Shakespeare

It is also the mark of his powerful presence, and authority, that he is utterly and uniquely “Shakespearian” in all of the themes and moods inherent within the sonnets. This may sound like the merest commonplace, but it is a phenomenon worthy of contemplation. There is no other writer quite with his consistent and continuing identity through comedy and tragedy, verse and prose, romance and history. He plagiarises himself; he parodies himself. His plangent words in the sonnets on love and obsession echo those of Richard II immured in prison; whenever Shakespeare is inclined towards meditation, he reverts to the idiom of that player-king. There are so many echoes of Twelfth Night in the sonnets that the strident figure of the man/woman Viola might almost be considered to be the master/mistress of the sequence.

There is a phrase in the 121st sonnet, the words of which echo through his plays, “I am that I am.” It is of course a repetition of God’s words to Moses on Mount Horeb. But the phrase may also be compared to Iago’s remark that “I am not what I am.” Shakespeare is both everything and nothing. He is many and yet no one. It might almost be a definition of the creative principle itself, which is essentially a principle of organisation without values or ideals. Virginia Woolf described Shakespeare as “serenely absent-present”¹ and that strange counterpoise seems to summarise the evanescent yet ubiquitous shape of his genius in his works. His presence is conspicuous by its absence. He had an excess of selflessness, a negative so deep that it became a positive. This may have been at first a matter of instinct, or of vital necessity, but at some point it became part of a deliberate pattern.

There is, therefore, the mystery of his invisibility, his self-effacement and self-depreciation. We may plausibly imagine that he accommodated himself to every situation and to every person whom he encountered. He had no “morality” in the conventional sense, since morals are determined by dislike and antipathy. There is nothing of personal vanity or personal eccentricity about him.

In his sonnets, too, there is the occasional element of self-abasement and even self-disgust. It is the key to part of the meaning of the sequence. Knowing himself guilty, he was drawn to those who would hurt him. And then, baffled by that injury (even if it were only indifference), he seeks solace in thought. For most of his life he was Shakespeare the player rather than Shakespeare the gentleman, and the taint of the public theatre never completely left him. In the 110th sonnet the narrator regrets that he has “made my selfe a motley to the view,” and in the following sonnet he laments “that my name receiues a brand” from the element in which he works. There are many critics who have therefore detected in Shakespeare a revulsion from the stage and a distaste for the business of writing, and acting in, plays. One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theatre. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative.

This is particularly true of his later plays. How much this was a commonplace of the age, and how much a reflection of Shakespeare’s true attitude, is difficult to discern. It may have been a piece of rhythmic grumbling, not to be taken very seriously. If we assume it to be genuine, it is one of the indications of his divided self. If he felt scorn, he felt at the same time what it was to be scorned.

The poems to his “black mistress” contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama. There is a hint of homosexual passion in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello and elsewhere – a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also the veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the “Dark Lady.” Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo. The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick, energetic, ambiguous, amoral. From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms. He outrivals Chaucer and the eighteenth century novelists in his command of smut and bawdry. He is the most salacious of all the Elizabethan dramatists, in an area where there was already stiff competition. There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang.² There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina, among them “ruff,” “scut,” “crack,” “lock,” “salmon’s tail” and “clack dish.” There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery and fellatio. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Armado declares that he allows his royal master “with his royall finger thus” to “dallie with my excrement” (1700).