The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Sixty-Eight Was Shakespeare raped?

Have you ever noticed how very queer Mr Shakespeare's two long narrative poems are?

I mean Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both published in this period when the theatres were closed down on account of the plague, both written therefore before his thirtieth birthday.

In the first a mannish woman rapes a womanish man, but he proves impotent.

In the second a man is excited by the idea of his friend's wife being chaste and rapes her, but the rape gets a bare eight lines out of the whole 1855. Before the rape, the poem lingers in a dream-like way over everything it invokes for our inspection: the doors and locks of the victim's house, the wind that blows down the corridors, Lucrece's discarded glove, her bedroom, her 'yet unstained' bed, her body's beauty - five gloating stanzas of the last, including a description of her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden yokes unconquered / Save of their lord. After the rape, the poem quickly enters the victim's mind and becomes her long rhetorical complaint before she kills herself. Although the presentation of the ravisher Tarquin is adequate, it is plain that the poet identifies more easily with the raped woman Lucrece.

I think that in both poems Shakespeare was looking back eleven years or so, towards that summer of 1582, when perhaps he played Adonis/Lucrece to Anne Hathaway's Venus/Tarquin in the fields of Shottery.

Was Shakespeare raped?

I think it not impossible. His Venus is not Ovid's Venus. She is not even much of a goddess. She is an older woman having her way with a country boy she has kidnapped.

Venus rapes Adonis, but she doesn't get what she wants. That much is made apparent at the climax:

Now is she in the very lists of love,

Her champion mounted for the hot encounter:

All is imaginary she doth prove,

He will not manage her, although he mount her;

That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy,

To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.

Tantalus was punished in Hades by being inflicted with a great thirst and placed up to his chin in water which receded whenever he tried to drink. The last line means there has been no penetration.

Did Shakespeare believe (like his beloved Ovid) that women get more sexual pleasure from the act than men do? Tiresias in the Metamorphoses is the type of those who say so. Juno rewarded him with blindness.

The lustful Venus certainly takes control from the start:

Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,

And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust.

Adonis, by contrast, is almost as chaste as Lucrece. Unwilling and obstinate, he takes another 521 lines to succumb in any sort to the blandishments of his ravisher:

He now obeys and now no more resisteth,

While she takes all she can, not all she listeth.

A couplet which suggests that their coupling gives her little pleasure, and him none. Notice, too, how the comic effect of such feminine rhymes as are employed (encounter/he mount her; resisteth/she listeth) is always to leave Venus looking more than a touch ridiculous.

Before and after the imperfect copulation, the imagery of the poem at many points suggests that fable of Shakespeare's childhood which had the boy Willy fleeing from his mother, both of them assuming different guises, until she caught him. Venus is likened to an eagle, a wolf, a glutton, a vulture whose lips 'are conquerors', a milch doe 'whose swelling dugs do ache', and then to falcons (yes, in the plural). Adonis is severally a bird lying tangled in the net, a divedapper (a species of grebe common on the Avon) turning his head this way and that to escape unwanted kisses, a deer, a lily prisoned in a jail of snow, a fleet-foot roe, a 'froward infant still'd with dandling',* a hare pursued by hounds, a bright star shooting from the sky, and (finally) a purple flower of which Venus 'crops the stalk', noting 'green-dropping sap' in 'the breach', which sap she compares to tears.

Ladies and gentlemen, I rest my case.

Venus and Adonis achieved an immediate and prolonged success with the public in general - sixteen editions of it were called for during the poet's lifetime. But what was the nature of this success? Why, it was as a kind of aphrodisiac, a drug or preparation inducing venereal desire. It made people 'burn in love', as Shakespeare's disciple John Weever declared in an epigrammatic sonnet. Others spoke frankly of sleeping with it under their pillows, and nuns were said to be using it as an aid to manustupration.

Madam, Pickleherring is not making this up as he goes along! I call as witness John Robinson, who in his Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon - the second edition, of 1623 - tells us that he managed to get himself engaged as door-keeper of that convent to keep an eye on three cousins of the Earl of Southampton who had taken the veil, and that 'these ladies, although making parade of chastity, poverty and obedience possess licentious books and when the confessor feels merrily disposed after supper, it is usual for him to read from Venus and Adonis or the Jests of George Peele, as there are few idle pamphlets printed in England that are not to be found in this house.' It was no less popular at the Court of Queen Elizabeth. A mad soldier called William Renolds (no relation!) even claimed that it had been published to show the world that the Queen was in love with him. I doubt if she was; and it certainly wasn't.

None of this is said by way of disapprobation. Both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are sexually arousing, and it would be false to pretend that a part of Mr Shakespeare's first reputation was not as an erotic writer. Pickleherring is willing to confess that the first time he read these poems he came across passages that gave him a hard on, and he imagines they made those nuns feel warm and wet. There is nothing wrong with this. I wish a few more readers would admit it. (Thank you, madam! You advance in my respect.)

But, sir, I take your point. There is something reprehensible and disgusting about a man taking pleasure in the rape of poor Lucrece, and I am ashamed to have done so. At the same time, I insist that Mr Shakespeare's verse is by no means innocent of such pleasure itself. To say that Lucrece's breasts are 'unconquered' save by her husband is to be an accomplice in the idea of ravishment. It feeds the doubtless horrible male fantasy that all sex is a game of conquest and possession. And I have not forgotten that the poem ends with Lucrece's suicide, no. As for that, the other one ends with Adonis gored to death by a wild boar, and Venus hanging over the wide wound that the boar had trench'd / In his soft flank, staining her face with the boy's blood, and confessing that if she had boar's teeth With kissing him I should have kill'd him first. Do you suppose that the author of Othello was ignorant of the fact that Love and Death are sisters, and pain and pleasure often close allied?

I set out to suggest in this chapter that William Shakespeare was not the dominant partner in his early sexual exchanges with Anne Hathaway, and to argue that in his identification with first Adonis and then Lucrece he might be telling us something of his own feelings with regard to what she may have done to him. Of course, it could be that like many men he found the very notion of a sexually predatory and aggressive female both disturbing and comical, and that he found this notion incarnate in the figure of Venus. All the same, working on my usual principle that what is interesting biographically in Shakespeare's work is what the subject does not demand he put there, I will maintain that in such an image as comes in the last line following we certainly do not see any Venus, any Goddess of Love:

With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast

And homeward through the dark lawnd runs apace;

Leaves Love upon her back, deeply distress'd.

That 'Love', deeply distress'd, left lying on her back in a Shottery meadow, might even be heard to drum her heels upon the ground in the well-known tantarum way of country girls unsatisfied by their swains. As to identifying Anne Hathaway with Sextus Tarquinius - I do no such foolish thing. Your author merely points out that William Shakespeare participates most keenly in the woman's role in this particular poem. Perhaps he was never raped. But he felt he had been.

The other thing to say about these two poems is that while both of them are dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, there is an observable difference between the two dedications. The first is impersonal but not cold. The second is both personal and warm: 'What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours: being part in all I have, devoted yours.' This difference in tone reflected the development in friendship between poet and patron, but I'll keep that for my next chapter, which will be all about Southampton.

For the moment, suddenly, my mind is filled up by memory of Mrs Anne Shakespeare coming after me with that birch broom of hers, driving me from New Place and chasing me round the mulberry tree when she caught me in her black silk calimanco. All at once, the notion of her as Tarquin is not so foolish.

* An allusion to Mary Arden's playing with her son?