My life and loves Vol. 4 by Frank Harris

Author:Frank Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER VIII

San Remo

I must now tell the greatest amatory experience of my life. I had made a great deal of money with Hooley, and was besides tormented with the wish to complete at any cost my book on Shakespeare. I had done some chapters in the Saturday Review, and Shaw, among others, had praised them highly. It was and is my belief that Shakespeare has been mis-seen and misunderstood by all the commentators. Ordinary men are always accustomed to make their gods in their own image, and so the English had formed a Shakespeare who loved his wife and yet was a pederast; who had made money at his business and retired to enjoy his leisure as a country gentleman in village Stratford after living through the bitter despair of Timon, and the madness of Lear: "O, let me not be mad, Sweet Heaven… I would not be mad!"

The only particle of truth in the fancy portrait has been contributed by Tyler, who, inspired by Wordsworth's saying that in the sonnets Shakespeare "unlocked his heart," proved that the sonnets showed that Shakespeare, about 1596, had fallen in love with a maid-of-honor named Mary Fitton and had been in love with her, as he said himself about 1600, for three years. I came to Tyler's aid by proving that this episode had been dragged into three different plays of the same period, and I went on to show that this love episode had practically been the great love of Shakespeare's life, and had lasted from 1596 to 1608. I proved also that though he disliked his wife, he was perfectly normal; that his fortune rested on the gift of Lord Southampton to him of a thousand pounds when he came of age in 1596; and that so far from having increased his wealth and been a prudent husbandman, he had never cared for "rascal counters," and died leaving barely one year's income, probably after the drinking-bout of tradition, in which he had drunk perhaps a little too much, for, to use his own words, he had "poor, unhappy brains for drinking": a too highly powered ship for the frail hull! Does he not talk in The Tempest of walking to "still his beating mind"?

All this and more I wanted to set forth, but was it possible to bring such a totally new conception of Shakespeare into life, and so to prove it that it would be accepted? I hated the English climate in the winter, and so I set off in an October fog for the Riviera; and I don't know why, but I went through Nice to San Remo. At San Remo, the hotel life quickly tired me, and I went about looking for a villa. I discovered a beautiful villa with views over both the mountains and the sea and a great garden; but alas, it was for sale and not for hire, the gardener told me.

This gardener deserves a word or two of description. He was a rather

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