by Robert Nye
Where two hearts are united all in one,
Love like a King, a Lord, a Sovereign,
Enjoys the throne of bliss to sit upon,
Each sad heart craving aid, by Cupid slain:
Lovers be merry, Love being dignified,
Wish what you will, it shall not be denied.
Finis quoth R. Chester.
Finis, indeed. When I asked Mr Shakespeare who R. Chester was he told me he was Salusbury’s secretary. Salusbury himself was a Papist Welshman, knighted by Elizabeth as a reward for his loyalty during the Essex rebellion. He had married the bastard Ursula some fifteen years before, and in fact she had given him eleven sons and daughters, which might make WS’s praise of married chastity seem a bit odd. Still, no doubt the phoenix and turtle-dove imagery of Chester’s original rigmarole was appropriate at the time of the marriage, since Mr Shakespeare explained to me that Salusbury was then the sole remaining male in a family, seeking to win back its good name and perpetuate it in a love-match – John Salusbury’s elder brother having been executed for complicity in the Babington Plot. Salusbury was a pugnacious character, a wine-bibber, a friend of poets, and he may well have reminded Mr Shakespeare of his own father in that year when Jack Shakespeare turned Papist and died. For whatever reason, he liked Salusbury well enough to let him use his own poem on the phoenix and the turtle theme in an appendix to the Chester drivel. Other poet-friends of Salusbury’s also contributed to the volume: George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. But it is William Shakespeare’s poem that stands out.
The Phoenix and the Turtle is certainly a strange and difficult poem. To unassisted readers, it would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his poetic mistress. But the poem is so quaint, and so charming in diction, tone, and allusions, as in its perfect metre and harmony, that I for one would be sad to have its meaning ever explained. I consider this piece a good example of the rule that there is a poetry for poets proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author’s name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.
The Phoenix and the Turtle is William Shakespeare’s darkest allegory of love. It celebrates a marriage in tones more appropriate to a funeral. It talks of love in terms of perfection, and of perfection in terms of a love that is transcendental and sublime without ever ceasing to be physical. Its distillation of the nature of self-hood in love (Either was the other’s mine) reminds me of such things as John Donne’s The Ecstasy, which I know that Mr Shakespeare read in manuscript when it was circulating in the Inns of Court. Donne’s obscurities are mere smoke, though, compared with the blazing bonfire of Shakespeare’s thought here. The poem is such a pure, such a concentrated mystery that we ought just to point out the simple things that can be said about it, before submitting our minds to the power of its music. All but six of its sixty-seven lines are in truncated trochaic tetrameters; the other six employ the final syllable of the trochaic line. The only action takes place in the sixth stanza, where the two birds flee away together. All the rest of the poem is preparation for this action and comment upon it. The birds are a female phoenix and a male turtle dove. Here is the poem:
Let the bird of loudest lay,
On the sole Arabian tree,
Herald sad and trumpet be,
To whose sound chaste wings obey.
But thou shrieking harbinger,
Foul precurrer of the fiend,
Augur of the fever’s end,
To this troop come thou not near.
From this session interdict
Every fowl of tyrant wing,
Save the eagle, feath’red king;
Keep the obsequy so strict.
Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.
And thou treble-dated crow,
That thy sable gender mak’st,
With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st,
’Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.
Here the anthem doth commence:
Love and Constancy is dead;
Phoenix and the turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.
So they lov’d as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
Twixt this turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
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 appall’d,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves, yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded
That it cried, ‘How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, Reason none,
If what parts can so remain.’
Whereupon it made this threne
To the phoenix and the dove,
Co-supremes and stars of love,
As chorus to their tragic scene.
THRENOS
Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos’d, in cinders lie.
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 be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
This is my favourite of all William Shakespeare’s poems outside of his plays. I do not understand it, but I know what it means. I have copied it out now in my own handwriting because that is something I always like to do. If you copy out The Phoenix and the Turtle in your own handwriting you discover that you know what it means, even though you do not understand it. I recommend the exercise to every reader.
Spiritual ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no apparent cause.
Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying.
Yet, human nature being what it is, basic and obstinate questions remain. Who was the phoenix? And who the turtle? And if we knew, would we know or understand the poem any better?
I have heard men say that The Phoenix and the Turtle refers to the love of Elizabeth and Essex, but I cannot for the life of me see how. It seems even less likely that it refers to WS and Rizley, and I do not see myself in the part of either bird. For what it is worth a number of Sir John Salusbury’s own acrostic lyrics, included in Love’s Martyr, make it clear that he was at least as much in love with his wife’s sister Dorothy Halsall as he was with his wife. It is just possible that Dorothy Halsall is the phoenix and John Salusbury the turtle celebrated by all the poets in the book, including Shakespeare. Such a secret and forbidden love would at least explain the obscurity which cloaks all the poems, as well as t
he fact that all the poets seem to know who they are talking about. Dorothy may have been one of those women in whom the divine is sometimes felt to be incarnate. Never forget that it is Beatrice, not Virgil, who guides Dante through Paradise.
Yet, for all that, I fear that I must close the mystery up only by creating another. For once, not long after these baffling and immortal verses first appeared, at a point where I found myself confronted by the torment of their memorability, aware that for the rest of my life now I would be unable to get them out of my heart and my head, I asked Mr Shakespeare, point-blank, one thunder-rumbling London afternoon, to identify his creatures.
‘Who is the phoenix?’ I asked him. ‘And who is the turtle dove?’
‘Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth,’ said Mr Shakespeare.
But I never could get him to say another word on the subject, and he might have been joking.
Chapter Eighty-Seven
Shakespeare in Scotland & other witchcrafts
Do you know the real names of the three witches in Macbeth?
Agnes Thomson, Violet Leys, and Janet Wishart – that’s who.
You will find their names in that book by King James called News from Scotland. In it he describes the atrocious life of the notable sorcerer, Dr Fian, whose trial he followed, and whose interrogation he conducted. The King was present at many other trials of the sort. Witchcraft was his passion – I mean, the elimination of it. In 1596 he set up a commission including the provost of Aberdeen to judge witches and sorcerers. In the course of that year, twenty-three women and one man were found guilty of sorcery, and put to death. James himself was present at the trial of Agnes Thomson and other witches who boasted of having raised a storm while the King of Scots was on a voyage. She was sent to sea with a whole concourse of sister-witches, each one riding in a riddle or sieve. They took hands and danced singing all in one voice while the master of their coven, Giles Duncan, played upon a Jew’s trump. At the trial this scene was re-enacted to the King’s satisfaction. Agnes Thomson confessed that ‘she took a black toad and did hang the same up by the heels three days and gathered the venom as it dropped and fell from it in an oyster shell’. She also took a cat and christened it, which caused such a tempest that the vessel perished ‘wherein was sundry jewels and rich gifts which should have been presented to the now Queen of Scotland’. The ship in which James sailed would have met the same fate if the King’s ‘faith had not prevailed above their intentions’. All this you can find for yourselves, good readers, in that silly News from Scotland.
I call it silly since I think James was. What Mr Shakespeare thought of him I do not know. I do know that he wrote Macbeth in part to please him. So he worked in bits and pieces borrowed from the King’s writings on the theme of witches and witchcraft – from James’s Daemonology as well as News from Scotland. He wrote it very swiftly, while our Company was in Scotland. We went there after the Essex affair, when we were in disfavour with Queen Elizabeth on account of that performance of Richard II commissioned by the plotters in trust that it would stir up feeling against her. We were not punished, but we made ourselves scarce.
We played before King James in Edinburgh. After, we went by royal orders to Dunfermline, where we played before his Queen in the palace of Linlithgow. At Aberdeen, we were received in pomp by the provost William Cullen. We stayed there for most of the month of October, performing in the town hall to great audiences. The Scots are very good to strolling players. In Aberdeen we dined at the town’s expense. At Linlithgow twelve of us players slept in feather beds.
Sir William Davenant, the poet’s godson, claims to have in his possession a letter to Mr Shakespeare signed by the King of Scots, and highly complimentary. I have not seen this letter, but I do not disbelieve in it. King James enjoyed the theatre, and he liked his Shakespeare. That, at least, is one of the things Ben Jonson got right in his Folio eulogy.
Macbeth is soaked in WS’s experience of Scotland. Banquo’s first question ‘How far is’t called to Forres?’ sounds rather more Scotch than English to my ear. QUELL for murder, SKIRR for search, LATCH instead of catch, GRUEL for broth, SLAB for sticky, CRIBBED for enclosed, all these are northern words which Shakespeare uses only in Macbeth. The receptiveness of his ear was quite remarkable. I was in lodgings with him at Inverness, for example, and our hostess remarked approvingly of the porridge which she had boiled for us that it was thick and slab – the phrase went straight into the Scottish play, used of the contents of the witches’ cauldron.
At Inverness, the close proximity into which we were thrown enabled me for the first and last time to observe Mr Shakespeare at work from the inception to the completion of a play. With Holinshed’s Chronicles open at his elbow, and the Scottish King’s two books of witchcraft not far away across the table, he sat down to write on a rainy October morning. He wrote fast and he did little crossing out. The first two Acts of Macbeth came in a single marvellous day and night. Words poured from Shakespeare’s pen in a torrent like one of those I watched tumbling down the mountainside. He created all those early scenes at the gallop, and the power and the urgency of their writing shows (in my opinion) both in the intensity of the verse and the way those scenes always play themselves fast in the theatre. The rest came more slowly, with pauses for reflection, but without apparent trouble. Sometimes he muttered phrases to himself, once or twice I heard him chanting them quite loudly. For example, ‘And pity, like a naked new-born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air.’ I remember that particularly because it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I first heard it, and I’m sure it would do so still if I was able to get to a modern playhouse and there was a performance that did not cut it out. Such things are omitted in these enlightened days. How, they would say, can a baby stride a blast? It is a prime example of what is now regarded as Shakespeare’s barbarity.
I regard it as a prime example of his genius, friends.
Mr Shakespeare’s writing method was straightforward. Each page was divided into columns. On the left-hand side he would put the name of the speaker, on the right-hand side he would put the exits and the entrances. The poetry was written in the middle. He would write fifty lines on one side, fifty lines on the other. Sometimes, in full flood, he would forget to write the name of the speaker, and just make a squiggle in the margin, for the initial letter of the character’s name; then he would go back and spell out the identity later. Similarly, with the exits and the entrances. Each page got dropped to the floor as soon as he had written it. At the end of that long first night in Inverness, as the sun came up, I woke from fitful slumbers and saw Mr Shakespeare still crouched at his table, his eyes red and staring, his hand scuttling back and forth across the page like a crab trapped in a bucket, the sweat running down his face, and the floor of the room covered with sheets inscribed with his rustic gothic handwriting, all straight-flowing letters. It is something I’ll never forget. It was like waking and finding yourself in the cavern of a demi-urge, or in some place where a man takes dictation from angels.
Mr Shakespeare stared sightlessly at me. Then he blinked. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ he demanded. ‘I’m starving! Be a good lad and fetch me some pippins, will you? Or a taste of dry biscuit. Or a slice of salted pork. Anything but Mrs MacDiarmid’s porridge!’
Did a discarnate spirit guide my master’s pen in Scotland? He said he was in the grip of Hecate when he wrote that play, but he said it with a grin and a shrug, and at such times I could never tell if he was serious. Later, though, I remember him remarking that the Witch Sycorax had him in her power when he wrote much of his last play of The Tempest.
It is possible that he always wrote his first drafts very fast, and that these first drafts (with some notable exceptions, such as Hamlet) were not much changed before it came to performance. I know that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, rehearsed, and performed in the space of a fortnight, at Queen Elizabeth’s express command, Her Majesty hav
ing declared her wish to see a play done at Court which would show ‘Sir John Falstaff in love’. Twelfth Night was such another, hurriedly prepared for a royal command performance at Whitehall on the twelfth night of January, 1601, at which the Duke Virginio Orsino, newly arrived in London from Italy, was gloriously entertained.
Perhaps what I saw for myself in Scotland was William Shakespeare’s usual practice. In the Dream he speaks of the poet’s fine frenzy. Against this, the character called Poet in Timon of Athens is made to say
Our poesy is as a gum which oozes
From whence ’tis nourisht*
Frenzy or gum, as Mr Heminges and Mr Condell report in introducing the works in the Folio, there were never many blots in William Shakespeare’s foul papers.
And that night in Inverness I thought the page would catch fire from the fury of his quill.
Unlike mine, in this. There is still no sign of that sad, adorable, enchanted child who told me her name was Polly. I would be heart-broken were it not that I have had no heart to break after poor Jane. Even as it is, I can barely lift my pen, it seems so heavy, and as for the ink it smells like juice of wormwood.
Reader, I know I ought to cut out every reference to this whore-child in my book. She is not relevant to my Life of Shakespeare. All that she did was fetch me a few eggs, then make my fancy dance with her girlish ways. Sir, I resolve to effect this act of exorcism as soon as it comes to the time for revision.