Shakespeare

But Shakespeare seems primarily to have borrowed from himself. He was a self-plagiarist who reused phrases, scenes and situations. The phrase “go to thy cold bed and warm thee” occurs in both The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear , it is a small example, but it is indicative of how a particular set of words was retained in his memory over many years. In his late plays he can sometimes revert to an earlier style, as if all stages of his growth were still within him. He will use the same scenario – that, for example, of a father reading the purloined letter of a son – again and again. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona there are anticipations of scenes and events in Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and As You Like It . There are also many scenic and structural parallels between the plays; there are strong resemblances between As You Like It and King Lear , for example, as well as between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest . That was how his imagination worked. It took on archetypal forms. In the process of imitating himself, however, he also revises himself; he knew by instinct what was worthy to be preserved, so that there is a continuing process of self-distillation.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men began performing in June 1594, but before that date Shakespeare had completed his second long narrative poem. The Rape of Lucrece may have been written at Titchfield, while the writer was working under the auspices of the Earl of Southampton, and it is in any case dedicated to the young earl in effusive terms. “The loue I dedicate to your Lordship,” Shakespeare writes, “is without end.” He goes on to claim that “what I haue done is yours, what I haue to doe is yours, being part in all I haue, deuoted yours.” What he had “done” was to compose a poem on the rape of Lucrece, the wife of Collatine, by Sextus Tarquinius. The mythical event is dated 509 BC, and has been used as an explanation for the rise of the Roman Republic. Shakespeare obtained his theme from the Fasti of Ovid and from the Roman history of Livy. They were standard grammar-school texts with which he was well acquainted. There is no direct copying of Ovid’s Latin, however. He takes the plot but not the poetry. This suggests one method by which he worked. He took up a copy of the Fasti , read it quickly, and then put it down without further reference to it. He needed only the raw materials to excite his imagination.

The history is not, however, what interests the poet. Shakespeare is concerned with the play of feeling between the two protagonists, as Tarquin prepares himself to rape the lady and then, after the deed, slinks away. The poem is chiefly remarkable for Lucrece’s sorrowful meditations after the event, in the course of which she determines to kill herself in front of her husband. The energy and fluency of Shakespeare’s verse are again immediately apparent. The poem, like his drama, begins in medias res with a rushing speed and it maintains its dramatic momentum throughout. He even introduces the word “Actor” into the proceedings. Shakespeare renders everything instinct with palpitating life. The Rape of Lucrece is extravagant in diction, elaborate in cadence, filled with paradoxes and oppositions, epithets and exclamations, conceits and images; it has a vaunting rhythm and an arresting rhyme-scheme. It is, in other words, a high-spirited performance in which Shakespeare displays all of his excitement and eloquence. Once more the pleasure of the reader is equalled only by the pleasure of the writer.

The general movement of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse can be characterised as one from formal regularity to irregularity. Rhymes, for example, become much less common. In his later plays, too, he pitches the natural stress of English speech against the melodious form of the iambic pentameter; he introduces parentheses, exclamations and “run on” lines that continue the cadence past its usual conclusion. He will also complete a sentence in the middle of the line, with a caesura, thus imitating the more irregular and disjunctive passages of thought and expression within his characters. There has been traced a characteristic curve in Shakespeare’s composition, a rhythmic evolution that reflects the unceasing development of the music of his being. As Pasternak observed, “rhythm is the basis of Shakespeare’s texts”; 1he composed, and imagined, in cadences; his head was filled with cadences, waiting to be born.

The Rape of Lucrece can also be seen as a mine of gold for Shakespeare’s later dramas; he becomes fascinated by the idea of the unquiet conscience and by the murder of innocence. The poem may also be the forerunner of murders in the bed, among them those of Duncan and Desdemona. The musings of Tarquin, the rapist, might almost be read as the inner history of Richard III for which there is no space on the stage. It is the procedure of the great writer – Shakespeare knew what interested him, and what preoccupied him, only after he had written it down.

The dedication of Lucrece may solve a problem concerning Shakespeare’s financial status at this time. Where did he obtain the £50 that was needed as his premium to become a “sharer” in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men? Much of his income must by now have travelled back to Stratford in order to support a wife and young family. It may be that the fee was waived on the understanding that he would write a certain number of plays each year; he may have bequeathed to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men the ownership of the plays he had already written. Or he may have been lent or given the money. There is a report by Nicholas Rowe that “my Lord Southampton, at one time, gave him a thousand Pounds, to enable him to go through with a Purchase which he heard he had a mind to.” Rowe had acquired the story from one “who was probably very well acquainted with his Affairs.” 2Southampton was notably generous, but the sum seems extravagant even by his profligate standards. There is no indication that Shakespeare ever possessed, or invested, so large an amount of money at any one time. In fact “a thousand pounds” is a conventionally hyperbolic expression used by Shakespeare himself; it is the sum Falstaff believes that he will receive after Hal’s coronation. We may conjecture a figure nearer £50 or £100. The young earl may have rewarded the author of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis with this more modest sum.

There is another intriguing connection between The Rape of Lucrece and a noble family. It has been suggested that the poem was conceived and written under the auspices – or at least under the influence – of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. 3She was the sister of Sir Philip Sidney, and had in direct tribute cultivated her brother’s own literary ideals within her circle. She completed his poetic rendering of the psalms, and was herself a notable translator. She had also created an informal network of literary patronage, and under her direction three neo-classical tragedies were written or translated from the French. Mary Herbert herself translated one of them. Each of these tragedies concentrated upon the sufferings of noble heroines, among them Cleopatra and Cornelia, and in deference to Mary Herbert takes an almost “feminist” reading of women betrayed by a hostile male world. The Rape of Lucrece is very much part of this tradition. It is not otherwise clear why Shakespeare would have chosen such an apparently unpromising subject. Samuel Daniel wrote a poem, The Complaint of Rosamond , and dedicated it to the Countess of Pembroke; this poem also expresses the sorrows of a suffering woman. Shakespeare borrowed Daniel’s rhyme-royal stanza for his own narrative. In the same fashion the dramatic eloquence of Shakespeare’s poem also aligns it with the neo-classical tragedies that were part of Mary Herbert’s literary circle. So the connections are there. It should be recalled that Shakespeare was for a period a member of Pembroke’s Men, and it is known that Mary Herbert took a personal interest in the players. One of the actors named her as a trustee in his will. The association lends further significance to Shakespeare’s early sonnets, which may have been commissioned by Mary Herbert.