The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Sixty-Nine All about Rizley

So here is the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Baron Titchfield, Earl of Southampton, in a miniature painted by Nicholas Hilliard. He is twenty summers old - it depicts him at the time of Venus and Adonis and of Mr Shakespeare's first sonnets advising and exhorting him to marry. This is the face of Narcissus.

Under the exquisite arch of the brows the eyes look down, but not in any kind of modesty. They consider the rest of their owner, and are pleased with what they see. The gaze, you might say, is cock-sure. Who's a pretty boy then?

This is the face that launched a thousand quips, all of them complimentary. It is long and oval, with delicate features, the face of an aristocrat. The long, thin nose is pointed, like a Russian dog's. It speaks of centuries of sniffing, as well as centuries of in-breeding. The hair is a cascade of love-locks, red-gold, curling. It dangles down over its grower's left shoulder, falling half-way to his wasp waist. It makes you want to swing him round the room by it. As for the mouth: two petulant petals pouting in complacent pride? That about covers it.

The lord and owner of this face has rings in his ears. He wears a white satin doublet. He has slashed and padded trunk-hose with, beneath his trunks, a pair of canions. Purple garters embroidered with silver thread hold up his white silk stockings. See, on the table beside him, his plumed helmet. One arm rests lightly on it. His other (gloved) hand rests on his padded hip.

To be honest, Pickleherring never much cared for the Earl of Southampton. You might say I was jealous, reader. Perhaps I was.

My main feeling, though, was straightforward dislike of the man. He was rich and he was a poet-fancier, that's all. I do not think he cared for poetry, though at one point he was an ardent theatre-goer, spending his time merrily in going to plays every day. What he liked was being seen by the audience. He had his own stool which he perched upon, one leg thrust forward. His habit was to make much fuss with his hair, patting and primping, or powdering his cheeks as he sat. He never even pretended that he was listening. He liked to prop himself against a proscenium door, and kick aside his stool to show off the clock on his stocking. Did I mention that he was left-handed? A further token, if you like, of his aptitude for viciousness. Not that I have anything against left-handed people. But Southampton made a virtue of disconcerting you by holding out his left hand to be kissed.

The young Earl lived for his hair, I always thought. Poets and barbers were much the same to him. In fact, as Mr Shakespeare once told me in a rare unguarded moment, Southampton took an odd delight in having his hair combed in a measured or rhythmical manner. He would only have it done by dressers who were skilled in the rules of prosody. He claimed that while many take delight in the rubbing of their limbs and the combing of their hair, these exercises would delight much more if the servants at the baths, and all the barbers, were so skilful in the art of poesy that they could express any called-for measure with their fingers. Whether Mr Shakespeare provided his patron with iambic or trochaic combing, I know not. His dactyls may have caused no small delight.

Little or nothing in himself, Southampton wanted immortality through others. At Cambridge, his dissertation was on Fame. Mr Shakespeare claimed that some of the sonnets would give it to him. Alas, this is probably true, though they're not the best sonnets.

This golden youth was a Papist, and the heir of Papists. His father, a Mary Stuart man, had perished in the Tower. The boy was brought up by his mother, a more worldly creature who groomed him to marry Lord Burghley's granddaughter, the Lady Elizabeth Vere.

This marriage of convenience, which would have brought together two of England's greatest houses, never came to pass, despite Lady Southampton's plots and entreaties and then Mr Shakespeare's work in the same cause. I have always suspected, by the by, that those first twenty-five sonnets urging Southampton to marry were in fact commissioned by Lady Southampton, but I cannot prove it, and I never dared ask their author. (Notice how in the third one he flatters the boy's mother!) They did not work anyway. The young Earl did not feel like marrying.

He went for women as well as men, mind you. He liked both men and women to adore him. Whether he loved anyone in his life, of either sex or none, I rather doubt.

Many writers sought Southampton's patronage, not just Shakespeare. It was known he would inherit a fortune on coming of age. (So he did, though Burghley contrived to dock it of PS5000 on account of the young man's breach of contract in the matter of Elizabeth Vere.) Besides our hero, others who tried to tap Southampton for funds included Barnabe Barnes, Samuel Daniel, Gervase Markham, Henry Constable, Bartholomew Griffin, George Wither, Richard Barnfield, George Peele, Matthew Gwinne (whose 'comedy' Vertumnus once sent King James to sleep), Arthur Pryce, William Pettie, and George Chapman (who even tried to find a patron in his grocer). Thomas Nashe is known to have written obscene verses for the little charmer, excusing himself by saying that he was only following in Shakespeare's footsteps. Alas for Nashe, his verses were so obscene that they still remain in manuscript. Meanwhile, out in the published world, dedications rained on Southampton's head, and he got wet.

In Mr Shakespeare's case, money certainly changed hands. Venus and Adonis (or its fame, or its power when recited for a bit of barbering) must have proved sweet to the young Earl's taste, for by the time of its sequel Southampton was inviting its author to dine at Holborn House, his palatial London residence, and to stay with him at Titchfield in the country. Mr Shakespeare was always reticent regarding it, but I believe that his patron once made him a present of PS1000 to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to - enough to purchase a fine house in Stratford, a large number of shares in our Company of actors, and leave some change to spare for playing primero. Southampton played a lot of primero. Gambling of any kind pleased him. He once lost 1800 crowns at a tennis-match in Paris.

It has to be admitted that Shakespeare had something of a weakness regarding aristocrats. He liked them to like him. I could not say why. In Southampton, who was ten years his junior, he found, for a while, a powerful patron who seemed like a friend. No doubt he was flattered and excited to find himself invited into a circle that was like a little court. Here he was, accepted on his own merits by a set that put much store by wit - persons who were worldly wise as well as wealthy, all of them impressed by his gift for puns (I can put it no higher). You can see this reflected in Love's Labour's Lost, a comedy first written to amuse Southampton and his friends. Not all Southampton's friends were idiots, either. John Florio, the scholar, was his tutor. It was Florio who gave Mr S the seed for his mulberry tree.

Southampton's patronage of Shakespeare, then, developed quickly into intimacy. But this was a friendship that brought Shakespeare more torment than peace.

I no more want to speak of this than to tell the boring story of the boring Lamberts. Southampton is even more boring. Consider him apart from WS. All his life he sought 'praise and reputation' - his own words. He rose and then he fell with his flash friend Essex. He commanded in some fashion the Garland on the famous Islands Voyage of '97, and was even credited with the capture of a Spanish vessel. However (yawn, yawn), he aroused Queen Elizabeth's fury two years later by accepting the rank of General of the Horse under Essex in Ireland without royal permission. When Essex tried to capture the Queen and seize power, in 1601, it was Southampton's London house that was used as a base for the crazy insurrection. You could say this was the worst mistake of a mistaken life. Southampton was tried for treason with Essex, found guilty, and only escaped execution thanks to his Mamma pulling a few strings with Secretary Cecil. No doubt she persuaded him that so pretty a head could not be dangerous.

In his manners, the irksome Earl was always epicene. When he served in the wars in Ireland it is said that he saw most of his active service in bed with a Captain Piers Edmunds. Southampton would 'cole and hug' his captain in his arms, and 'play wantonly' with him - I quote from a report that was sent to Cecil. To COLE or CULL is to fondle, as in CULL-ME-TO-YOU, which as my wife Jane used to remind me is a country name for the pansy flower. WS may well have been thinking of Southampton and Edmunds when he wrote of Achilles and Patroelus in Troilus and Cressida. Something he said to me once led me to understand that Southampton is also Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well, that disagreeable hero, another reason why I do not like the play.

For the rest, I believe Southampton's part in Shakespeare's story to be negligible. True, when his patron toyed with studies of the law for a brief while, the poet obligingly fitted out a sonnet in praise of him with a few legal terms remembered from his own days as a NOVERINT. Then, when Southampton entertained day-dreams of serving the King of France, his Will-to-boot came up with comedies which transport the spectator to Nerac and the Louvre. Such things are not profound. They belong, like their begetter, to the surface.

This is not to say that William Shakespeare did not take Henry Wriothesley seriously. He did. Too seriously. And he suffered much pain as a consequence. You will learn of that when I tell you about the sonnets, the story behind them, as that concerns Southampton. Not that he was the only one concerned.

For the pretty Earl's part, Pickleherring is sure that the sonnets were over his head. Beyond him. If he read them at all, that is, which he probably did not, except for the ones that are simply in praise of his beauty.

He died, in 1624, Henry Wriothesley, of a lethargy, having lived in one most of his life, if you ask me.

Oh yes, and Wriothesley should be pronounced as RIZLEY. That's how top people always say it. Rhymes with GRISLY.