ON 28 JULY 1597, in the middle of all the traumas in the poet’s private life, London theatres were closed by the authorities and remained dark until October. Pressure on the players had been exacerbated by a scandal over a seditious play, The Isle of Dogs, whose authors, including Ben Jonson, found themselves in jail, face to face with the psychopathic Topcliffe and the sinister Poley. Perhaps this is the time alluded to in Sonnet 66 when Shakespeare speaks of his art being ‘tongue-tied by authority’. In August his company began a long tour from Kent to Bristol, perhaps the context of the miserable journeys Shakespeare describes in the sonnets, lamenting his separation from the boy. At any rate, one might guess that it was at this time that he wrote a number of private poems, seeking temporary consolation for his various griefs.
People do strange things at such times: some live for the moment; for others, certainties are shaken; marriages can break up, and even religious people can feel that life is meaningless. The sonnets are in part self-analysis in response to just this kind of emotional upheaval. And now, married for nearly fifteen years and living apart from his forty-year-old wife, Shakespeare writes about a love affair with a married woman, which has left him wounded and exposed; all the more galling for a man who, as he has admitted, was so reticent about his inner life. And where his feelings for the boy were of passionate love, although apparently not physically consummated, the affair with the woman was a sexual passion. It is time to look at the third character in the triangle of the sonnets: the enigmatic Dark Lady.
It might be thought inevitable that a man who had lived apart from his wife for ten years would have affairs. The theatre is a sexy business with many pleasures and many temptations. Certainly the thought of those beautiful boy actors with their painted eyes, rustling in silk skirts, got Puritan preachers hot under the collar. The Elizabethans were very up-front about sex. For instance, when the astrologer and physician Simon Forman attended the State Opening of Parliament in 1597, and struck up a conversation with a gentlewoman serving at court, Joan Harrington, she went home and slept with him the same day. Women were part of the theatre audience: they too liked seeing boys as girls, and if they took a fancy to a leading actor, so be it. A law student’s diary from 1602 repeats a story, possibly apocryphal, that Shakespeare bamboozled Burbage out of a well-to-do groupie who wanted to bed the star lead. John Aubrey, on the other hand, says Shakespeare would not be ‘debauched’ (that is, go to brothels); and that, when asked to do so, ‘writ he was in pain’ (that is, said he was ill). And perhaps a practised womanizer is unlikely to have displayed the anguished reaction to infidelity expressed in the sonnets. From which it might appear that Shakespeare was in love.
Many of the first 126 sonnets appear to be to the young man. But some of those poems reveal that the young man is sleeping with the poet’s mistress. Then, starting with Sonnet 127, there is a sequence of poems to the woman herself. Their language is at times tender, at times misogynist and abusive. He complains that she has a ‘steel-bosom’, is disdainful, tyrannous and unkind; although, he admits:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare
The details he gives about her are few. Unconventionally beautiful, she has black hair and eyes and is very dark-complexioned. She is married. She has had other lovers, including lords. She is well known (‘the world knows’) and there are some hints that she is of higher social standing than Shakespeare. Sonnet 150 mysteriously suggests that there was something about her condition or status that had engaged his sympathy, that her ‘unworthiness aroused pity in me’. As for how the affair started, in Sonnet 134 he seems to say that he asked the young man ‘surety like to write for me’ – that is, to approach her as a proxy wooer, and that the woman had then pursued the young man, his friend, who ‘came debtor for my sake’. For this Shakespeare blames himself: ‘So him I lose through my unkind abuse’. In other words, he feels he has injured his friend by wrongfully using him as a go-between.
Shakespeare and the woman then begin a passionate sexual relationship. Her husband is evidently away, for on occasion the poet visits her at home, where he sees her playing the virginals. But he soon discovers that she is also sleeping with the young man. The poet says he loves her ‘dearly’, but bitterly regrets her power over him, which he sees as manipulative and controlling. He becomes a slave to her dominating personality, her beauty and her sexual power.
The so-called Dark Lady has proved a tempting pitfall to biographers, and some would think it unwise to read the sonnets so literally. But again, if we take them as a mainly private record of real events and emotions, however much reshaped as poetry for publication, then Shakespeare’s mistress must have been a real woman who moved in the societies of the theatre and the court, yet was in some way an outsider because of her colour and background. But who was she?
First, what does he mean by calling her black, a very complicated word in Elizabethan literature, where it can even be used as a euphemism for Catholic? Shakespeare explicitly says he is overturning literary convention (‘I have seen roses damasked, red and white/But no such roses see I in her cheeks’). His mistress, he says, does not conform to the sonneteers’ stereotype of a beautiful woman. In her face and her body (‘her breasts are dun’) she is ‘coloured ill’. This emphasis is so pronounced throughout the poems that it is difficult simply to dismiss it, as some have done, as a literary conceit. It suggests that, whatever her background, the woman was what an Elizabethan would have called a Moor. And if she was a dark-skinned musician, known in theatrical and noble circles, then the strong likelihood is that she was of Levantine or Italian origin, and most likely Venetian – the Bassanos and the Ferraboscos, the main musical families in Elizabethan London, were both from Venice.
The date of Shakespeare’s affair, as we have seen, is suggested by the appearance of two sonnets to the woman in the collection pirated in 1599; perhaps they were among the poems circulated among his ‘private’ friends the previous year. This again is supported by modern computer analysis of their vocabulary. Sonnets 127–54, the poems to the woman, include the very early marriage sonnet, 145; but their main period of composition is broadly in the late 1590s, with some revision through to 1603–4. Of course it is always possible that some were written earlier and have been reworked, but as it stands, the sequence comes from the late nineties. If the identification of the boy as William Herbert is correct, the affair most likely took place in the summer of 1597, when Shakespeare was thirty-three. This fits very well with verbal parallels with his plays of that time, and even perhaps with his allusion to his art being ‘tongue-tied by authority’, which suggests the period when the theatres were closed between July and October. This impression is reinforced by Shakespeare’s references to his own age, which are underscored even more than in the sonnets to the boy. As he says to the woman, ‘you know I am past my best’ (a feeling perhaps accentuated, if the Folio portrait is at all accurate, by his premature balding: Elizabethan men were vain about their hair). So these are the poems not of the man in his late twenties who knew Southampton, but of a man around Dante’s age when he wrote the Inferno: nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita – in the middle of our life’s road.
The affair with the Dark Lady troubled Shakespeare deeply and he says he lost his reason: in the poems to her, the linking of sex and guilt is particularly pronounced. This seems to be as characteristic of his personality as his obsession with aggression and violence. To judge by the way he depicts men’s and women’s relationships in his plays, Shakespeare believed in the ideal of fidelity and a spiritual dimension to human love. Such ideas were widely canvassed and debated at the time, as in John Case’s remarkable book on equality in Christian marriage. Shakespeare was a Bible-reading Christian, married at eighteen and possibly so far faithful – otherwise why should the affair have traumatized him so? His consuming sexual passion for a married woman fills him with guilt. He has broken his ‘bed vows’ to his wife Anne, as the other woman has to her husband. The sense of ageing with which the poems are shot through helps us understand their melancholy edge and self-flagellation. Shakespeare’s sexual jealousy has a subtext of his own physical decline and anxiety about his sexual performance.
A sensitive, imaginative and supremely intelligent man, Shakespeare lived in a patriarchal society that shaped him and his attitudes. Drawn to both men and women, he seems to have believed in the possibility of true friendship and companionship between men and women, an equality articulated many times in his plays, as in Emilia’s famous speech in Othello. In the greater intimacy of the sonnets, though, there are strong hints that he believes passionate friendship between men to be on a higher plane than their relationships with women. Shakespeare is drawn by the power of female sexuality, but at the same time threatened by it. And the disgust evident in his language has been seen by some critics – not all of them women – as misogynistic. This is perhaps where the scandal of the sonnets lay to an Elizabethan audience – not (as for early modern readers) in his love for the young man, but in the image of a powerful woman in sexual control.
From our perspective, the sonnets about the Dark Lady seem a classic male response to overwhelming grief: he throws himself into an all-consuming affair with a dangerous married woman, and in the poems this awakes all the old emotions and beliefs he was brought up with. Themes such as the corrupting power of lust on the soul, guilt and infidelity run through the later sonnets, which are all the more explicable if Shakespeare’s upbringing was Catholic:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner, but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, – and prov’d, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos’d; behind, a dream:
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
These were the sentiments of much Elizabethan poetry, religious or otherwise. Thomas Watson, for instance, wrote of love as a ‘bayt for soules’; for Robert Southwell ‘Beauty is a bayt that, swallowed, choakes … A light that eyes to murdring sightes provokes.’
It has been all too easy to see these sonnets as secular poems: in fact a strong religious sense pervades them, especially in those about lust and the soul, such as the almost medieval 146: ‘Poor soul the centre of my sinful earth’. But perhaps they also contain an element of parody: employing religious imagery for an obsessive sexual relationship might have caused offence to some contemporary religious readers, but it is typical of Shakespeare’s habit of situating himself between opposed thought worlds. In the end it is this that makes him such a modern mind, despite his roots in late medieval Christianity.
In several sonnets to the woman he puns on his own name and Herbert’s. For example, in 135 he plays on a proverb (‘Every woman will have her will’). Here Shakespeare’s manuscript perhaps instructed the printer to emphasize his compulsively-obsessively clever punning on the word ‘will’ (meaning what is wanted; mental resolve; shall; his own name; the boy’s name; and the male and female sex organs, as in ‘willy’ today). The spelling here is modernized, but the italics and capitalization may well be his:
Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,
And Will to boot, and Will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious.
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?
The sea, all water, yet receives rain still,
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in Will, add to thy Will
One will of mine to make thy large Will more.
Let no unkind no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one Will.
There is nothing else quite like this in the poetry of Shakespeare’s day: private, anguished, guilt-racked, obscene. Alongside his class anxiety are both spiritual anxiety and male anxiety about erections and ‘willies’. His self-view – as a man in a male-dominated society – and even his sexual potency are dependent on, and yet threatened by, her female power; and he hates himself for it.
These kinds of male anxieties are evident also in other writing of the time: particularly revealing in the context of the sonnets is the autobiography of the musician Thomas Whythorne. A private text not intended for publication, it contains many parallels, especially when describing the courtly world of musicians and artists in which men of Shakespeare’s background mixed with women of a higher class. Whythorne suggests we can see the sonnets, for all their literary artifice, as poems that began as private responses to a painful, confusing real-life situation.
The shy Whythorne was, like Shakespeare, a gentleman but not of high rank. This handsome, sensitive and talented musician, desperate in his affection at various times for a city widow, a courtly gentlewoman and a serving gentlewoman, reveals the heated atmosphere and erotic charge of the Elizabethan court and its artistic fringes. In Whythorne’s world, men and women write sonnets to each other as gambits in love, just as Shakespeare’s characters do. They read sonnets, send sonnets to each other and write them privately to get things off their chest.
Whythorne tells the tale of a married woman at court, of higher status, who falls in love with him. In a scene straight out of a Shakespeare play, she ‘caused a chest of mine to be removed out of the chamber where I was accustomed to lie … and to be brought into a chamber so nigh her own chamber as she might have come from one to the other when she list without any suspicion. This chamber I was then placed in Then one day she took occasion to come alone into my chamber to see the marks of my sheets ….’ (obviously, to see if he had a lover). But, says Whythorne, ‘I was thoroughly determined that whatsoever came of it I would by God’s grace never defile her wedlocked bed.’ One remembers Shakespeare’s remarks on breaking his own bed vows. Here and elsewhere Whythorne is writing of a real situation that asks us to see literature not just as artistic creation but as a response to real life.
His most graphic and interesting portrait is of the woman he loved most: a courtly woman who boasted of her power over men, how ‘by a frown she could make them go pale, and by a smile feel joy again’. This is Whythorne speaking of his own ‘Dark Woman’:
Having been sometime a courtier, and well experienced in the affairs of the world, with a great wit and a jolly, ready tongue to utter her fancy and mind, she took pleasure many times to talk and discourse of the things she had knowledge of by experience: as sometimes of religions, she would argue in matters of controversy in religion; sometimes of profane matters Sometimes she would touch upon the city, with the grades of the citizens, and not leave untouched the fineness of the delicate dames and the nice wives of the city. Sometimes she would talk of the Court, with the bravery and vanities thereof, and of the crouching and dissimulation, with the bazzios de los manos [hand kissing] that are there used by one courtier to another; and sometimes she would talk of the courting of ladies and gentlewomen by the gallants and cavaliers; and sometimes would talk pleasantly of the love that is made and used in all these places between men and women …
This world of ‘bravery and vanities’, one imagines, was precisely the world of Shakespeare’s proud mistress.
So who was she? The subject of poems, a well-known musical gentlewoman, the mistress of nobles, she moved on the fringes of high society with her two Wills, the one a nobleman, the other a writer and actor. Distinguished by her dark skin, according to the poet she was, in some unexplained way, perceived by the world to be ‘unworthy’. Despite many guesses, the identity of Shakespeare’s lover remains a mystery. But if the sonnets are autobiographical and she was a real person, we probably do not have far to look to find her in the very small world of theatrical and musical society in late 1590s’ London.
Just such a woman moved in Shakespeare’s circle at precisely that time. She first appears in the consultation books of Simon Forman in May 1597. A well-known ‘astrological’ physician, later mocked by Jonson in his play The Alchemist, Forman was highly sought after. Part doctor, part analyst and part soothsayer, his clientele was mainly lower-class but he also saw musicians, theatre people and aristocrats, and among his clients that year were the wives of Shakespeare’s colleagues Richard Burbage, Augustine Philips and Richard Cowley, Shakespeare’s printer Richard Field, Philip Henslowe, and even Shakespeare’s future landlady Mrs Mountjoy. Forman’s still largely unpublished notebooks give a wonderfully vivid portrait of the Elizabethan world: its ambition and class envy, its struggle for money and patronage, its medical knowledge and superstition, and the sexual habits of the time. The contents of the notebook that runs from May 1597 until the autumn of that year, probably the very period of the writing of the sonnets to the woman, are tantalizing.
On 17 May a courtly gentlewoman went to Forman’s house in Philpot Lane near London Bridge. Her name was Emilia Lanier and she was seeking advice about her husband’s prospects of advancement. Alfonso Lanier was from a French musical family, one of the queen’s musicians; but at this moment he was about to leave his wife for several months, to accompany the Earl of Essex on his expedition to the Azores to attack the Spanish treasure fleet on its return from South America.
Her small talk was of preferment, class and sex. Like many of Forman’s patients, Mrs Lanier wanted to know the future. Would her husband be promoted? On the 25th she came again and revealed much more about herself. She told Forman she was twenty-four (actually she was twenty-eight). She was the daughter of Baptista Bassano from Bishopsgate – a member of the famous family of royal musicians, who had come from Venice in Henry VIII’s day. Some years earlier she had been the mistress of the chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, who until his death the previous summer had been the patron of Shakespeare’s company. Hunsdon, she told Forman, ‘had loved her well and kept her and did maintain her long’. However, in the manner of the upper classes, when she became pregnant by him, she was married ‘for colour’ [for appearance’s sake] to Alfonso Lanier in October 1592. Whether she continued to be Hunsdon’s mistress is not clear. Evidently young Emilia Bassano had been well known at court; now she lived with her husband, her four-year-old son Henry and her servants near the court in Longditch, Westminster. In a first hint of her lingering bitterness about her treatment by the patriarchal system that ruled the court, Forman notes ‘it seemeth she had ill fortune in her youth’.
On 3 June Emilia returned with direct questions. Would her husband ‘have the suit’? She was hoping for social advancement (it soon becomes clear that she loved the aristocracy and pursued it with disarming frankness). She revealed she was about twelve weeks pregnant and was worried by pains in her left side: she had previously had miscarriages, she said, ‘many false conceptions’. Forman was intrigued by her. ‘She is high minded’ he jotted down in his notes. ‘She hath some thing in the mind she would have done for her. She can hardly keep secret. She was very brave in youth …’ ‘Brave’, also used by Whythorne of his courtly women, meant splendid, showy, finely dressed. In other words she was a striking woman, like those depicted in paintings of Elizabeth’s courtly festivities.
Mrs Lanier’s court connections were wide: her kinsmen, the Bassanos and Ferraboscos, were the most important musical families there. Forman recorded that ‘she hath been favoured much of her Majesty and of many noble men, and hath great gifts and been much made of. And a noble man that is dead hath loved her well and kept her and did maintain her long.’ To be ‘favoured of many noble men’ in that society meant she had taken them as lovers. Lord Hunsdon had been in his late sixties. For him a beautiful young mistress was a badge of power and masculinity – a trophy. At court, such women had semi-official status.
To be able to move in such a world Lanier must have been well educated and accomplished in poetry and music, as befitted a gentlewoman (she had probably been a ward in the household of Susan Bertie, Countess of Kent, a patroness of poetry, whom she later referred to as the ‘mistress of my youth, the noble guide of my ungoverned days’). From her late teens, Lanier had been part of the cult of youth at Elizabeth’s court, where the now ageing queen ‘danced six or seven galliards a morning, besides music and singing’ accompanied by talented young gentlewomen on the virginals. In this very sexualized atmosphere the beautiful young women of the court, like Lanier, cut quite a dash, as was described by Nashe in his famous pamphlet ‘Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem’ of 1593:
Gorgeous ladies of the Court … their eyes framed to move and bewitch [like] angels painted in church windows with glorious golden fronts beset with sunbeams … their breasts they embusk up on high, and their round roseate buds immodestly lay forth to show there is fruit to be hoped. They show the swellings of their mind in the swellings and plumpings out of their apparel ….
That’s what it meant to be ‘brave’. Many years later, living ‘clos’d up in Sorowes Cell’, Emilia would recall with exhilaration the thrilling power of her self-image in the days when ‘great Elizaes favour blest my youth’.
On 16 June she returned once more to Forman. By now her husband may have been preparing for the voyage – Essex’s fleet was due to depart on 10 July. Impecunious, desperately seeking advancement (‘in hope to be knighted’, she says), he had enrolled as one of Walter Ralegh’s gentleman volunteers. Now she wanted to know ‘whether her husband shall come to any preferment before he come again or no, and how he shall speed’. But she was not happy in her marriage. She told Forman she was receiving an annual pension of £40 from Hunsdon’s estate and possessed many jewels that he had given her, and had another allowance left to her by her father, but Alfonso had frittered it away. ‘Her husband has dealt hardly with her and spent and consumed her goods and she is now very needy and in debt.’ Gender and class antagonisms and anxieties are bubbling under the surface here. Forman, fascinated, cast another horoscope and made more notes (which are not always easy to follow, but the gist is clear): ‘She shall be a lady or attain to some great dignity. He shall speed well and be knighted hardly but get little substance. And the time shall come she shall rise two degrees. But hardly by this man. But it seems he will not live two years after he come home. And yet there shall some good fortune fall on her in short time.’
Her pregnancy was now causing her much pain and she had morning sickness: ‘the foetus kicks not’, noted Forman after examining her. He gave her a purgative to procure a miscarriage, which took place a few days later. No wonder she was bitter. She had been at the very centre of things; but now her husband had left her in a parlous state and she had lost another baby. Perhaps this experience helps to account for the streak of anger and coldness in her, especially towards men.
Her next recorded visit to Philpot Street was ten weeks later, on 2 September. Her question was ‘whether she shall be a lady, and how she shall speed’. Forman cast another chart. From her questions, and given the continued absence of her husband, one might wonder whether she had become involved with someone else. On the 11th she consulted Forman again, and this time, excited by her looks, her personality and her ‘history’, he tried to have sex with her (as he frequently did with female patients in exchange for waiving his fees). Emilia refused. Eventually she did sleep with him, but did not allow him to have intercourse, though Forman ‘felt all parts of her body willingly and kissed her often’. At this point, in his only specific detail about her physical appearance, Forman noted that (like Shakespeare’s Imogen in Cymbeline) she had a mole below her throat.
Lanier’s husband came back some time some time after the end of October. The fleet had encountered many problems and been nearly wrecked on the Goodwin Sands: one ship in particular, the Andrew, was in the news that month (and that autumn Shakespeare would mention it in his new script, The Merchant of Venice). But there was to be no promotion. Some time later Forman added to Alfonso’s horoscope that ‘he was not knighted, nor worthy thereof’. Under Emilia’s he also said that ‘she shall not, nor was not now worthy thereof’.
It’s a fascinating tale, especially revealing for the intimate insight it gives into social exchanges, sexual habits, and class and gender jealousies in Shakespeare’s circle at this time. For, of course, given his patients, Forman’s consulting room was part of Shakespeare’s circle. And what of Lanier herself? Favoured by the queen, admired by many lords, the mistress of Hunsdon: was she part of Shakespeare’s circle too?
When Forman’s diary was examined in detail for the first time thirty years ago, it was indeed suggested that she was Shakespeare’s mistress. The Dark Lady’s attributes in the poems after all might have applied to more than one woman in 1590s’ London, but surely not that many. The suggestion, however, was not well received by those scholars who were reluctant to allow real people into Shakespeare’s private life, and who sought to separate the works from the author’s life and times. Feminist critics also objected to Lanier appearing as an appendage, a sex object of the male poet. A generation later, the situation is very different. Lanier is accepted in her own right: her poetry is taught on university courses, published in modern editions and in anthologies of women’s writing of the period. Now it is time to pose the question again. Shakespeare’s London was, after all, a very small world.
Coming from a family of royal musicians Emilia Lanier, née Bassano, was no doubt musically accomplished herself; it was customary in such families to train daughters as well as sons. They were people of high standing in London’s courtly and artistic society, including the theatre world. But most interesting are the Bassanos’ origins, for they were Jews. At least two of her uncles also married Jewesses, and although they conformed as Catholics in Venice and as Protestants in London, they retained a consciousness of their Jewishness. (This would not have been a bar at court – the queen herself had a Jewish lady-in-waiting.) The Bassanos’ forebears worked in silk: their coat of arms was a mulberry tree – morus in Latin, which also means ‘Moor’. They must have been dark-skinned, for when two of Emilia’s cousins appeared in a London court case they were described as ‘black men’, which is how one might expect Sephardi Jews from northern Italy to appear to Londoners. In Elizabethan eyes, then, Lanier, although outwardly conforming and baptizing her children into the Protestant Church, was doubly an outsider: of Jewish descent and with the looks of a ‘Moor’.
Shakespeare must have known her, for she had been the mistress of his patron. Although Lord Hunsdon only became patron of his company in 1594, prior to that he had been responsible for court performances at which royal players and musicians would have been familiar figures. Shakespeare could hardly have been unaware of the mistress of such a powerful man. It is also now known that Lanier later knew Ben Jonson, who worked with her kinsmen on his masques. Even more intriguingly, her mother, Margaret Johnson, had a nephew named Robert, who would later become a royal lutenist and collaborate with Shakespeare, writing music for several plays, starting in 1609, the year of the publication of the sonnets.
So both before and after 1597, Mrs Lanier had close connections with Shakespeare’s circle. Indeed, she looks and sounds startlingly like the woman in the sonnets. Here, one must confess, we enter the realm of diverting speculation rather than that of verifiable historical fact, but if she is that woman, then Shakespeare’s remarks on her skin colour and unconventional beauty take on a peculiar significance, as do the poet’s references to her ‘unworthiness’ on which he took pity, and to her unspecified foreignness. Even the dates fit: Lanier’s husband was away from July until the end of October 1597, when it is possible that at least some of the sonnets to the woman were written. What makes her even more interesting is that she later became the first woman in England to publish a volume of poetry, which was registered in 1610 soon after Shakespeare’s sonnets came into print. In its preface she lectures women who are not loyal to other women (‘leave such folly’, she says, ‘to evill-disposed men’). And she bitterly castigates men for their inconstancy and their habitual and unthinking unkindness to women: ‘Forgetting they were born of woman, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like vipers deface the wombes wherein they were bred.’ And here, from a long religious poem, is Lanier’s protofeminist manifesto on the rights of women:
Then let us have our Libertie againe,
And challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie;
You came not in the world without our paine,
Make that a barre against your cruel tie;
Your fault being greater, why should you disdaine
Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny.
The idea that Shakespeare’s lover might have written such verses is almost too good to be true. The poems are indebted especially to Samuel Daniel, the Pembrokes’ house poet, but she had possibly also read Shakespeare. Her remarks about blackness are particularly interesting, as, for instance, when she calls Cleopatra: ‘as faire/As any Creature in Antonius’ eyes/… as rich, as wise as rare/As any pen could write … Yet though a blacke Egyptian do’st appeare …’. This focus perhaps owes more to Samuel Daniel and Mary Herbert than to Shakespeare, but it is fascinating nonetheless since, like Shakespeare, she insists on Cleopatra’s blackness. Curious, too, are her games with the word ‘will’:
If twere his Will that Cup might passe away.
Saying Not my will but thy will Lord be done …
Loe here his Will, not thy Will Lord …
One further clue is given by Emilia’s poem. Its title is ‘Hail God King of the Jews’: it is a poem about religious conversion which tells the tale of the conversion of a ‘Moor’ – the assimilation of the daughter of a Venetian Jew into the English Protestant state. As her father and his brothers remained conscious of their Jewish roots, it is ironic that her move for social acceptance finally led her to write a Christian poem (whose aim was to gain the patronage of noble women, including Pembroke’s mother). It suggests she has gone through a violent conversion: Christ’s passion is at the hands of ‘Jewish wolves’, and since she is writing about her own conversion, the poem’s title would have little point unless she were a Jew. This brings into the picture an area of hot debate in the 1590s: the question of Jewish women’s conversion and their marriage to Christians. And if Emilia Bassano was indeed Shakespeare’s mistress, it is interesting that in that same autumn of 1597 he should have written a play about Venetian Jews which includes a character by the name of Bassanio (pronounced, as hers, with three syllables, not four). The curious emphasis of Sonnet 134 on transaction, payment and forfeit is also noteworthy. His lover is accused of using love like a moneylender, seducing the boy who had come ‘surety-like … under a bond’, as a ‘debtor’ for the sake of the poet who is ‘mortgaged’ to her will; he speaks of a woman who is ‘covetous’ and a ‘usurer’. In Elizabethan England, the words ‘Jew’ and ‘usurer’ were synonymous.
Throughout his career Shakespeare maintained a deep interest in Italian culture, and especially in Venice: he probably read an Italian source for The Merchant in the original; he had access to Lewis Lewkenor’s book on Venice in manuscript, and would read his new book on the city a couple of years later. His Jews are Venetian, although the London Jewish colony, with which we would expect him to be more familiar, was Spanish and Portuguese. If Shakespeare had a mistress who was the daughter of a Venetian Jew, it would add a further fascinating detail to the crises in both his professional and personal lives in the year after his son’s death.
As published twelve years later, in the order in which Shakespeare chose to arrange them, the sonnets tell the tale of a journey of the heart, a relationship with a beginning and an end. And in the end he leaves us with the image of himself demoralized by the affair with the Dark Woman, unable to stop wanting her but knowing it is ruining him. Obsessed with sex and bodily decay, accusing her of breaking her bed vow to her husband and her promise of love to him, in Sonnet 152 he declares ‘my honest faith in thee is lost’, as if honesty between two people married to others had been a possibility. In a telling and pathetic image, in Sonnet 143 he sees himself as a ‘neglected child’ running after his mother who has other things on her mind:
Whilst I thy babe, chase thee afar behind.
But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind:
But his tough-minded and worldly-wise mistress, one imagines, did not wish to be his mother. Like the musician Whythorne, the poet Shakespeare found himself out of his depth. The last few sonnets in the sequence are livid with the sense of the poet’s ‘nobler part’, his soul, betrayed by his bodily desire. He seems to tell us that he has venereal disease and fears that sooner or later his young friend may catch it too. Love is a fever and his reason has left him:
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with ever more unrest …
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
However self-deluding, he wants his reader (or himself?) to believe that this is a tale of lost faith; that he believed she would be true, that they made promises to each other, and swore ‘deep oaths’. What such promises meant between two married people is left unsaid. The last of the sonnets, 153 and 154, are two versions of the same poem, which perform a distancing trick after the anguished revelations of the previous poems. They are about the cooling of the heat of sexual passion; and now the previous hints at venereal disease are out in the open:
… a seething bath, which yet men prove
Against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
I, sick withal, the help of bath desir’d,
And thither hied, a sad distemper’d guest
The model for this pair of poems is an epigram in the widely read Greek Anthology, probably from the 1603 edition, a copy of which was owned by Ben Jonson; perhaps Shakespeare knew it through him. This sonnet may, then, have been written after 1603, looking back on events as he shaped the collection into a literary form. The poem connects the cure for love with the seething baths for the relief of sexual diseases. Its ‘strange maladies’ may refer to syphilis, which was believed by the Elizabethans to be a foreign, ‘French disease’. ‘Love’s fire heats water’ in 154 suggests burning urine, a common symptom. As regards ‘the help of bath’ in 153, it is possible that the reader would hear this (and was meant to) as the town of Bath, where in his time hot mineral baths were taken for the relief of sexually transmitted diseases. Curiously enough, Shakespeare’s company’s tour that summer took them to Bath in late September.
For Shakespeare the affair had evidently been a deeply wounding experience – especially, for a man who was so guarded, because it laid him bare. And yet, as happens time and again with great artists, out of loss came art.
Things alien fascinated Shakespeare. His plays abound with references to distant lands, foreign commodities, strange artefacts and exotic cultures. Falstaff imagines the sky raining potatoes, then an exotic new arrival from Peru via Virginia. On stage Shakespeare represents Moroccan and Russian ambassadors, and Caliban the Carib islander. He talks of the perfumes of Arabia, Lapland sorcerers and the veils of Indian women. Through these shards of alien worlds, he explored the distortions and caricatures that cultures create of each other. Repeatedly he represented cultures that define themselves as ideological opposites engaged in a dynamic process of interaction: Rome and Egypt in Antony and Cleopatra; the indigenous islander and the colonist in The Tempest; the fissured Christian world of the eastern Mediterranean, of white and Moor in Othello. And one of his early explorations of the Other was The Merchant of Venice, on which he had been busy before the theatres reopened in late 1597.
The story of the bond of a pound of flesh was an old folk tale, but Shakespeare used an Italian story called Il Pecorone, published in 1558, for which no Elizabethan translation is known; so presumably he read it in Italian. He was also much indebted to Marlowe’s powerful and grotesque The Jew of Malta, revived in 1594 during the trial of Ruy Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish physician convicted of attempting to poison the queen.
‘There shall be no mercy for me in heaven,’ Shylock’s daughter Jessica says, ‘because I am a Jew’s daughter …. I shall be saved by my husband; he hath made me a Christian.’ More than with most of the plays, interpretation of The Merchant of Venice has been in the eye of the beholder. By the late 1590s there was a small colony of Christianized Jews in London, with a few more in Bristol and Oxford. The Jews of London outwardly practised Christianity but privately held synagogue in their houses, and maintained their rituals, including circumcision. Stow, in his history of London, says that the community was centred on Houndsditch at the end of Bishopsgate, where Shakespeare and the Bassanos lived up to 1596, and that they were mostly pawnbrokers and sellers of old clothes. There were only a couple of hundred, but their small number bore no relation to the threatening aura that attached to them – the product of a long history of anti-Semitism in England going back to the blood libels of the Middle Ages.
Like all English people of his age, Shakespeare was brought up in an anti-Semitic culture and must have imbibed such tales as a child. His subsequent experience of Jews may have been somewhat different, but in the plays he sometimes reflects the prevailing view, using the word ‘Jew’ as an oath or in jokes that suggest the deprecating attitude to them that was part of normal Christian speech. The play puts Machiavellian and anti-Semitic politics in the mouths of some characters and elsewhere engages the audience’s sympathies for Jews (‘does not a Jew bleed?’). And although his new play was in no way designed to comment on the Jewish ‘question’, it still touches on critical issues such as conversion to Christianity. The result is, to us, an extremely uncomfortable mix of romance and racism, in which the quality of mercy is decidedly strained.
Like Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, it had wide relevance as part of the artist’s response to the Elizabethan state’s treatment of outsiders. But is it anti-Semitic? Some characters support the removal of strangers, but others reject it. Perhaps such theatrical conflict was what he was aiming for. But then again, this was drama written for a popular audience, and Shakespeare typically harnessed the dramatic excitement of anti-alien feelings and therefore ran the risk of inflaming anti-alien and anti-Semitic sentiment.
For a modern audience this feeling is exacerbated by several failures in the play. In crucial areas it is surprisingly lacking in psychology, which is unusual in plays of this period. Jessica, the daughter of the Jew Shylock, exhibits no moral scruples as she helps to destroy her father and is one of the least delineated major characters in Shakespeare. Shylock’s final exit is very hastily managed in Act IV, in a cheap plot device in which the tables are turned on him: the Jew can keep half his goods on condition that he converts. Having agreed, he exits with just three words: ‘I am content.’ The verdict arrived at by conniving lawyers is unpleasant, perhaps deliberately so, but it is unsatisfying to today’s audiences. Finally, Shylock’s conversion, the marriage of his daughter to a Christian and the giving of his property to her and her husband leave us – for all the fine speech about the quality of mercy – with the uncomfortable sense that the Jew himself has been very swiftly erased from the history of this particular fictional Venice.
In the end, too many unresolved questions are left hanging in the air. Perhaps for personal reasons Shakespeare’s eye was not quite on the ball – the play written swiftly to fulfil his contract while working on a more important project, Henry IV Part 2? But still The Merchant leaves behind an uneasy edge, a sense of unresolved tension. Perhaps it embodies more of his personal experience than has been thought. In that light it might be worth looking at the merchant Antonio, a character which, it has been suggested, Shakespeare himself played, and the only one in his entire output who suffers from depression throughout. It doesn’t happen often with him, but something is not quite right about The Merchant of Venice. Fairy tales can be more dangerous than they seem. Perhaps, with this one, being all things to all people was simply not possible.