Without once making an appearance in his own person—for, after all, this is a mythological fantasy—Shakespeare is constantly, inescapably present in Venus and Adonis, as if he wanted Southampton (and perhaps “the world,” at which he glances in his dedication) fully to understand his extraordinary powers of playful identification. He is manifestly in Venus, in her physical urgency and her rhetorical inventiveness, and he is in Adonis too, in his impatience and his misogynistic distaste. But he is in everything else as well. If a mare could write a love poem to a stallion (and, more precisely, the ecstatic inventory of the beloved’s features, known as a blazon), she might write this:
Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.
(lines 295–98)
If a hare could write a poem about the misery of being hunted, he might write this:
Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way.
Each envious brier his weary legs do scratch;
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.
(lines 703–6)
The point is not that horses or hares are central to the poem—they are not. The point is that Shakespeare effortlessly enters into their existence.
What do you offer a beautiful, spoiled young aristocrat who has everything? You present him with a universe where everything has an erotic charge, a charge whose urgency confounds the roles of mother and lover. Here is Venus hearing the sound of the hunt and running in panic toward the scene:
And as she runs, the bushes in the way
Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,
Some twine about her thigh to make her stay.
She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace,
Like a milch doe whose swelling dugs do ache,
Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake.
(lines 871–76)
How do you awaken and hold a jaded young man’s attention? You introduce him to a world of heightened sensitivity to pleasure and to pain. Here is Venus shutting her eyes at the sight of Adonis’s fatal wound:
Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smothered up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So at his bloody view her eyes are fled
Into the deep dark cabins of her head.
(lines 1033–38)
And if you are begging for the generosity of a noble patron, what stupendous gift can you possibly give in return? You propose symbolically to turn death itself into orgasm. Here is Venus telling herself that the boar intended not to kill Adonis but to kiss him:
“And, nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin.”
(lines 1115–16)
The “loving swine” has only done what she herself has all along been proposing to do:
“Had I been toothed like him, I must confess
With kissing him I should have killed him first.”
(lines 1117–18)
This is what Shakespeare had to offer.
Evidently, Venus and Adonis pleased the earl: judging from the rush of imitations, admiring comments, and reprintings—ten times by 1602!—the poem pleased virtually everyone. (It was particularly popular, it seems, with young men.) Flush with his success, Shakespeare was as good as his word, bringing forth within a year’s time the much graver Lucrece. But this time the tone of the dedicatory letter to Southampton was no longer diffident, tentative, or anxious: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end. . . . What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” Elizabethan dedicatory letters were often quite florid, but what Shakespeare wrote here is not at all typical. This was not, as might have been expected, an exercise in praise or the desire to please or a plea for patronage; this was a public declaration of fervent, boundless love.
Something happened in the course of the year between Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, something led Shakespeare to shift from “I know not how I shall offend” to “love . . . without end.” There is no direct access to whatever it was, but it is possible that hints may lie in the sonnets. For the sonnets—assuming that most of the first 126 of them were written to the same person—do not merely praise the young man and affirm the power of poetry; they sketch a relationship unfolding over time, in all probability over years. Admiration ripens into adoration; periods of joyful intimacy are followed by absence and desperate longing; the poet finds it tormenting to endure separation from his beloved; he feels in many ways unworthy of so precious a love, but he is also aware that he is able by his art to confer eternity upon the mortal beauty of the young man; he knows that a time will come, perhaps soon, when the young man will see him as decrepit and no longer care for him; he struggles to accept the inevitable loss of a love that has sustained his life; exuberant praise gives way to reproach and self-doubt; the poet is at once excited and tormented by his social inferiority; his passionate devotion slides toward abject subservience, and then this subservience slowly modulates back into a partial critical independence; he insists that the young man is perfect, even as he recognizes deep flaws in his character.
In the midst of this tangle of shifting, obsessive emotions, there are glimpses of what seem to be specific events. The young man succumbs to temptation and sleeps with the poet’s mistress. The betrayal is painful less because of her infidelity—“And yet it may be said I loved her dearly” (42.2)—than because of his, for his is the love that truly matters. The poet himself is in some unspecified way unfaithful to the young man but ventures to hope that he will be forgiven for his “transgression” (120.3), just as in comparable circumstances he earlier forgave the young man. The poet has given away a keepsake—a small notebook or writing tablet—that the young man has presented to him, but it does not matter, for the gift is inalienably lodged in his brain and heart. Several rivals—one of them, at least, a writer of considerable distinction—are competing, apparently successfully, for the young man’s attention and favor. And the culminating “event”: from sonnet 127 onward the poet shifts his obsessive attention away from the fair young man and focuses instead on his feelings—a tangle of desire and revulsion—toward his black-eyed, black-haired, sexually voracious mistress.
Biographers have often succumbed to the temptation to turn these intimations of events into a full-blown romantic plot, but to do so requires pulling against the strong gravitational force of the individual poems. Shakespeare, who had an effortless genius at narrative, made certain that his sonnets would not yield an entirely coherent story. Each of the great poems in the sequence—and there are many—is its own distinct world, a compressed, often fantastically complex fourteen-line rehearsal of an emotional scenario that the playwright could, if he chose, have developed into a scene or an entire play. An example is the justly celebrated sonnet 138, a poem already removed from any narrative context and anthologized during Shakespeare’s own lifetime:
When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth
Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust,
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with he
r, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
“I do believe her though I know she lies.” Since the poet makes clear that he knows perfectly well that his mistress is unfaithful, “I do believe her” seems to be short for “I pretend to believe her.” The plot, it seems, is one of those cuckoldry stories that fascinated Shakespeare and his contemporaries; the opening lines give voice to the shadowy suspicion that pulls toward farce in Much Ado About Nothing, or toward murder in The Winter’s Tale. The suspicion here has a May-December twist, the anxiety that preys on the mind of Othello, excruciatingly aware that, compared with Desdemona, he is “declined / Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much” (3.3.269–70).
The poet goes on, however, to acknowledge that his strategy—pretending to be gullible so as to seem younger than his years—does not actually fool his mistress for a moment, any more than he is fooled by her “false-speaking tongue”: “On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.” By now a different plot is in place, neither familiarly farcical nor tragic, something more like the strategic game of mutual lying in which Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (along with almost every other character in that play) indulge. “Simple truth”—the truth of the dark lady’s infidelity and the poet’s aging—is suppressed by his “simply” crediting her lies, that is, by a deliberate indulgence in a fiction. A way to characterize this indulgence might be Coleridge’s phrase for what one does when watching a play: a “willing suspension of disbelief.” But the poet is describing his relationship to his lying mistress, not to a work of art.
The game could well lead to an explosion of moral disapproval or self-reproach, conventional ways to banish the deceit and to restore moral order. Indeed, Shakespeare seems to be building toward such an explosion, as he calls the whole pattern of their lives into question:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust,
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
But the close of the poem—sliding from “old” to a sighing “O”—surprises us by frankly suspending the impulse to strip away the veil of deception: “O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust.” Love’s “habit,” both its habitual behavior and its finest clothing, is a tissue of lies. Instead of moral judgment, there is a candid acceptance of the erotic virtue of mendacity. As the final couplet makes clear, the man and woman who lie to each other lie with each other.
Sonnet writing was a courtly and aristocratic performance, and Shakespeare was decidedly not a courtier or an aristocrat. Yet the challenge of this form proved agreeable to him. To be a very public man—an actor onstage, a successful playwright, a celebrated poet; and at the same time to be a very private man—a man who can be trusted with secrets, a writer who keeps his intimate affairs to himself and subtly encodes all references to others: this was the double life Shakespeare had chosen for himself. If his astonishing verbal skills and his compulsive habit of imaginative identification, coupled with deep ambition, drove him to public performance, his family secrets and his wary intelligence—perhaps reinforced by the sight of the severed heads on London Bridge—counseled absolute discretion.
Such a deliberately chosen double existence helps to explain the paradox that has tantalized centuries of readers: the sonnets are a thrilling, deeply convincing staging of the poet’s inner life, an intimate performance of Shakespeare’s response to his tangled emotional relationships with a young man, a rival poet, and a dark lady; and the sonnets are a cunning sequence of beautiful locked boxes to which there are no keys, an exquisitely constructed screen behind which it is virtually impossible to venture with any confidence.
A code of discretion and the practice of concealment shape the sonnets, but so do certain shared excitements, recurrent preoccupations, and seductive strategies. It would be folly to take these as a kind of confidential diary, a straightforward record of what actually went on in the relationship between Shakespeare and his deceitful dark lady, whoever she was in real life, or between Shakespeare and the aristocratic young man, whether he was Southampton or someone else or perhaps an amalgam of multiple lovers. But even a record of fantasies, in part adapted from other poets, in part spun out of the threads of actual relationships, may reveal something about Shakespeare’s emotional life.
The sonnets represent the poet and the young man as excited by the immense class and status difference between them. Even while slyly criticizing his beloved—or perhaps because he is slyly criticizing him—Shakespeare plays at utter subservience:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire? (571–2)
And he stages too his intense awareness of the social stigma that attaches to his profession:
Alas, ’tis true, I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view.
(110.1–2)
Perhaps this shame, the shame of dressing up like a fool in motley and putting on a show before the gaping public, was something that Shakespeare actually felt, quite apart from the relationship depicted in the sonnets. But here it is part of the erotic dance between himself and the beautiful boy:
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.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.
Pity me. . . .
(111.1–8)
The permanent stain that Shakespeare the performer bears and that indelibly marks his social distance from his aristocratic beloved becomes quite literally part of the appeal: “Pity me.”
The age difference between the poet and the young man functions in a similar way, not, that is, as an impediment to desire, but rather as a paradoxical source of excitement, something to be noted, highlighted, and exaggerated:
As a decrepit father takes delight
To see his active child do deeds of youth,
So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite,
Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.
(37.1–4)
Where could the seductive pleasure possibly lie here? Perhaps in a patriarchal society where the young were accustomed to domineering fathers or tyrannical guardians, a weak father figure was thrilling. The excitement of the role reversal must have been intense, intense enough to lead Shakespeare to stage himself as a kind of parasite on the younger man. The poet’s performance does not preclude vanity. “Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,” Shakespeare writes, “And all my soul, and all my every part.” But this frank admission of narcissism—“Methinks no face so gracious is as mine”—is only a way of intensifying the beloved’s triumph. When he looks into the mirror, Shakespeare writes, he sees that in reality his face is “Beated and chapped with tanned antiquity” (62.1–2, 5, 10) and that whatever pleasure he takes in himself is borrowed from the man he loves: “Painting my age with beauty of thy days” (10.14).
The emotions at play here have something of the blend of adoration and appetite that Shakespeare depicted in Falstaff’s feelings toward his sweet boy, Prince Hal. But the roles are reversed: where Shakespeare imagined himself as the young prince in relation to Robert Greene’s calculating older man, now he plays the older man to the sweet boy. Perhaps this was one of the inner currents that enabled Shakespeare to transform the character he based on Greene from a mere braggart into the complex, poignant figure of Falstaff, self-loving, calculating, cynical, adoring, abject, and doomed. As Hal sweeps away his memories of Falstaff—“I know thee not, old man”—so the poet urges the young man simply to forget him: “Nay, if you read this line, remember not / The hand that writ it.” But the difference is that the poet’s request to be forgotten is in reality a declaration of abject love and a thinly disguised appeal to be remembered and loved:
Nay, if
you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
(71.5–8)
Again and again, the young man is invited to embrace the father he will displace and bury and eventually forget. And the oblivion that lies in the future only serves to intensify the appeal.
One of the most famous of the sonnets (73) sums up the emotional claim that Shakespeare is making on the young man by exaggerating their age difference:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Elsewhere in the sonnet sequence there is an emphasis on eternity—the timelessness of the poet’s lines, the endless replication of the young man’s beauty—but not here. Each of the images—the yellow leaves, the twilight, and the embers—exquisitely conveys transience. It is only a matter of time before it will be irrevocably over: naked branches, darkness, cold ashes lie just ahead. And the transience, the coming-to-an-end that Shakespeare sees even in the moment of love’s flourishing, confers a painful intensity upon the relationship.