The Sonnets

It happened that one of the greater guests, a powerful Seneschal, a renowned warrior, caught the apple a moment before the charging youth – closing on him at speed and calculating its upward trajectory – snatched it in the very act of rising again from his hand.

‘Huzzah!’ our host called out in triumph. Holding his prize aloft, he backed into the middle of the circle, to rising roars. There he took a wolf bite of the apple, to further approbation, while among the gathered others, I watched in smiling approval.

Chapter 4

MY LORD BURNED WITH A CONTINUOUS, dense energy. He was one of those who needed little sleep. When he rested, he slept instinctively and deeply, like an animal. After we had thrown the apple, he approached me and said, ‘Master Shakespeare, I wish to speak with you about certain matters.’

It was already past midnight. In his chambers during the early hours, he paced up and down. I stood still and silent, leaning against the wall, not daring to interrupt his fervent movement. Eventually he turned towards me. ‘Is Master Marlowe older than you?’

‘Hardly,’ I answered, surprised by this odd question. ‘By only a few months, I believe.’

‘Yet you openly acknowledge him your superior?’

‘My superior in art,’ I said. ‘The worthier pen.’

‘You say so freely.’

To which I answered, ‘Every scribbler in our land is in debt to his great peroration, his mighty line. Where he leads, we others follow.’

‘You truly admire Faustus?’ he asked.

‘Marlowe is Faustus,’ I replied. ‘They say he necromances spirits, that he is on speaking terms with Mephistopheles.’

He smiled at that, saying, ‘This … other work that you mentioned at our table –’

‘Hero and Leander,’ I said.

‘Hero and Leander. What is it, precisely?’

‘A poem about love, dwelling much on masculine beauty. It is said that he intends to dedicate it to you.’

His face lit up. He was addicted to praise.

‘To me?’

‘So it is said.’

‘Yet it is unfinished.’

I smiled. ‘So it is said.’

He looked at me searchingly. ‘And you do not mind … a rival for your praise?’

‘He has a worthy subject.’

He paused and considered me. ‘You are honest. You see coldly and clearly, and yet I believe you burn hot inside.’

I would not deny it. So before him I said, as though in affirmation of a fact, ‘I see clearly and burn hot.’

That night, after I left my lord’s rooms, I attempted to give some further shape to the thoughts I had earlier that day – that his youth and beauty incited dreams in the observer. Earlier that morning, when he emerged from the lake, there was one more witness than those I had already described. In the dawn mists, a figure was collecting brushwood in some dense, nearby scrub. At first I thought it might have been a boar, rooting in the undergrowth. Despite the low-lying vapour, I could begin to make out an elderly crone, bent-backed, in a grey hood. She had been dragging a sack of brushwood backwards from a thick covert where she had been collecting sticks for firewood.

The foliage was so dense there that it would have been difficult to lift the sack under the immediate oppression of the overhanging boughs. Once she was out of its entanglements, she intended to lift her load onto her shoulders. So she emerged from the thicket backwards, like some strange animal, hauling her load, wheezing and gasping, at precisely that place on the shore where my lord, unconscious of any other human witness, was approaching after his swim in the lake. I supposed that, suspecting a meeting, I could have warned her of his emergence from the water, but the comical nature of our situation touched me and stimulated my curiosity.

Perhaps the elderly crone heard the jingle of horses’ bridles, or the splashing of my lord’s feet as he neared the shore, for she seemed suddenly aware of others in her vicinity. She turned round, perplexed, and was faced with an entirely naked youth emerging like a god from the elements.

Her face, I do recall, was a picture. It was a wonderful old countenance, wrinkled and shriven, but with a clear, bright, and intelligent eye. I know enough of age to appreciate that the inhabiter of that bag of bones was the same being who had danced with graceful feet on the common in her youth.

For a brief moment her eye surveyed the figure that had risen from the waters – heavy, pale shoulders, long fair hair, the nub between the slender legs – with the purest appreciation.

Why should either of them have been offended? It is true that he, at first as startled as she, tensed a little from the unexpected meeting; but seeing almost immediately that his witness offered no offence and appeared appreciative of his form, he relaxed, and even lowered the lid of his eye in the form of a rakish wink. For a moment, all that old woman’s Christmases seemed rolled into one. She cackled with pleasure, allowed her eye one more appreciative traverse of his figure, and then – modesty imposing itself at last – turned away to lift the sack onto her back. It seemed she shook with laughter as she slowly disappeared into the mist.

I handed my lord his clothes. When he had dressed, we rode back through the morning towards the great house.

Chapter 5

I HAD BEEN WORKING on the idea of composing a sequence of poems or sonnets addressed to my patron. The sonnet itself had a complex history. According to a prevailing fashion, it was addressed by a poet to a mistress, often one who was out of reach, after whom he yearned, or at least affected to do so for the sake of the fulsome compliments he would bestow upon her. It was a convention which had emerged in part at least from the troubadour tradition of France, and since we English tended to ape French fashions, it had its adherents amongst the nobility. Great ladies found it amusing to be addressed thus, in appropriately lofty language, by one who remained suitably distant and chaste. I had one obvious difficulty in my own circumstances: my patron was a master, not a mistress. Yet precisely because of this, the convention imposed its own interesting construction. It reminded me of the convention in a theatre, whereby a man would play a woman’s role. By the same processes, perhaps, it stimulated rather than repressed the imagination.

If a man, rather than a woman, were to be the object of those high-flown praises, a more subtle tone was required – of fervent infatuation which was, at the same time, ironic. And since my master was himself both intelligent and someone who enjoyed praise, I began with the advantage of a most discerning subject for my poetry.

Until then I had mainly drafted certain thoughts in the form of individual lines and brief passages of description or argument. But now, reaching my rooms, I attempted to write a sonnet which would perhaps function as a keystone to my efforts. With a clean page before me, I began by praising my master’s beauty as though he were my beloved mistress, at the same time asserting that my love was not physical, but spiritual.

A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,

Which steals men’s eyes, and women’s souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition thee of me defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

If it were a sonnet which would form the key to the others I would write, there were certain ways in which I would attempt to make it stand out from the other sonnets I intended to compose. I deliberately chose to use eleven syllables to the line, as opposed the usual ten. In addition, I left a clue to the identity of my patron in the phrase:

A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,

The mysterious word ‘Hews’, with a capital letter, as though it were a name, would be opaque to the merely casual reader. But since my patron was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose initials were HWES, an anagram of Hews, it would give a clue to the identity of the fair young man. It happened too that certain of those tradesmen, builders and merchants who had cause to address my lord, or wrote him bills, often altered his name to ‘Henry, Earl Wriothesley of Southampton’. Thus ‘Hews’ would act as a vernacular reference to my patron.

I chose the moment carefully to show the poem to my lord. We had been riding through the forest that early summer morning. He dismounted from his horse in order to walk to the edge of a nearby decline, so that he could survey the surrounding country. As I walked alongside him, I drew the paper forth from my clothes. Taking it from me, he read it with studied amusement. I watched him raise his eyebrows at the last few lines, read them again, and then laugh the louder.

‘Most excellent,’ he said. ‘I am thy spiritual love, but Nature pricked me out for women’s pleasure.’ He smiled again. ‘I should be desirous to see more.’

I asked him whether he had noted the hidden reference to his name in ‘Hews’.

My patron said, ‘If these are dangerous times, as you counsel me, then it is right that living persons should not be mentioned. And since these are private poems, for our own enjoyment, Master Shakespeare, I believe all your references to me as your patron should be hidden to an outside view. If you will accept those conditions, pray continue as you will.’

He returned the paper to me. ‘Will you make a copy of this, in your own hand, so that I may keep it?’

It became our custom. When I had finished a poem, I would copy it; keeping the overwritten and amended original for myself, giving the fair version to him. As for the content, perhaps I could do better in due course. But the tone – part infatuation, part irony, directed at a mysterious and unidentified beautiful youth – seemed well set for our enterprise. In due course I would arrange the poems in a different order, but meanwhile they would steadily accrue.

Chapter 6

THAT SUMMER, GRANTED MY LORD’S PERMISSION, I began to sing his praises in those effusive and extravagant terms so dearly beloved of my countrymen. For there was another circumstance which propelled me towards such orisons to beauty, and my lord towards receiving them with a good grace. It happened that in our kingdom we were ruled by a Queen, a veritable lion-hearted Empress, and in our pleading for her mercy and her favour we all of us sounded like troubadour poets singing of our love. It happened too that the very form or construction of my sonnets – soliciting the favours of a fair subject – rhymed with the prevailing fashion among courtiers. And so I proceeded from one to the next, gaining greater confidence as each one was well received by my patron.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,

Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, – and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings,

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I continued to sing my calculated songs throughout that summer, piling verse on verse, page on page, making each time a fresh copy for my lord. With the form established between us, I began to exceed myself in gallantry, making the object of my praises the subject of love itself. Though my poem was addressed to a handsome youth, I strove as best I could to reflect some universal desire.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I burnt my nightly hours as he inferred, confined to my small room, bent over my formal rhythms, counting the beats on my fingers, feeling for that thread of sense which would hold together the discreet observations and soaring praises they would contain. Sometimes several days, or even a week, would pass without a single line that I deemed worth showing to him. At other times, in the course of a night’s labour, I would find several pages of some worth had piled one upon the other. So, often laboriously and occasionally swiftly, I began to accumulate my efforts.

Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb

Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;

Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’

So should my papers, yellow’d with their age,

Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage

And stretched metre of an antique song:

But were some child of yours alive that time,

You should live twice, – in it and in my rhyme.

The introduction of a child of his own making who would perpetuate that beauty was accidental and felicitous, though perhaps with my poetic senses now attuned to his particular circumstances, I presaged some future development.

Chapter 7

THERE WERE TIMES when my lord seemed to regard me with a certain wry amusement for my pains. In conversation one day, he deliberately switched the subject from the sonnet he had been reading towards another subject perhaps closer to his heart. At the time he was staring at the floor, as though gathering his thoughts. Now he turned to peer once more at me with his green eyes, flecked with gold. ‘My mother has spoken to you again?’

‘She has.’

‘And on the usual subject?’

‘The usual,’ I said.

‘And you take her side, as always.’

‘Her side is your side,’ I replied, and added, ‘She speaks for you.’

He turned away. ‘Damn me, if she does.’

I said, ‘There are matters which await you. That is all she says.’

‘Yes, yes, matters!’ This was fierce and fast. He seemed compelled to continue, for the rest of what he wished to say now streamed forth. ‘It is time, perhaps, that you knew something further of me, of my closer circumstances…’

‘Your closer circumstances?’ The phrase rang oddly, and I was at a loss as to this new departure.

He said, ‘You know, for example, that my father died when I was eight.’ I nodded, nervous at his apparent continued excitation. Now, with an effort, he seemed to compose himself sufficiently to explain. ‘After my father had been buried, my Lord Burghley became my legal guardian. When I was still no more than a child, my great guardian caused me to sign a contract, promising to marry his granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere, on pain of which refusal, on reaching my majority, I would pay a fine – a terrible fine, almost equal to the value of my entire estate. You know of this?’

It was common gossip, so I said, cautiously, ‘I have heard rumours, nothing more.’

‘Then,’ he insisted, ‘you have heard of the disposition of my Lord Burghley?’

I said only that I knew that he had the disposition of a lawyer, and the reputation of a courtier.

‘And what else have you heard of him?’ he asked.

‘That he is our Queen’s closest advisor, and the strongest voice in the Privy Council.’

‘Yes, yes, that is his political suit. But have you ever seen the man, in person?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘He is the coldest creature that ever walked upon this earth. He regards all art, all painting, all poetry, as vanity. The theatre in particular he considers both impious and seditious. They say he is not of the Puritan party, yet he has a puritan’s instincts. Whatever he touches, becomes ice. If he walks through summer, winter follows. And yet it was he who replaced my dead and lamented father – in nomine patris.’

‘In your maturity,’ I tentatively suggested, ‘You will grow away from him.’

‘If only it were so!’ He seemed a little calmer now, staring at the floor, but still biting his fist, his attention set in some other realm. ‘Even from a distance, from London, he still controls my household. My mother too is fearful of him.’

‘Why, my lord?’ I asked.

He raised his eyes again to mine. ‘If I do not marry the one he has chosen for me, my mother too shall be ruined by the catastrophic fine that my Lord Burghley, in his wisdom, shall apportion on me.’

He remained unusually excited. I did my best to calm him, saying, ‘Your mother thinks more of an heir from you than of your inheritance.’

‘Yes, yes! He blackmails her too, though at a remove. His reach is great. His claws are in everyone.’

I was about to say something more, but my lord continued, ‘And then, of course, there is my tutor, Master Florio.’ He paused, raised his eyes towards the ceiling, adding with emphasis, ‘Master Florio.’

I attempted emollience. ‘Master John Florio. A most eminent Italian scholar, to whom you owe your own achievement in learning.’

‘A fine tutor, and in that respect I perhaps am willing to accept your description. But we should not forget one thing – that he writes regularly to his own master.’

‘His own master?’

‘My Lord Burghley, who appointed him.’

I halted, silenced in part by the strange complexity of my patron’s circumstances. ‘Perhaps he writes to apprise my Lord Burghley of your great advances in learning.’

He laughed at this, with a dismissive air. ‘No, no, my dear Master William. He writes of my predisposition to marriage, of my carousing in certain company. And so, Master Florio, instructed by his master, admonishes me for my behaviour. Amongst his lessons he coldly arranges certain threats against me. Why, the man’s an Italian, of passionate mind. Yet he passes on the current of my Lord Burghley’s coldness as though it were his own.’

I smiled at this, and said, ‘Machiavelli too was a Florentine,’ then added, ‘In Master Florio’s favour, he imposes upon himself the same discipline he would exert upon you.’

‘What discipline is that?’ he shot back at me.

‘He constructs a dictionary of Italian and English, a great and noble undertaking –’

‘In his own interest –’

‘And in my interests, too,’ I said, ‘for I find in his other translations of Italian works a rich source of stories and quaint dramas. It is, I admit, my own concern, but he is generous to me with his translations –’

‘And no doubt you are grateful to him, as you should be. And I am grateful to him, too. But why should a man play double if he is, as you say, of so single a mind? Why should he serve two masters if one master is enough?’

‘It sounds as though his other master – my Lord Burghley – is difficult to refuse.’

‘Don’t you see? He admires his master, just as Signor Machiavelli admired his prince…’ He paused, then burst out, ‘He is Lord Burghley’s flea!’

I allowed the first clean wave of his anger to pass me by, swiftly and uncomfortably. ‘How can you be certain that what he writes is anything more than praise of you? You yourself received your Master’s degree from Cambridge at the age of sixteen. He has good reason to be proud of his pupil.’

But he objected, ‘You are too generous. You take every other’s part. I believe you’ – he struggled for words – ‘complicate matters.’

‘My lord, it is in my nature to seek for wider motive.’

‘Then, speaking of wider motive, let us return to my mother. She would arrange some further slip of a girl to marry me, and because I hesitate –’

‘She would accept your direct refusal,’ I said. ‘If you proposed another match –’

He turned away in anger. ‘Another girl, another victim of the great imperative …’ His voice became fierce again, ironical. ‘Why, marry and produce an heir.’

I could not help but smile at his retort.

‘You laugh at me, Master William?’ he asked.

I replied, as gently as I could, ‘No, sir, I do not laugh. I merely play the devil’s advocate, as you have asked.’

He considered me for several moments. Who knows what he saw, or for what he searched. Perhaps he observed something genuine in my perplexity.

Calmer now, he appeared to ease a little. He said, ‘I am not like you, William – so silent, so determined upon your life. You resemble nothing so much as one of those steel springs inside a lock. Tonight I will go to bed and sleep, and dream. And you, to some further vigil at the board?’

It was true. I observed in my mind’s eye another appointment, until the early dawn, with a sheet of paper and the little flame. ‘That is how I choose to burn my hours.’

‘Yet it is I who have no other cause, more weighty than to be myself.’

I said, as gently as I could, ‘That is enough.’

‘Oh, it would be,’ he said, ‘if I knew the meaning of myself.’

‘You will learn it.’

‘How?’ he asked, with genuine puzzlement.

I smiled at his earnestness. ‘It will grow into you. You will grow into it.’

‘Will I?’

‘You will.’

‘You make a pun upon your name.’

‘You made it first. I merely follow you. Your will is your own.’

‘Damn these circumstances, though. In many respects you are kindness itself. Yet still you press me.’

‘I do not press you. I remind you.’

‘Of my duty.’

‘Of yourself.’

‘And you will teach me to be myself?’

‘I will attempt to remind you, from time to time, of what you may be.’

Chapter 8

BUT OUR RELATIONS WERE SUCH that my patron was apt to remind me of what I should be, too. One day while out riding, he said, ‘I should like to show you at first hand how my Lord Burghley attempts to influence me. Two years ago, when I was merely seventeen years, my guardian engaged one of his secretaries, a Master John Clapham, to write a poem in Latin, dedicated to me, called Narcissus.’