The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Eighty-Six 'Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth'

Between the second death and the third death, William Shakespeare published his obscure and enigmatical poem of The Phoenix and the Turtle.

First, though, the matter of Polly. She is gone, my little egg-girl. I have not seen her now for some three days. Pompey Bum smiles when I ask him about her absence. He is so vague and dismissive on the subject that his manner implies she might never have existed. 'What moppet?' he says. 'We never have moppets in here.' He would like me to think that my mind is going. If he could get me carted off to Bedlam then my boxes would be his, and this book as well.

He appeared suddenly on the stairs yesterday as I was carrying out the slops. He was wearing something on his head that looked like a drowned water-rat. He called it a PERUKE, and claimed it as the very latest fashion.

'I'm all behind!' he complained, when I asked him about my love's whereabouts.

Pompey Bum is forever saying this, and patting the seat of his vast breeches whenever he says it. No doubt some pun is involved, and I am supposed to be bemused as he changes the subject. He means, my great whoremaster of a landlord, not just that he has many tasks to do but that he wears much horse-hair stuffing in his breeches. He always has a face like a man at cack.

'Polly who?' he said, when I persisted with my queries.

'Flinders,' I said. 'But I heard you call her Anne.'

'Not me,' said Pompey Bum, grinning. 'And we never have no Annes.'

Then he was off down the stairs, like a big monkey in trousers, holding the rat in place on his greasy skull, and chanting just to mock me a rhyme that children sing: 'Little Polly Flinders / Sat among the cinders / Warming her pretty little toes! / Her mother came and caught her / And whipped her naughty daughter / For spoiling her nice new clothes!'

This left me feeling hot and sick and hopeless. The blackguard had succeeded in turning my flesh-and-blood darling into something ghostly and unsubstantial by this suggestion that I had dreamt her up from a character in a nursery rhyme.

Or perhaps it is the girl herself who has mocked me - by claiming 'Polly Flinders' as her name? This further thought (which came later), that she was herself the author of the fiction, was hardly comforting. Whatever, she was gone, and she is still gone.

All night I kept hearing sweet imagined noises from the room below. But each time I fell out of bed in a sweat and removed my Ovid, only darkness met my eye when I applied it to the peep-hole. Darkness and silence. There was no one there.

The Phoenix and the Turtle first appeared in 1601 in an octavo volume called Love's Martyr, commemorating the marriage of Sir John Salusbury to Ursula Stanley, illegitimate daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby. The longest thing in the book is a terrible set of verses by one Robert Chester, allegedly translated 'out of the venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano'. So far as I know, Torquato Caeliano never existed, and Robert Chester was certainly no poet. Here is a sample of his versification:

Where two hearts are united all in one,

Love like a King, a Lord, a Sovereign,

Enjoys the throne of bliss to sit upon,

Each sad heart craving aid, by Cupid slain:

Lovers be merry, Love being dignified,

Wish what you will, it shall not be denied.

Finis quoth R. Chester.

Finis, indeed. When I asked Mr Shakespeare who R. Chester was he told me he was Salusbury's secretary. Salusbury himself was a Papist Welshman, knighted by Elizabeth as a reward for his loyalty during the Essex rebellion. He had married the bastard Ursula some fifteen years before, and in fact she had given him eleven sons and daughters, which might make WS's praise of married chastity seem a bit odd. Still, no doubt the phoenix and turtle-dove imagery of Chester's original rigmarole was appropriate at the time of the marriage, since Mr Shakespeare explained to me that Salusbury was then the sole remaining male in a family, seeking to win back its good name and perpetuate it in a love-match - John Salusbury's elder brother having been executed for complicity in the Babington Plot. Salusbury was a pugnacious character, a wine-bibber, a friend of poets, and he may well have reminded Mr Shakespeare of his own father in that year when Jack Shakespeare turned Papist and died. For whatever reason, he liked Salusbury well enough to let him use his own poem on the phoenix and the turtle theme in an appendix to the Chester drivel. Other poet-friends of Salusbury's also contributed to the volume: George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Jonson. But it is William Shakespeare's poem that stands out.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is certainly a strange and difficult poem. To unassisted readers, it would appear to be a lament on the death of a poet, and of his poetic mistress. But the poem is so quaint, and so charming in diction, tone, and allusions, as in its perfect metre and harmony, that I for one would be sad to have its meaning ever explained. I consider this piece a good example of the rule that there is a poetry for poets proper, as well as a poetry for the world of readers. This poem, if published for the first time, and without a known author's name, would find no general reception. Only the poets would save it.

The Phoenix and the Turtle is William Shakespeare's darkest allegory of love. It celebrates a marriage in tones more appropriate to a funeral. It talks of love in terms of perfection, and of perfection in terms of a love that is transcendental and sublime without ever ceasing to be physical. Its distillation of the nature of self-hood in love (Either was the other's mine) reminds me of such things as John Donne's The Ecstasy, which I know that Mr Shakespeare read in manuscript when it was circulating in the Inns of Court. Donne's obscurities are mere smoke, though, compared with the blazing bonfire of Shakespeare's thought here. The poem is such a pure, such a concentrated mystery that we ought just to point out the simple things that can be said about it, before submitting our minds to the power of its music. All but six of its sixty-seven lines are in truncated trochaic tetrameters; the other six employ the final syllable of the trochaic line. The only action takes place in the sixth stanza, where the two birds flee away together. All the rest of the poem is preparation for this action and comment upon it. The birds are a female phoenix and a male turtle dove. Here is the poem:

Let the bird of loudest lay,

On the sole Arabian tree,

Herald sad and trumpet be,

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou shrieking harbinger,

Foul precurrer of the fiend,

Augur of the fever's end,

To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict

Every fowl of tyrant wing,

Save the eagle, feath'red king;

Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white,

That defunctive music can,

Be the death-divining swan,

Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou treble-dated crow,

That thy sable gender mak'st,

With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,

'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

Here the anthem doth commence:

Love and Constancy is dead;

Phoenix and the turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none:

Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance, and no space was seen

Twixt this turtle and his queen:

But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine

That the turtle saw his right

Flaming in the phoenix' sight:

Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appall'd,

That the self was not the same;

Single nature's double name

Neither two nor one was call'd.

Reason, in itself confounded,

Saw division grow together,

To themselves, yet either neither,

Simple were so well compounded

That it cried, 'How true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one!

Love hath reason, Reason none,

If what parts can so remain.'

Whereupon it made this threne

To the phoenix and the dove,

Co-supremes and stars of love,

As chorus to their tragic scene.

THRENOS

Beauty, Truth, and Rarity,

Grace in all simplicity,

Here enclos'd, in cinders lie.

Death is now the phoenix nest,

And the turtle's loyal breast

To eternity, doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:

'Twas not their infirmity,

It was married chastity.

Truth may seem, but cannot be;

Beauty brag, but 'tis not she;

Truth and Beauty buried be.

To this urn let those repair

That are either true or fair;

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.

This is my favourite of all William Shakespeare's poems outside of his plays. I do not understand it, but I know what it means. I have copied it out now in my own handwriting because that is something I always like to do. If you copy out The Phoenix and the Turtle in your own handwriting you discover that you know what it means, even though you do not understand it. I recommend the exercise to every reader.

Spiritual ecstasy is the only key to work of this kind. To the reader without that key it can only be so many strange words set in a noble rhythm for no apparent cause.

Poetry moves in many ways. It may glorify and make spiritual some action of man, or it may give to thoughts such life as thoughts can have, an intenser and stranger life than man knows, with forms that are not human and a speech unintelligible to normal human moods. This poem gives to a flock of thoughts about the passing of truth and beauty the mystery and vitality of birds, who come from a far country, to fill the mind with their crying.

Yet, human nature being what it is, basic and obstinate questions remain. Who was the phoenix? And who the turtle? And if we knew, would we know or understand the poem any better?

I have heard men say that The Phoenix and the Turtle refers to the love of Elizabeth and Essex, but I cannot for the life of me see how. It seems even less likely that it refers to WS and Rizley, and I do not see myself in the part of either bird. For what it is worth a number of Sir John Salusbury's own acrostic lyrics, included in Love's Martyr, make it clear that he was at least as much in love with his wife's sister Dorothy Halsall as he was with his wife. It is just possible that Dorothy Halsall is the phoenix and John Salusbury the turtle celebrated by all the poets in the book, including Shakespeare. Such a secret and forbidden love would at least explain the obscurity which cloaks all the poems, as well as the fact that all the poets seem to know who they are talking about. Dorothy may have been one of those women in whom the divine is sometimes felt to be incarnate. Never forget that it is Beatrice, not Virgil, who guides Dante through Paradise.

Yet, for all that, I fear that I must close the mystery up only by creating another. For once, not long after these baffling and immortal verses first appeared, at a point where I found myself confronted by the torment of their memorability, aware that for the rest of my life now I would be unable to get them out of my heart and my head, I asked Mr Shakespeare, point-blank, one thunder-rumbling London afternoon, to identify his creatures.

'Who is the phoenix?' I asked him. 'And who is the turtle dove?'

'Mrs Lines and Mr Barkworth,' said Mr Shakespeare.

But I never could get him to say another word on the subject, and he might have been joking.