This week, we jump right into the deep end of Shakespeare's poetry with his lengthy (and sexy) dedications to the Earl of Southhampton. But first, a brief and entirely interesting foray into handwriting history and a moving argument for mercy that came as a timely and happy surprise.
SIR THOMAS MORE (The additions ascribed to Shakespeare)
Shakespeare actually had very little to contribute to this little-known play, but our playwright's literal hand in it is way more fascinating than the play itself. Turns out, a few pages of an original manuscript from a few scenes was found in 1844, and in 1871, Richard Simpson came to the conclusion that some passages were written by the Bard himself. Considering that up to that point, the only known handwriting samples we had were half a dozen signatures from Shakespeare's personal legal documents, this was a big friggen deal.
The documents found are comprised of a heavily revised script for the play, in which six different handwriting styles are distinct. "Hand D" is agreed to be very possibly Shakespeare's own. The pages are known as "foul papers" ("working drafts" as opposed to "fair copies" of finished drafts meant for the typesetters to use). They are written in a specific style of script called Secretary Hand, which was a popular style in Elizabethan times. It's difficult to decipher because it's fairly removed from our now more popular Italic scripts (the "cursive" we all learned in elementary school... and by "we" I mean people Gen Oregon Trail or older). It also has a number of contractions for now archaic words and terms that I can only imagine are akin to how we use "ain't" today--almost wholly unknown in writing to non-English speakers.
Luckily, the Riverside contains a side-by-side comparison of the transcribed papers to modern spelling. To make things even more opaque, Shakespeare had an "idiosyncratic" and inconsistent way of spelling things, but once you study it a bit, you kinda get used to the conventions. Thank goodness for the extensive footnotes. The Riverside also contains some scans of the original sheets of folios for curious perusal, and boy, was I curious.
As far as the scene's content, it's Sir Thomas More (of Henry VIII fame) trying to calm a riot down by shaming the commoners for their ethnocentric hatred toward refugees and foreigners. It's as relevant today as any plea toward kindness, and gives everyone food for thought in my country of immigrants:
The Book of Sir Thomas More, Act 2, Scene 4
Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England; Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silent by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed; What had you got? I’ll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled; and by this pattern Not one of you should live an aged man, For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With self same hand, self reasons, and self right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another….
Say now the king... Should so much come too short of your great trespass As but to banish you, whither would you go? What country, by the nature of your error, Should give you harbour? go you to France or Flanders, To any German province, to Spain or Portugal, Nay, any where that not adheres to England, Why, you must needs be strangers: would you be pleased To find a nation of such barbarous temper, That, breaking out in hideous violence, Would not afford you an abode on earth, Whet their detested knives against your throats, Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God Owed not nor made not you, nor that the claimants Were not all appropriate to your comforts, But chartered unto them, what would you think To be thus used? this is the strangers case; And this your mountainish inhumanity.
Wise words echo 400 years later, proposing that we put ourselves in others' shoes for once, and empathize with the stranger (as the Bible always says but people seem to ignore because they only care about abortion or homosexuals to do anything about the needy or disenfranchised like Jesus actually did). Even in a tiny passage that surfaced through the ages, Shakespeare was taking us to church.
(Be sure to read about this speech and hear Sir Ian McKellen deliver it.)
VENUS & ADONIS
There’s controversy (when isn’t there controversy?) about whether this poem is meant to be a serious-ass missive to Shakespeare’s aspirational mancrush the Earl of Southampton, a philosophical and moral plea to its readers, or an ironic entertainment in the style of Italianate erotic romances, as were all the rage at the turn of the sixteenth century. Given that only one copy exists solely because people read this poem to tatters, I’m falling on the side of IT’S HILARIOUS with sexy bits of beauty folded into it and everyone ate that shit up. It hit sixteen editions before 1640, and all we have is one stinkin’ copy? Unless everyone was using it for privy paper, I'm assuming it was a hit with the masses.
During his life, Shakespeare was primarily famous for publishing this early piece of work in 1593. It was written during one of the many occasions in Shakespeare's time when everything was closed to PLAGUE (King Lear was just one of many things he worked on during one of these lockdowns). It was the first thing he ever printed (thus his claim in the opening epistle that it was “first heire of my inuention”) and it was twice as popular as his most successful play, Henry IV Part I.
It’s based on everyone’s favorite old chestnut from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the goddess Venus spots the thirst-trap young Adonis and throws herself at him, but he spurns her entirely, with ridiculous results. There are plenty of flowery phrasings to be had, and though nowhere near as good as Shakespeare’s later work, it can be condensed into an entertaining slapstick one-act.
Adonis is hunting—his favorite thing in the world—and Venus fawns over him for several stanzas. He teases her but refuses to give in to her beauty even though she brags that even Mars, the God of War, dropped everything to be ravished by her. She attempts to persuade him that his duty to humanity is to procreate, but he only wants to hunt. He says he needs to leave before the sun gets too high; he wants to avoid being sunburnt. To her dismay, the only thing he wants to mount is his horse. But just as he does, a mare in heat shows up and his horse gallops off to mate with her, leaving Adonis to fall on his ass. Venus smugly walks up to him saying “I told you so” and that he should take a lesson from his horny horse and just give in to sexual desire already. She goes on about her adoration some more, and then pretends to faint. He tries to slap her awake and then kisses her. She revives and clutches him to her bosom and kisses him so hard he just lays back and thinks of England as she has her way with him.
Even though she’s still not satisfied, she lets him go for the night. But when he says he’s going hunting for boar with his buddies the next day, she freaks right out, afraid he will get stabbed and die. She tries to rouse him for another quickie but he’s so done and it is night and he’s late for his stag do with his bros. She cites every possible reason why boars are super dangerous and she won’t let him go until his dense brain acknowledges how he’s safer making love to her, but no dice. She brings up procreation again, and he interrupts, saying he’s sleepy as hell. He drops some actual wisdom (a stopped clock is right twice a day, amiright?) about how he is too young but he knows she is in lust, not love, so he scampers off into the night.
Venus cries in the darkness, but as soon as the sun rises, she gets up and goes searching for him, following the sound of hunters’ horns and hounds. She surmises from their barking that the party has caught their boar but it is not dead yet, and Adonis is now in the most danger. She sees the boar, snout covered in blood, and she fears the worst. She encounters the hounds, all licking their wounds. She rails against Death for taking her Adonis, but then as soon as she hears what she thinks is his voice, she takes it all back. She finds Adonis’ gored body and she basically dies inside. She speaks elegiac words over him about how nature itself loved him so much that birds would bring him berries, so the boar could not have wished him dead, but only to kiss him, and if she had tusks, she would have accidentally killed him herself.
Due to this horror, she declares that love will always be accompanied by jealousy and sorrow and cause all kinds of evils in the world, and this is her vengeance on all those who dare to love. Adonis melts into the ground and becomes a purple-and-white-checked flower. She plucks it to wear between her breasts forever and smell his lovely perfume, then heads home to lock herself up from the world.
This whole thing smacks of a youthful genius who hasn't quite gotten the hang of their own voice, but nonetheless, it is full of memorable snippets like this:
Fondling,' she saith, 'since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough, Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain, Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough, To shelter thee from tempest and from rain Then be my deer, since I am such a park; No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark
Ohhhh that is hot and heavy, boyo. No wonder people read this to shreds in the loo.
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
This one, published a mere thirteen months after V&A, provides the "graver labour" Shakespeare promised to his buddy the Earl in the intro to the last poem. It celebrates a woman's chastity instead of her wonton animalistic desires. It went through six editions while William was still above ground, sticking to the "complaint poem" style that was all the rage at the time. Just as we find morbid entertainment in subjecting ourselves to nine hours of The Vow (and subsequently cheering when Keith Raniere was sentenced to 120 years), Elizabethans loved to read about a woman's detailed victim statement re: her own "ravyshement."
The opening note to the Earl is even more fawning than the last, what with "my love I dedicate to your Lorship is without end" and all that. Scholar Tucker Brooke attests that "There is no other Elizabethan dedication like this." Ohh, William, you might have showed your hand there, my friend.
Shakespeare chose another well-known story from Roman history and Ovid and decided to begin in medias res, jumping right to the action scene. He gives the backstory, titled "The Argument" aka a poetic "dumb show" that presents the basic plot: Collatinus brags in front of his army buddies and the Prince Tarquinius that he has the most loyal wife ever, he wins a bet that his wife is the only one who is not out carousing about town, Tarquin sees Lucretia and must have her, sneaks off, gets invited in by Lucretia, sneaks into her bedroom, rapes her, runs off, Lucretia tells everyone the next morning, promptly stabs herself out of shame and that's how Rome started being ruled by consuls and not kings anymore.
The poem begins with Tarquin sneaking over to Collatinus' house, where Lucretia, none the wiser, thinks he is a friend and serves him dinner. They talk into the night and decide to retire. Tarquin debates with himself a bit about all his lustful feelings but his penis does all the thinking and he tiptoes through the house to enter her bedroom. He stares at her, mentally fawning over how hot she looks, how perfectly untouched she is, then he grabs her breast, wakes her, and threatens her with death and shame if she resists his attack. She eloquently pleads with him not to commit this heinous deed, appealing to the friendship he has with her husband, how she treated him well. Also, why be the monarch that everyone only respects out of fear? And surely, if you look at yourself as you do others, would you not condone this behavior?
He says STFU, now I'm even more horny. He puts out the lamp and wraps her face in bed linens and takes what he wants, *insert serval stanzas about how Chastity is pure and Lust only becomes poorer when acted upon* and then he slinks out into the night despite being enervated from his efforts. She does not wish to see the light of day, where all her stains will be seen, but she yet curses the night for being so horrible. She tells herself that everyone will know her tale and Tarquin's terrible name. Sad that her husband will bear the burden of this shame, she blames herself (NOOO!) for letting Tarquin into the house. But it was Tarquin who lied to her with some conceit as to why Collatinus sent him there, that asshole!
Lucretia goes on for dozens of stanzas about how there is so much injustice and evil and entropy lurking around everything that is perfect and beautiful in this world. She moves on to wish bad luck to those men who fuck shit up and live to regret their wrongs, especially the mightiest men whose offenses are made scandalous by their high office in life. She gets up to grab a knife, finding it ironic that she didn't want to die by his falchion but is fine with stabbing herself (yeah, girl, carrying the shame for being raped has never been a fair game). She promises her husband will never be "father" to Tarquin's rape-baby nor will she poison him with her tainted "well" (like UGH fuck the patriarchy). She reasons that her body being ruined leaves her soul to wither, so there's no point in living. But she will at least relay her story to her husband before she departs this world because fuck it, Tarquin needs to go down.
Lucretia calls her maid and the girl reads sorrow in her looks. She says she's been through hell and they need to summon her husband, so she asks for paper and ink so she can send a letter by messenger. As she's giving the letter to the messenger, she feels as if her "blemish" is plainly visible to him (and everyone). Meanwhile, as she waits for a response, she mulls over a particularly detailed painting that depicts some business surrounding the siege of Troy. Her thoughts land on Hecuba and her distress over Priam's death. She blames lusty Paris for stealing Helen and starting the war and causing so many people trouble over his dumbass decision. She scratches at the image of Sinon, for he betrayed Priam the same as Tarquin betrayed her.
Collatinus arrives and she can barely speak her woe at first, but she slowly and sadly goes about the task of telling it. She asks how she can make this right, but he has no words, he's so distraught. She says she will tell them who has raped her if they take revenge and she reveals that it was Tarquin. At that very moment, she pulls out a knife and stabs herself. Collatinus and his men all stand aghast as her father throws himself upon her body, saying he cannot live if she is dead. Collatinus comes out of his catatonic state and similarly "bathes" in her blood, grieving for his wife. They both vie for "best mourner" until Brutus, Collatinus' buddy, shakes Collatinus out of his madness and urges him to get up and go kill Tarquin post-haste and parade Lucretia's body around Rome to show everyone how Tarquin is a total shit and must needs be banished forever. The END.
Alrighty then, that was fun. Next week, a mixed bag of more poems, and then we finally get to the motherlode of SONNETS. I've got an entire book to read and entire app to peruse, complete with videotaped readings of each one, so I'm poised to understand the shit out of them!
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