Shakespeare

He may also have needed the seclusion of New Place to arrange in shape and order the sonnets he had written on various occasions in the past. Now that his mother was dead, he may have felt able to publish their somewhat scandalous content. It is not certain whether he considered the sensibilities of his wife – unless he believed, as many scholars have since maintained, that the contents would be understood to be manifest fiction. Deprived of income from the closed theatres, he may also have considered this an opportune moment to sell the manuscripts to a publisher.

They were duly published in 1609 under the title “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Neuer Before Imprinted.” They were printed by George Eld and were to be sold for 5 d a copy, by John Wright whose shop was at Christ Church gate on Newgate Street. The dedication was signed by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, rather than by Shakespeare himself. It must be the most famous dedication in all literary history, consisting of the mysterious and much debated lines.

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING SONNETS MR.

W H ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY

OVR EVER LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTVRER IN SETTING FORTH. TT.

It is not at all clear what is meant by this. Who or what is the “begetter”? The inspirer of the sonnets, or the person who provided them to the publisher? And who is “Mr. W H”? Could it be Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? But then why are the initials reversed? Is it William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who may have been the recipient of the early sonnets? It is unlikely that a nobleman would be addressed as “Mr.” Could it be William Hathaway? Or might it be Sir William Harvey, who had previously been married to the Countess of Southampton? It might even be a misprint for “Mr. W SH.” It is also possible that Thorpe misunderstood Shakespeare’s original dedication to “W H,” and added “Mr.” as an afterthought. Like all good historical problems, the interpretations are endless and endlessly intriguing. Who is the “adventurer” and to what obscure or dangerous corner of the world is he “setting forth”? Could this also be another reference to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, who in the spring of this year became a member of the consortium known as the King’s Virginia Company?

It is sometimes suggested that Thomas Thorpe was a “pirate” printer who came across Shakespeare’s poems clandestinely and published them without authorisation. But there is no record of Shakespeare’s protest, and there is no sign that they were withdrawn from sale or subsequently “corrected” for an authorised edition. It is much more likely that Shakespeare himself was responsible for their collection and publication. The order of the poems is expertly arranged, and who else would have such a complete collection of the sonnets in manuscript? They were an enduring project, continued over several years. No one else would have owned all of the material available to the poet himself. In 1612, three years after publication, Thomas Heywood reported that Shakespeare had indeed published his sonnets “in his owne name.” 4Then, two years later, William Drummond recorded that Shakespeare had “lately published” 5his work on the subject of love.

There is no reason to doubt this contemporary testimony. Thomas Thorpe himself was a respectable publisher who had issued works by Jonson and by Marston, and who also had close connections with the theatrical world. In recent years he had published authorised versions of Sejanus and Volpone , performed by the King’s Men, as well as Eastward Ho! It is most improbable that he would print a pirated edition of poems by the most famous dramatist of the age. It would have been a grave lapse of duty in the eyes of his colleagues in the Stationers’ Company, and open him to severe censure.

It has been stated with some authority that by 1609 the fashion for sonnet sequences had passed, and that at this late date the passionate expression of even the most famous dramatist might not find favour. It is true that the early seventeenth-century world was fuelled by sudden fads and fashions. It was a time of constant novelty and inventiveness in which there was little room for old styles and old themes. But the first years of the reign of James had inaugurated a new range of sonneteering, and in particular a kind of roguish or epigrammatic “anti-poetry” of which the sonnets to the Dark Lady are a good example. It was not necessarily a bad time to be published.

Edward Alleyn purchased a copy of the Sonnets in the summer of 1609 (if the reference is not a later forgery), but the little volume does not seem to have been overwhelmingly popular. There was to be no further edition until 1640, long after the death of the poet. In contrast, Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence was reprinted on nine separate occasions. There was, however, some reaction to Shakespeare’s publication. The young George Herbert condemned the sequence for indecency, and one early reader appended in his first edition “What a heap of wretched Infidel Stuff.” 6The complaint has not been upheld by posterity, but at the time it may have been provoked by the unflattering references to the Dark Lady or to the homo-erotic tone of some of the earlier sonnets.

However long Shakespeare remained in Stratford, he had returned to London for the Christmas season at court. He was no longer acting but he was still responsible for rewriting and general supervision of the plays set before the king. In the chamber accounts of Whitehall it is noted that the King’s Men played no less than thirteen times. One of those plays was the newly written Cymbeline .

It is a play that might have been composed for the newly purchased Blackfriars Theatre which, after a respite in the plague, opened a few weeks later in February 1610. There were a number of stage devices, including the descent of Jupiter “in Thunder and Lightning, sitting vppon an Eagle: hee throwes a Thunder-bolt. The Ghostes fall on their knees.” There was no mechanism for these effects at the Globe, so we may assume the likely venue to have been the private playhouse. Such gaudy interventions emphasise how carefully and deliberately Shakespeare staged his dramas for the new conditions of performance. There is “Solemne Musicke” and a jaunty parade of spirits, all adding to the atmosphere of intimate spectacle that the Blackfriars playhouse encouraged. This is also the play in which Imogen wakes up beside a headless corpse, and believes it to be the body of her husband. No artifice is too obvious, no illusion too theatrical, in this most pantomimic of plays. Shakespeare has taken a potential tragedy and elevated it to the status of melodrama. In this last phase of his career he was pre-eminently a showman.

Samuel Johnson did not admire Cymbeline .

To remark the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation.

If we rename folly as fancy, and absurdity as deliberate farce, then we may come to a better understanding of the play than the eighteenth-century critic. Shakespeare delighted in its “impossibility” because he was writing a play which was in part masque and in part romance. It was entirely suited to its period, at a time when Jacobean spectacle had reached new heights of artificiality. It was a play without a subject, except that of its own intricacy.

Shakespeare went back to the legendary history of Britain and to the plays of his childhood, even to the plays in which he had been cast as a young actor, summoning up the spirit of old romance; in the sequence of spectacle and vision towards the end of the play, he even employed an antique style in homage rather than in burlesque. Plays of this kind had become very popular on the London stage, with dramas such as Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s recent Philaster and the revival of the favourite Mucedorus . But, in Cymbeline Shakespeare out-runs them all with the sheer arbitrariness and extravagance of his invention. There was also a vogue for plays concerning the British past, perhaps reflecting the new king’s concern for a united Britain. Throughout this play, in fact, can be detected the pressure of James’s sovereignty in small allusions and details. There is one other detail. Imogen, disguised as a boy, claims that her master is one “Richard du Champ.” This is of course Richard Field in a French guise. Field had been the publisher of The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis , in whose atmosphere of musical solemnity Cymbeline itself is bathed. Shakespeare here is making a playful allusion to his old friend.