Shakespeare and the Resistance by Clare Asquith

Author:Clare Asquith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-08-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

RALLYING THE OPPOSITION: VENUS AND ADONIS

IN 1591, LORD Burghley’s secretary, John Clapham, dedicated a condescending and slightly humiliating Latin poem to Southampton entitled Narcissus, a reworking of the myth of the beautiful young man who falls in love with his own reflection. The poem is set in a ‘fortunate island’ enriched by a ‘virgin queen’ under whom it enjoys everlasting peace—England, clearly.1

Clapham’s Narcissus had an unlucky start in life. He was one ‘whom Prosperity void of light engendered, vain Pride brought forth, and Opinion nurtured with the warm milk of Error’—a series of swipes at the wealth, pretensions, and deluded beliefs of Southampton’s family, from which he had been providentially removed by his guardian.2 But the Cecil rescue attempt clearly failed. The youthful Narcissus enters Cupid’s domain, the palace of the blind—an alluring labyrinth of inextricable error, filled with dark shadows, where idle young men, ‘unwilling to endure toil’, cluster like crows around a corpse to learn about love.3 Narcissus kneels, is sprinkled with water, and attends to the teaching of Cupid on his flaming throne (‘cathedra’). He is initiated into evil ways—prodigality, wantonness, falsehood, self-love. Before long he is mistaking shadows for reality. ‘You will be mine’, Cupid exults as Narcissus bows like a slender reed before him.4 Finally, Lust, in the form of an unbridled horse, gallops off with the spoiled, pampered Narcissus to the river of self-love, where, deceived by the shadow of his own reflection, he drowns.

Clapham’s poem is a public portrait of Lord Burghley’s view of Southampton at the age of eighteen—weak, immature, easily led, reared by his vainglorious family in an erroneous religion, and lured back again by wicked influences. Now, wilful, licentious, and obstinately papist, he faces ruin. The standard jibes at Catholicism—hedonism, homosexuality, the substitution of the shadows of idolatry and superstition for substance—are so transparent that, as one critic has commented, ‘the surprise is it has never been decoded’.5 Readers would recognise the sort of man it was who had returned to the old religion in spite of his upbringing in the Cecil household, and had rejected a marriage to Lord Burghley’s granddaughter.

Two years later, in June 1593, a second work dedicated to Southampton appeared on the London bookstalls: Venus and Adonis, by William Shakespeare. Again, it was a poem, and again, it concerned the tragic fate of a beautiful young man accused of self-love. But there the resemblance with Narcissus ended. This time the youth was the victim not of a depraved teacher on a flaming throne, but of an overpoweringly possessive queen.

Riding off to a boar-hunt at dawn, a young man is accosted by a woman older and stronger than he is, who subjects him to a prolonged and grotesque sexual assault. She lifts him from his horse, forces him to the ground, and attempts to seduce him. When he refuses she accuses him of self-love, and, in terms suggestive of the unwelcome proposal of marriage constantly urged on Southampton at this point, begs him to yield. ‘Say, shall we? Shall we? Wilt thou make the match?’ (586).

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