Shakespeare

There is one other piece of literature that emerged in 1601. Attached to a volume celebrating “the love and merit of the true-noble knight, Sir John Salisburie” were sets of verses written by “the beste and chiefest of our moderne writers.” Sir John Salisbury had been knighted in the summer of 1601 for his services in helping to suppress the Essex rebellion. Among these verses was Shakespeare’s poem now known as “The Phoenix and Turtle,” as complex and as riddling a piece of work as anything to be found in Hamlet. On a mundane level Shakespeare may have been happy to disassociate himself from the Essex episode, in which Richard II had been so unfortunately imbroiled. But it is also possible that the poem had originally been written in 1586 when Salisbury had married Ursula Stanley, half-sister to Lord Strange.

But the poem itself rises above its immediate circumstances. It is a threnody upon the indivisibility of lovers and the divine union of love:

Beautie, Truth, and Raritie,

Grace in all simplicitie,

Here enclosde, in cinders lie.

It has been treated as an allegorical work or, in more modern terms, as an exercise in “pure” poetry rising unbidden and entire from the depths of Shakespeare’s being, a pearl of great price fashioned instinctively by experience and suffering. In its riddling complexity it bears more than a passing resemblance to the contemporaneous poetry of John Donne. Although Shakespeare sometimes seems more inclined to poetical miscellanies and ancient English ballads, there is no reason why he should not have heard or read Donne’s poetry in manuscript. Donne was known to the Countess of Pembroke. He had been a member of Lincoln’s Inn and had also served with the Earl of Essex; he can be said to have moved in the same London circles as Shakespeare himself. This was also the milieu in which Donne’s poems were circulating in manuscript, and there seem to be echoes of his work both in King Lear and in Two Noble Kinsmen. There are connections between the personages of Shakespeare’s world that are now lost to view.

CHAPTER 72. I Am (Quoth He) Expected of My friends

After the death of his father Shakespeare’s visits to Stratford, in order to see his widowed mother as well as his wife and family, are likely to have become more frequent. It was a slow process of readjustment, or reorientation, that would finally result in his living for long periods of time in his home town. It represents the return of the native, one of the most characteristic passages of human experience. In his later plays, too, Shakespeare celebrates the reunification of families and the reconciliation of old differences. There is one other additional fact to add to this homecoming, which is to be found in Oxford.

The association with Shakespeare and Oxford is not well understood- there are somewhat implausible suggestions that he used the Bodleian Library that was established in 1602-but it is clear enough that he habitually stopped at Oxford on his journeys between London and Stratford. We know this from three separate sources. One was a diary kept by an Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, in which he states that Shakespeare “always spent some time at the Crown tavern in Oxford kept by one Davenant.” Thirty years later Alexander Pope, who could not have known of Hearne’s diary, has the same story to the effect that

Shakespeare often baited at the Crown Inn or Tavern in Oxford, in his journey to and from London. The landlady was a woman of great beauty and sprightly wit; and her husband, Mr. John Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city) a grave melancholy man, who as well as his wife used much to delight in Shakespeare’s pleasant company.¹

Aubrey completes the story with the note that “Shakespeare did comonly in his journey lye at this house in Oxon: where he was exceedingly respected.”²

John and Jennet Davenant were a London couple – Davenant was a wine-importer living in Maiden Lane – who had somehow become acquainted with Shakespeare. One contemporary stated that Davenant was “an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare.” ³ In 1601, after six of their children had died at birth or in early infancy, they decided to move to the healthier atmosphere of Oxford. Here they managed a tavern, then known simply as the Tavern, a four-storeyed building on the east side of Cornmarket. It was not an inn, which could take in travellers, but a place for convivial drinking. If Shakespeare did indeed stay with the Davenants, as seems very likely, he would have done so as a guest rather than a customer. The air seems to have been beneficial, and the Davenants acquired a family of seven healthy children. Their first-born son, Robert, recalls Shakespeare covering him with “a hundred kisses.” ⁴ Their second son William, apparently named after Shakespeare and the dramatist’s godson, has left a more equivocal story.