The Craft of Will

...Writers &Writing THE CRAFT OF WILL BY PHOEBE PETTINGEL SIR THOMAS BROWNE, that ingenious theoretician, decided that "What songs the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling, are not beyond all conjecture " In a similar spirit, Robert Giroux takes up some equally enigmatic but more fascinating riddles concerning one of Browne's Jacobean contemporaries In The Book Known as Q A Consideration of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Atheneum, 334 pp , $17 95), he examines questions that have long been asked by readers Who were the Fair Youth and Dark Lady in the sonnets9 Were these intensely private love poems ever meant to be seen by outsiders7 Literary sleuthing can be as absorbing as a whodunit, and The Book Known as Q satisfies both in its solutions and as a critical study of some of the most beautiful poems ever written in English Giroux states at the outset that he has "approached this subject as a book publisher, a publisher of poets " His years as an editor and friend of writers at Farrar, Straus and Giroux have led him to reflect deeply on the influence actual events have on what one writes He has concluded that much can be learned about Shakespeare's history from Q (so called because the first edition of these poems, issued during the Bard's lifetime, is in a quarto format) "I can only regard with amusement," declares Giroux, "those who profess the idea that one cannot interpret the sonnets as biography, and insist that they are pure'literature, whatever that is Poets, alter all, are not purespints, from my experience, I would say they are all too human ' He goes on to quote John Berry-man'sjudgment that "When Shakespeare wrote, 'Two loves 1 have,' reader, he was not kidding " A publisher's perspective on the questions raised b\ Q is apt, for it appeared under strange circumstances In 1609, seven years before Shakespeare's death and while he was enjoying the peak of his popularity in his own time, one Thomas Thorpe brought out a book consisting of 154 of the Bard's sonnets (together with a narrative poem, probably an apprentice effort, entitled "A Lover's Complaint") The number of misprints and garbled phrases in the text strongly suggests that Shakespeare, a meticulous editor, had no hand in the work's production This supposition is supported by the peculiar dedication, signed by Thorpe and beginning "To the onlie beggetter of these insuing sonnets Mr W H "?making it ambiguous whether "W H "represents the author (a typo for W S ), the youth who inspired him, or merely the person who procured the manuscript for Thorpe Anyone remotely familiar with the critical literature on the sonnets knows that innumerable treatises have tried to prove the identity of W H , and that most have been more clever than convincing Giroux sensibly agrees with William Empson's opimon that Thorpe "wanted to set us guessing" in order to create interest and promote sales Giroux notes that Q contains three extra pages before thepoems, one bearing the dedication, the others blank, as if Thorpe needed to think up a way to use waste space "Thorpe's odd dedication reads like something a book publisher with a commercial motive and a printing problem might, under the circumstances, produce " A still more compelling reason for Shakespeare's probable noninvolvement with the publication of Q is the trank subject matter ot this work, unsurpassed as "confessional" poetry In the Petrarchan tradition that had then become fashionable among English poets, sonnets were usually love poems Treating the theme with his habitual breadth, the Bard ranged through "infatuation, admiration, slavish devotion, lust, rapture, eros, phiha, and transcendence " The first 126 poems are addressed to a young aristocrat, Shakespeare's patron and friend, whom he loves and admires Poems #127-152 agomze over the poet's black-haired mistress, whom he loves, yet despises There are intimations in both series of an affair between the Fair Youth and Dark Lady as well For many that this triangle was not fictional is proved by the poet's use of his own nickname, "Will," for himself, and by the "naked honesty and self-exposure" these sonnets give voice to The authentic pain caused W H Auden to exclaim, "Of one thing I am certain Shakespeare must have been horrified when they were published " Speculation concerning the young man for whom the Bard entertained such heady and complex feelings has occupied most of the literature about the sonnets According to Giroux, the conundrum is less opaque than it has been made to seem His candidate is that old favorite, Henry Wnoths-ley, Earl of Southampton This nobleman fits the available criteria, and was, besides, the patron to whom Shakespeare dedicated two long poems on classical subjects written to bolster his intellectual reputation, Venus andAdonis (1593), and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) The crux of Giroux's argument is the striking resemblance between sonnet 26, addressed to the Fair Youth, and the letter to Southampton printed at the beginning of Lucrece Thelatterruns,inpart, "Thelovel dedicate to your Lordship is without end The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance What I have done is yours, what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater " The poem commences Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written ambassage, To witness duty, not to show my wit Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it, Although, as Giroux says, "If you do not see the resemblance between poem and letter, all arguments are unavailing," many readers will be brought around to his belief that the link is strong If one accepts Southampton as the Fair Youth, a number of elements in the poems fall into place The young Earl possessed a feminine beauty, as the famous Hilhard miniature shows, fully justifying "A woman's face with nature's own hand painted,/Hast thou the Master-Mistress of my passion" (sonnet 20) Political references such as "The painful warrior famoused for worth" (sonnet 25)—an allusion to the disgrace of Sir Walter Raleigh—and the "Mortal Moon" sonnet (107), which seems to hint at the death of Queen Elizabeth, are connected to crises in Southampton's life And the Earl's well-documented shallowness jibes with the personality of the Fair Youth All in all, though too complicated to allow more than a brief sketch here, Giroux's case is a persuasive one Certain actors in the drama cannot be identified as easily?especially the Dark Lady, because she was not a public figure Others, however, are illumined through their relations with Southampton Giroux is particularly interested in the career of John Flono, the Earl's tutor and a spy in his household This rather pedantic character made much of his Italian parentage to advertise the Renaissance revival in Italy to Englishmen Significantly, Shakespeare's plays took their subjects from English history before he know Southampton, afterward, they turned to Italian settings Love's Labors Lost actually quotes from Flono's compositions, contains numerous mentions of writing sonnets and caricatures the tutor Flono knew Thorpe well, and is, Giroux submits, a likely culprit for having gotten the manuscript into the publisher's hands Whatever may have happened, the expectation of "commercial euphoria" that prompted Thorpe to engage two booksellers—an unusually optimistic move—was dashed Q was received with public silence and quickly dropped out of sight It was not republished for 102 years Giroux surmises that Shakespeare may have had it suppressed when it came out, using the formidable influence of his patron Why else should this masterpiece have been ignored when Shakespeare's other works were selling well'' JL...

...he great mystery of Q," Giroux reminds us, "is not its strange publication history, its possible suppression, its weird dedication, or even the identities of the male friend and dark-haired woman It is the poems themselves " The Book Known as Q reproduces a facsimile of Thorpe's original edition to bring the reader back to the sonnets Studying them again, I was overwhelmed by their emotional power The 16th and 17th centuries abounded in well-crafted specimens of the genre But only Shakespeare wrote with such conviction and simplicity of the self-loathing that attends sexual infatuation, or of the almost holy rapture with which we contemplate the beloved in the first flush of love Mark Van Doren, a brilliant Shakespeare scholar and Giroux's teacher, once invoked a couplet from "A Lover's Complaint" to describe its author "He had the dialect and different skill,/Catching all passions in his craft of will " Giroux's study convinces me that it finally does matter who was important to the Bard in the days when, as Colette put it, "Shakespeare worked without knowing that he would be Shakespeare " The Book Known As Q enriches our understanding of a needy young man, "all too human," in love with his beautiful and shallow patron, trapped in a humiliating entanglement with a promiscuous woman, jealous of rival poets, but learning to express himself as no one ever has before or since...