Shakespeare

The traffic of favours went in both directions. The dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton, and its subsequent enormous popularity, helped to create an image of the young man as a patron of learning and of poetry. In the year following its publication, for example, Nashe alluded to him as “a dere lover and cherisher you are, as well of the lovers of Poets, as of Poets themselves.” 6In the heated world of court favour and court intrigue, such a reputation did Southampton no harm at all.

The poem is part of a genre of erotic narrative poems largely taken out of Ovid. Shakespeare would have read about the ill-starred pair in the first part of Spenser’s Fairie Queene , published three years before, and of course Marlowe’s Hero and Leander had been circulating in manuscript for a similar period. Lodge had published Glaucus and Scilla , and Drayton was about to offer Endimion and Phoebe to the world. The works of Shakespeare should not be taken out of their context, since it is there they acquire their true meaning. He borrowed the stanzaic form from Lodge, and may have found his theme in Marlowe, but he wrote the poem in part to emphasise his learning. One of his principal sources, therefore, was Ovid’s Metamorphoses . As with the composition of The Comedy of Errors , he wished to demonstrate that he could deploy classical sources with as much brilliance as Marlowe or, even, as Spenser. The attack by Greene upon him, satirising him as a country bumpkin, may in part have provoked his invention. But he was still not averse to outright stealing from other places. The description of the horse of Adonis, often cited as a testimony to Shakespeare’s knowledge of equine matters, is cribbed almost verbatim from a translation by Joshua Sylvester of Divine Weekes and Workes by Guillaume du Bartas.

Venus and Adonis was immensely popular. Only one copy of the 1593 edition survives; the first print-run had been read literally to disintegration. There were no fewer than eleven editions over the next twenty-five years, and there may have been other reprints that have simply vanished. It was in his lifetime far more popular than any of his plays, and did more to secure his literary reputation than any drama. His instinct to compose such a narrative poem, especially at a time of theatrical dearth, was undoubtedly the right one.

It is in essence a dramatic narrative that, like Shakespeare’s plays, hovers between comic and serious matter. Half the lines are conceived as dialogue or dramatic oratory. The confrontation between the lascivious Venus and the frigid Adonis becomes the subject of quintessential English pantomime:

She sincketh downe, still hanging by his necke,

He on her belly fall’s, she on her backe.

But the farce is succeeded by the solemn obsequies on the dead boy. Shakespeare cannot stay with one mood for very long. It repays reading aloud, and in Chaucerian fashion it may have been performed by Shakespeare as a private entertainment. It moves rapidly and energetically; Shakespeare is both adept and nimble, attentive and consoling. It was remarkable for what was known as its wantonness. Although it was not half as pornographic as some of the poems then being circulated in manuscript, it earned a rebuke from John Davies as “bawdy Geare.” 7Thomas Middleton included it in a list of “wanton pamphlets” and a contemporary versifier suggested that

Who list read lust there’s Venus and Adonis

True model of a most lascivious leatcher. 8

Venus and Adonis is a poem concerning overpowering lust for a young male, considerably more passionate even than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , and it seems obvious to the reader that Shakespeare took great delight and pleasure in writing it. Erotic literature is perhaps the one genre in which the author’s personal tastes and preoccupations are vital to its success and effectiveness. But at the same time it would be unwise to attribute such feelings of personal passion to Shakespeare. He is eloquent, of course, but he is also detached. Passion is an element within his repertory of effects. The reader is given the curious impression that the author is there and yet not there. To feel so much, and yet be able to mock that feeling – that is the mark of a sublime intellect. It is perhaps also why the poem has often been considered as an extension of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. There has never been a more fluent, or more artful, English writer.

Venus and Adonis became particularly popular among the students of the universities and of the Inns, who read it individually or perhaps even in groups. In 1601 Gabriel Harvey could still write that “the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis”. He was by no means the anonymous or unremarked writer he is often assumed as being. Venus and Adonis itself became almost a byword for poetry itself. In Peek’s Merry Conceited Jests the tapster of the inn at Pie Corner was “much given to poetry, for he had ingrossed the Knight of the Sunne, Venus and Adonis , and other pamphlets.” It was called “the best book in the world,” 9and a play of 1608, The Dumb Knight , has the following dialogue. “I pray you, sir, what book do you read?” “A book that never an orator’s clerk in this kingdom but is beholden unto; it is called, Maid’s Philosophy, or Venus and Adonis”. We may say, with some certainty, that Shakespeare now was one of the most famous poets in the country. He was not the faceless man in the crowd, or the unnoticed stranger in a corner of the inn.

Shakespeare and Southampton could have met in, or through, the playhouse. Southampton became a regular attender of plays. Indeed it seems to have been his principal London recreation. There were other connections. In the year after the publication of Venus and Adonis Southampton’s mother, the Countess of Southampton, married Sir Thomas Heneage; Heneage was Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, and therefore responsible for arranging payment for the players at court. It is a tenuous connection, perhaps, but in the small and overcrowded world of the English court an interesting one.

The poet and the earl might also have met through the ministrations of Lord Strange; Southampton was an intimate friend of Lord Strange’s younger brother, who was himself an amateur playwright. What could be more natural than that the young earl should be introduced to the most promising author of the day? And one, too, whom he had seen act? Lord Strange and the Earl of Southampton were also part of that group of Catholic sympathisers which Lord Burghley suspected, and indeed Southampton was considered by many to be “the great hope of Catholic resistance.” 1Shakespeare was well adapted to such a group. The young earl was also, by a complicated set of circumstances, related by marriage to the Ardens of Stratford. Shakespeare could therefore have claimed a further connection. It is also intriguing to note that Southampton’s erstwhile spiritual adviser, the poet and Jesuit Robert Southwell, was also related to the Arden family. It has plausibly been suggested that Shakespeare read, and copied from, some of Southwell’s poetry. A poem by Southwell, “Saint Peter’s Complaint,” was preceded by an epistle “To my worthy good cousin, Master W.S” from “Your loving cousin, R.S.” There are affinities and unwritten alliances that are now largely hidden from view.

There is also a possibility that they met through the agency of Southampton’s tutor in French and Italian, John Florio. Florio, born in London, was the child of Protestant refugees out of Italy. He was an excellent linguist, a capable scholar, and a somewhat censorious lover of the drama; he professed that he was living in a “stirring time, and pregnant prime of inuention when euerie bramble is fruitefull.” 2This “stirring time” was Shakespeare’s time. Florio also translated Montaigne into English, and in that work provided phrases and allusions for King Lear and The Tempest . Now all but forgotten, Florio was a contemporary of great significance to Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare’s comedies of this period are Italianate in setting, if not in sentiment, and their atmosphere can plausibly be attributed to the influence of Florio upon the dramatist eleven years his junior. There are occasions when Shakespeare seems to evince so specific a knowledge of Italy that it is believed by some that he must have travelled to that country in his youthful days. But, again, the presence of Florio may account for that knowledge. Florio helped other dramatists also. In the preliminaries to his Volpone , set in Venice, Ben Jonson wrote an autograph dedication to Florio “the ayde of his Muses.” Florio also possessed a great library, filled with Italian books. We need look no further for the Italian sources that have been identified in Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare borrowed many phrases and images from Florio’s Italian dictionary, A World of Words- ” it were labour lost to speak of love,” Florio writes – and he may have composed an introductory sonnet to Florio’s Second Frutes , published in 1591. Florio is one of those somewhat elusive figures who appear from time to time in Shakespeare’s biography, whose significance is out of all proportion to their visibility.