elderly crone heard the jingle of horses’ bridles, or the splashing of my lord’s feet as he neared the shore, for she seemed suddenly aware of others in her vicinity. She turned round, perplexed, and was faced with an entirely naked youth emerging like a god from the elements.
Her face, I do recall, was a picture. It was a wonderful old countenance, wrinkled and shriven, but with a clear, bright, and intelligent eye. I know enough of age to appreciate that the inhabiter of that bag of bones was the same being who had danced with graceful feet on the common in her youth.
For a brief moment her eye surveyed the figure that had risen from the waters – heavy, pale shoulders, long fair hair, the nub between the slender legs – with the purest appreciation.
Why should either of them have been offended? It is true that he, at first as startled as she, tensed a little from the unexpected meeting; but seeing almost immediately that his witness offered no offence and appeared appreciative of his form, he relaxed, and even lowered the lid of his eye in the form of a rakish wink. For a moment, all that old woman’s Christmases seemed rolled into one. She cackled with pleasure, allowed her eye one more appreciative traverse of his figure, and then – modesty imposing itself at last – turned away to lift the sack onto her back. It seemed she shook with laughter as she slowly disappeared into the mist.
I handed my lord his clothes. When he had dressed, we rode back through the morning towards the great house.
I HAD BEEN WORKING on the idea of composing a sequence of poems or sonnets addressed to my patron. The sonnet itself had a complex history. According to a prevailing fashion, it was addressed by a poet to a mistress, often one who was out of reach, after whom he yearned, or at least affected to do so for the sake of the fulsome compliments he would bestow upon her. It was a convention which had emerged in part at least from the troubadour tradition of France, and since we English tended to ape French fashions, it had its adherents amongst the nobility. Great ladies found it amusing to be addressed thus, in appropriately lofty language, by one who remained suitably distant and chaste. I had one obvious difficulty in my own circumstances: my patron was a master, not a mistress. Yet precisely because of this, the convention imposed its own interesting construction. It reminded me of the convention in a theatre, whereby a man would play a woman’s role. By the same processes, perhaps, it stimulated rather than repressed the imagination.
If a man, rather than a woman, were to be the object of those high-flown praises, a more subtle tone was required – of fervent infatuation which was, at the same time, ironic. And since my master was himself both intelligent and someone who enjoyed praise, I began with the advantage of a most discerning subject for my poetry.
Until then I had mainly drafted certain thoughts in the form of individual lines and brief passages of description or argument. But now, reaching my rooms, I attempted to write a sonnet which would perhaps function as a keystone to my efforts. With a clean page before me, I began by praising my master’s beauty as though he were my beloved mistress, at the same time asserting that my love was not physical, but spiritual.
A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes, and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition thee of me defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
If it were a sonnet which would form the key to the others I would write, there were certain ways in which I would attempt to make it stand out from the other sonnets I intended to compose. I deliberately chose to use eleven syllables to the line, as opposed the usual ten. In addition, I left a clue to the identity of my patron in the phrase:
A man in hew all Hews in his controlling,
The mysterious word ‘Hews’, with a capital letter, as though it were a name, would be opaque to the merely casual reader. But since my patron was Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, whose initials were HWES, an anagram of Hews, it would give a clue to the identity of the fair young man. It happened too that certain of those tradesmen, builders and merchants who had cause to address my lord, or wrote him bills, often altered his name to ‘Henry, Earl Wriothesley of Southampton’. Thus ‘Hews’ would act as a vernacular reference to my patron.
I chose the moment carefully to show the poem to my lord. We had been riding through the forest that early summer morning. He dismounted from his horse in order to walk to the edge of a nearby decline, so that he could survey the surrounding country. As I walked alongside him, I drew the paper forth from my clothes. Taking it from me, he read it with studied amusement. I watched him raise his eyebrows at the last few lines, read them again, and then laugh the louder.
‘Most excellent,’ he said. ‘I am thy spiritual love, but Nature pricked me out for women’s pleasure.’ He smiled again. ‘I should be desirous to see more.’
I asked him whether he had noted the hidden reference to his name in ‘Hews’.
My patron said, ‘If these are dangerous times, as you counsel me, then it is right that living persons should not be mentioned. And since these are private poems, for our own enjoyment, Master Shakespeare, I believe all your references to me as your patron should be hidden to an outside view. If you will accept those conditions, pray continue as you will.’
He returned the paper to me. ‘Will you make a copy of this, in your own hand, so that I may keep it?’
It became our custom. When I had finished a poem, I would copy it; keeping the overwritten and amended original for myself, giving the fair version to him. As for the content, perhaps I could do better in due course. But the tone – part infatuation, part irony, directed at a mysterious and unidentified beautiful youth – seemed well set for our enterprise. In due course I would arrange the poems in a different order, but meanwhile they would steadily accrue.
THAT SUMMER, GRANTED MY LORD’S PERMISSION, I began to sing his praises in those effusive and extravagant terms so dearly beloved of my countrymen. For there was another circumstance which propelled me towards such orisons to beauty, and my lord towards receiving them with a good grace. It happened that in our kingdom we were ruled by a Queen, a veritable lion-hearted Empress, and in our pleading for her mercy and her favour we all of us sounded like troubadour poets singing of our love. It happened too that the very form or construction of my sonnets – soliciting the favours of a fair subject – rhymed with the prevailing fashion among courtiers. And so I proceeded from one to the next, gaining greater confidence as each one was well received by my patron.
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself,