Shakespeare's Wife (33 page)

The persuasion of the young man to marry gradually gives way to a boast by the poet that the young man will be known to posterity not through the issue of his loins but because he, Shakespeare, has made him immortal in his verse. What is absurd about this claim is that though everybody knows the verse, nobody knows the identity of the young man, who may be several interchangeable young men. As far as description goes he is generic, young, lovely, with bright eyes and hair like marjoram buds; there is no identikit portrait, no blazon of his physical charms, not even a pun on his name. There are some sonnets that don't seem to be about any ‘him' at all.

 

So is it not with me as with that Muse,

Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,

Who heaven itself for ornament doth use,

And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,

Making a couplement of proud compare

With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,

With April's first-born flowers and all things rare

That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.

O, let me true in love, but truly write,

And then believe me, my love is as fair

As any mother's child, though not so bright

As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air.

Let them say more that like of hearsay well;

I will not praise that purpose not to sell. (21)

 

So may a man celebrate the worth of his wife, whom he does not wish to share with the rest of the world. We know from his extreme reticence that, however hyperbolically he might write of a distant patron, Shakespeare did not ‘like of hearsay well'. If his brother chaffed him about never praising the beauty of his wife, he might have answered in this vein, slightly testily, recalling his commitment to her and her children, and her equal status with him in the ‘one flesh' of wedlock. Some of the sonnets ask forgiveness for neglect, again in terms that seem ill sorted for a relationship between a young and lovely nobleman and a poeticising commoner. We can hardly imagine the young Earl of Southampton complaining like a neglected wife that the man Shakespeare never told him that he loved him.

 

As an unperfect actor on the stage,

Who with his fear is put besides his part,

Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,

Whose strength's abundance weakens his own heart,

So I, in fear of trust, forget to say

The perfect ceremony of love's rite,

And in mine own love's strength seem to decay,

O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might.

O, let my books be then the eloquence

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

Who plead for love and look for recompense

More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

O learn to read what silent love hath writ;

To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit. (23)

 

There was no ‘perfect ceremony' to bind Shakespeare to his lovely boy, but he was so bound to Ann. It is not fashionable to suggest that he cared what she thought of what he did, but what writer—husband would be totally indifferent to his wife's opinion? What husband challenged by his wife would not say that everything he did was for love of her, even is she was never mentioned in any of it?

 

Let those who are in favour with their stars

Of public honour and proud titles boast,

Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars,

Unlooked for joy in that I honour most.

Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread

But as the marigold in the sun's eye,

And in themselves their pride lies burièd,

For at a frown they in their glory die.

The painful warrior famousèd for fight,

After a thousand victories once foiled,

Is from the book of honour razèd quite,

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled.

Then happy I that love and am beloved

Where I may not remove or be removed. (25)

 

The only relationship from which Shakespeare could not ‘remove or be removed' was the one he had with his wife. This may not have been what he meant, for he may have been crediting the ideal lover with ideal constancy, but it is the obvious significance of the words he chooses here. Perhaps what Ann read as she leafed through Thorpe's little book were versions of sonnets that had once been written to her and had been reworked for another purpose. In 1609 Ann was fifty-three and unlikely to have given too much importance to rhymes written so long ago, but she was still without her husband's company for most of the year. Stratford citizens visiting London probably brought back excited tales of the theatres and who knows that her daughters did not beg their mother to come with them to see their father's plays?

Perhaps Ann was moved by the travelling Sonnets 27 and 28,
remembering the early days when Will first rode off to London leaving her and his children behind.

 

Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired,

But then begins a journey in my head

To work my mind when body's work's expired,

For then my thoughts from far where I abide,

Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,

And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,

Looking on darkness which the blind do see—

Save that my soul's imaginary sight

Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,

Which like a jewel hung in ghastly night

Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

Lo, thus by day my limbs, at night my mind,

For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. (27)

 

When Will rode off to seek his fortune he was on his own for the first time in his life. He may well have suffered the loneliness and anxiety, the frustration and disappointment that resound from this group of sonnets. A similar note is sounded in Sonnet 50:

 

How heavy do I journey on the way

When what I seek, my weary travel's end,

Doth teach that ease and that repose to say

‘Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend'.

The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,

Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,

As if by some instinct the wretch did know

His rider loved not speed being made from thee.

The bloody spur cannot provoke him on

That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,

Which heavily he answers with a groan

More sharp to me than spurring to his side,

For that same groan doth put this in my mind:

My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

 

Scholars have preferred to think that these were the feelings that afflicted Shakespeare as he rode towards Ann and his family rather than away from them. There is no hard evidence either way. Even the term ‘friend' in the third line does not exclude Ann. A friend for life was one of the promises made in ‘The Bride's Goodmorrow' the term hardly fits the master-mistress of the poet's passion, because friends are meant to be
similes inter pares
, of equal standing, in perfect reciprocity. Sonnet 52 refers to the infrequency of his visits to his ‘friend', like feasts ‘so solemn and so rare', which reminds us that he would return to Stratford for those very feasts. The imagery of the chest and the wardrobe and even the ‘up-locked treasure' might be taken to imply his home rather than the rather cheerless lodgings he could expect in London. All of which is not to say that Shakespeare's sonnets are addressed to his wife, but that perhaps once, before they were prepared for publication, some of them had been meant for her. Praise of the beloved for constancy, as in Sonnet 53, seems ill directed towards the young man. If Shakespeare assumed different masks for different sequences and different imagined readers, it is no more than we should expect. It seems not unreasonable that one of his masks was the aspect that he showed to his wife.

Perhaps Ann had seen this sonnet long before it appeared in print:

 

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,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

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 remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (29)

 

Such a sonnet is barely fit for the eyes of a patron, or for that matter for a paramour of the moment. It speaks of solitude and distance self-imposed, of ambition thwarted, of disadvantage in the sphere of his endeavour, all to be expected of a half-educated young man taking on the London theatre industry at its own game. If it referred to a woman keeping a home for him, remaining true to her bond with him regardless of his uselessness as a provider, it would make sense. If instead of plaudits and profits he could send home only a sonnet such as this, Ann would have been more than satisfied. The same could be said of the sonnet that follows it in Thorpe's edition. After a catalogue of repinings it ends:

 

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restored and sorrows end. (30)

 

The most direct of the sonnets is also the least applicable to a crush on a first, second or third young man, however seductive and brilliant. Sonnet 110 reads like an apology to his oldest and truest love:

 

Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored my own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new.

Most true it is that I have looked on truth

Askance and strangely, but, by all the above,

These blenches gave my heart another youth,

And worse essays proved thee my best of love.

Now all is done, have what shall have no end.

Mine appetite I never more will grind

On newer proof to try an older friend,

A god in love, to whom I am confined.

Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,

Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.

 

Shakespeare had chosen the life of a mountebank, a dealer in shadows and illusions. If Ann was anywhere near as puritan as her brother Bartholomew she must have detested the idea from the beginning and
even Shakespeare's eventual success would hardly have mollified her. The devil being the father of lies, dissimulation is the beginning of all sin and it was this, less than the lasciviousness of the displays, that excited the ire of the puritan reformers. The sonnet sounds as if it is a mild defence against a passionate condemnation, beginning by freely admitting guilt, ‘Alas, 'tis true,' ‘Most true it is…' The poet proceeds to argue like a sophist, excusing his infidelities in terms that strangely presage the devilishly brilliant boy who has ruined the country maid in ‘A Lover's Complaint'.

 

To make the weeper laugh, the laugher weep,

He had the dialect and different skill,

Catching all passions in his craft of will.

 

That he did in the general bosom reign

Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted,

To dwell with him in thoughts, or to remain

In personal duty, following where he haunted.

Consents bewitched, ere he desire, have granted,

And dialogued for him what he would say,

Asked their own wills and made their wills obey.

 

The boy's sophistical argument, that experiencing inferior loves serves to convince a man of the superiority of his first love, is a tougher doctrine than that might seem, for it has little to do with a rebirth of passion or conjugal intimacy. The sonnets that follow 110 spell out the theme of repentance and reformation:

 

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,

The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,

That did not better for my life provide

Than public means which public manners breeds. (111)

 

Though the sonnets claim to be plain-speaking all through, this is the plainest speech so far. We don't know when these lines were written, but it seems that they belong to a much later stage in the poet's life than the trickier sonnets of the 1590s. The ultimate
statement of the doctrine of marriage as spiritual discipline is probably Sonnet 116.

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken.

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never lived, nor no man ever loved.

 

The final couplet contains the equivocation, for if God is love, mere man is not capable of it. Such heroic love is unattainable for fallible humans, but strive for it the poet must and will. The love he now finds true may not have been his original passion for Ann, and Ann may not here be meant. Then again she may: again the poem appears to answer an angry accusation, and once again it finds a sophistical excuse. Shakespeare could have written ‘no one ever loved' he wrote ‘no man ever loved'. In his plays women are shown time and time again to be constant in love through months and years of separation. Ann may have been the model, and her steadfastness itself a reproach that grew more poignant with the passing of the years.