The first heir of my invention: Shakespeare, Southampton, and the Long Poems
A preview of what’s to come at the November SAT Conference in London
Our conference this year will be at the Marylebone Theatre in London on 17 November. It will be a fascinating event with readings from Sir Mark Rylance, Annabel Leventon, comments from Lord Montague of Beaulieu and award-winning poet Alice Oswald, among others. Join us as we explore the relationship of the long poems, the Earl of Southampton as the dedicatee, and the Shakespearean works. Click here to purchase tickets. Unfortunately, there will be no streaming option for this event.
One of the speakers will be Dr. David Richardson talking about Venus and Adonis and the Battle over the Legacy of Philip Sidney: How did the political and literary environment of 1590s London shape Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis?
Herewith a taste of what he will be talking about.
The spring of 1593 was an exhilarating time for readers in London. The theaters were closed by a plague that ravaged the city, but the bookstalls of St. Paul’s were filled with new works from some of the greatest writers England ever produced. Not least of these were the pamphlets of satirist Thomas Nashe who gleefully abused the learned but pedantic Harvey brothers in a literary feud that had begun with Martin Marprelate’s attack on the clergy but had taken on a life of its own.
For his latest response to Nashe, Pierce’s Supererogation, Gabriel Harvey summoned his “Gentlewoman Patronesse” to turn the tables on the writer dubbed the young Aretine after the Italian author famed for his vicious and bawdy writing. In the preface dated 27 April he wrote:
Were that fair body of the sweetest Venus in Print, as it is redoubtedly armed with the complete harness of the bravest Minerva. She shall no sooner appear in person, like a new Star in Cassiopeia, but every eye of capacity will see a conspicuous difference between her and other mirrors of Eloquence.
There is little doubt that “She” is Mary Sidney, the beautiful thirty-two-year-old wife of Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, one of the wealthiest men in England. The “harness of the bravest Minerva” invoked the spear-shaking Pallas Athena, associated with Mary in recent dedications by Christopher Marlowe and Nashe himself (in an unauthorized edition of her brother’s sonnets). The “fair body of the sweetest Venus” refers to the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, registered a week earlier by printer Richard Field, but not yet released.
When it appeared a few weeks later, it caused an immediate sensation. No one had ever written a character quite like the fleshy, frustrated Goddess who flung herself at the reticent Adonis. It was conventional in Elizabethan poetry that classical Goddesses represent the Queen. For readers who identified the fallen Adonis with Mary’s brother Philip Sidney, the identification of this Venus with Elizabeth was both unthinkable and unavoidable. And yet, for all the titillating sexual content and the political topicality, the poem was also a sophisticated entry into the literary debate over the role of literature inspired by Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, a bestseller at the time. The author was not identified on the title page of Venus and Adonis, but the dedication to the young Earl of Southampton bore a name familiar to us but new to Elizabethan audiences: William Shakespeare.
Centuries of historians have tried and failed to connect Shakespeare and Southampton, as patron, or even as the homosexual lover of the Sonnets. A conflict between Mary Sidney and the members of her brother’s circle who joined the faction of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, after Philip’s death may better explain the dedication.