Abstract
What political pressures as well as professional and literary opportunities inspired Shakespeare to compose ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ for publication in the Poetical Essays of Love’s Martyr? Although this question cannot be answered with certainty, four interdependent explanations suggest why on this occasion he made an exception to his rule of avoiding such print projects after 1594. Yet the plural motives that impelled him to participate in this joint venture are further complicated by being intertwined with those of his collaborators. And at the centre of this network of political and literary associations stood Ben Jonson, whose connections with Salusbury and Shakespeare provide the strongest evidence of how ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ became part of this prestigious collection.
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Notes
Robert Speaight, Shakespeare: The Man and His Achievement (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 220, incorrectly states that the first edition ‘was denounced as “seditious”‘ and ‘clandestinely printed and sold’. The volume’s lack of registration is neither suspicious nor irregular. Love’s Martyr was among the third of all books published during the period that were not registered.
See Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 400. Blayney, 403, warns that ‘inane conspiracy theories’ arise from a misunderstanding of ‘questions of entrance’.
Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006), 377.
For dramatic sparring between Jonson and Shakespeare from 1599 to 1601, see James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
Colin Burrow (ed.), William Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90.
Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Shakespeare’s Poems (London: Thomson Learning, 2007), 94.
Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, Scenes from His Life (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), 138, had previously described Chester as Salusbury’s ‘side-kick (later chaplain)’.
See instead Charles R. Forker, ‘Robert Chester (fl. C. 1586–1604)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
See Boris Borukhov, ‘Was the Author of Love’s Martyr Chester of Royston?’ Notes and Queries 56 (2009): 77–81.
Carleton Brown (ed.), Poems of Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (London: Kegan Paul, Trencher, Trübner 1914), xlvii–liv. Although Borukhov maintains that we do not know who Chester really is, he nonetheless reveals our most complete portrait (aside from Charles Forker’s article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) of Chester in refuting the Royston thesis.
See J. George, ‘Robert Chester’, The National Library of Wales Journal 6 (1950): 392,
and John Buxton, ‘Two Dead Birds: A Note on The Phoenix and Turtle’, English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 46. Chester had earlier stood in for Salusbury in a similar capacity on 18 January of that year.
Sally Harper, Music in Welsh Culture Before 1650: A Study of the Principal Sources (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 299 and 298.
See G. Blakemore Evans, The Poems of Robert Parry (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 10–22. (Evans proves Parry is the sole author of the ‘patron’ poems in Sinetes Passions that Brown had attributed to Salusbury.)
C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (ed.), Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 11: 41, following Brown, Poems by Sir John Salusbury, liv. With few exceptions, Chester’s poem has been excoriated in contemporary criticism. F. T. Prince in Poems (London: Methuen, 1960), xl, calls it ‘rubbish’, that is not only ‘grotesquely incompetent and tedious’ but ‘chaotic’, and Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen in Shakespeare’s Poems, 94, pronounce it ‘pedestrian’, ‘tedious’ and ‘aesthetically discouraging’.
Terence G. Schoone-Jongen, Shakespeare’s Companies: William Shakespeare’s Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 103–17, acknowledges that even though the arguments for his connection with Lord Strange’s Men are plausible, ‘none of these premises are unequivocal evidence for Shakespeare’s presence in the company, and, as such, alternative explanations for his whereabouts cannot be ruled out’ (117).
See also Sally-Beth MacLean, ‘A Family Tradition: Dramatic Patronage by the Earls of Derby’, in Region, Religion, and Patronage, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 205–26.
E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: ‘The Lost Years’ (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985), 62, admits that Shakespeare ‘was not named as a member of Strange’s Men in their license to travel of 6 May 1593’.
Lawrence Manley, ‘From Strange’s Men to Pembroke’s Men: 2 Henry VI and the First Part of the Contention’, Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (2003): 253–87, shows how Shakespeare elevates the Stanleys’ role in history.
Richard Dutton, William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989), 7.
For a strong refutation, see R. Bearman, ‘“John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament”: A Reappraisal’, Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003): 184–203, and “Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?” Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 83–94.
See John Roe (ed.), The New Cambridge Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 48;
and MacDonald P.Jackson, ‘Vocabulary and Chronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 73.
Thomas P. Harrison, ‘Love’s Martyr by Robert Chester: A New Interpretation’, University of Texas Studies in English 30 (1951): 66–85;
Muriel Bradbrook, Shakespeare in His Context: The Constellated Globe (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1989), 78.
Marie Axton, ‘Miraculous Succession: The Phoenix and Turtle (1601)’, in The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 116–30.
Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr’, “The Phoenix and Turtle”, and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion’, Review of English Studies 40 (1989): 55. For Elizabeth’s transformation into the dead phoenix in the Jacobean period,
see John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2003); and Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Elizabeth H. Hageman and Katherine Conway (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), especially Alan Young, ‘The Phoenix Reborn: An Appropriation of an Elizabethan Symbol’, 68–81, and Georgianna Ziegler, ‘A Second Phoenix: The Rebirth of Elizabeth I as Elizabeth Stuart’, 111–31.
For the Elizabethan use of phoenix iconography, see Elkin Wilson, England’s Eliza (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 21–2;
and Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 81–3.
For the larger dynastic context, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), especially 385–94.
Although included in the First Folio, scholars have long suspected it to be a collaboration. See Brian Vickers, ‘Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher’ in Shakespeare, Co-Author (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 333–402.
Their main advocates are: (a) Alexander Grosart, Love’s Martyr, and William H. Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle; (b) Carleton Brown, Poems by Sir John Salusbury; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare, ‘The Lost Years’; (c) Harrison, ‘Love’s Martyr’, 66–85; John Buxton, ‘Two Dead Birds’, 44–55; Anthea Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr’, 48–71; and Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen, Shakespeare’s Poems (2007); (d) Gwyn Williams, ‘Shakespeare’s Phoenix’, National Library of Wales Journal 22 (1982): 277–81; (e) Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies;(f) Roy T. Ericksen, ‘“Un certo amoroso matire”: Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and Giordano Bruno’s De gli eroici furori’, Spenser Studies 2 (1981): 193–215; (g) Bernard H. Newdigate, ‘The Phoenix and Turtle: Was Lady Bedford the Phoenix?’ TLS, 24 October 1936: 862; ed., Jonson, Poems (1936) and The Phoenix and Turtle (1937); and (h) Alfred von Mauntz, Jarbuch 28 (1893); J. Mort, Shakespeare Self-Revealed in His Sonnets and Phoenix and Turtle (London: Sherratt & Hughes, 1904);
Walter Thomson, Sonnets of William Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (Liverpool: B. Blackwell and H. Young & Sons, 1938);
G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: On Shakespeare’s Sonnets and The Phoenix and Turtle (1955); Kenneth Muir and Sean O’Loughlin in The Voyage to Illyria: A New Study of Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1937);
(i) John F. Forbis, The Shakespearean Enigma and an Elizabethan Mania (New York: American Library Service, 1924), 200;
(i) David Honneyman, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Court of Navarre (Lewiston: The Edwin Meilen Press, 1997);
(k) Ilya Gililov, The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix (New York: Algora, 2003);
(1) Clare Asquith, ‘A Phoenix for Palm Sunday: Was Shakespeare’s Poem a Requiem for Catholic Martyrs?’ (2001);
(m) Clara Longworth de Chambrun, Shakespeare: A Portrait Restored (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), 237–9;
John Finnis and Patrick Martin, ‘Another Turn for the Turtle: Shakespeare’s Intercession for Love’s Martyr’ (2003). For a concise debunking of Gililov’s outrageous historical speculation, see Boris Borukov, ‘“The Phoenix and Turtle” Was Published in 1601’, Notes and Queries 53 (2006): 71–2.
Heinrich Straumann, ‘“The Phoenix and the Turtle” in its Dramatic Context’, English Studies 58 (1977): 496.
John Kerrigan, ‘Shakespeare’s Poems’, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 76.
J. C. Maxwell, The Cambridge Shakespeare: The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), xxviii.
Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 142; and Tom MacFaul, Paternity and Poetry in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 157.
See Richard Levin, ‘The Figures of Fluellen’, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 209–29.
For the network of associations linking Salusbury, Marston, Shakespeare and Jonson to the Middle Temple, see Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 137–41. For William Stanley’s connection to the Children of Paul’s and his own troupe the Earl of Derby’s Men, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 339–40.
See Charles Cathcart, Marston, Rivalry, Rapprochement, and Jonson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 20.
W. Reavley Gair (ed.), Antonio’s Revenge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 11. It was printed as The Honorable Lord and Lady Huntingdon’s Entertainment of their Right Noble Mother, Alice Spenser, Countess Dowager of Derby, the Last Night of Her Honor’s Arrival at the House of Ashby.
Mark Bland, ‘“As far from all Revolt”: Sir John Salusbury, Christ Church MS 184 and Ben Jonson’s First Ode’, English Manuscript Studies 8 (2000): 44.
See David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 67–8;
Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 65–7;
and Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162–7. Jonson in Discoveries mentions Rutland’s scorn for him as a ‘poet’.
G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 82–3.
See Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989), 147,
and Tom Cain (ed.), Poetaster (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 283–4.
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare: Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan (London: Methuen Drama, 2011), 247, guesses, with no convincing evidence, that Shakespeare ‘purged’ Jonson by acting the role of Sir Vaughan in Satiromastix. But Evans and Cain illustrate how the Welsh knight Sir Vaughan partially evokes Salusbury as a patron (not a poet or player) who seeks revenge after discovering that Horace/Jonson has been hypocritically mocking him.
The Actaeon-Niobe allegory was first successfully decoded by Alexander Corbin Judson in Cynthia’s Revels (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1912), xxv-xxviii. Its language, Judson states, indicates that the earl’s ‘execution had already taken place’. See also Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage, 38–48. Recent criticism, intent on aligning Jonson with Essex’s cause, downplays the importance of the Actaeon inset. Bland, ‘“As far from all Revolt”‘, 56, dismisses it as ‘ironical’. Louis Montorse, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 165, similarly exaggerates what he calls the play’s ‘recurrent tendency to subvert itself in elaborating ‘Queen Elizabeth’s personal mythology’.
See Retha M. Warnicke, Mary, Queen of Scots (New York: Routledge, 2006), 71.
Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, ‘“All Mankind and Her Scots”, Mary Stuart and Modern Britain’, Literature and the Nation, ed. Brook Thomas (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), 72.
John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (New York: Mariner Books, 2005), 180, and My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots (Hammersmith: Fourth Estate, 2004), 7.
Victoria Moul, Jonson, Horace, and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 24–7, cogently explores this poem’s remarkable improvisation on Horace’s Odes, 1.12, and its model Pindar’s Olympian 2.
Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson: His Vision and His Art (London: Methuen, 1981), 134.
See Robert C. Evans, Habits of Mind: Evidence andEffects of Ben Jonson’s Reading (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 1995), 57–88, and Jonson, Lipsius, and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism (Durango: Longwood Academic), 1992.
See Katherine Maus, Jonson and the Roman Frame of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Stephen Orgel (ed.), Selected Masques (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 345.
H. R. Woudhuysen (ed.), Love’s Labour’s Lost (London: Thomson Learning, 1998), 12–13.
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Bednarz, J.P. (2012). Literary Politics: The Publication of Love’s Martyr . In: Shakespeare and the Truth of Love. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230393325_4
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