Shakespeare and His Collaborators over the Centuries

Shakespeare and His Collaborators over the Centuries

Edited by

Pavel Drábek, Klára Kolinská and Matthew Nicholls

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Shakespeare and His Collaborators over the Centuries, Edited by Pavel Drábek, Klára Kolinská and Matthew Nicholls

This book first published 2008

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Pavel Drábek, Klára Kolinská and Matthew Nicholls and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-84718-978-4, ISBN (13): 9781847189783

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ..................................................................................... ix Preface ........................................................................................................ xi John Russell Brown Collaborations: An Introduction.................................................................. 1 Lois Potter Involuntary and Voluntary Poetic Collaboration: The Passionate Pilgrim and Love’s Martyr ................................................. 5 Elena Domíngez Romero Some Considerations on William Shakespeare’s “editorial hand” in the Pastoral Anthology Englands Helicon (1600-1614)........................ 21 Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa The Bad Quarto Hamlet: A Case for Collaborationism? ........................... 33 Pavel Drábek Shakespeare’s Influence on Mucedorus .................................................... 45 Otília Cseicsner Shakespeare the Dramaturge ..................................................................... 55 Petr Osolsobě Sir Thomas More: Less Collaborative, More Shakespearean .................... 67 Lili Mesterházy The Taming of The Two Noble Kinsmen ................................................... 77 Kareen Klein Paris, Romio and Julieta: Seventeenth-Century German Shakespeare ................................................................................. 85

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Annamária Fábián “According to my Bond”: Redefinitions of the Bonds in the Adaptations of Shakespeare’s King Lear....................................... 107 Ágnes Tünde Tánács Corporeality in Shakespeare’s and Davenant’s Versions of Macbeth............................................................................................... 119 Katalin Tabi Shakespeare’s Text Set Anew: A Tentative Methodology of Playscript Analysis with a Focus on Theatrical Texts of Hungarian Productions of Hamlet ....................................................... 129 Anna Cetera Phoney Business: Shakespeare the Exhibit, the Souvenir, the Sham.................................................................................................. 141 Shinichi Suzuki Learning to Read Shakespeare: Caliban in The Tempest for Children in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries ............................... 157 Paul Franssen Collaborating with Shakespeare: Philip Burton’s You my Brother and New Views on Shakespeare and his Colleagues ................. 173 Márta Minier A European Hamlet from 1929 ............................................................... 185 Klára Kolinská “If the Bard Were Still Jung”: Reading for One(’s)Self in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)............................................................................. 203 Ágnes Matuska Tarantino’s Kill Bill and the Renaissance Tradition of Revenge Plays ..................................................................................... 211 Jacek Fabiszak “Writing” Shakespeare on Polish television............................................ 221

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Saskia Kossak F.K. Waechter’s Prinz Hamlet: A Picture Book – Not Necessarily for Children (Only) ....................................................... 233 List of Contributors ................................................................................. 243

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1 Shakespeare’s chair acquired by Princess Czartoryska in Stratford in 1790. Photo by Anna Cetera, Courtesy of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow.................................................................................. 153 Figure 2 The fake frame of Czartoryska’s chair with the “authentic” plank inside. Photo by Anna Cetera, Courtesy of the Princes Czartoryski Museum in Krakow.................................................................................. 154

PREFACE

This book presents papers given at an international conference equally entitled Shakespeare and His Collaborators over the Centuries, which took place at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) on February 8-11, 2006. The initial objective of the event was to explore and question the ways in which Shakespeare has been treated as the solitary genius, a notion that supplanted the collaborative nature of theatre and most writing in the early modern period. By virtue of the participants (and their inspiring contributions), the conference did much more, as John Russell Brown points out in his introduction to this volume. The word collaborator turned out to be a potent metaphor, bridging Shakespeare’s contemporaries as his “co-adjutors” (to use Ben Jonson’s term) and those who later adapted his works or were merely inspired by them. All these synchronic and diachronic collaborators have helped create and maintain the myth of a great cultural momentum that has been traditionally identified as Shakespeare, the original William Shakespeare’s immortal body politic, so to speak.

The conference papers were divided into sections dealing with “Shakespeare and his Contemporaries”, “Shakespeare and his Successors”, “Shakespeare in the 20th-Century Theatre”, “Shakespeare as Inspiration”, and “Shakespeare in the Society” (dealing with the role that Shakespeare’s works have played as a social phenomenon). The arrangement of the present volume follows loosely the programme of the sections.

The conference would have been impossible without the help of other members of the staff and students of the Department of English and American Studies. I would especially like to thank Klára Kolinská, who was a pleasure to work with on the organization of the conference (enviable in her responsibility and reliability) and co-editing this volume; our colleague Matthew Nicholls, who did a tremendous job in editing the present volume; the head of the English Department, Jeff Vanderziel for his generous support (both financial and moral); Michaela Sochorová, the Department secretary, who has ever been an indispensible part of everything happening at the Department; Milada Franková, who helped chairing the sections; Don Sparling, who stepped out of his usual field of expertise and gave a wonderful guided tour of the city, and the student

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helpers, Petra Braunová, Filip Krajník, Markéta Polochová, Jana Přidalová, and Barbora Tabačková.

Pavel Drábek Brno, July 2008

JOHN RUSSELL BROWN

COLLABORATIONS: AN INTRODUCTION Scholarship and theatre both run on wheels and in many directions: their producers are autonomous and propelled by their own engines and yet their products are, inevitably, inter-related, interdependent and, surprisingly, multifarious. A conference in Brno on “Shakespeare and his Collaborators” amply demonstrated this when it brought participants from many countries and representatives of different skills and interests.

Collaboration was inevitable from the beginning of Shakespeare’s career because poetry in his day was a means of communication that passed in manuscript between like-minded individuals with common expectations and similar backgrounds. So Shakespeare’s poems are presented here as a site for collaboration in opening contributions from Lois Potter and Elena Domínguez Romero. Playwriting was a competitive rather than self-sufficient art and, as part of a rush to find new plays that were more popular with the public than they are now, Shakespeare’s earlier works, dating from before his was a name with which to conjure, bear obvious signs of collaboration. This activity continued into the last years of the sixteenth century and beyond as argued in papers by Otília Cseicsner, Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, Lili Mesterházy and Pavel Drábek, the co-editor of this volume.

Looking ahead to later centuries and other countries, collaboration with Shakespeare becomes like some great river that has turned into a delta, its waters reaching far and wide and sometimes all but disappearing. But the plays are not rivers of water: they take hold of other minds and in their new homes quicken earlier feelings and start many new thoughts, all calling to be expressed both in service and homage to their source and in fierce independence or self-protection. This amazing spread of influence and nourishment, unequalled by other writers in Europe or North America, is represented in two sections of this book. Annamária Fábián, Ágnes Tünde Tanács, Ágnes Matuska and Kareen Klein deal with plays and a film that echo or have their origin in a Shakespeare play. Márta Minier and Klára Kolinská consider how a production or novel can present a play in new guises, collaborating by modifying the form or style in which the text

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is given a new life. In a similar way Katalin Tabi examines acting texts for Hamlet to show how performance has been altered by the process of cutting significant sections. Paul Franssen positions himself further from any single play, to consider collaboration in the form of biographical novels, especially Philip Burton’s You, My Brother in which Shakespeare is an author ready to collaborate and is seen in contrast to Ben Jonson, who always demands his own way. To read these two groups of papers in a single session would be to daze rather than enlighten as still more examples will, of their own accord, crowd into a reader’s mind, an effect that would have followed attendance at the Brno Conference had it not lasted for four days.

The last section of this book leads into the still wider territory of Shakespeare’s appearance in the cultures of the twenty-first century. Anna Cetera considers the authenticity of exhibits, souvenirs and other physical presentations in museums (with the example of a Polish aristocratic collector of the romantic era), and Jacek Fabiszak considers how “Shakespeare”, as an idea as well as a dramatist, has been presented on Polish television. Shinichi Suzuki deals with the bowdlerized texts of The Tempest that were used to introduce them in schools in the 19th century. The book concludes with a paper by Saskia Kossak, showing how a picture book of a kind usually appealing to children has presented the same play in graphic images that arrest and stimulate in direct correlation to a viewer’s knowledge of the original.

This collection of papers demonstrate how diversity in collaboration has drawn writers, translators, directors, producers and publicists into active contact with Shakespeare, together with the enabling collaboration of publishers, teachers, dramaturges and scholars. From time to time, actors have also figured but in a supporting, rather than a leading or star role and that is why I am writing this introduction rather than contributing a paper. I did try to write about actors as collaborators with Shakespeare but this proved a struggle that yielded nothing more than a work in progress and certainly did not warrant reproducing here. Actors were not Shakespeare’s collaborators and, I have come to believe, they never will be. Fellow was the word he and fellow practitioners used when writing and, probably, talking about actors. We might translate this into modern English as colleague, associate, comrade or companion, even as equal or, in some contexts, brother. Occasionally in Shakespeare’s plays fellow is used condescendingly or even contemptuously, but only in familiar speech not when defining or developing a relationship. A little of that derogatory usage may well have crept in when he addressed his “fellow” actors

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because, in our day, the dealings of authors with actors do not always run smoothly and there is little reason to believe that is a new phenomenon.

Today, in rehearsal or what we call “workshops”, experienced actors will often say that they feel exceptionally free in a Shakespeare play; it seems that the texts were written to allow and even positively encourage freedom of interpretation and characterization. How that should be was what I found myself writing about and could not compress into a paper on collaboration. Here I can only record how trying to use that word caused me to pause and, eventually, to stop writing. Shakespeare also called the players shadows and that word also haunted me: shadow boxing is possible and instructive but produces nothing of more than passing value. Shakespeare may well have treated actors as equals or brothers, having worked as one himself; he also treated them deftly and mysteriously, as if he remembered that in a play they could be anything and nothing, and something else constantly, as if they were shadows. In none of these ways can they be called collaborators.

This book demonstrates that, actors apart, the opportunities for collaborators have been endless and so, too, are the advantages of studying them as off-shoots from what Shakespeare has left for us to enjoy. By taking hold of the texts and bringing their own concerns to them, collaborators will change them in response to new ideas and new ways of living of which Shakespeare could never guess; in doing so they show us more of what lies within the texts and how their basic stories, stage action and overall themes can speak to our own times. Actors also reinterpret the texts when they bring them alive before us through their presence on stage: they may wear modern clothes and use modern behaviour and speech habits, but they are tied to the past and lack the opportunity to create their own versions of the texts that true collaborators enjoy. Scholarship has the task of following their progress and counting the cost and the profit.

LOIS POTTER

INVOLUNTARY AND VOLUNTARY POETIC COLLABORATION:

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM AND LOVE’S MARTYR

Poetic collaboration as a genre The best known story about collaboration in the early modern period is told by Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, about Beaumont and Fletcher:

Meeting once in a tavern, to contrive the rude draft of a tragedy, Fletcher undertook to kill the king therein; whose words being overheard by a listener (though his loyalty not to be blamed herein) he was accused of high treason; till the mistake soon appearing, that the plot was only against a dramatic and scenical king, all wound off in merriment. (Fuller 1952: 439)

Like the supposed assassination plot, Fuller’s story is probably “dramatic and scenical” in origin. In The Woman-Hater (originally ascribed to Beaumont and Fletcher, though scholars now ascribe it only to Beaumont), two informers misunderstand an overheard conversation and arrest an innocent man as a traitor. True or not, however, the anecdote gives a convincing portrayal of the collaborative process as one imagines it occurring among playwrights: mutual agreement about the plot, followed by a division of labour. Other jointly written plays may have involved sequential rather than concurrent collaboration, when one writer took over a job that another writer had left unfinished, or revised it at a later stage. The first model is what the editors of the Oxford Complete Works think happened with Timon of Athens, while they suggest the second for Measure for Measure and even, possibly, Macbeth. My own work on The Two Noble Kinsmen suggested to me that it was produced by a mixture of these methods.

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We usually think of collaboration as confined to the theatre, a world in which there was obvious motivation for dividing up a task in order to get it done more quickly. Poetry and fiction, on the other hand, are generally thought of as the work of a single mind, though the author might benefit from feedback in the course of writing, as Sidney apparently did when he read chapters of the Arcadia to his sister and her ladies during the course of composition. Even in the theatre world, it is possible, as Heather Hirschfield suggests, that single authorship was more prestigious than teamwork, until the success of Beaumont and Fletcher changed the perception of joint authorship (Hirschfield 1999: 179-181). In the “apologetical dialogue” at the end of Poetaster, Jonson depicts himself withdrawing from the theatrical world of petty rivals and unintelligent audiences to the lofty solitudes of poetry. Yet the end of the sixteenth century brought the recognition that the solitary author had only a precarious hold on immortality. With the publication in 1598 of the conflated version of Sidney’s unfinished Arcadia, and with Spenser’s death in 1599, it had become obvious that the century’s two most ambitious and prestigious works of single authorship were going to remain unfinished.

Hence the attraction, even for professional writers, of what Arthur Marotti calls “Social Textuality” (Marotti 1995: 135-208). Much amateur poetry is collaborative; it likes word games – acrostics and posies – and uses them as a means of courtship. One such interchange is described by Master Stephen, in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598). He tells Edward Knowell that he received a jet ring from a woman with a “posy”, or short verse inside it saying “‘Though fancy sleep, my love is deep.’ Meaning that though I did not fancy her, yet she loved me dearly…. And then I sent her another, and my posy was: ‘The deeper, the sweeter, I’ll be judged by St Peter.’” Edward comments: “How, by St. Peter? I do not conceive that!” and Stephen triumphantly explains: “Marry, St. Peter, to make up the meter” (2.4.32-40; this passage is the same in both the Q and F versions of the play.). The level expected in these verse games was obviously not very high. Jonson ridiculed them more extensively in Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster.

In another social form, which E.F. Hart christened the “answer poem”, the poet chooses an earlier poem – usually one that is easily recognizable through its opening line or unusual verse form – in order to parody, or agree, or disagree with it, as with Ralegh’s answer to Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love”. Sometimes one poet amplifies the theme of the first; more often, his verses are a point-by-point refutation of everything said in the earlier poem. This poetry is not so much

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collaborative as contra-laborative. As You Like It (1599) contains two examples of the answer poem. In 2.5, Jaques takes up Amiens’ “Who doth ambition shun” with “If it should come to pass | That any man turn ass” (2.5.47-48), imitating the metre though not the rhyme, in a direct, even hostile, confrontation with the author. Then, in 3.2, Touchstone parodies the rhythm and rhyme scheme of Orlando’s verses on Rosalind (“If a hart do lack a hind, | Let him seek out Rosalind”, 3.2.99-100, etc.), partly as a criticism of their badness and partly to show off his virtuosity: “I’ll rhyme you so eight years together, dinners, and suppers, and sleeping hours excepted” (3.2.94-95). Hamlet of course demonstrates a complete command of parody when he writes some dozen or sixteen lines to insert into a play that has already passed the censor, and later when he rewrites Claudius’s letter to the English king in the same style as the original. Parody, in this case, is a form of revenge: a couplet for a couplet.

Verse competitions were probably more widespread on the European continent than in England. A manuscript belonging to Charles d’Orléans (the Orleans of Shakespeare’s Henry V) contains ten poems, including one by François Villon, with the same first line: “Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine.” Orléans, a distinguished poet himself, apparently provided the first line and had his guests compete in writing the rest (Champion 1933: 94). It is not clear whether all the participants in the “concours de Blois” were actually present at the same time – some of the poems may have been written for a visitors’ book – but full-scale poetic competitions took place in France and Spain and the societies of rhetoric, where they existed, evidently provided an organization for what the French called joutes poétiques (poetic jousts).1 Jonson’s early comedies, especially Cynthia’s Revels and Poetaster, show courtly competitions that may have a basis in reality. Steven May has suggested that such competitions might be the source of some of the Elizabethan sonnets that appear to share the same subject matter, and even the same line (for instance, both Samuel Daniel and Bartholomew Griffin address “Care-charmer sleep”).2

1 This information derives from group discussion after this paper was presented in Brno. I am particularly grateful to Teresa Bałuk-Ulewiczowa for information about Polish societies, and to Paul Franssen for suggesting that the same activities probably took place in the Dutch Chambers of Rhetoric. Pavel Drábek has since informed me that such gatherings were also characteristic of Czech culture in that period, with poetic jousts taking place in the early sixteenth century at the Pardubice Castle, owned by the house of Pernstein (Pernštejn). 2 In their edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine cite a suggestion by Steven May “in private communication” that two other, very similar sonnets – number 99 by Shakespeare and number 16 from Constable’s

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The closest equivalent to the joute poétique in Britain is the “flyting”. More formal and hostile than the answer poem, this was an exchange of verses, often bawdy, where each poet insulted the other at length, usually adhering to formal conventions. The poems were composed in private but read or recited in public. The ultimate origin was probably the classical song contest, or perhaps something more primitive, where two bards cursed each other. It was particularly common in countries that still retained a strong oral tradition, like Scotland and Wales. One flyting in Wales lasted from 1581 to 1588 and produced a total of 54 poems (Williams 2004). The Scottish examples were still better known. In 1579, Alexander Montgomerie, at the court of the thirteen-year-old James VI, issued a poetic challenge and, with the king as judge, succeeded in unseating his rival. James quoted from Montgomerie’s work in 1584, when he published his first collection of poems, Essayes of a Prentise, along with a short essay on writing poetry. Through this book, English poets who took this seventeen year old poet seriously as a probable heir to the throne of England could have learned what flyting was and what other kinds of poetry the king liked. James’s court in the 1580s was a centre for poets, producing exchanges of comic verse, verses written under assumed names, and verses written by royal command. Naturally, James’s book was prefaced by a number of poems in which his courtiers praise the volume that is to follow. As Wayne Chandler has shown, commendatory poems go back to the beginning of printing in England, but were increasingly used from the 1570s on and had become commonplace by the end of the century. Though the first published play to appear with commendatory verses was Samuel Brandon’s The Virtuous Octavia (1598), probably a closet drama, most published plays had already been seen in the theatre (Chandler 2005: 3). The readers of a volume of poems, on the other hand, would have no previous knowledge of the contents. It looks as if the author generally showed at least some of his work to prospective verse-writers, much as publishers nowadays send complimentary copies to academics, hoping for a quotable blurb (Chandler 2003: 163). In one or two cases, the commendatory verses inspired “answer poems”. In Robert Tofte’s Alba (1598) the author replied to each writer, in the same length and metre as the commendatory poem, modestly expressing his thanks and disclaiming any value attributed to his work.

Diana – might have been written in response to “a poetic competition or challenge such as the one that produced Sir Thomas Heneage’s response to Ralegh’s ‘Farewell False Love’ or Spencer’s Amoretti 8, variants of which appear in poems by Dyer and Sidney” (Mowat and Werstine 2004: 329-30).

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Thomas Coryate’s experience in 1611 shows how interactive the commendatory poem could become. A member of the famous Mermaid Club, and also of Prince Henry’s household, Coryate apparently sent his friends the frontispiece of his travel book, Coryate’s Crudities Hastily Gobbled Up, hoping for a few commendatory verses. Turning the whole thing into a joke, his friends responded with verses ridiculing first the frontispiece and then the entire project, in Latin, Greek, Italian, even Welsh. Other writers jumped on the bandwagon, until Coryate was positively drowning in “commendatory” verses. Rather helplessly, he explained in the preface, “I sollicited not halfe those worthy Wights for these verses that I now divulge, a great part of them being sent vnto me voluntarily from diuers of my friends, from whom I expected no such courtesie”. Despite himself, he had to print them all: Henry, the seventeen year old Prince of Wales, insisted on it (Coryate 1776: I: d3v). Clearly the prince knew something about the flytings at his father’s Scottish court and enjoyed being part of this one.

The Passionate Pilgrim

This rich variety of collaborative and combative verse may not seem to have much connection with Shakespeare. We know that he is unlikely to have been part of the elite Mermaid Club. None of his works before the 1623 Folio include commendatory poems by other people. Yet the collaborative tradition supplies a context for two of the most puzzling works with which his name is connected: The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and Love’s Martyr (1601). The Passionate Pilgrim, notoriously, is ascribed on the title page to “W. Shakespeare”. It contains four sonnets and a song that are undoubtedly his, along with a number of other poems, some already published by other writers and some of unknown authorship. Love’s Martyr, mainly by Robert Chester, contains the work of at least five other writers, along with the untitled Shakespeare poem usually called “The Phoenix and Turtle”. Both volumes have titles that use religious language to describe secular love. “Passionate” had been a fashionable word since Thomas Watson’s early sonnet cycle, Hekatompathia (1584), which means, as its subtitle says, Passionate Centurie of Loue. Another W.S., William Smith, published in 1596 a sonnet sequence called Chloris, or the Complaint of the passionate despised Shepheard. Christopher Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love” was published for the first time in The Passionate Pilgrim. When it was reprinted the following year in England’s Helicon (1600), it became “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”, probably because of the volume in which it first appeared. The

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word was everywhere in the 1590s. So, perhaps more surprisingly, was “pilgrim”. A “passionate palmer” appears in Robert Greene’s Never Too Late (1590) (Dowden 1883: iv; note 2). There would later be a Passionate Hermit (the subtitle of Dolarny’s Primerose, by John Reynolds, 1606).

The passionate pilgrim, figuratively speaking, is also love’s martyr. The speaker in Robert Tofte’s Alba declares that he had vowed:

As painfull Pilgrim in deuoutfull wise, A voyage in that Holy land to make, At my sweete Saint her Shrine to sacrifice. (Robert Tofte, Alba, B6v)

He also calls himself “a Martyr for religious Loue” (C6). Although this is an obscure volume, it is relevant because Tofte is a poet who went to the theatre: the one poem from Alba that is known to most scholars tells of going to see Love’s Labour’s Lost and losing his mistress there. Thus, his imagery of pilgrims and saints probably derives from Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo’s first encounter with Juliet is based on his conceit of himself as a pilgrim. Both plays incorporate sonnets as part of their dialogue, and Tofte is returning the compliment.

The Passionate Pilgrim has inspired a good deal of suspicion, not least because it was printed only on one side of the paper, to make a mere twenty poems look like more. On the other hand, it sold well, so people apparently did not feel that they were being cheated. They might have welcomed the publishing gimmick as a way of leaving space for them to write their favourite poems, or allowing them to tear favourite pages out of the book. Moreover, as is often pointed out, anyone looking into the volume might easily have thought it genuinely Shakespearean. It opens with two sonnets that were published in 1609, in different versions, as sonnets 138 and 144, followed by one of the sonnets from Love’s Labour’s Lost. It includes two more poems from the play, as well as a number of sonnets and other poems on the subject of Venus and Adonis and perjured or frustrated love. A few of the other authors can be identified: the sonnet beginning “If music and sweet poetry agree” (8) is by Richard Barnfield, and one of the Venus and Adonis poems (11) was published in Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa in 1596. Poems 15 to 20 in the collection have a separate title page calling them “Sonnets to divers notes of musicke”; number 16 is Dumaine’s song from Love’s Labour’s Lost.

James Shapiro thinks that the experience of seeing his poems reprinted, out of context, in The Passionate Pilgrim would have been annoying for Shakespeare, especially since it might seem to make claims for poems which, in their theatrical context, are presented as amateur efforts (Shapiro

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2005). Yet, as Patrick Cheney points out, there is no record of any complaint from Barnfield or Griffin, who had still more reason to be annoyed than Shakespeare, since they received no credit for their poems (Cheney 2004: 164); it was only when Jaggard republished the volume in 1612, adding substantial chunks from Thomas Heywood’s Troia Britannica, that someone protested – not surprisingly, Heywood himself, who added that Shakespeare (unnamed but clearly identifiable) was equally annoyed. Certainly, the printer must have known that some of the poems in his book were not written by Shakespeare: for one thing, Barnfield’s Lady Pecunia, from which his sonnet comes, had been published by William Jaggard’s brother John in 1598. Still, “by Shakespeare” might mean not only written by Shakespeare but also in the persona of Shakespeare.3 The entire 1599 volume could be seen as a tribute to Shakespeare’s most popular early writings. The most obvious is of course Venus and Adonis. The sonnets on this subject are clearly inspired not merely by the theme but also by Shakespeare’s poem, since they all feature an amorous Venus courting a boy Adonis who either rejects or ignores her. In fact, almost any sonnet about unrequited sexual passion could easily be imagined as spoken by Venus. Even the version of 138 that appears here could be taken to be by Adonis. Though the speaker refers to himself as “past the best” and even “old”, he also asks rhetorically, “wherefore says my Loue that she is young?” – something that Venus certainly does say (“Thou canst not see one wrinckle in my brow”, line 139), whereas the 1609 version links the woman’s falsehood to her promiscuity, asking “But wherefore says she not she is unjust?” The poem emphasizes the fact that Venus is a personification of Love, just as Shakespeare had done in calling her “loue-sicke Loue” (328) and punning that “Shee’s loue, she loues, and yet she is not lou’d” (610). When Jaggard reprinted the collection in 1612, he actually called it “The Passionate Pilgrim, or, Certaine Amorous Sonnets, betweene Venus and Adonis, newly corrected and augmented.”

Thus, Patrick Cheney argues, “the volume coheres in presenting the printed voice of a single authorial persona, singing a complaint against love, beauty, and the female sex” (Cheney 2004: 159). Read by an enthusiastic admirer of Venus and Adonis, the volume might indeed seem to be a sort of appendix to the longer poem, using the voices of the

3 An interesting parallel occurs in John Soowthern’s Pandora (London, 1584), a collection dedicated to the Earl of Oxford, in which there are several sonnets supposedly “by” his wife on the death of her son. These might conceivably be by her, but it seems to me more likely that they are simply put into her mouth.

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narrator, Adonis, and even (quoted in the sonnets) Venus herself. On the other hand, a reader who knew the plays as well might have supplied other narrative voices. The theme of forswearing, which dominates the collection, is more obviously relevant to the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost than to Venus and Adonis, though in the poems, unlike the play, it is women who are forsworn. Many of the poems could be put into the mouths of Navarre and his courtiers, who speak for much of the time in a mixture of quatrains and couplets that could easily be mistaken for sonnets.4 They seem to belong to the same cynical world as some of the sonnets in the so-called Dark Lady group, now generally thought to have been written around the same time as the play. Finally, the poem that ends the first section of the book, which opens, “Good night, good rest”, and rhymes “sorrow” with “come again tomorrow”, might have recalled, for those who had seen it, Romeo and Juliet with its repeated goodnights and Juliet’s

Good night, good night; parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say goodnight till it be morrow. (RJ 2.1.229-230) The link between the two “Rosaline” plays and the dark lady sonnets is generally recognized. Shakespeare’s sonnets give no names to the characters who appear in them, nor do they have a title, like Astrophil and Stella, identifying the mistress and/or her lover. Venus and Adonis might have been an alternative title for The Passionate Pilgrim (as Jaggard recognized when he added the names to the subtitle of his 1612 edition), but another might have been Berowne and Rosaline.

It is possible to construct a good many scenarios to explain the way in which The Passionate Pilgrim became a tribute to Shakespeare’s early erotic poems and plays. Jaggard may simply have printed a collection that was already grouped together in a commonplace book, but even so it is worth asking how so many sonnets on the Venus and Adonis theme came to be written. Did writers compete or collaborate on them? Given that Francis Meres, a year earlier, had referred to Shakespeare’s sugared sonnets circulating among his private friends, it has naturally been assumed that one of those private friends was careless with the two poems that Jaggard printed at the beginning of his volume. But it is equally possible that Shakespeare himself was the source, using this opportunity to test the waters before deciding whether to publish the mainly misogynistic 4 The sonnet was by no means limited to fourteen lines in this period: Watson’s Hekatompathia consists of 16-line poems, while Robert Tofte uses a 12-line form, made up of two “Venus and Adonis” stanzas.

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and bawdy poems that constitute 126-152 of the 1609 edition. In that case, Shakespeare himself would have been a collaborator on what – however it happened – can surely be called a collaborative volume.

Love’s Martyr

There is, of course, no doubt that Love’s Martyr (1601) was the work of several hands and that a plan – perhaps several plans – lay behind it. It was issued by Edward Blount, a well regarded and respectable literary publisher, and dedicated to John Salusbury, an esquire of the body to Queen Elizabeth, who received a knighthood at her hands in 1601. Its title page claims that the main poem, Love’s Martyr, is a translation of an Italian poem by Torquato Caeliano. It also draws attention to the “true legend of famous King Arthur, the last of the nine Worthies”, which is “the first Essay of a new Brytish Poet, collected out of diuerse Authenticall Records”. In other words, the book is presented as a combination of translation and original work, with the translation ascribed to Robert Chester and the story of King Arthur to a modern British – that is, Welsh – poet. Alexander Grosart, the first editor of this volume, established that there is no such person as Torquato Caeliano, although poems by both Torquato Tasso and Livio Celiano appeared, consecutively, in an Italian collection of 1587. None of them remotely resemble the English poem. It seems clear that both the story of King Arthur and the story of love’s martyrdom are by Robert Chester, pretending to be two people. In the main story, a Phoenix who is about to die without an heir is taken to Paphos to meet a forsaken Turtledove; they agree to burn together, and a pelican, observing, sees a new phoenix rise from their ashes. The Arthurian story is told to the Phoenix by Nature, who accompanies her to Paphos. Just as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is the absent centre of The Passionate Pilgrim, Chester’s poem is the centre of Love’s Martyr, to which the other poems refer, if sometimes obliquely. Chester presents himself as a member of a circle with literary interests, mentioning in his dedication (A3) the advice he has received from “the directions of some of my best-minded friends” and later explaining that he inserted the history of King Arthur after being “intreated by some of my honourable-minded Friends” (34).

The only part of Chester’s book in which most readers are interested now is its final section, which has its own title page:

Hereafter follow Diverse Poeticall Essaies on the former Subiect; viz: the Turtle and Phoenix. Done by the best and chiefest of our moderne writers,

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with their names subscribed to their particular workes: neuer before extant. And (now first) consecrated by them all generally, to the loue and merite of the true-noble Knight, Sir John Salisburie.5

The title page to the entire volume, having listed the contents of Chester’s poem, adds,

To these are added some new compositions, of seuerall moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their seuerall workes, vpon the first subiect: viz. the Phoenix and Turtle.

The vagueness of this title may mean that the contributions arrived after the main part of the volume had been set in type. The stress on the fact that these poems are new, and that the names of the authors will follow their poems, may be Edward Blount’s way of showing that he was a respectable publisher. Maybe, following the episode of The Passionate Pilgrim, he was determined not to be accused of misleading readers about the contents of his volume. Or maybe, for the same reason, the “best and chiefest writers” had insisted on separate billing.

These writers are, in order, someone who calls himself Ignoto, William Shakespeare, John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. The first poem in this section is, however, ascribed to a Vatum Chorus, a Chorus of Bards. After invoking Apollo and the muses, the anonymous author, pretending to be multiple, declares that the writers want “to gratulate | An honorable friend”, presumably Salusbury, not out of “Mercenarie hope”,

But a true Zeale, borne in our spirites, Responsible to your high Merites…

Like commendatory poems, their offerings are focused on the subject matter of the poem, or, at least, on its basic idea about the immolation of a phoenix and turtle dove (the dramatists mostly ignore the lengthy digressions). On the other hand, they appear at the end rather than the front of the volume, and praise the book’s dedicatee, Salusbury, rather than its author, Chester.

I do not propose here to offer a reading of Shakespeare’s notoriously difficult poem, which has been variously interpreted as alluding to the

5 Curiously, this is virtually a translation of the title of the Italian collection in which the Tasso and Celiano poems appeared: Rime di Diversi Celebri Poeti dell’ età nostra (rhymes of several [divers] celebrated poets of our age). See Grosart’s edition of Chester (1878).

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personal history of Sir John Salusbury, to the relationship of Elizabeth and Essex, and to various permutations of these two theories. Instead, I should like to look at it in the contexts both of collaboration and of commendatory poem. It has sometimes been suggested that Shakespeare had very little interest either in Salusbury or in Love’s Martyr, since his poem says that the “dead birds” left “no posterity” and makes no mention of their rebirth in a new phoenix. This, however, is to assume Shakespeare’s ignorance not only of the contents of Chester’s poem, but of the phoenix myth, which is omnipresent in the period. Chester himself had already treated the myth even more radically by making the new phoenix the offspring of two parents rather than exploiting the paradox that unique perfection can be succeeded by another, equally unique, perfection. It is also surprising that the Turtle Dove should be male and the Phoenix female – something on which one of the other writers will comment. Another odd feature of the poem is that its full title is Love’s Martyr, or, Rosalin’s Complaint, but the poem never uses the name Rosalin.

As William Matchett has noted, in the only full-length study of the poem, several features of the appendix suggest careful planning, either because the authors agreed on the shape their contribution should take or because one of the poets, probably Jonson or Marston, played the role of a “plotter” (Matchett 1965: 77).6 The different sections have learned-sounding titles – Invocatio, Threnos, Epicidium, Perfectioni Hymnus Peristeros, Praeludium, Epos and Ode ένθουσιατική – that suggest a common origin. Shakespeare’s poem, calling a group of mourners together for a ceremony, follows one called “The Burning” and the opening line of Marston’s poem, “O, ’twas a moving epicidium!” seems to comment on the way that ceremony was expressed in Shakespeare’s immediately preceding one. When Marston goes on to deny that so much beauty and virtue could perish, he is not trying to rescue Shakespeare from an embarrassing mistake; rather, he is dramatizing the moment when, after death and mourning, the phoenix is reborn. Both dramatists, not surprisingly, wrote poems that live in an imagined present. The movement

6 Matchett has made some valuable contributions to the study of this poem, for instance in noting that Ignoto’s line “One Phoenix borne, another Phoenix burne” recurs in a poem by H.G. [possibly Henry Goodyere] published in 1618 in The Mirrour of Maiestie, a poem in honor of Queen Anne (181). H.G. actually did a Phoenix emblem (pictured in the book) for the queen (182). Maurice Evans, however, in his edition of The Narrative Poems (Penguin, 1989), describes Ignoto’s poem as “based on a popular Elizabethan emblem” (58). Evans suggested that Ignoto might be John Donne, who at this period was involved in his courtship and marriage of Ann More.

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from tragedy to joy also explains the surprisingly jocular tone and rhythm of Jonson’s “The Phoenix Analysde”:

Splendor! O more than mortall, For other formes come short all Of her illustrate brightnesse. (Chester 1878: 186)

At one time, scholars wondered why Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists should have felt it worth their while to write poems for an obscure Welsh squire and his still more obscure poet. More recently, it has become clear that Salusbury was in fact rather important (see, in particular, Honigmann (1998), chapter 9 (99-113), and Bland (2000)). Through his mother, he was descended from Henry VII; his wife was an illegitimate but acknowledged daughter of the Earl of Derby. A family commonplace book shows that Salusbury and a number of his relatives wrote poetry themselves, much of it in the form of acrostics or posies. Much of the poetry written in the book is in Welsh, and one of the Welsh poets was William Cynwal, the traditional bard who took part in the flyting of the 1580s; he also produced an elaborate illustrated genealogy of Salusbury’s mother. It had taken Salusbury considerable time to rebuild his family’s reputation after the Babington plot of 1586, for which his brother was executed, but in 1595 he had invited a number of Welsh bards to celebrate his restoration of his family’s honour and fortunes. The existence of this cooperative poetic circle – and Salusbury’s reputation for generosity as a patron – no doubt had something to do with the willingness of Shakespeare and other dramatists to add their own poems to the Chester volume.7

It may already have been a collaborative volume. Chester’s poem is followed by “Cantoes Alphabet-wise to faire Phoenix made by the Paphian Doue”. These are an ingenious tour de force: a stanza in which each line’s first word begins with “a”, followed by one where each begins with “b”, and so on (in the latter part of the alphabet, the author ran out of rhyme words beginning with the right letter and had to compromise). Following these acrostic Cantos comes a sequence of “Cantos Verbally Written” – like acrostics, but with words instead of letters: the first word of each line of a longer poem becomes a short posy, like “My Phoenix rare, is al my care” and “I haue no loue, but you my Doue.”8 Chester placed his name at

7 Burrow suggests that, in the aftermath of Essex’s execution, poets may have been in search of another patron (Burrow 2002: 88-9). 8 Carleton Brown notes that these “cantoes” borrow from existing collections of posies, such as those in Harleian MS 6910. See Brown (1914: lv).

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the end of this section, but, since the poem identifies Salusbury with the Turtle Dove, it is likely that the Cantos would have been understood by contemporaries as the voice of Salusbury himself. The family commonplace book, preserved in the Library of Christ Church College, Oxford, shows that his household in Wales went in for such verbal games as posies and acrostics spelling out the names of female relatives (Christ Church MS 184; Brown 1914: xxxiii). The fact that the same posy is the basis of several different poems among the cantos “alphabet-wise” attributed to the dove in Love’s Martyr suggests that these may be the result of a poetic competition or game,9 probably confined to Salusbury’s immediate circle of family and friends, and one in which mutual admiration rather than antagonism was the dominant mode. The collaborative mode of the appendix might well have seemed appropriate to the knighthood of an amateur poet who enjoyed social poetry. Unfortunately, the spirit of collaboration does not seem to have lasted. Only a year later, Dekker and Marston collaborated on Satiromastix, incorporating a fierce response to Jonson’s attacks on them in Poetaster. Among many other things, they ridiculed Jonson, as he had ridiculed others, for being paid to write acrostics and “poesies for rings, or hand-kerchers, or kniues” (Satiromastix 5.2.272). Since the play was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men, Shakespeare, whose dirge had lamented the loss of so “true a twain” and “single nature’s double name”, now presided over a collaborative attack both on Jonson’s egotism and on his career as a social poet. He and Marston probably learned about the side of Jonson’s career that he was now attacking through their mutual connection with Salusbury and their brief experience of collaboration on Love’s Martyr.

Bibliography

Bland, Mark (2000). “‘As far from all reuolt’: Sir John Salusbury, Christ Church MS 184 and Ben Jonson’s First Ode.” English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 43-78.

Brown, Carleton, ed. (1914). Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester. Early English Text Society. London: Kegan Paul and Oxford University Press, 1914.

9 For instance, “I had rather loue though in vaine that face, | Then haue of any other grace”, which is used in nos. 7, 9, and 11 of the sequence.

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Burrow, Colin, ed. (2002). William Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Champion, Pierre (1933). François Villon, sa vie et son temps. 2 vols. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1933.

Chandler, Wayne A. (2003). Commendatory Verse and Authorship in the English Renaissance. Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

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Chester, Robert (1878 [1601]). Robert Chester’s “Love’s Martyr, or, Rosalin’s Complaint” (1601). Ed. Alexander B. Grosart. New Shakspere Society 19. N. Trübner & Co., 57, 59, Ludgate Hill, London, 1878.

Cheney, Patrick (2004). Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Coryate, Thomas (1776 [1611]). Coryat’s Crudities; reprinted from the Edition of 1611. To which are now added, His Letters from India, &c. And Extracts Relating to Him from Various Authors…. 3 vols. London: 1776.

Dowden, Edward (1883 [1599]). “Introduction” to The Passionate Pilgrim. Facsimile by William Griggs. London: W. Griggs, 1883.

Fuller, Thomas (1952). The Worthies of England. Ed. and abridged by John Freeman. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1952.

Hirschfield, Heather Anne (1999). “‘Work upon that now’: the Production of Parody on the English Renaissance Stage.” Genre 32 (1999): 175-200.

Honigmann, E.A.J. (1998). Shakespeare: the ‘Lost’ Years. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.

Jonson, Ben (1969). Every Man in His Humor. Ed. Gabrielle Bernhard Jackson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969.

Marotti, Arthur (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Matchett, William H. (1965). The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare’s Poem and Chester’s Love’s Martyr. London, the Hague, Paris: Mouton & Co., 1965.

Mowat, Barbara A., and Paul Werstine, eds. (2004). Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square Press, 2004.