A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro

Author:James Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061840906
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

To which Juliet replies:

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion show in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

(1.5.94–101)

The title appealed to those who could not get enough of the passionate language of Romeo and Juliet. Writers at the time joked about young men who slept with a copy of Venus and Adonis under their pillows and about others who rifled Shakespeare’s work for pickup lines. Just a year earlier John Marston had mocked young men about town from whose “lips… doth flow / Naught but pure Juliet and Romeo.” It was a stock joke, retailed in a university play performed at Cambridge in late 1599 called The Return from Parnassus, Part One, in which one character predicts that another is sure to plagiarize Shakespeare: “We shall have nothing but pure Shakespeare and shreds of poetry that he hath gathered at the theaters.” He’s right. A moment later that character tries to pass off romantic lines from Romeo and Juliet as his own. In case anybody missed the point, when Jaggard published a third edition of Shakespeare’s Passionate Pilgrim in 1612, he advertised on the title page that the volume contained “Certain Amorous Sonnets.”

Because of Jaggard’s clever packaging, most readers of The Passionate Pilgrim assumed that the entire volume was by Shakespeare. And admirers of Shakespeare continued to believe this for the next two hundred years. Not until the nineteenth century would skeptical researchers reassign half of the lyrics in The Passionate Pilgrim to other poets. Today, ten of its poems still remain unattributed. The case is still occasionally made for Shakespeare’s authorship of the four poems about Venus and Adonis. As scholars who have made headlines in recent years for claiming that Shakespeare wrote such poems as “Shall I Die” and the “Funeral Elegy” would grudgingly admit, it’s surprisingly hard to distinguish Shakespeare on an off day from one of his imitators on a very good one. Some of the greatest names in the history of Shakespeare criticism from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—Malone, Theobald, Furnivall, Dyce, Collier, Dowden, and Halliwell-Phillipps—maintained that most of the poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were Shakespeare’s. We can only assume that, except for a small coterie of poets and their admirers, few in 1599 would have known better or thought otherwise.

Some writers might have been flattered by Jaggard’s gambit. Not Shakespeare, who was offended by what Jaggard had done and let it be known; the publication of The Passionate Pilgrim would only make it more difficult to undo the reputation as poet of the “heart robbing line.” Our source is his fellow poet and dramatist Thomas Heywood (whose work was later stolen by the unscrupulous Jaggard and passed off as Shakespeare’s to flesh out the third edition of The Passionate Pilgrim). At that time Heywood complained loudly about this

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