Shakespeare

It was not at all unusual for young writers to be pressed into the service of noblemen. Thomas Kyd had for a while become secretary to the Earl of Sussex; Lyly had been secretary to the Earl of Oxford, and Spenser had been in similar employment with the Bishop of Rochester. In fact at a later date Southampton enlisted the poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood into his household in precisely that role. Shakespeare’s own employment is an un-provable hypothesis, but it does no violence to the chronology or to Shakespeare’s known expertise in matters of composition and handwriting. He would have made an excellent secretary.

It is a matter of historical record that, at a dinner in Oxford in 1593, Southampton sat with the four principal patrons of the English theatre – the Earl of Essex, Lord Strange, the Earl of Pembroke and the Lord Admiral Howard. No account of Elizabethan society, or the Elizabethan theatre, can omit this almost claustrophobic sense of belonging. That claustrophobia, or closeness of association, is echoed in a play that Shakespeare wrote during this period. Love’s Labour’s Lost is something of a puzzle. It seems in part to be a satire on some of Shakespeare’s more notable contemporaries, and is so highly allusive and ironic that it hardly seems designed for the public playhouses. It has sometimes been assumed that it was commissioned in some sense by Southampton, and there has even been speculation that it was first performed in Southampton House or at Titchfield. In a ground-plan for Titchfield House there is an upstairs chamber designated as the “Playhouse Room,” just to the left of the main entrance.

With its cast of young noblemen and noble ladies, its affected pedants and its schoolmasters, its nimble wits and its dunces, it has been variously interpreted as a playful satire upon Southampton and his circle, upon Lord Strange and his supporters, upon Thomas Nashe, upon John Florio, upon Sir Walter Raleigh and the notorious “school of night.” There are references to a thundering rival poet, George Chapman, and to other Elizabethan notables who are now less well known than the characters in the play. And it may indeed refer to all of them. But if it is so densely allusive a play, then it could really only have been intended for a very knowing audience. Shakespeare even went back to the work of John Lyly, the court dramatist par excellence, for the tone and structure of his play. He was also thinking of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil and Stella. This was the courtly and noble milieu in which his mind and imagination were working. It was played before Queen Elizabeth in 1597, and Southampton staged it for the royal family of King James I at Southampton House eight years later. Southampton had a particular, and perhaps proprietorial, interest in the play. Yet it was not only a coterie drama. It was also performed at a public theatre, and there is a poem of 1598 which begins:

LOVES LABOR LOST, I once did see a Play

Yclepéd [called] so …