First published in the 1880s in a private, eleven-volume edition that extended to more than a million words, My Secret Life, by ‘Walter’, purports to be the memoir of a Victorian gentleman’s sexual adventures. ‘Walter’ presents a small puzzle of authorial attribution. William Potter, author of The Romance of Lust (1873–76), has been put forward as the likely author of My Secret Life. But the most popular candidate, a known associate of Potter’s, is Henry Spencer Ashbee, a book collector, author and bibliographer of early erotica. Biographer Ian Gibson referred to him as a subtype of the bibliomaniac: the ‘erotomaniac’. It is likely that Ashbee either wrote the whole book, partly from imagination, or compiled and edited the text, adding the most remarkable index ever produced and seeing the book through the press.
Unlike Tolstoy and, more appositely, Henry Miller, Ashbee found in Shakespeare a kindred soul. He confessed to having read Hamlet ‘hundreds of times’, and to delighting in act 3, scene 2:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Lying down at Ophelia’s feet
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
(The title of Much Ado About Nothing has been read as a similar play on words, ‘no-thing’ or ‘o-thing’ meaning vagina.)
Ashbee found Romeo and Juliet ‘full of incongruities and obscenities’. He expressed a practical view of the playwright’s strategy: ‘It would appear that Shakespeare, fearing that his play would not please the better class, endeavoured by means of obscene jokes to gain favour with the pit.’
Whoever ‘Walter’ was, he claimed to ‘have had women of twenty-seven different Empires, Kingdoms or Countries, and eighty or more different nationalities, including every one in Europe except a Laplander’. Most of the action in My Secret Life takes place near the Lyceum, Drury Lane and other theatres. Like Ashbee, the secret author admired Shakespeare and made frequent references to his work. In a brothel, ‘Walter’ meets a girl who has seen Hamlet; he quotes Macbeth (‘in my sear and yellow leaf’); and he presents a ‘phallic parody’ of Portia’s court speech from The Merchant of Venice.
Apart from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, Ashbee relished Biron’s long speech in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The speech includes the evocative line, ‘Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible / Than are the tender hooks of cockled snails’, and it places women’s sparkling eyes, which are ‘the books, the arts, the academes, / That show, contain and nourish all the world’, above religion.
The title of John Fry’s Pieces of Ancient Poetry echoed those of respectable compilations of moralising verse, like Elegant Extracts: or, Useful and Entertaining Pieces of Poetry, Selected for the Improvement of Young Persons (1791) and Fragments, in Prose and Verse (1809) by the late friend of Henrietta Bowdler, Miss Elizabeth Smith, whose work was ‘very popular in religious circles’. Fry’s editions were popular in different circles. Parts of Pieces had to be expurgated to avoid problems with the authorities. His Carew book, too, ran risks. In life, Carew was accused of ‘irregularities of his conduct’. Fry appreciated how Carew wrote, ‘especially in the amorous way’, mostly to a beauty called Celia. Carew was fascinated by every aspect of his lover. When he noticed a mole on her bosom, he wrote a poem. When a fly flew into her eye, he wrote a poem…
John Fry’s bibliographical works are not just manifestos for bibliographical rigour; they are also polemics against prurience and prudery, celebrating the naughty side of Shakespeare. Fry was a teenager when he published Elizabethan poetry. Despite his illness, he had a healthy young man’s interest in bawdry and innuendo. Pieces includes the wicked Scottish ballad ‘Johnny Cock’; a much loved 1597 poem by Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex; and an ebullient song about Devereux’s son, the Third Earl of Essex, to be sung to the tune of ‘Whoppe! doe me now harme, good man’:
Had gott a young girle
His wimble did pierce her flanke;
His nagge was made able
By chaunge of his stable;
O there was a brave quoad hanc!
This maide inspected;
But fraud interjected
A Maid of more perfeçon:
The Midwives did her handle,
While ye Knt held ye candle
O there was a clear inspeçon!
These lines refer to a pitiable episode in English history. At the age of thirteen, the Third Earl of Essex married fourteen-year-old Frances Howard. Before the marriage was consummated, Frances allegedly began an affair with Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, later First Earl of Somerset. The young bride sought an annulment on the grounds of Essex’s impotence. He for his part claimed he was perfectly capable with other women, and that his wife ‘reviled him, and miscalled him, terming him a cow and coward, and beast’. Dual inspections were arranged, one in which Essex showed off his erection, and one in which his wife’s virginity was examined—her face was covered, ostensibly for modesty but probably, as the song suggests, to conceal a substitute. After these spectacles the annulment was granted. Three years later a panel of Lords, led by Bacon, put the Somersets on trial for their roles in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. A juror in the trial, Essex pressed the King to send Frances to the scaffold. She and her new husband were condemned to death, but were pardoned before that sentence could be carried out.
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Venus and Adonis was first published in 1593. According to the Bodleian Library, at least fifteen further editions were published over the next forty-three years, around ten of them in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Very few copies survive from all these editions: most were read and shared so avidly they simply fell apart. One of the more enthusiastic readers was William Reynolds, who interpreted the poem as a coded personal love message from Queen Elizabeth. Among saner readers, Venus and Adonis rapidly earned a salacious reputation as an aid to ‘solitary pleasure’. In the 1598 Cambridge play The Return from Parnassus, the character Gullio promises to ‘worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow’, just as an ancient king ‘slept with Homer under his bed’s head’. Samuel Johnson included Venus and Adonis in his list of the most scandalous and corrupting verse of the late sixteenth century. In support of that inclusion, Johnson cited a 1625 quarto, A Scourge for Paper Persecutors, by J. D., which included this revelation:
Making lewd Venus with eternall lines
To tye Adonis to her loves designes:
Fine wit is shown therein, but finer ’t were
If not attired in such bawdy geer:–
But be it as it will, the coyest dames
In private reade it for their closet-games.
William Covell graduated MA from Cambridge in 1588. Alongside notes about other authors, Covell’s 1595 Polimanteia included comments on Venus and Adonis and Shakespeare’s other long poem, The Rape of Lucrece. The following year, Covell was accused of adultery with Brigett Edmunds, the wife of John Edmunds, another Cambridge MA. Yet another Cambridge MA, George Mountain, appeared as a witness in Covell’s defence. Mountain’s evidence, though, was undermined by Brigett’s testimony, which put Covell in a world of trouble, and pointed to a debauched culture among the university men: ‘Mountain toulde me that Covell confessed that the sweeteste sporte that ever he had with me was in the chayre.’ She claimed Mountain had heard Covell ‘boaste that he laye with Licea, and by what meanes he gott to hir bedd’. (‘Licea’ is Giles Fletcher’s Licia, or Poemes of Loue, Cambridge, 1593.)
Brigett’s account also included an accusation against Mountain: he had read ‘bawdrye’ to her. Mountain contended that he ‘never redd vnto hir anie of bawdrye, excepte she meanes it by this’:
that vpon a tyme when as she the said Brigett with diverse others wente to Elye or came from Elye by boate he (the saide Mr George Mowntayne) goeinge or commeinge with them alsoe: Mr Iohn Edmunds Iunior did instantlie requeste him the said George Mowntayne to take his booke or some storie booke to reade [on] the waye to passe the tyme awaie withall, and herevppon he tooke Bocchas [Boccaccio] in ffrence and reade of it in the boate to the companie there, and englished the same to them; wherein he saith there was no bawdrye at all.
Brigett’s reply was damning for the man who aspired to ecclesiastical advancement, and who would in fact become Bishop of London. Her accusation, she said, was not about Mountain’s reading of Boccaccio but ‘an other tyme when as he red vnto hir an englishe book’. That volume was The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter. First printed in 1566, it went into multiple editions and earned a second volume. A saucy compilation of Italian and Italianate tales, Painter’s book was a source for at least four Shakespeare plays.
Also in Johnson’s scandalous grouping were Marlowe’s edition of Ovid’s Elegies, Thomas Cutwode’s Caltha Poetarum, or The Bumble-Bee and ‘some of the dissolute sallies of Green and Nashe’. The Bumble-Bee includes picturesque, orgasmic lines like this:
She bends her branch, and bows it up and down and to the heavens she doth exalt her eyes:
And with a very fervent prayer doth frown, looking aloofe unto the loftie skies:
Somewhile to kneele, and otherwhiles to rise.
Moving her body with a modest motion,
As holy dames do use in deepe devotion.
Francis Freeling owned one of the only three known copies of the Bumble-Bee. Though the poem was much more salacious than the Garden Plot, Richard Heber presented an edition of it to the Roxburghe Club as his Member book. Shakespeare probably knew of the poem, and he may have owned it and used it as a source. Freeling drew a link between the poem, the mandrake and II Henry IV:
Steevens quotes it in a note on the word mandrake in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part II, Act iii, Scene 2, and says he would give further extracts from it ‘but on some subjects silence is less reprehensible than information.’
In his footnote, Steevens does expand somewhat on this point: ‘In the age of Shakespeare…it was customary “to make counterfeit Mandrag, which is sold by deceyuers for much money.” Out of the great double root of Briony (by means of a process not worth transcribing) they produced the kind of priapic idol to which Shallow has been compared.’ The comparison appears in
I do remember [Justice Shallow] at Clement’s Inn like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring: when a’ was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: a’ was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invincible: a’ was the very genius of famine; yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake: a’ came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched huswives that he heard the carmen whistle, and swear they were his fancies or his good-nights.
Such salty content is consistent with what we know about how Shakespeare operated. The authors of playscripts sometimes shared in supernormal profits (the ‘overplus’) from the performance of plays. This created an incentive to add bawdy and sensational content; what Dekker called, in 1612, ‘filth’. When it came to spicing up and ‘vulgarising’ plays, Shakespeare’s talent was obvious. The Comedy of Errors contains several examples of this calibre:
Antipholus: Then she bears some breadth?
Dromio: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
Antipholus: In what part of her body stands Ireland?
Dromio: Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
Antipholus: Where Scotland?
Dromio: I found it by the barrenness; hard in the palm of the hand…
Antipholus: Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
Dromio: Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
This is the type of passage that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors preferred to remove. The best-known excisers were the siblings Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler. In 1807, Henrietta produced the first edition of the Family Shakespeare. Four little duodecimos printed in Bath, the edition contained twenty of the plays—more than half the canon. Henrietta’s preface explained the project: ‘For those who object to such alterations, there are many editions of Shakespeare, “with all his imperfections on his head”; but it is hoped that the present publications will be approved by those who wish to make the young reader acquainted with the various beauties of this writer, unmixed with any thing that can raise a blush on the cheek of modesty.’
Some darker and more difficult plays were among the twenty, including Hamlet and King Lear. Some spicier plays, too, such as Measure for Measure and Othello; Eric Partridge called these Shakespeare’s ‘most sexual, most bawdy plays’. Commercially, this first edition was a failure. Later editions, though, would succeed spectacularly, making the Bowdlers a household name and their Family Shakespeare a household favourite.
From Othello, the Bowdlers removed Iago’s shout to Roderigo in the opening scene of the first act: ‘I am one Sir, that come to tell you, your Daughter, and the Moore, are now making the Beast with two backs’. They removed, too, rude jokes like this one:
Clown: Are these I pray, call’d wind Instruments?
Boy: Ay, marry are they, sir.
Clown: O, thereby hangs a tail.
Boy: Whereby hangs a tail, sir?
Clown: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.
From Measure for Measure, the Bowdlers excised most of the sexual innuendo, and especially the lines involving Lucio and Pompey. In Hamlet, Ophelia’s apparent suicide becomes an unfortunate riparian accident. The Bowdlers also removed Biron’s speech in Love’s Labour’s Lost. In Noel Perrin’s words, ‘here was Shakespeare mutilated’.
Sir William Boothby directed much of his seventeenth-century book-buying towards lurid medical and social tracts such as Confessions of a Maried Couple and The Tenne Pleasures of Marrage. The founder of the Mitchell Library had similar tastes. Unmarried throughout his life, David Scott Mitchell retained a racy, bachelor’s sense of humour. He devoured as a young man scientific and pseudo-scientific books on the nocturnal behaviour of debutantes, presbyophiles and nymphomaniacs; books on ‘sexual relations, sexual organs and marriage’ by such authors as Alexander Walker and Dr Edward B. Foote, the ‘postbellum physiologist, health crusader and mail-order magnate’. Plain speaking, independent and broad-minded, Mitchell also collected heterodox religious texts and conventional erotica.
Knowing his character and interests, it is no surprise that he preferred to take his Elizabethan literature raw, and he disdained the Bowdlers’ Family Shakespeare. His interest in Shakespeare was a radical act, just as it was for Fry and Wrangham. While the Bowdlers were making a PG-rated Shakespeare, John Fry and his collaborators were busy preserving and celebrating the adults-only version. The Bowdlers, Mitchell and Fry supply polar visions of Shakespeare’s library: the wholesome family library against the surreptitious collection of an erotomaniac.
The idea of a Shakespearean porn library is as fascinating as Orville Ward Owen’s obsessive vision of a mechanised, rotating one. The word ‘pornography’ did not exist in Shakespeare’s time, and the field of erotica was ill-defined and fungible. If Shakespeare owned ‘erotica’, we would expect to see a wide variety of texts falling more or less into that category. Apart from the Boccaccio and Painter volumes that Mountain read, there would likely be a selection of other early Italian works such as Pietro Aretino’s Sonetti lussuriosi (1534) and its accompanying erotic illustrations by Giulio Romano. English publishers reprinted with enthusiasm Aretino’s works, including his 1534 Ragionamenti (‘Dialogues’). John Wolfe’s 1584 London edition of that work includes the anonymous Ragionamenti di Zoppino, a catalogue of Roman prostitutes.
Shakespeare may have travelled to Italy in his ‘lost years’ and encountered Italian erotica there. He certainly knew people who had been to Italy, including the Anglo-Italian John Florio, and some of the books certainly made their way to England at an early date. Julie Peakman, author of Mighty Lewd Books (2003), traced some of the titles that moved between Italy and England in the sixteenth century. She also found that the Ragionamenti ‘retained its popularity’ in Italy well into the twentieth century: ‘My Italian friend recalls her father kept a copy in his library in Rome in the 1950s.’
Some sixteenth-century erotica circulated only in manuscript. Nashe’s poem ‘The Choice of Valentine’s’ is an example. Some material circulated only between lovers. A poem recently discovered inside a 1561 edition of Chaucer in the West Virginia University library was written by Lady Elizabeth Dacre to Sir Anthony Cooke. The poem ends unambiguously with an epigram by Martial: ‘Long enough am I now; but if your shape should swell under its grateful burden, then shall I become to you a narrow girdle.’
Apart from manuscripts and imported Italian and French erotica, a Shakespearean porn library would have contained bawdy songs, ballads and lyrics, and English translations of Juvenalian satire and gory Senecan tragedy—all of which were guaranteed to get the blood flowing. In 1596, Valentine Symmes published an English version of Lucius Apuleius’ Golden Ass. Other saucy translations included Marlowe’s of Ovid’s Amores (copies of which were sequestered and burned); and George Chapman’s of Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595). A self-respecting sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century erotic library would also include William Barksted’s Mirrha the Mother of Adonis: or, Lustes Prodegies (1607, influenced by Venus and Adonis and Measure for Measure), Thomas Lodge’s version of Scylla’s Metamorphosis (1589), Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594), Michael Drayton’s Endymion and Phoebe (1595), Thomas Edward’s Cephalus and Procris (1595), John Weever’s Faunus and Melliflora (1600), Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditis (1602) and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598).
These are the books we would expect to see in the library of the man who wrote these lines for Venus in Venus and Adonis:
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain.