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Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part Four

Chapter 36:  That Hath a Mint of Phrases in His Braine

Shakespeare and Southampton could have met in the playhouse.  Southampton became a regular attender of plays.  Indeed it seems to have been his principal London recreation.  In the year after the publication of Venus and Adonis Southampton;s mother married Sir Thomas Heneage who was Treasurer of the Queen's Chamber.  It is a tenuous connection but in the small and overcrowded world of the English court an interesting one.

The poet and earl might have also met through the ministrations of Lord Strange; Southampton was an intimate friend of Lord Strange's younger brother.  There is also a possibility that they met through the agency of Southampton's tutor in French and Italian.  

There are many connections between Shakespeare and Southampton.  That they did meet is certain.  Shakespeare's second dedication to Southampton, in The Rape of Lucrece, is sure evidence of greater intimacy.  It has also been assumed that he addressed his sonnets to some noble youth, but the case is more uncertain.

There is also the possibility that for a short time in 1593 Shakespeare became secretary to Southampton.  He may have worked for the young nobleman at Southampton House but there are many scholars have found buried allusions to the family estate at Titchfield in Hampshire in the texts of the plays of this period.

It is a matter of historical record that, at a dinner in Oxford in 1593, Southampton sat with the four principal patrons of the English theatre, the Earl of Essex, Lord Strange, the Earl of Pembroke and the Lord Admiral Howard.  No account of Elizabethan society can omit this almost claustrophobic sense of belonging.     That claustrophobia is echoed in a play that Shakespeare wrote during this period.  Love Labour's Lost is something of a puzzle.  It seems in part to be a satire on some of Shakespeare's more notable contemporaries.  It has sometimes been assumed  that it was commissioned in some sense by Southampton and there has even been speculation that it was first performed in Southampton House.

The essential plot is a simple one.  Ferdinand, Kind of Navarre, persuades three of his courtiers to join him in three years of study during which they will renounce all contact with women.  At the same time, however, the Princess of France and her three noblewoman arrive in his kingdom, with predictable.  The King falls and his nobles fall in love and forswear their oaths.  It is a strong yet slender thread upon which to hang a range of allusions, characters and witticisms as well as assorted comic business.  The dramatic court is loosely established upon the real court of Navarre, from whom Shakespeare even borrowed the names of his courtiers.

Love's Labour's Lost is written in Shakespeare's most artificial style and of all his plays, it is the most heavily rhymed.  It is a world of artifice in which pattern and symmetry are the single most noticeable features.  It is a world of play.  As evidence of Shakespeare's dramatic and linguistics virtuosity it is little short of a wonder.  

Shakespeare wrote some sonnets for the play itself and these were later incorporated within an anthology.  The puzzle of Love's Labour's Lost  is rendered more puzzling by references to a sequel entitled Love's Labour's Won.  It is part of an inventory of Shakespeare's plays compiled by contemporary in 1598 and a bookseller's catalogue of 1603 proves that it was printed and sold.  There have been attempts to identify it with The Taming of the Shrew and with As You Like It.  It must simply be assumed that it is a "lost" play by Shakespeare,

Shakespeare was at ease with his courtly audience, and with the audience and with the composition of the gentle comedy Love's Labour's Lost he played the role of a privileged servant.  He knew the formalities and informalities of court life, just as he knew the exact tone with which noblemen addressed each other.  He was at home with the learning of the period, and with the most important scholars and literary men around him.  He was part of one of the inner circles of Elizabethan society.  There are also allusions in Love's Labour's Lost to the military campaigns of the Earl of Essex and of course Southampton himself was a close ally of Essex in the world of court intrigue.  If Shakespeare was not part of  "Essex's affinity" to use the word for the noble earl's friends and associates, he was well acquainted with those who were.  We may note in a similar spirit of kinship that if Shakespeare was not himself a recusant, he was in close association with fervent adherents to the old faith.  Within the cluster of interests - Essex, Southampton, Strange, Roman Catholicism - his own affinities.