’s punning use of the word “prick”—for the Elizabethans “pricked” their signs, and the word is still slang for “penis” with us today. But it is worth pointing out that in the long sequence addressed to the fair youth this obsession with “begetting” is, ironically enough, very typical of the Taurine temperament; the poet was wishing for W.H. the very best that a Taurus could imagine for himself—an heir!

  If we dare to imagine that actual events are described in the sonnets, the story they hold for us is a strange one indeed; the first sequence traces out an intimate, perhaps passional, relationship between the poet and a young man, which appears to have lasted for some time; in the second sequence a mysterious dark lady appears on the scene and disturbs this happy state of affairs, first by seducing the young man away from the poet, and finally in making the poet himself fall helplessly in love with her. As far as we can judge this irresistibly attractive female vampire not only shared her favours with both men, but succeeded in completely captivating and subjugating them. It is an extraordinary situation, and one which might have made the subject of one of his greatest plays had he used it; the poems trace out the whole fever-chart of this mysterious three-cornered love-affair with the most moving candour. The poet is cornered by his double passion for a fair man and a female demon. Instructive, too, is the contrast between the pure idealism of the sonnets addressed to the man, and the fiercely realistic sequence addressed to the woman. The fair youth is a pattern of honesty and fidelity while the dark woman is hopelessly profligate, a specialist in every sort of treachery. But neither the poet nor his friend can resist her. Indeed one wonders whether perhaps the unfortunate Shakespeare by insisting so much on the hypothetical heir of Mr. W.H. did not himself finally push him into the arms of this female cormorant, and so become the unwitting cause of his own sufferings. That would be poetic justice indeed!

  If we accept the recent dating of the sonnets by Dr. Leslie Hotson,[21] and his case seems a firm one, we can assume that the first batch to the young man were written between the age of twenty-two (when Shakespeare first met Mr. W.H.) and twenty-nine. In other words, when the pirate first produced them in book form, they referred to events which lay far back, nearly twenty years, in the poet’s early youth. Perhaps by then the principals were dead, or the subject-matter so obscured by the passage of time that the piracy called forth no protest from the poet. At any rate Shakespeare does not seem to have protested against it.

  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.