Henry Wriothesley and Clapham’s Narcissus

Birth of Shakespeare Part 4

In previous posts I explored how Shakespeare exploited the literary connections of Venus and Adonis to Ovid and Philip Sidney to claim a position in the literary scene of 1590s London. Today I consider the dedication to Henry Wriothesley, young Earl of Southampton and the relationship to John Clapham’s Narcissus the only prior work dedicated to Wriothesley.

Rose-cheek’d Adonis hied him to the chase - Ben Kutcher

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE

Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,

and Baron of Titchfield.

Right Honorable,

I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. Only if your honor seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honored you with some graver labor. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather and never after ear so barren a land for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honorable survey and your honor to your heart's content, which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world's hopeful expectation.

Your honor's in all duty,

William Shakespeare.

Of Shakespeare’s published works only the two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece (the graver matter promised in the passage above) bear a dedication from the author, both to the young Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

Generations of scholars have tried to ascertain what relation if any Shakespeare had with Southampton. First Shakespeare biographer Nicholas Rowe, on the authority of William Davenant, recorded in 1709 that Southampton had given the author ₤1000, but eventually it became clear that Southampton did not have access to such a large sum. It has been speculated that Southampton was the fair youth of the Sonnets and that he and Shakespeare were involved in a homosexual relationship memorialized in those poems which appear to be written to a younger male lover, the fair youth. Unfortunately, no shred of evidence has surfaced that establishes the two ever met, let alone carried on a torrid and forbidden affair. An alternative explanation sometimes proffered is that Shakespeare was participating in efforts sponsored by William Cecil to encourage Southampton to marry his granddaughter Elizabeth de Vere, eldest daughter of the Earl of Oxford by Cecil’s daughter Anne. It is even suggested by those who believe that Oxford wrote the plays of Shakespeare that he was the one lobbying the young nobleman to marry his daughter in the so-called procreation sonnets. If any of these, the effort was unsuccessful, as Cecil’s ward, Southampton had to pay a fine equal to the dowry he would receive from the match to turn it down. Southampton chose to pay 5000 pounds rather than marry Elizabeth. No one has ever made a very good case for how Venus and Adonis or Lucrece might induce a young man to marry, or why an author seeking patronage might think this was a good way to curry favor.

The language of the dedication itself is a puzzle. It is not clear whether Shakespeare is offering extravagant praise or subtle disparagement of Southampton. The self-deprecation in the opening sentence is purely conventional, but it is not clear which of the poem and the patron is the prop and which the weak burden. Is the poem the “first heir of my invention” or Southampton the heir which might prove deformed? The metaphor of “earing” a field derives from Plato’s Phaedrus and implicates Sidney’s critical theory, but Plato uses the image to distinguish readers who are capable of understanding the truths they encounter in literature from those who are intellectually or morally barren, in whom seeds of wisdom will not grow. Shakespeare seems to say that if Southampton doesn’t appreciate his work, he will be sorry for expecting better and find someone else who will. The final line continues the ambiguity, never quite calling the Earl honorable but rather expressing the world’s wish that he were.

Another narrative poem published two years before Venus and Adonis may offer some insight into the dedication and the poem itself. In 1591, John Clapham, a clerk for William Cecil, published a Latin poem, Narcissus, which was the first work dedicated to Southampton, then just seventeen. Venus and Adonis two years later was the second. In 1992 Charles Martindale and Colin Burrow published an article considering the long-neglected poem and offering a translation. They propose that Narcissus served as a pre-text for Venus and Adonis, by which they mean both that Shakespeare was inspired by the remarkably bad poetry to demonstrate what good was, borrowing elements from the poem to make clear the comparison, and that the form and dedication provided cover for a literary offering that had the potential to offend both court and potential patron. My Latin is much less than small, so I am hesitant to criticize Clapham’s Latin verse, but Martindale and Burrow are scathing – “Narcissus, the poem which follows, is a characteristic if undistinguished example of Neo-Latin verse.” Later they suggest “If Shakespeare were not simply aware of Clapham's Narcissus, but were also mischievously aware both of its structure and of its badness” he might have recognized an opportunity to score some points for parody while showing off his own efforts all the better by comparison.

The similarities between Clapham’s Epistle and Shakespeare’s dedication are striking

THE EPISTLE

To the most famous and noble lord, Henry Earl of Southampton,

John Clapham desires increase of virtue and honor and many happy years.

I am somewhat afraid, most distinguished lord, that to many I will myself seem to be striving after my own shadow with my Narcissus, whose errors I have described in these verses, and with him too to be quite mad. For what is sillier or more unsuitable than, when one may safely lie hidden, rashly to expose oneself to the judgement of others. and to bring forward to public view things which show nothing except the evidence only of a frivolous and idle disposition. But, whatever will be other people's opinion of me, all will be well with me, I hope, if you think this tender offspring – reborn as it were from the grave, although to many it could seem premature – deserving the patronage of your honor. So may it please you, to receive, Excellency, this poem, however insignificant, destined to go forth into the light - not without good fortune - beneath the authority of your name, as assured testimony of a mind wholly dutiful toward you and utterly devoted to your honor. When you read it through, if I perceive you are pleased with it, I shall indeed be satisfied; otherwise, contrary to my desire, I humbly entreat you to be indulgent to my errors, and think that you have only seen a shadow – which is nothing.

Even the reference to the grave finds a match in Shakespeare’s promise of graver things.

Shakespeare also adapts the opening line (all translations by Martindale and Burrow):

“It was spring, and Aurora rising on her rosy chariot had left Ocean, when the Sun began from his rising place with headlong course to make the nights equal to the days.”

Compare Venus and Adonis,

Even as the sun with purple-colored face 
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,

Aurora, goddess of the morn, weeps for her son Memnon slain by Achilles at Troy in Book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses . “Aurora’s owne greef busyed her, that smally shee it markt. Which thing shee too this present tyme with piteous teares dooth shewe: or through the universall world shee sheadeth moysting deawe.” She begs Zeus to memorialize her slain son, and he responds by transforming the body into a cloud of black smoke that becomes a flock of shorebirds. Thus Shakespeare manages in one line to foreshadow the narrative of the poem, to set the scene and tone and establish for the reader the extent to which he will engage with classical mythology.

Martindale and Burrow argue that the most compelling borrowing from Narcissus is Adonis’ horse. “After the god of love has lectured Narcissus on techniques of courtship, the youth mounts an uncontrollable horse called Libido on which he gallops frenziedly away. This equestrian addition to the myth is unusual: Gower 's Narcissus also has a horse; Ovid's does not. But it derives, obviously enough, from the longstanding tradition which allegorizes horses as various forms of carnality.”

There is no precedent for associating a horse with Adonis, but plenty of associations with Philip Sidney whose first name identifies him as a lover of horses, who began his Defence of Poesy with a lengthy essay on the subject of horsemanship in which he argues that horses unlike men always reveal their true feelings, and rooted the work in Plato’s Phaedrus in which an unruly horse stands for the temptations of the flesh.

Again, Martindale and Burrow, “Shakespeare's rampling steed, which threatens to break out of the confines of art and to distort the formal limits of the poem, refigures this allegorical tradition in ostentatiously literalized and fleshly form. In the process one immediate source for his knowledge of that allegorical tradition, Clapham's Narcissus , is made to seem frail and empty by comparison. This could be part of the point of the long digression brought about by the fierce amorousness of Adonis' horse. To transform an insipid interlude in a Neo-Latin poem into such equine vitality would be the clearest possible sign to Shakespeare's patron that here was a writer who could make texts live in the vernacular. It is hard to believe that Shakespeare would have bothered to plunder Narcissus in the manner which earlier hunters after sources imply. But to absorb, animate, and transcend the poem, to make it appear a lifeless husk awaiting the animating impulses of Shakespeare, would have both imaginative and practical point. His patron would see, even in the most cursory comparison of the two poems dedicated to him, vernacular literature growing an abundant life from a zestless and old-fashioned Neo-Latin prototype.”

Continue reading: Shakespeare's Patron: Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke