SHAKESPEARE, THE EARL AND THE JESUIT

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Connections

 

I

 

It was quite usual for Elizabethan earls to establish connections with Elizabethan playwrights: the earls of Leicester, Sussex, Derby, Worcester, and Pembroke, among other noblemen, patronized acting companies. It was not unusual for Elizabethan earls to know Jesuits: the second earl of Southampton ran afoul of the government by communicating with Edmund Campion; Philip Howard, the earl of Arundel, was reconciled to the Catholic church by William Weston; the earl of Essex corresponded with Thomas Wright when the priest was still a member of the Society of Jesus.[1] It was extraordinary, however, for an earl, a playwright, and a Jesuit in the England of Elizabeth to have the kind of ties shared by Southampton, Shakespeare, and Robert Southwell.

That there was such a nexus has been proposed, but only as a suggestion. One of Southwell’s nineteenth-century editors, Alexander Grosart, having found traces of the Jesuit’s poetry in Shakespeare’s works, believed that the poet-priest’s exhortations to the “finest wits” of his day to use their gifts in the service of God and virtue were directed to Shakespeare as well as others. Awaking to this possibility, which had not since been much noted, Southwell’s twentieth-century biographer, Christopher Devlin, went further. He noted (as had Grosart) that in an edition of Southwell’s works published by the Jesuit press at St. Omer in 1616, the opening to the prose introduction of earlier editions, which had been printed, “The Author to his loving Cosen,” was altered to read, “To my worthy good cosen Maister W.S.”; and a signature, not present earlier, was added: “Your loving cosen, R.S.” Finding that Southwell and Shakespeare were distantly related by both blood and marriage, and that no other kinsman of Southwell’s resembled the person addressed, Devlin thought it plausible that “Maister W. S.,” who, the introduction implies, “was a devotee of poetry and perhaps the stage,” was William Shakespeare. In support of his surmise, Devlin presented a brief case for Southwell’s influence upon English literary circles in the 1590’s, and he cited what he took to be parallels between the Jesuit’s most ambitious poem, Saint Peters Complaint, and The Rape of Lucrece. To make credible the historical connection between the two writers, he pointed to Southwell’s family ties to and probable influence with the earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, and suggested that the concluding lines from the Complaint’s poetical preface, which had urged that poets of talent turn from “stilling Venus Rose” to developing loftier themes, were a plea to the earl to encourage his “Will,” author of Venus and Adonis, toward the “graver labor” that would become Lucrece.[2]

 

Favour my wish, well wishing workes no ill:
I moove the Suite, the Graunt restes in your will.

 

There are problems with some of these conjectures. Though it may have circulated in manuscript, Venus and Adonis was published in 1593, after the imprisoned Southwell could have reacted to it in his own work; the cited parallels between the Complaint and Lucrece seem on the whole less than striking; and, as noted by the latest editor of Southwell’s poems, Nancy Pollard Brown, nothing in the edition of 1616, with its tantalizing initials, “points to any source acquired directly from Southwell or his associates on the Mission.” Devlin’s theories were thus generally ignored--until they were resurrected by his fellow Jesuit, Peter Milward, whose study Shakespeare’s Religious Background[3] rehearsed what was known or guessed about Shakespeare and persons or things Jesuitical, and augmented the list of echoes of Southwell’s works that might be heard in those of the playwright and poet.

This line of inquiry has had little impact on recent biographical studies of Shakespeare, even on those which, in the wake of Honigmann’s revisiting of the “lost years,” have emphasized the possibility of Catholic sympathies in the greatest Poet of Protestant England and, in doing so, have mentioned Southwell in passing. But suspicion about the relationship of the cousins “R. S.” and “Maister W. S.” should not be allowed to expire. There is considerably more evidence to connect Southwell and Shakespeare than has been dreamt of by his biographers, much of it involving the earl of Southampton. If the idea of this triangular relationship seems strange in itself, we should re-examine some of the efforts that have already been made to make it appear less so.

Devlin appealed to pedigrees to suggest that the three men could have been brought together not merely by chance but by family associations. He claimed, for example, that a brother and a sister of Southwell married a niece and nephew of Southampton’s father. This is quite unlikely.[4] Much more probable are the family connections Devlin posited between Southwell and Shakespeare through the descendants of Sir Robert Belknap and of Nicholas, Lord Vaux.[5] None of these genealogies, however, relates all three subjects, Southampton, Shakespeare, and Southwell. A family tree that does so can in fact be constructed, as shown in the illustration below.[6] 

Some of the lines of kinship are remote, yet they reveal a network of “cousins,” as the term was loosely used in the sixteenth century, joined together, when by nothing else, by persistent allegiance to Catholicism into the late years of Elizabeth’s reign, and beyond. As the numbers of recusants grew smaller, it became easier for relatives on the periphery of a Catholic family circle to find means of and reasons for acquaintance with those at its center.[7] If, as Honigmann and others have suggested, a young Catholic Shakespeare could make his way to Lancashire because a Catholic squire unrelated to him needed a player and tutor for his household, and a Catholic schoolmaster could recommend just the right bright man, how much more plausibly might three “cousins,” Shakespeare among them, find occasion to meet in London. There Shakespeare wrote plays, Southampton was ravenous for them (at one point, reports a contemporary, he was “going to plaies every Day”),[8] and Southwell was concerned to reform poetry as well as religion. There Southampton House was known by the government to shelter priests, and to receive Catholic visitors such as the Gages, kin to all three men, and (perhaps) Southwell’s sister, Mary Banester;[9] from this site it was not a very long walk down Chancery Lane to Arundel House, frequently visited by Southwell and perhaps his secret city residence, and not a much longer one to the dwellings of John Gage and his wife Margaret Copley, and of the Banesters--all related to Southampton as well as to Southwell (and, less closely, to Shakespeare). Out in the country, Southwell’s cousin John Shelley was in the service of Southampton’s grandfather, Anthony Browne, Lord Montagu (another protector of priests); Southwell himself may have been present at the Montagus’ residence in Cowdray when the young earl was there discussing his refusal of marriage to Burghley’s granddaughter.[10] Times and places for meeting might (as Shakespeare would say) “cohere,” if “place” cohered with “wishing.” Southampton’s father had sought out Campion; if the more circumspect son were sought after by a Jesuit cousin, his family might not, in spite of the danger, have discouraged a contact. Some believe that John Shakespeare had received his “spiritual testament” from Campion;[11] would John’s son have found reason, in Southampton’s orbit, to come to “know” a Jesuit in some way kin to himself? All of these considerations must remain in an airy realm of possibility until they are given weight by a mass of fact and interpretation.

The first facts to contemplate are those that brought Southwell from the Continent into England at an extended moment of crisis in his own life and in the lives of Shakespeare and Southampton. Robert Southwell was born in Norfolk, late in 1561, son of Richard Southwell and Bridget Copley. His father’s great uncle had married into the family of Lord Vaux, which was connected by marriage to the Throckmortons, kin to Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden. Through his own mother, who had been a companion to the Princess Elizabeth, Robert was related both to Francis Bacon and to the Cecils, and (as noted above) was a descendant as well of Sir Robert Belknap, a distant blood relative of Shakespeare.[12] The Copley home in west Sussex, probably well known to the Southwell children, stood in a “wide semi-circle” of Catholic houses inhabited by Robert’s relatives--Shelleys, Gages, and Cottons, all destined in some way to figure in the life of Shakespeare’s Southampton--and protected by the second earl of Southampton and his father-in-law, Lord Montagu.[13]

In circumstances that are not entirely clear, Southwell left England in 1576 along with his cousin John Cotton to enter the Jesuit school at Douai, where he developed a desire to join the Order. After an initial rejection, he was accepted into the novitiate at Rome in 1578. He then studied at the Society’s Roman College, became tutor and prefect of studies at the English College (a seminary that trained missionaries for the English field), and was ordained priest. Sent to England in 1586, then more fluent in Italian than in his native language, he ministered clandestinely to the spiritual needs of Catholics. His superior was Father Henry Garnet, later to be undone by the Gunpowder Plot.

With the help of the countess of Arundel, Southwell established headquarters in London but travelled throughout the country, an outlaw priest liable to arrest and execution. He set up a secret press, from which it is likely he published in 1587 the first of his English prose writings, An Epistle of Comfort, to the Reverend Priestes, & to the Honorable, Worshipful, & other of the Laye sort restrayned in Durance for the Catholicke Fayth.[14] Although his primary duties were to administer the sacraments, to preach, to confirm, and to console, he felt it part of his vocation to write poetry, more than seventy pieces of which survive: a few in Latin, most in English, several of them translations or transformations of works by the Italians Petrarch, Tasso, and Tansillo, and by the Englishmen Edward Dyer and Thomas Watson (the latter had been in residence with Southwell at Douai). It is generally believed that most of Southwell’s English verse dates from his time on the Mission, when he had recovered facility in his native language, and that poems which had circulated in manuscript were collected soon after his arrest in 1592, although selections were not published until 1595, the year of his death, with additional poems appearing in succeeding editions into the seventeenth century. The most ambitious of his poems, Saint Peters Complaint (based on an Italian original but anticipating English works like Daniel’s Rosamond and Shakespeare’s Lucrece), attempts to turn the “complaint” tradition popularized in the Mirror for Magistrates to religious ends by having the “fallen” apostle lament his denial of his Lord. Some of Southwell’s “ditties,” it should be noted, he sent to the “loving Cosen” (or, to his “worthy good cosen Maister W. S.”) who had “importune[d]” him to compose them.

Only slight hints remain about the parts of literary London in which Southwell had time to move.  He knew something of the theater (he speaks in his works of “stage players”--whose profession he calls “shameful”--and “tragedies,” and “dumb shows”). He probably knew the sonneteer Watson from the days at Douai, although there is no evidence of personal acquaintance in England. Somehow a set of Southwell’s papers came into the hands of John Trussell, a poet whose life is yet to be thoroughly investigated.[15] In 1594 Trussell published a translation of Watson’s Amintae Gaudia, and in the following year a work of his own, The First Rape of Faire Hellen, a complaint poem much indebted to Lucrece and to other works in that genre. Also in that year, the same John Trussell (we must assume) edited and contributed prefatory verses to Southwell’s prose work Triumphs over Death, making clear his admiration for the author, whose death had left the manuscript in his hands. This edition was printed by Valentine Simmes, producer of quarto versions of Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, Part II, Much Ado about Nothing, and Hamlet. Now it is possible, though not certain, that Shakespeare’s maternal grandmother was a sister of Thomas Trussell of Billesley; with a younger Thomas, an attorney, the poet’s father John Shakespeare acted on at least one business affair.[16] If John Trussell belonged to this Warwickshire family, Shakespeare might have been acquainted as a kinsman with Southwell’s editor, and in a band of association with the Jesuit himself. The evidence on this point is not substantial; nor is it so negligible as to discourage further research.

Not to be discounted either is the potential witness of the St. Omer edition of Southwell’s works  to the poet’s friendship with his cousin, “Maister W. S.” It may be technically true, as Brown says, that this text itself shows no special signs of derivation from Southwell’s own milieu; but there is no reason to assume that the Jesuit editors introduced the new material without warrant. For them to have fabricated such an uninformative identification in 1616 would have been pointless. If they knew on extra-textual grounds the identity of “W.S.,” they may have decided on their own to hint at it.[17] The Jesuits must have had some kind of source for the addition, however, just as for the many changes they made in the poem “Of the Blessed Sacrament of the Aulter” (printed by them for the first time and with the title from the extant manuscripts changed to “The Christians Manna”).  If the source for the mysterious initials was a personal one, there is none likelier than Southwell’s Jesuit colleague on the mission, John Gerard, who, having come to England from Rome in 1588, was sometimes his companion, both in London and in Warwickshire. Gerard may have been acquainted with Francis Manners, friend of Southampton and co-conspirator with him in the Essex rebellion. When Gerard finally left England in 1606, after the tumults of the Gunpowder Plot, he spent several weeks at St. Omer, and much of the next twenty years in neighboring parts of Flanders. The memoirs of his experiences in England, which his superiors asked him to write, became a primary source of information about missionary activities in the Catholic community.[18] For obvious reasons, his written discussion of the Jesuits’ personal contacts with specific individuals was limited since a protective reticence was clearly necessary; but surely he told more than he wrote. And Continental Jesuits may have believed that “Maister W. S.” could afford less anonymity if, like William Shakespeare, he had died in 1616. In 1619, St Omer’s library owned a quarto copy of The Play of Pericles, and, as has been recently discovered, the quarto of King Lear.[19] Was the author whose name appeared on the title pages known to be Southwell’s kinsman?

To his father, in 1588 or ’89, Southwell sent a letter exhorting him to return in all conscience to the Old Faith from which he had lapsed. The “Epistle” was sufficiently paradigmatic to warrant circulation and was later published (1596-7) together with another piece, A Short Rule of Good Life. In 1591 he wrote The Triumphs over Death, a letter of consolation to the earl of Arundel upon the death of his half-sister, Lady Margaret Sackville, and completed the dramatic prose meditation, Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares, one of his most popular and influential writings. At the end of the same year, in response to the prospect of new penal measures against Catholics, Southwell addressed An Humble Supplication to the Queen, portraying vividly the persecution of his co-religionists, denouncing the cruelty and bad faith of those responsible for it, protesting the loyalty of Catholics generally to their sovereign, and asking for greater toleration from a “most mercifull . . . Princesse.” The Funeral Teares was in fact licensed and published anonymously in the year of its composition; the Triumphs appeared in 1595; the Humble Supplication, though topical and “public,” was distributed only in manuscript until it was printed in 1600, long after the situation that had provoked it.[20]

Betrayed into the hands of the pursuivant Topcliffe in June of 1592 (the agent gloated in a letter to the Queen that he “never did take so weighty a man”),[21] Southwell was tortured, then held in solitary confinement for almost three years. He was finally tried, convicted of entering the country illegally as a priest of Rome and of administering the Roman sacraments, and executed by the hanging and exquisite mutilation reserved for traitors. Because of his close imprisonment, in which he was denied pen and paper, he wrote, as far as can be determined, nothing during the last years of his life but a formal letter to Robert Cecil requesting a final disposition of his case.[22]

Such, in brief, was the missionary career of Robert Southwell, deliberately shrouded in secrecy except at rare moments when he felt that a public voice was needed to console, condemn, inspire, or direct. Keenly aware of the danger he posed to those in whose company he might be found, he refrained from seeking out even those closest to him, his own family, when he detected signs of fear in them. He wrote to his father:

 

It is not the carelessness of a cold affection, nor the want of a due and reverent respect, that hath made me such a stranger to my native home and so slack in defraying the debt of a thankful mind, but only the iniquity of our days, that maketh my presence perilous and the discharge of my duty an occasion of danger. I was loath to enforce an unwelcome courtesy on any, or by seeming officious to become offensive, deeming it better to let time digest the fear that my return into the realm had bred in my kindred than abruptly to intrude myself to purchase their anger, whose good will I so highly esteemed (EF 3).

 

To invite or approach Southwell required courage. It should not be surprising, then, that signs of his relationship with anyone in England should be deeply hidden.

 Where are such indications to be looked for? The historical record deliberately kept thin by those who made the history should be tightly wrung, and complemented by an examination of texts the testimony of which can be retrieved only with the greatest difficulty. In the case of Shakespeare, a small group of his personal relationships will be inquired into; his memory will be solicited, however imperfectly it can be rescued from its traces. T.S. Eliot’s assertion that “Shakespeare read with the most prodigious memory for words that has ever existed,” though hardly susceptible of proof, must be close enough to the truth to serve as a working hypothesis.[23] Where will this searching lead? Into the realms of “source study” and “topical criticism” that have often seemed inhabited by phantoms. Shakespeare, however, saw the value of ghosts, whether or not he believed in their existence; and like Hamlet and Horatio, we might be audacious enough to speak with them. The result of this conversation will not be to reduce poems and plays to single and “definitive” meanings, but to increase the number of legitimate meanings that may co-exist within them. Put another way, a search for some of the poet’s narrowly defined purposes (Meinungen) and for possible occasions for his work will not contract their “significance,” which can remain large and manifold beyond the limits of intention, and which in fact may be enlarged by interpretations that take intentions into account instead of assuming them to be spectral and inconsequent.

 

II

 

The text first to be considered should be the one about which critics interested in Southwell have been most willing to vent their suspicions, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Devlin’s theory that Southwell had urged Southampton to discourage the author of this poem from “distilling Venus rose” and turn him toward a higher artistic enterprise has been taken up and modified by Richard Wilson, who more pointedly speaks of the priest’s “reproof” to Shakespeare for writing a poem not only erotic but political, and in its politics a “betrayal” of the recusant community. Reading the work as an allegory, in which Venus and the boar (not truly enemies) represent the martyr-makers Elizabeth and Burghley, and Adonis, the young Southampton who is set upon by both, Wilson finds the poem “a critique of martyrdom . . . a parable of its futility in the sadistic arms of a ‘hard-favour’d tyrant’ (931) and in a state ‘most deceiving when it seems most just’ (1156).”[24] Both interpreters assume that Venus and Adonis circulated in manuscript before its publication in 1593, early enough for Southwell, who had been captured in June of the previous year and kept in close confinement thereafter, to have read and responded to the poem. There is no sound reason, however, to make this assumption.

The letter that serves as an introduction to the Jesuit’s collection of poems is not an indictment, not even a friendly one, of the “loving Cosen” to whom it is addressed, and therefore no indication of the writer’s unhappiness with a particular composition for which his friend might have been responsible. Southwell complains about poets’ “abusing their talent” by “making the follies and fayninges of love, the customary subject of their base endevours”--about poets like Petrarch, Gascoigne, and Watson, perhaps, whose lyrics Southwell parodied;[25] but the letter is also a justification of his own efforts as a priest to write verse, and an invitation to “skillfuller wits” (his cousin included?) to better his attempts. The cousin, who shows enough interest in poetry to “importune” the author to “committe” the “fault” of writing poems and (one may assume) to send him copies, is someone whose “Musicke” might improve the poems that Southwell is to send. The new melodies may be those of a poet, not a musician, for Southwell speaks of music in metaphorical terms, the musical “meane” figuring a life of Aristotelian virtue;[26] and he hopes that a more gifted wit will “goe forward” with the sacred poems already written, if not “begin some finer peece.” This is not the kind of letter that a shocked or scandalized clergyman (who writes to his “lovinge Cosen” with “many good wishes”) would have sent to the author of Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare may have read the letter, however, whether it had been addressed to him or not, in one of the manuscripts of Southwell’s poetry that had circulated in England’s Catholic underground; for it is certain (as will be shown) that he was familiar with the Jesuit’s verse, and much of his prose as well, before the publication in 1594 of Lucrece, which was written after Southwell had been imprisoned and before many of his poems came into print in 1595. It is also most likely that Shakespeare had read Southwell before composing Venus and Adonis.

Southwell’s disparaging mention of Venus in the poetic preface to Saint Peters Complaint is no evidence that he knew Shakespeare’s narrative of her misfortunes.

 

Southwell’s censure applies not to an individual but to all of the “wits” who have been forever (or “Still,” in Elizabethan usage) drawing puerile inspiration from the goddess. The rose distilled is an image that he had used as early as 1587 in the Epistle of Comfort (153v-154r), where, several pages later, he had condemned “the adultryes of Venus” (161v). According to standard chronologies of Shakespeare’s works, this was long before Shakespeare imagined in Venus and Adonis a “stillitory” producing a perfume “that breedeth love” (443-44), and, in the Sonnets, wrote about the “liquid” of “summer’s distillation,” and a lover’s “truth” “distill[‘d]” like “roses” (Sonnets 5 and 54).[27] Southwell’s “stilling Venus Rose,” then, may be a sign of his influence on Shakespeare rather than part of a rebuke to a “cousin” who at the time of Southwell’s writing showed no signs of needing to be scolded.[28] Such an hypothesis becomes more credible when we see how much language Venus and Adonis shares with a range of poems in Southwell’s manuscript volume.

In the dedication of Venus and Adonis to Southampton, Shakespeare declares that if his work prove “deformed,” he will “never after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a harvest.” Southwell, in “Lewd love is Losse,” uses much the same language for a different purpose, warning his reader against the empty charms of earthly pleasure: “Gleane not in barren soyle these offall eares, / Sith reap thou maiest whole harvestes of delight” (13-14). The parallels do not seem coincidental, for they are to be found in the midst of others:

 

Taken by themselves, these are sparse indications that one author had the other’s work in mind; but they are only the first among many.

In his poem on Herod’s murder of the Innocents (composed in his favorite stanzaic form, which is that of Venus and Adonis), Southwell describes the eerie atmosphere in which the young ones lie slaughtered:

 

 

The baroque image of starlight floating, almost drowning, in the blood of children that seems like the juice of  “flowers . . . untimely cropt,” is also evoked in Shakespeare’s poem, when Venus’s eyes, which had “fled” at first sight of Adonis’s bleeding body, finally opened like “stars” and

 

 

Adonis himself is then transformed into a “flower,” which Venus in her grief and possessiveness untimely “crops” (1037, 1032, 1051-56, 1167-75). In another of Southwell’s poems, God is a cropper: “God doth sometymes first cropp the sweetest floure, / And leaves the weede till tyme do it devoure” (“I dye without deserte, 35-36); in Venus, “The Destinies” command the cropping, and flowers (as in Southwell’s lyric) are contrasted with weeds: “The Destinies . . . / bid thee crop a weed, thou pluck’st a flower” (945-46).

Of the many other verbal parallels to be found in the works of the two poets, the following are among the most salient--not each one in itself, for some of them are commonplace expressions, but considered as a group containing too many correspondences to allow for mere coincidence:

 

Since it is inconceivable that Southwell authored all the lyrics here cited after he might have read Venus and Adonis in 1592, when imprisonment ended his writing,[29] we must assume (accepting the  consensus that Venus was written not long before its publication in 1593) that Shakespeare was the debtor.  Shakespeare’s recollection of Southwell’s prose must also have produced the echoes in Venus of the Epistle of Comfort (1587) and Marie Magdalens Funeral Teares (published in 1591).[30] If these conclusions solve a problem, however, they also beget mysteries. Where would Shakespeare have obtained Southwell’s poems, none of which was to be published until 1595?  They would have come directly or indirectly from a Catholic source to which they had been secretly entrusted (from Trussell, perhaps, or Southampton’s family,[31] or the Vauxes), or even, if “Maister W.S.” was Shakespeare, from the Jesuit himself. But then why did Shakespeare make use (not all of it unconscious, surely) of Southwell’s works of piety in fashioning a poem so frankly erotic, and so heedless of the Jesuit’s stated plea that poetry be rescued from the profane and devoted to the sacred? The secular poet may have simply been opportunistic, appropriating from another author whatever seemed suitable for his purposes, just as he drew upon Holinshed, Plutarch, and Italian storytellers for his narratives, or read Thomas Nashe for exposure to a richly eccentric store of diction and imagery.[32] We must still wonder, however, why Shakespeare would have looked to Southwell specifically for literary inspiration, especially since much of what Shakespeare recalled and recast is not especially “inspired.” Another possibility is that Shakespeare drew religious writing into his pagan context in deliberate defiance of the priest’s calls for a sacred poetry, in an act, almost, of desecration. What Venus derives from Southwell, however, has a great deal more to do with imagination than with belief. The poem is risqué but not impious. It shows little resemblance to the Elegies of Donne, whose conspicuous (if relatively mild) blasphemies seem intended to distance the author from the claims of a too importunate faith. Indeed, the rather complex, ambiguity-laden morality of Venus stands in sharp contrast to the deliberately simplified immorality of Donne’s audacious pieces. If, finally, Shakespeare merely considered his Jesuit cousin too much of a puritan, Southwell’s religious rigor may be seen to have ramifications beyond its application to the sexual imagination of poets.

Questions about Shakespeare’s unstated purposes cannot, in fact, be answered without reference to his writing a poem for the earl of Southampton. His intention to do so has not always been considered obvious. Some commentators, taking too literally Shakespeare’s statement that Venus was “the first heire” of his invention, have supposed, like the nineteenth-century German scholar Karl Elze, that he “brought [the work] with him from Stratford to London, where it circulated in manuscript till Southampton accepted the dedication, and the poem then found a publisher.”[33] Nothing in Venus and Adonis, then, would answer to Southampton’s concerns except by accident. Shakespeare would have dedicated his poem to the earl with as little acquaintance with his patron-to-be as had Nashe, who would dedicate to Southampton The Unfortunate Traveler in the blind and ultimately futile hope that his bid for patronage would be accepted--not realizing that the fair “Geraldine” who was subjected to comic ridicule in the tale had been the second wife of Southampton’s great-grandfather, Sir Anthony Browne. On the contrary, Shakespeare seems to have known his man. He intended Venus and Adonis to have a broad general appeal; and it had, becoming the most popular of his works during his lifetime, promoted by its own brilliance and its participation in the fashion set for Ovidian erotic narratives by Lodge (Scillaes Metamorphosis) and Marlowe (Hero and Leander). Yet the poem clearly spoke to the condition of its twenty-year-old dedicatee, whose coming of age was rich in the dilemmas that would invite his appreciation of this seriocomic story.

Because of the analogies in language and subject matter between Venus and the first group of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in which the poet urges an apparently unwilling young man to marry and beget an heir, and the resemblance of this situation to the plight of Adonis, who is fiercely pressured to succumb to “love” and just as fiercely resistant to it, some critical attention has inevitably been given to the possibility that Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis in direct address to Southampton in the midst of the earl’s connubial quandary. The poet may have anticipated or repeated (although this is not very likely) advice given in the Sonnets at a time when Southampton’s refusal of Lord Burghley’s proposal that he marry his granddaughter threatened the young man’s social and financial well-being; or Shakespeare may have sought to defend the earl against the charges of petulant self-love apparently leveled against him in the Ovidian poem Narcissus, written by Burghley’s secretary, John Clapham.[34] Whether or not Venus can be construed as an offer of “advice” or defense, and whether or not Shakespeare would have been in a position to advise a nobleman on the matters in question, it is possible that the spectacle of a contest between a voracious yet maternal goddess and the unripe, unwilling object of her desire may have interested a young man like Southampton, who saw himself pulled in many directions by his elders as he approached his majority. Shakespeare did not compose his poem as a naive allegory closely shadowing the earl’s situation. That would have been to imply not only that Southampton/Adonis was unready for the demands made upon him by elders, but also that he was morally self-satisfied (not even the fair youth of the Sonnets was so) and narcissistic, blind to the dangers of the world and not up to meeting them. Adonis is only half a sympathetic character, and a comic as well as a sentimental one. Southampton was meant to laugh at him, and to look upon Venus with bemused alarm, affection, and pity.[35] The earl knew the difference between his refusal of a marriage for which he had no taste and Adonis’s incapacity for love or lust, the difference between his own ambition to go off to the wars and Adonis’s immature predilection for the hunt. Shakespeare knew that his patron knew, and would not have dared to write so teasingly close to his experience otherwise. Southampton’s troubles, however, went beyond those encountered in the difficult game of negotiating his way out of a marriage.

Richard Wilson, though overly committed to an allegorical reading of Venus, rightly underscores the fact that Southampton was in the early 1590’s a Catholic “hope.”[36] At the age of eight Henry Writothesley had been snatched by the state from his Catholic family at his father’s death and placed in Burghley’s household to be raised as a Protestant.[37] The boy at first refused to attend the Anglican service, and his recalcitrance came to the attention of the earl of Leicester, who pressured the countess of Southampton to make her son give up his recusancy.[38] The young earl must have made his submission in Burghley’s household, and later as a student at Cambridge, where he could not have received his degree without having taken the Oath of Supremacy. External conformity, however, did not always signal a change of heart in matters of religion; the countess of Southampton’s devoutly and openly Catholic father,  did not scruple to allow the heretical service in his own house, even after Rome had made recusancy a necessary condition of fidelity to the faith.[39] Lord Montagu (like his son-in-law, the second earl of Southampton) protected the faith and the faithful so far as it lay within his power.  The third earl of Southampton might do the same if he would when he came of age, even if his public adherence to the religious laws of the Elizabethan regime made him technically a “schismatic.” He did not have to court martyrdom as his father had done to become a Catholic hero, for his grandfather had provided a different heroic model. The young earl’s defection in heart as well as in appearance could prove disastrous, however, to those who had a large stake in his steadfastness. As Laertes was to say of Hamlet, he was not free, “as unvalued persons do,” to “Carve for himself.” Southampton’s family and dependents were desperately concerned to keep him in the embrace of at least a hidden faith. 

 Questions of marriage and faith were not in fact unrelated. Southampton’s mother and grandfather must have been intensely conflicted as they dealt with Burghley about the earl’s prospective marriage to Elizabeth Vere.[40] They knew Southampton’s attitude towards the match; they understood the Catholic Church’s teaching, as expressed in the handbooks of casuistry for the English mission, that to “contract marriage with a heretic . . . is to sin mortally. Parents, therefore sin in not prohibiting such marriages”;[41] yet they realized that a family alliance with the most powerful counselor in England might help them and other oppressed Catholics to practice their religion in their own way. In 1594, the dowager countess herself would marry the Vice-Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage, once a persecutor of Catholics though possibly a convert in his old age,[42] perhaps in part for the protection he might afford her circle and herself. It is not clear, then, whether the earl’s family would have tried to cultivate in him a resistance to the threats and blandishments of the Lord Treasurer or a sensible acquiescence; in any case, the solicitings from each side must have been urgent. Southampton’s ultimate refusal of Elizabeth Vere was to cost him dearly, both the five thousand pounds he would be forced to pay to his former guardian and a large wealth of good will.

If Shakespeare felt able to intrude discreetly into this situation, it was surely not as a giver of advice. Venus and Adonis charts no course of action, offering only entertainment, comic criticism, and sympathy.  Venus and Adonis flirts with allegory, but it is a mythical one in which Venus is “love” (610) and Adonis is “beauty” (1019-20), whom “the destinies” (736) doom to separation, just as Fate, “jealous” of perfect union, divides abstractly conceived lovers in Andrew Marvell’s “The Definition of Love.” Shakespeare’s poem, however, is too multifarious to allow its characters and their actions to participate fully in allegorical schemes, either the one that the poet explicitly declares or others that he might imply. Southampton, like anyone else, could enjoy the work for its dazzling transformation of an old story, its verbal, pictorial, and dramatic artistry, its sexual candor, and its complex tone infused with contradictory implications. He would not be encouraged to see Venus as a mere villain or Adonis as a simple martyr. And yet, goddess and boy were at least reminiscent of characters he knew--an exacting Queen, or a guardian, or a Mother Church who would possess a subject entirely; a hapless ward or subject trying to preserve his integrity against threats of suffocation or bloody execution.

 Among the voices demanding of Southampton submission of body and soul was that of Robert Southwell, who preached on behalf of the Roman church, as Wilson puts it, “the politics of refusal.”[43] Southwell stood with the rigorists who insisted that Catholics deny the Queen’s spiritual authority, avoid the Protestant service, and accept the penalties for their recusancy in the spirit of martyrs.[44] Shakespeare heard the preacher’s sermons and songs, and he made their words, though not in any obvious way their doctrine, resonate throughout the first poem that he addressed to Southampton. Again the question must be asked, “To what end, if any?” If Shakespeare intended to give his poem a “political dimension,” it would be natural for him to have in mind the language of a relevant political spokesman, like Southwell, although little in the set of verbal parallels between Southwell’s writings and Venus seems allusively to suggest an ideological bias. The comparison of Adonis’s death with that of the Holy Innocents is surely ironical, but whether to the diminishment of Adonis or to the disparagement of martyrdom, or to neither purpose, is not clear.[45]  Adonis’s distinction between heavenly love and earthly lust (793-804) may, as proposed by Wilson, sound “like a parody of the homely similes of Southwell” on the same subjects ( in “Lewd Love is Losse”);[46] but such a parody need not be politically inspired. What seems to constitute a true act of resistance to Southwell is Shakespeare’s choice of Venus as a subject after reading an exhortation from the Jesuit poet to the “finest wits” that they forsake her. What is the meaning of such apparent defiance of a “cousin” and a priest? Was it meant to be perceived by Southampton? Was it a straightforward personal or political gesture, and an oppositional one? In opposition, then, to whom or what? Or was it a less fraught refusal to comply with puritanical importunities? As is always the case with Shakespeare, nothing is entirely straightforward, whether dissent or agreement.

 

III

 

On October 6, 1594, Robert Southwell languished in the Tower, living out the final months of his life. On that day, the earl of Southampton became, as Burghley noted in his diary, of “full age.” Southampton could not celebrate just then, for he was in the midst of arranging for his friends the Danvers brothers, who had been involved in a brawl and a killing, to escape to the Continent. The onerous fine levied on him by Burghley for refusing the hand of Elizabeth Vere had soon to be paid. Earlier, the wedding of the dowager countess to Sir Thomas Heneage had taken place on the second of May, just seven days before Shakespeare’s new poem Lucrece, written for and dedicated to Southampton, would be registered at Stationers’ Hall. The year was momentous for the poet as well. In June the London playhouses were allowed to reopen after being closed for the most part during almost two years of plague. Two days after Southampton’s birthday, Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain, wrote a letter to the Lord Mayor of London asking that a new acting company formed under his aegis be allowed in the city (it had, along with another new group, the Lord Admiral’s Men, already performed at Newington Butts); the Lord Chamberlain’s company was of course Shakespeare’s. Would the resurrected playwright “need” Southampton’s patronage after this new commercial arrangement? If his devotion to his patron were more than mercenary, he did not have to “reason” the need, as Lear would say. Whatever his other prospects, it seems that Shakespeare continued, often privately, to address works to Southampton in this year and later--more than the poem Lucrece, and always with Southwell in the background. One of these offerings was a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which may or may not have been written in 1594 but had much to say about Southampton’s situation at that time.

What E. K. Chambers once called the “hymeneal” character of the Dream has often evoked speculation that it originated as an entertainment produced for an aristocratic marriage, a fact that would account not only for the wedding theme but for Oberon’s elaborate blessing of the “best bride’s-bed,” of “each several chamber” of the “owner”’s “palace,” and of the future “issue” of the play’s married couples (5.1.391-420). Eleven different weddings have been seriously proposed as the play’s first occasion, among them, the marriage of Southampton’s widowed mother to Sir Thomas Heneage.[47] Critical sentiment has begun to turn against the idea that Shakespeare first wrote the comedy for private use;[48] but the Dream need not have been performed at specific wedding festivities to have in some way referred to or derived meaning from them. The Southampton-Heneage marriage could have provided Shakespeare the means to show his patron another pledge of his commitment, as well as continued understanding of the difficulties faced by the young nobleman who had attained the age of an independence heavy with social, political, and religious restriction. A number of considerations lead to the conclusion that Shakespeare made use of the event in just that way.

Of all the nuptials that criticism has associated with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the only one whose celebration could have been related to the “rite of May” observed in the play (4.1.132-33) was that of the dowager countess and the Vice-Chamberlain.[49] In the play’s mature marital couple, Theseus and Hippolyta, are intimations of the forty-one year old bride and the elderly bridegroom, even though there was little prospect in the marriage for the “children” which the play anticipated for its fictional lovers (5.1.414). Like the Duke and the Amazonian Queen, Mary Southampton and Thomas Heneage had been adversaries--in the wars of faith--but had concluded a peace that the wedding helped to solemnize. They did so at a time when the bride’s son, the earl of Southampton, faced the matrimonial crisis created by Burghley, who like Egeus in the play, insisted on a marriage unacceptable to at least one of the parties. For Southampton, it might have seemed that “The course of true love” never would “run smooth” (MND 1.1.134). Perhaps by the time of his mother’s wedding, certainly not long after it, he had become taken with Elizabeth Vernon, a relatively poor cousin of the earl of Essex and one of Queen Elizabeth’s maids of honor;[50] and whether in the first flush of  passion he intended marriage to the woman who would, after her pregnancy, become his wife, he and she might well have felt the exasperation of Lysander that love should stand “upon the choice of friends [i.e., relatives],” or the anger of Hermia that she should feel the “hell, to choose love by another’s eyes” (MND 1.1.140). The Dream, of course, makes fun of loves that are as interchangeable as glasses of the same prescription; but the humor is not on Egeus’ side. Even though love in the play is less than transcendent and eternal, the stubbornly proud parent is not right to insist that his will triumph over the determination of wayward youth. Though social codes might prescribe otherwise, the young seem in the comedy to have the greater right to be arbitrary.

The other woman in Southampton’s life, and a significant presence in the play, was the Queen herself. It has long been assumed that the playwright meant to compliment her in lines by now notorious:

 

Many have taken for granted that the “fair vestal throned by the West,” “the imperial vot’ress,” was a flattering allusion to the virgin Queen, whom the playwright anticipated would have been present at a performance to receive his homage.[51] Against this reading it must be objected that Elizabeth, whom Ralegh had addressed as “Diana” or “Cynthia” herself and begun her association with the “moon,” would not necessarily have accepted as a compliment the notion that she be identified, in the play’s context, with a “vestal” and “vot’ress” of the more august moon goddess, and had nothing better to do but spend her time “in maiden meditation, fancy-free.”[52] And if Elizabeth is to be thought of as the moon itself, whose beams are “chaste,” it (and therefore she) is described by Oberon in terms that might seem pejorative: “cold” and “wat’ry” (156, 162).[53] Titania emphasizes lunar destructiveness: “the moon (the governess of floods), / Pale in her anger, washes all the air, / That rheumatic diseases do abound” (2.1.103-105). In her frigid authority the moon “Quench’d” the love that Cupid had meant for the young virgin (2.1.162), successful as Elizabeth sometimes was in attempting to control the desires and preserve the chastity of “vestal” maids of honor like Elizabeth Vernon. Rather than offering the Queen adulation, the play hints at criticism of her, which the earl of Southampton would not have been displeased to see.

The long mutual antipathy between Elizabeth and Southampton that was to culminate in the earl’s participation in the Essex Rebellion of 1601 began at least as early as 1595, when for unexplained reasons the Queen showed the promising young courtier signs of her disfavor.[54] Like every other nobleman, he understood that he could never achieve his ambitions without her blessing, which he assiduously sought. Yet Elizabeth had from his boyhood been the enemy of his faith. She had imprisoned his staunchly Catholic father several times for his unacceptable religious opinions and political actions, the final incarceration (on grounds established by the anti-recusancy act of 1581) coming just months before he died.[55] Under the wardship system, at the second earl’s death the Queen received slightly more than a third of his heir’s properties, which she farmed out to the wardship’s purchaser during the young man’s minority.[56] Another unflattering reference to the moon in the play, then, may have been directed at Elizabeth:

 

Elizabeth was not only Cynthia, of course, but the “Faerie Queene.” Titania, also “the Fairy Queen” (2.1.8), falls in love with an ass. The wife of Oberon was far too different from the virgin monarch of England for most in a contemporary audience to have suspected that her character was meant to wound the English Queen’s majesty.[57] A playwright might go only so far in his satirical designs. Still, a poet like Shakespeare, who thought so little of Elizabeth that, unlike many of his fellows, he refrained from writing a eulogy for her after her death, and was publicly scolded for this act of recusancy, might well have dared to give his patron the opportunity to laugh in secret at a sovereign on whom both depended but for whom neither had any real love.[58]

Another indication that A Midsummer Night’s Dream had special meaning for Southampton and his circle is its rather uncensorious references to Catholic doctrine and practice. The blessing of the bridal bed resembles the Catholic benedictio thalami;[59] and the fairies bless rooms, as in Catholic ritual, with “field-dew consecrate,” or holy-water. (5.1.403-4, 415). In a way that traditional religionists could appreciate, the play’s rather sympathetic portrayal of the spirit world violates the strict Protestant rationalism of Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, which had dismissed Robin Goodfellow and his colleagues as the fading retinue of a dying world.[60] Hatred of “heresy,” of which something is made in the play (2.2.138-42), is not unique to Catholics, but not many non-Catholic heresimachs in Elizabethan England would also have approved of holy-water. Nor could many Protestants of the stricter sort have endorsed Theseus’s declaration that nuns (the queen was another matter) were “Thrice blessed” to “master so their blood” as to live a celibate life (1.1.74-5). Monkishly, the Duke seems to endorse a religion of “works,” assigning too much value to ascetical exertion.

At the same time, however, Theseus assumes that Hermia would not want to live a “barren sister” all her life, “Chaunting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon”; she should be “distill’d” as an earthly bride, not as a martyr (1.1.72-3, 76). There is an inconsistency here, one which Shakespeare (who could easily have bypassed the opportunity to praise heroic celibacy and thus avoided the conceptual dissonance) took the trouble to create. He did so out of material that Southwell provided.

At the beginning of the message to his cousin that prefaces his collection of poems, Southwell declares that “Poets by abusing their talent, and making the follies and fayninges of love, the customary subject of their base endevours, have so discredited this facultie, that a Poet, a Lover, and a Liar, are by many reckoned but three wordes of one signification.” In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the attitude of Theseus is similar, though his language is more succinct: “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact” (5.1.7-8). Arguing for Jesuit influence on Shakespeare, Peter Milward noted the similarity as one of several isolated shards of evidence for his contentions, but did nothing else with it. He also repeated Grosart’s theory that a line from the poem that prefaces Saint Peters Complaint, “Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose” (16), represented Southwell’s annoyed response to Venus and Adonis. Neither Milward nor Grosart noticed that this second passage, like the first, is echoed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “earthlier happy is the rose distill’d” (1.1.76). Two such conspicuous connections between Southwell’s stern moralizings and Shakespeare’s festive comedy should prompt a search for more, and an inquiry into what they might signify.

 There is in fact much in common between Southwell’s poems and the two scenes from which the parallels have just been drawn. The “rose distill’d” is found in Theseus’s warning to Hermia that refusal to obey her father’s wishes concerning her marriage could have ruinous consequences. She would have

 

 

The distraught speaker of Saint Peters Complaint imagines himself caged not in a cloister but in its antithesis, the devils’ “mew” (609); and the rest of the poem is rich with vocabulary used by Theseus, most of the words clustering in lines 76-114, 416-33, and 561-609.[61] Especially notable are  “happy worldlings” (416, and 332: “earthly”): cf. “earthlier happy”), and “stilling . . . rose” (The Author to the Reader, 16; but also 561-7: “Roses . . . distill”),  In the rest of Scene 1, we might compare “crazed” (92) with the Complaint’s “crasie” (199); “this spotted and inconstant man” (110) with “spotted soule” (18); “misgraffed” (137) with “to graffe in stock of meaner sap” (700); “Swift as any shadow, short as any dream” (144) with “a shade, a dreame” (95); “collied” (145) with “coales” (250); “leagues” (165) with “league” (686); “he hath turn’d a heaven unto a hell” (207) with “From heaven . . . to . . . hell . . . estranged . . . , That . . . Angels turnes to Divells” (629, 641); “liquid pearl” (211) with “liquid pearle” (357); “perjur’d . . . oaths” (241-3) with “perjurde oathes” (528). While speaking on the same theme, the playwright’s character and the poet speak at cross purposes, one celebrating, the other denigrating “earthly” happiness; but there can be little doubt that one writer has adopted the language of the other--and not just in this scene.

At the beginning of the final act, Theseus offers his bemused comments about the “imagination” in a dialogue with Hippolyta about the kinship in folly of lover, madman, and poet:

 

 

Southwell’s “a Poet, a Lover, and a Liar” (from “The Author to his loving Cosen”) are not quite a perfect match for “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet”; but “The Author” sees a kind of madness in poets “possessed” by “idle” and diabolical “fansies”; and Shakespeare at least raises the idea of the poet’s mendacity at the end of the play when he has the poetical Puck, who admits that the characters have been but “shadows” or players in an “idle theme,” deny that he is a “liar” (5.1.423, 427, 435)--a comical disclaimer, as it seems to be, only if the audience were counted on to assume it false. The parallels are close enough to be given further weight by others. Theseus disbelieves “antic fables” and “toys,” shrugs off the “devils” from “hell,” deprecates the mind that can counterfeit “Helen” in a brow of “Egypt” and an “eye” that can both roll in “frenzy” and “glance” through space indefinite. Just so, but with more solemnity, Saint Peter complains of “fabling wits” devoted only to “lovers layes” (34), of the “anticke sightes” and “tales” formed in “fansies forging mold” (730-32). These too are “toyes” (The Author to the Reader, 17), although the religious poet may turn them into something exalted. The Saint’s Complaint also has “Divells” from “hell” (641, 638), a “forged Goddesse” (cf. a counerfeit Helen),  an “Egyptian” (289), “eyes” that “glaunce” (356) and spheres (eyes) full of love that in a motion “rowles” (406), and a “phrensie” allied to “fansy” (298-9). The skeptical duke (who is himself a fiction and whose story is a myth) describes how the “poet’s pen” waits on his imagination, a seething “brain” which “bodies forth” the “shapes” of “things unknown.” By supposing some “fear” in the “night” this wayward faculty turns a “bush” into a “bear.” In Southwell’s poem, the Author’s “penne” (14) writes of “body” and “braine” (279-80), of the mind’s “lying shapes” (668), its “straunge chymeraes” (728), false nocturnal fears (the “fayn[ed] frights” of dreams [728]), a “Beare” (283), and if not a “bush,” a “shrub” (618).  Hippolyta also finds “fancy’s images” unreliable “witnesse[s],” but perceives some connection between a “story . . . told” and “minds transfigur’d.” Her use of this last word (unique in Shakespeare) may have been suggested by Peter’s recollection of “Thabors joyes” (181), occasioned at Christ’s “transfiguration” on that mountain (Matt 17.2; cf. EC, 32r: “transfigured”).[62]

The reminiscences of Southwell’s poetry with which the play’s final act begins continue throughout the scene. From the shorter lyrics, “natures blots” (“Christs Childhoode” 5) are quite the same as what Oberon calls “the blots of Nature’s hand” (5.1.409). “Sinnes heavie loade” combines “over-charge” with a prayer, “take me to the skie” (1, 42); in the play we find “o’ercharged” along with Pyramus/Bottom’s declaration that he has already gone to heaven: “My soul is in the sky” (5.1.85, 303). Pyramus’s “gracious, golden, glittering gleams” (5.1.274; “gleams” is unique as a noun in Shakespeare, and “gleam’d” appears only in Lucrece) turns to parody what is ingenuous, if somewhat laughable, in Southwell’s “Seeke flowers of heaven”: “glorious gleames” and “Most glittering gold in lieu of glebe” (12-19)--aspects of flowers which, like the Dream’s “love-in-idleness” (2.1.168), contain “Life giving juice of living love” in their “sugred vaines” (13-14).

 Saint Peters Complaint offers an additional set of comparisons with the play’s fifth act. Like the mechanicals’ little drama, the poem too has “actors in . . .  tragicall mischaunces” (320), and it shares with these comical tragedians some of its rhetorical features. Thisby’s swan song shows some kinship with St. Peter’s heavy meditations.

 She poeticizes:

In his Complaint, St. Peter is fond of extolling Christ’s eyes, as he does in a fashion that would become Crashavian:

 

 

This stanza shares some of Thisby’s rhymes (love-dove, milk-silk); its “groning” matches the lovers’ “moan”; and both speakers admire their beloved’s “eyes.” The eyes of Pyramus are “sweet,” like those of Peter’s Christ, in whose “deare eyes” (also called “nectared Aumbryes” and “sweet elements”) can be read “sweet lessons” (343-4, 351, 415). The poem’s “O sister Nymphes” (589) recalls the play’s “O Sisters Three.” Peter (like Hamlet’s Claudius, later) imagines “Caines murdring hand imbrude in brothers blood” (523); Thisby asks the Fates to “lay” their “hands” in “gore,” and her sword to “imbrue” her breast. (“Imbrue” is common in Southwell, but Thisby is one of only two speakers in Shakespeare to use the word.)

In parts of the play not yet examined, we can find a small number of isolated passages to set beside portions of Southwell’s verse--for example: “Flower of this purple dye” (3.2.102) and “leaves . . . staind in beauties die” (“Seeke flowers of heaven,” 9); “thief of love” (3.2.283) and “theefes of Harts” (SPC, 324). Perhaps more interesting, because they may be relevant to the question of whether Shakespeare read Southwell’s work in manuscript, are parallels between expressions in the Dream and in poems by Southwell not included in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions: “knitteth souls” (1.1.172) and “knitteth . . . their hartes” (“Christ upon the Crosse to man,” 18); “her close and consecrated bower . . . stalls” (3.2.7-10) and “Thy sacred Stall . . . his closed bowre” (“The Complaint of the B. Virgin,” 37-40). One of these poems (in a group extant only in the Folger Library’s Harmsworth Manuscript) is an alternate and diminutive version of Saint Peters Complaint. This poem’s speaker, acknowledging that he had used “oathes” to “forsweare the truthe,” laments “breach of plighted trouth,” and cries out, “O fatal fray . . . What develish drift . . .” (4, 9, 13, 36). He sounds much like Helena when she exclaims: “When truth kills truth, O devilish-holy fray” (3.2.129).  Quince as Prologue, who announces the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby, in giving his synopsis describes “the grisly beast, which Lion hight by name” and the “bloody blameful blade” with which Pyramus “broach’d his bloody boiling breast” (5.1.139, 147). The variant Complaint has a “hart” resisting “bloudie blades,” “a grisely Beare . . . , a ramping Lions pawe” (hence Shakespeare’s “grisly . . . Lion”?), a “breach” (the printed version has the verb “Brochte” in a different context [358]), and, for sound effects, a passel of other “b’s”: “boasting bragges before,” “bind,” “brunt,” “base,” “better,” “bewitch,” “blind,” “blasphemous,” “Boarish” (25-6, 41, 9, 16-42), with much other Quince-like affecting of the letter (“O fatal fray, o foule and filthy foile!” [13]).

The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brings us back to the poem in which Southwell directly addresses “the Reader” (concerning “Venus Rose” and other matters). He has written, he says, of the fallibility of “Saintes”; but “their weaknesse is no warrant to offend: / Learne by their faults, what in thine owne to mend” (5-6). Puck, we might remember, also speaking directly to an audience, begins the play’s last speech with some of the same words: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended” (5.1.423-24). Both speakers resort to clichés in their rhymes, but not by coincidence if the other parallels between play and poems taken in sum are signs of “influence.”

These examples do not exhaust all the correlations between Southwell’s poetry and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but others might be better appreciated when considered with those which can be established between the Jesuit’s prose works and the play. Since some of this prose is “poetical” and some not, we might begin with the prose-poem Marie Magdalen’s Funeral Teares, published in 1591 but previously circulated in manuscript, and already seen as an influence on Venus and Adonis.[63] It sends us to Theseus’s appreciation of the “simplicity” of the players about to perform for him:

 

 

One of the more dramatic moments in the Funeral Teares is the appearance of the risen Jesus to Mary who has spent a considerable time in Christ’s empty tomb, grieving over his inexplicable absence. Both before and after he manifests himself, speech fails her; and, as the italics indicate, the meditation’s interlocutor defends her aphasia in many of the terms that would be spoken by Theseus:

 

But feare not Mary for thy teares will obtaine. They are too mighty oratours [cf. “great clerks”], to let any suite fail, & though they pleaded at the most rigorous bar, yet have they so perswading a silence [cf. “Out of this silence yet I pick’d a welcome”] . . . .They tie the tongues of all accusers. . . . This water . . . hath merited his love. . . . [Delay made Christ’s presence] so much the more welcome. . . . O loving maister . . . , thou shewest by a sweete experience, that though she paied thee with the dearest water of her eyes, yet small was the price that shee bestowed in respect of the worth that shee received. . . . Love would have spoken, but feare enforced silence. Hope frameth the words, but doubt melteth them . . . , her voice trembled [cf. “shiver”], her tongue faltered, her breath failed. In fine [i.e., in conclusion] teares issued in liew of words, and deep sighes in stead of long sentences. . . . Though wordes woulde have broken out, and her hart sent into his, the dueties that shee ought him. . . , she was forced...to seal them up al under silence by supressing speech [cf. “Throttle their practic’d accent”]. . . . (55v-60r) [also, “my . . . supplication . . . pointed with sighs” (64r); “made the period of her aspiring griefes” (66v)].

 

At various other points in the Dream we might note less concentrated echoes of the Funerall Teares. Not the least of these is Bottom’s attempt at Pauline eloquence, “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.1.211-14), with Southwell’s more respectable allusion to Saint Paul: “neither thy sence can discerne, nor thy minde conceive any other object,” closely folllowed by “Thy eies . . . Thy ears” (27v), and then by “My eies . . . , my brest . . . , my heart . . . , my tongue” (29v). It is obvious to every annotator that Bottom’s report of his rapture derives ultimately from Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians 2:9: “The eye hath not seen, & the eare hath not heard, neither have entred into the heart of man, the thynges which God hath prepared for them that love hym” (Bishops’). Not usually noticed is that Shakespeare actually complements this scriptural passage with another, from Second Corinithians. Bottom prefaces his rhapsody about the “eye of man” with the claim, “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass, if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had--but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had” (4.1:204-11). He thus follows Paul’s similarly (but not so severely) stammering recollection of his being “caught up to the third heaven”: “I wyl come to visions. . . .  For I knew a man in Christe, aboue [fourteen] yeres ago, (whether [he were] in the body I can not tell, or whether [he were] out of the body, I can not tell, God knoweth) that he was taken up into the thirde heauen:  And I knewe the same man (whether in the body or out of the body, I can not tell, God knoweth) Howe that he was taken up into paradise, & hearde unspeakeable wordes, which is not lawfull for man to utter” (2 Cor. 12:1-4 [Bishops’]). This conflation reminds us that Shakespeare, when relying on sources, may be eclectic, even or especially within the works of a single author, so that a single passage can prove, as Kenneth Muir, John Tobin, and other scholars have noted, “polygenetic” or “overdetermined,” appearing like a thread whose several strands have come together from different skeins according to various rules or whims of association.[64] It is plausible, then, that Shakespeare’s imagination would link both scriptural texts not only because of their thematic similarity, but because of their nodal relationship in Southwell, who recalls the first in his Funeral Teares, having also quoted it, as well as the second text, in his Epistle of Comfort (190v, 103v).

That the Epistle of Comfort in some way lies behind Bottom’s speech may be inferred by another consideration. Soon after quoting from Second Corinthians, Southwell refers to an episode in the Acts of the Apostles in which Paul, bitten on the hand by a viper, “shook” it off into a fire (105v; Acts 28:5). Shakespeare, hardly by mere coincidence, alludes in the third act to the same incident, when Lysander tries to cast off Hermia with insults: “Vile thing, let loose; Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent” (3.2.260-1)--this not long after the metamorphosed Bottom has for the second time been described as “translated” (3.2.32), a word used by Southwell near his references to “the third heaven” and the “Viper” (101v), and not very long after he had spoken of an artist’s changing a “mans shape” into that of an animal (82r-v).[65]

This part of Southwell’s Epistle also sheds light upon the origins of a speech by Titania in Act Two. Protesting that she will never give up the “changeling boy” whom Oberon insists he must have, she explains why:

 

 

From the Epistle of Comfort, we can actually see how the various elements of this passage coalesced in Shakespeare’s imagination. In a single sentence, Southwell writes of a “marchant . . . ever busie about his billes” and a “woman great with child . . . ever musing upon the tyme of her deliverye” (112r-v), thus providing the basic juxtaposition in Titania’s narrative of the “traders” with the “big-bellied” sails and “womb.” Circling around this central point are the words that become the language of the speech: “religious orders . . . vowed persons . . . Indies” (88r); “spice” (97r); “ayre” (117r); “night” (118r); “syde” (108v); “sitt” (117r); “sande in the shore” (116v); “marke” (117r); “A . . . shipmaister . . . setteth forth from the shore, and goeth to sea . . . , directinge his shippe to a gaynfull haven . . . lanched out of the porte” (96v); “fludd” (117v); “laughtures” (94v); “sayle” (96v); “conceyveth” (102v, for 103v); “groweth” (102v); “bellye” (113v); “wantones” (99r); “wynde” (116v); “folowe” (118r); “rich” (115v); “younge” (97v); “esquire” (126v); “imitate” (100v); “lande” (113v); “fetched” (95r); “toye” (103r; cf. “trifles”); “voyage” (115r); “dye . . . mortall” (112r); “for his sake” (104v); parte” (117r).

The classical, medieval, and contemporary sources from which Shakespeare has been shown to have drawn information, ideas, and images--most notably, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, several Senecan tragedies, Plutarch’s Lives, Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcrafte[66]--are of course prominent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but Southwell often provides a companion influence. Titania’s description, for example, of the consequences in nature of the “brawls” between Oberon and herself (2.1.88-117) is sometimes read as inspired by Ovid and Seneca.[67] On the whole, however,Titania’s language is closer to that of passages in Southwell’s Epistle, which contains references to Deucalion’s as well as Noah’s flood, and to other natural calamities wrought by God in “revenging him selfe uppon sinners” (EC, 59r, 65r-66r; cf. Titania’s explanation of the weather’s fury “As in revenge” [2.1.89]). The story of “Pyramus and Thisby” with its notorious mulberry tree and “mantle . . . stain’d with blood” (5.1.142-8) is right from Golding’s Ovid. But it is possible that Shakespeare recalled the Epistle of Comfort collaterally with the Metamorphoses. Southwell’s work itself has several Ovidian moments, alluding to the story of Phaethon as well as Deucalion (68v, 65r), and telling the biblical story of Joseph’s coat in terms that could have reminded the dramatist both of Thisbe’s garment and of Pyramus’s mistake: “When Jacobe sawe the cote of his sonne Joseph imbrued with bloode, thincking that he had been devoured by a wylde beaste . . . , he cutt his garments . . .” (25v). Like Golding, Southwell has a “mantell” in his passage (25r);[68] unlike Golding, he also has the word “imbrued,” which, as already noted, Thisby uses so dramatically (5.1.344). Later, in a discussion of martyrdom, the Jesuit writes of the symbolic “bloode of the . . . mulberye” (152v), apt to remind a reader of Ovid of the white berry turned forever purple by the blood of Pyramus and Thisbe.[69] Shakespeare’s “strong imagination” need not have been very “antic” to have recalled the religious text along with the classical story.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a number of Shakespearean rarities with antecedents in Southwell’s works, some of which have already been recognized. We might notice a few more of them. The OED attributes the first printed uses of “enamel” in a figurative sense (as in, from this play, the snake’s “enamell’d skin” [2.1.255]) to Shakespeare and to Nashe. Southwell in his poem “Seeke flowers of heaven” anticipated both writers: “Their stalks [are] inameld with delight” (11). Shakespeare seems to have coined the expression “Palpable-gross” (“palpable grosse” in the Quartos and the Folio; 5.1.367), but perhaps only after reading “palpable . . . grosse” in successive sentences of the Epistle (175r-v), as he might have created Bottom’s chimerical “sucking dove” (1.2.82) with a faint memory of Southwell’s “doves” and “sucking lambs” (SPC, 437, 566). Puck’s is the only use of “neeze” (for sneeze) in Shakespeare (2.1.56). The Epistle translates it from the Book of Job: “His neesing is like the blazing of fyer, and his eyes like the eye liddes of the morning” (72v), “eyelids” being mentioned by Oberon at 2.1.170. Among Shakesepeare’s works, only the Dream (1.1.34; 2.2.21) and Romeo and Juliet (1.4. 76, 62) contain “Sweetmeats” and “spinners” (for spiders); the words appear in the Epistle (111v, 118r), in a section that, as we have just seen, inspired Titania’s speech on the changeling boy’s mother.

After this rather relentless search for signs of Southwell’s influence on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and there are a few more to be discovered), we might consider whether his contributions are in any way relevant to an understanding of the play--at least in one of its dimensions. We should return to the shared image of the “rose distill’d” as the starting point of our inquiry.

As already noted, Southwell was distressed that the ablest of poets were forever “distilling Venus Rose,” devoting their gifts to the making of trifles. In the Epistle of Comfort, however, he sublimated the metaphor:

 

The swetnesse of the rose, if it be untouched soone withereth awaye with the leafe, which to day is fayre, and to morow fadeth. But put it into the still, cover it from the comforte of the Sunne, yea scorche it with the fyre, it vapoureth out most delicate water, which maye be longe preserved, & imparteth sweetnesse to whatsoever it toucheth: So that whether it be by fyer, or by naturall course, the rose wythereth: but in the firste manner, both the leafe keepeth a pleasant savour, &  distilleth from it a most sweete liquor, whereas in the seconde, bothe the leafe is lesse lykesome and the water lost. So fareth it with Gods Martyres (153v-154r).

 

When Theseus reminds Hermia that the “rose distill’d” is “earthlier happier” than that which, nun-like, “lives, and dies in single blessedness” (1.1.76-78), he does not truly contradict the Jesuit, for the “distill’d” martyr is obviously not “happier” on earth; nor does Theseus fully deny the biblical teaching of the book of Lamentations, “Happy is he that sitteth solitarye. . . , that carrieth the yoke” (3:27-28), which Southwell quotes in his Epistle (43v). Theseus is speaking, however, and Shakespeare is writing from the perspective of Southampton and his family; that is, from that of an Elizabethan lay Catholic aristocracy whose troubled lives and conflicted consciences had them of more than one mind about the pure heroic doctrine preached by the least temporizing of their clerical leaders--of whom Robert Southwell was one.  Was it not the vocation of aristocrats to be “earthlier happy” (or, as Southwell put it, to enjoy “earthly solaces” [EC, 51v]), and to distill their roses in the sexual delights of marriage, begetting new and orthodox members of the kingdom of heaven? Oberon prophesies the health of the wedded couples’ children:

 

 

Southwell had a different kind of blessing in mind for the young members of the Church Militant:

 

Nether doth [our heavenlye fathers] comforte consiste, to see in us a shadowe of his beautye, a sparke of his wisdome, or a resemblance of his might, riches, or glorye: but rather in seeinge in us, the scares, wemmes, and werttes of his vexations and paynes: which the more they deface us in outwarde shew, the more they beautifye us in soule . . . . The scarre of a wounde in the childes face, which he hath suffered in his fathers quarell . . . is a more edginge whetstone, of fatherlye affection in the parent, then if it were absent, because it yeldeth, a perpetuall testimonye of a dutifull and lovinge mynde. So god [is] more desirous to have us affectionate, then fortunate children . . . (EC 33r-v).

 

Southwell shared with Shakespeare, as we have seen, a detestation of “natures blots” (“Christ’s Childehood” 5), but the missionary priest could admire the “scares, wemmes, and werttes,” both symbolic and literal, that had religious significance. The play once more draws images of secular happiness out of the stern otherworldliness of Counter-reformation piety.

It would be too simple to conclude, however, that this piety was utterly renounced, either in the play or in the lives of the Catholics for whom Shakespeare’s comedy held special significance. “When Theseus calls “Thrice blessed” those who “master so their blood / To undergo [a] maiden pilgrimage” (1.1.74-75), he does not voice the playwright’s flattery of the Queen, to whom the rest of the play is less than complimentary; he remarks upon a distinction in Catholic teaching between the life of the “commandments” (which are to be universally observed) and the life of the “counsels” (which are works of supererogation, to be pursued by those who would, according to the injunction of Christ, be “perfect” [Matt. 19:21]). In the deep crisis faced by the Elizabethan Catholic laity, when persecution by the government could consume all their wealth, force them into prison or exile, or kill them, they were sometimes spoken to by their clerical leaders as though the difference between commandments and counsels had become blurred. The “comfort” that Southwell offered them in their troubles was only supernal; he seemed to ask them to face oppression and torture as though they were called to be perfect. Over the decades of the Queen’s reign, the aristocratic Catholic laity found different ways of responding to such calls. Some managed to accommodate themselves to Elizabeth’s regime while preserving a Catholic identity; some became “Church papists,” or crypto-Catholics; some converted to Protestantism; some lost lands, goods, freedom, or their lives.[70] As will be seen again in the next chapter, Southampton’s family offered the state both compliance and resistance; they did the same to their church. They desired to be both devout and prosperous; they did not wish to wither, collectively, like a solitary rose on a virgin thorn, or to glory in their scars. Yet they did not want a church entirely without saintly desperadoes, who risked their lives to keep the Old Faith and to some extent the Old Ways alive, who were “Thrice blessed” to “master so their blood” as to shed it. At peril to themselves, Southamptons and Montagus escorted, concealed, protected, and consulted missionary priests, and were able to practice a proscribed religion in private because of their wealth and connections. They were in a sense, then, only “twice blessed”; and they would not cross the line that separated their condition from a “higher” one.

Whatever its larger purposes as a commercial venture or as a pure act of the imagination, A Midsummer Night’s Dream embodies this well-defined attitude toward religious issues. It respects Catholic cultural and religious practice and acknowledges (for some) the legitimacy of Catholic ascetical teaching; but (like the later Merchant of Venice)[71] it celebrates “earthlier” happiness and the conciliations of comedy over the tragic, otherworldly divisiveness of the Catholic martyr’s absolute idealism. In this way the Dream shows affinities with another work usually paired with it chronologically, and also thought to have had special meaning for Southampton, Love’s Labor’s Lost.[72] In that play too (in which echoes of Southwell’s poetry have been heard)[73] an isolating asceticism is shown incompatible with the vocation and temperament of  worldly aristocrats; but in the end, a Catholic hermitage and a penitential regimen of good works are presented as temporary but salutary means of reforming a King and his courtiers. In the Dream, Shakespeare translates Southwell’s solemn “Prologue to the first Pageant of [Christ’s] Passion” (mentioned in the preface to the Jesuit’s poems) into the fifth act’s comical “Prologue” (106) and his induction to Thisby’s tragical “passion” (315), otherwise called a “pageant” (3.2.114). Southwell’s martyrial “bloode . . . of the mulberye” returns in the hilarious play of the mechanicals to its original use in an Ovidian love story (5.1.148); and love’s martyrs, Pyramus and Thisby, are made as risible in their unqualified passion as the adolescent lovers whose loyalties are transferable at the touch of a flower’s sap. The couples in the play who mock the pageant seem a bit smug, however--as a non-fictitious audience might be. In their class-consciousness they are terribly amused by the fumbling antics of the well-intentioned “players”; and in their blindness they fail to see that, deficient in constancy themselves, they might show sympathy for the mythical lovers who are portrayed as having it in the extreme. In the comedy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, martyrdom is neither to be embraced nor laughed away

In another play about Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare treats martrydom for love more seriously and no less ambiguously, and again in a way that had special relevance to the Southampton circle. The playwright based his drama, of course, on Arthur Brooke’s poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet; but he was probably led to this book by the interest its story would have had for his patron. The Montagus were Southampton’s family on his mother’s side. In 1572, George Gascoigne wrote a masque about the Italian families of Montague and Capulet for the double wedding of   Lord Montagu’s son, Anthony Browne, to the daughter of Sir William Dormer, and of Montagu’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Sir William’s son. Gascoigne had emphasized for his employers the illustriousness of the Montagu (or Montacute) name.[74] Shakespeare underscored the insanity of a feud that, like sectarian conflict, kept families apart and led their children--both wiser and more foolish than their elders in their love, extreme in their “devout religion” even unto “idolatry”--to deaths that turned them into saints memorialized in golden statues but left to the living a sense of “woe” that was almost empty because the “poor sacrifices” that created it were unnecessary (RJ, 1.2.88; 2.2.114; 5.3.299-310). Almost empty, because martyrdom on both sides led not to vengeance but to reconciliation.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the “wall [came] down that parted” the “fathers” of Pyramus and Thisby (5.1.351-52), but, as in Romeo and Juliet, too late to forestall a tragedy. The complexly Catholic Southamptons and Montagus (if any other than the earl ever saw them performed) would have recognized in both plays their own convictions about the perniciousness of certain walls,[75] and about the grandeur and gaucherie of martyrs. Their kinsman Southwell, whose writings are extensively woven into the comedy’s fabric,[76] would never know of the play nor how much he was at issue in it. He may, however, in the days of his freedom have learned from his relatives themselves how much they were inclined to comply with his exhortations and where the lines of their opposition were drawn. Shakespeare seems to have had a special understanding of the Jesuit’s intricate relations with his patron’s family, probably receiving information from Southampton, and perhaps from his “cousin” Southwell, whose writings he would continue to read, to recall in astonishing detail, and to make central to his reflections on principles of religious and political conscience that were of considerable moment to his patron and (dare it be said?) to himself.