Shakespeare

He also added some sonnets at a late stage, and cancelled others, shaping them all into some semblance of dramatic unity. There is evidence of revision, in at least four of the sonnets, which was undertaken later with the purpose of unifying the sequence. There is also a confluence of what scholars called “early rare words” and “early late words”; this mixture suggests that Shakespeare first worked on the sonnets in the early and mid-1590s and then went back to them for the purposes of revision in the early seventeenth century. Other sonnets seem to have been added at intervals between those dates. This intermittent composition also throws doubt upon the presence of any coherent story of love and betrayal within the sequence.

In the first publication of 1609 the sonnets were followed by a longer poem, “A Lover’s Complaint”; that was also standard procedure in the style of Spenser’s Amoretti and Daniel’s Delia. The whole exercise was perhaps for him a way of asserting his worth as a poet. The question that has exercised scholars for many generations – are these ventures in dramatic rhetoric or are they impassioned messages to a lover? – becomes therefore unanswerable. And that is perhaps what is most significant. Wherever we look in Shakespeare’s work, we see the impossibility of assigning purpose or unassailable meaning.

This of course flies in the face of those who have looked for parallels in Shakespeare’s private life for the characters in the poems. The references to a rival poet, claiming the favour of the young man, have been interpreted as allusions to Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Barnaby Barnes, George Chapman and assorted other versifiers. The “lovely Boy” and object of the poet’s passion has been identified with the earl of Southampton. In the late sixteenth century, however, the impropriety of addressing a young earl in that manner would have been quite apparent; to accuse him of dissoluteness and infidelity, as Shakespeare accuses the unnamed recipient, would have been unthinkable. The “Dark Lady” has been variously identified as Mary Fitton, Emilia Lanier, and a black prostitute from Turnmill Street in Clerken-well. Elaborate stories have been written, therefore, about Emilia Lanier abandoning Shakespeare for a passionate affair with Southampton; the suggestion has been made that the whole experience of loss was then darkened by the threat of contracting venereal disease from this faithless woman. It is very dramatic, but it is not art. It seems to have been forgotten by these clandestine biographers that one of the conventions of the sonnet sequence consisted in the poet magnanimously awarding his mistress to his close friend. Shakespeare was following the tradition in his own explosive way. The fact that the collection was greeted with almost universal silence on its publication in 1609 suggests that there was no inkling of controversy or private scandal connected with it; it is, in fact, likely that the audience of the day found the poems slightly old-fashioned.

Emilia Lanier was certainly well known to Shakespeare. She was the young mistress of Lord Hunsdon who had been the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and was also related to Robert Johnson, a musician who collaborated with the dramatist on several occasions. She was a poet, too, who at a later date dedicated one of her volumes to the Countess of Pembroke. Born Emilia Bassano, she was the illegitimate daughter of Baptist Bassano, one of a Jewish family from Venice who had become the court musicians. He had died early and, in her youth, Emilia had become the ward of the Countess of Kent before attending court where she “had been favoured much of Her Majesty and many noblemen.” Among those noblemen was the old Lord Hunsdon, fifty years her senior; but, when she became pregnant, she was married off “for colour” to a “minstrel”⁷ named Alphonse Lanier.

Members of the Bassano family accompanied the performances of Shakespeare’s plays in the royal palaces. They were dark-skinned Venetians, and some of Emilia’s relatives were described as “black men.” It may not be entirely coincidental, therefore, that Shakespeare wrote a play about a Jewish family in Venice and that one of the central characters is named as Bassanio. Here we may remark upon Shakespeare’s manner of invention. Baptist Bassano is split into two. He becomes Shylock, the Venetian Jewish merchant, and also the Venetian Bassanio. Shakespeare loved the process of self-division. There may of course be some association, too, with Othello, also set in Venice. And there is the connection already noted with Rosaline of Love’s Labour’s Lost who is described as being “black as ebony.”