Shakespeare by Bill Bryson

the wardship of Lord Burghley, the queen’s lord treasurer—effectively her prime minister. Burghley saw to his education and, when Southampton was just seventeen, sought to have him marry his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth de Vere, who was in turn daughter of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and longtime favorite among those who think Shakespeare was not Shakespeare. Southampton declined to proceed with the marriage, for which he had to pay a colossal forfeit of £5,000 (something like £2.5 million in today’s money). He really didn’t want to marry Burghley’s granddaughter.
    Southampton, it appears, enjoyed the intimate company of men and women both. He had a mistress at court, one Elizabeth Vernon, but equally while serving in Ireland as Lord-General of Horse under his close friend the Earl of Essex, he shared quarters with a fellow officer whom he would “hug in his arms and play wantonly with,” in the words of one scandalized observer. He must have made an interesting soldier, for his most striking quality was his exceeding effeminacy. We know precisely how he looked—or at least wished to be remembered—because Nicholas Hilliard, the celebrated portraitist, produced a miniature of him showing him with flowing auburn locks draped over his left shoulder, at a time when men did not normally wear their hair so long or arrange it with such smoldering allure.
    Matters took a further interesting lurch in the spring of 2002 when another portrait of Southampton was identified at a stately home, Hatchlands Park in Surrey, showing him dressed as a woman (or an exceedingly camp man), a pose strikingly reminiscent of the beautiful youth with “a woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted” described with such tender admiration in Sonnet 20. The date attributed to the painting, 1590–1593, was just the time that Shakespeare was beseeching Southampton’s patronage.
    We’ve no idea how much or how little Southampton admired the poem dedicated to him, but the wider world loved it. It was the greatest publishing success of Shakespeare’s career—far more successful in print than any of his plays—and was reprinted at least ten times in his lifetime (though only one first-edition copy survives, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford). Written in narrative form and sprawling over 1,194 lines, Venus and Adonis was rich and decidedly racy for its day, though actually quite tame compared with the work on which it was based, Ovid’s Metamorphoses , which contains eighteen rapes and a great deal of pillage, among much else. Shakespeare threw out most of the violence but played on themes—love, lust, death, the transient frailty of beauty—that spoke to Elizabethan tastes and ensured the poem’s popularity.
    Some of it is a little rich for modern tastes—for instance:
    And now she beats her heart, whereat it groans…
    â€œAy me!” she cries, and twenty times, “Woe, woe!”
    But such lines struck a chord with Elizabethan readers and made the work an instant hit. The publisher was Richard Field, with whom Shakespeare had grown up in Stratford, but it did so well that a more successful publisher, John Harrison, bought out Field’s interest. The following year Harrison published a follow-up poem by Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece , based on Ovid’s Fasti. This poem, considerably longer at 1,855 lines and written in a seven-line stanza form known as rhyme royal, was primarily a paean to chastity and, like chastity itself, was not so popular.
    Again there was an elaborate dedication to the foppish earl:
    To the Right Honourable Henry Wriothesely, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.
    The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it