BOOKS
A Publisher on Shakespeare
A. L. Rowse
The Book known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets R. Giroux (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £10.95)
More nonsense has been written, and more unnecessary confusion created, about Shakespeare's Sonnets than the rest of his work put together. Mr Giroux is a New York publisher with a creditable en- thusiasm for the Sonnets and he has made a creditable effort to get them right. This is a very difficult job. Mr Giroux admits that he is an amateur; and only someone utterly im- mersed in the Elizabethan age, who has spent all his life in Shakespeare's background, can hope to worry out the pro- blems correctly and approximate to the right answers.
To give a relevant example. In Sonnet 134 Shakespeare writes of his patron in regard to the Dark Lady: He learned but surety-like to write for me Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.
This means, plainly, that Shakespeare got the young patron to write as surety on his behalf to the lady, who took the opportuni- ty to entangle him in the bond in which she has the poet. Nothing could be simpler: it is Shakespeare himself telling us that the patron wrote on his behalf. It was regular Elizabethan usage to get a social superior to write on one's behalf to the lady to whom one was paying one's addresses.
Mr Giroux comments on this 'but the let- ter referred to has not been seen by Pro- fessor (sic) Rowse or anyone else'. Mr Giroux has not enough knowledge of the period to know that of course it would not survive. The vast majority of Elizabethan letters have naturally disappeared; what has survived of Southampton's are mostly public letters, about public affairs or business. A modern-minded New York publisher wouldn't know about that; then he should take telling from an Elizabethan authority who does know, and not imagine that he is correcting him. It is William Shakespeare himself who is telling us, as above; Mr Giroux should correct his mistake in his next edition.
He does see, correctly, that the Sonnets belong to the three years, 1592-1594/5. Then why except the Mortal Moon Sonnet 107 from his obvious and intelligible dating? There are two topical references in two lines which must therefore converge upon one point, ie. belong to the same date. 'The Mortal Moon hath her eclipse en- dured' — 'endured' means that she has come through it — she has not died, but survived the 'eclipse', the shadow upon her. But at the same time:
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now, within those very years when the Son- nets were written, the Queen came through the shadow of the Lopez conspiracy against her life, and the promise of peace was secured at last with the surrender of Paris to Henry of Navarre, in whose success the Elizabethans — Essex and Southampton particularly — were much interested. Both events dominated the spring of 1594.
Why do ordinary people get these things wrong? The answer is quite simple because they have very little idea of dating. Very well, they should learn from an Elizabethan historian — I am willing to learn about New York publishing from a New York publisher.
Yet the academics are hardly better, some much worse. Professor Leslie Hotson thought that the Mortal Moon was the Spanish Armada! Mr Giroux does at least see that the Rival Poet was the obvious per- son, Marlowe, who was killed in 1593 dur- ing the crucial period of the Sonnets, and that the Sonnets were patronage poems written by the Elizabethan poet for the ob- vious person, his patron. Mr Giroux is quite good about his fellow publisher, Thomas Thorpe, and sees — what is again obvious — that Mr W. H. was Thorpe's dedicatee and not Shakespeare's young man at all. Even here, the massively learned E.K. Chambers and the enthusiastic and erratic Dover Wilson failed to see this obvious point and plumped for Lord Herbert under the misapprehension that Thorpe's Mr W.H. was Shakespeare's. I shall have to live to a hundred to get this correction across to the public, but am encouraged by Agatha Christie's point that people always miss the significance of the obvious. I am fortified by the knowledge that most peo- ple can't think, but don't know it.
Mr Giroux has the sense to see that cir- cumstantial evidence is evidence. All the circumstantial evidence points to Emilia Bassano as the Dark Lady, and there is not a shred against it: the closeness to the per- son of Shakespeare's Company, the discarded mistress of the Lord Chamberlain himself, well known, indeed notorious as Shakespeare tells us, and as she would be; discarded and thrown down from being kept in 'pomp and pride', at the very mo- ment when Shakespeare fell for her out of pity for her 'unworthiness'; the close dating to the plague years 1592 and 1593. Apart from her musical background, her temperamental foreignness and promiscui- ty, there is the fact Roger Prior discovered that she turned out to be quite a good poet. All her characteristics are corroborated by Simon Forman's experience of her, just like Shakespeare's. The complete and water- tight concatenation of facts makes it not only improbable but impossible that they should apply to any other woman and the experience of those definitive years. We can say with every confidence that her iden- tification will never be overthown.
Then it is simply silly to say that she could be 'any one of scores of Elizabethan women who had black eyes and hair, and played the virginal' (sic for virginals). WhY do people say such things? Quite simple third-rate thinking. Fancy putting MY unanswerable identification alongside An- thony Burgess's conjecture — as if they were in pan materia, Mr Burgess knows about music and novel-writing, not about the Elizabethan age, indispensable to knowledge of Shakespeare. Naturally Mr Giroux is best about publishing and has interesting things to saY about Thorpe, whose flowery language in his dedication of the Sonnets has created s° much confusion. Mr Giroux conjectures that the reason why no second edition ap- peared for many years was that someone was interested in suppressing it. He says 'there is no direct evidence for the suppres- sion; it is all indirect, negative and cir- cumstantial, like the scarcity of surviving copies'. In general, as an historian, I arn, against conjectures; but I am open-minded and there may be something to be said for this one. The circumstances surrounding the publication of the Sonnets were certain- ly odd,, and they were certainly not publish- ed by Shakespeare, with their appalling portrayal of the Dark Lady. Thorpe got hold of them from the only person who had got the manuscript, and published them M 1609. Immediately in 1610 Emilia announe" ed the publication of her long religious poem, which came out in 1611 with her prose, reply inserted against 'evil disposed men' who defame women: 'who, forgetting they were both women, nourished of women,. and that — if it were not by the means 01 women — they would be quite extinguished out of the world and a final end of them all, do like Vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred„' ... Something had made her very angry.
Emilia's book is rarer even than the Son- nets. It amuses me to think that the em- phasis Mr Giroux gives this rather supports my identification, though publishers do not always see the point.
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