Shakespeare by Bill Bryson Page A

assured of acceptance. What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would sow greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life still lengthened with all happiness.
    Your Lordship’s in all duty,
    William Shakespeare
    As these dedications are the only two occasions when Shakespeare speaks directly to the world in his own voice, scholars have naturally picked over them to see what might reasonably be deduced from them. What many believe is that the second dedication shows a greater confidence and familiarity—and possibly affection—than the first. A. L. Rowse, for one, could think of “no Elizabethan dedication that gives one more the sense of intimacy” and that conclusion is echoed with more or less equal vigor in many other assessments.
    In fact we know nothing at all about the relationship, if any, that existed between Shakespeare and Southampton. But as Wells and Taylor put it in their edition of the complete works, “the affection with which Shakespeare speaks of him in the dedication to Lucrece suggests a strong personal connection.” The suspicion is that Southampton was the beautiful youth with whom Shakespeare may have had a relationship, as described in the sonnets—which may have been written about the same time, though the sonnets would not be published for fifteen years. But according to Martin Wiggins of the University of Birmingham, addressing work to a nobleman “was commonly only a speculative bid for patronage.” And Shakespeare was just one of several poets—Thomas Nashe, Gervase Markham, John Clapham, and Barnabe Barnes were others—vying for Southampton’s benediction during the same period (his rivals’ obsequious dedications, not incidentally, make Shakespeare’s entreaties look restrained, honest, and frankly dignified).
    Southampton was not, in any case, in a position to bestow largesse in volume. Although he enjoyed an income of £3,000 a year (something like £1.5 million in today’s money) upon reaching his majority, he also inherited vast expenses and was dissolute into the bargain. Moreover, under the terms of his inheritance, he had to pass a third of any earnings to his mother. Within a few years he was, to quote Wiggins again, “virtually bankrupt.” All of which makes it unlikely that Southampton gave—or was ever in a position to give—Shakespeare £1,000, a story first related by Shakespeare’s biographer Nicholas Rowe in the early 1700s and endorsed surprisingly often ever since: for instance, by the Shakespeare scholar Sidney Lee in the Dictionary of National Biography .
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    So by 1594 William Shakespeare was clearly on the way to success. He was the author of two exceedingly accomplished poems and he had the patronage of a leading aristocrat. But rather than capitalize on this promising beginning, he left the field of poetry and returned all but exclusively to the theater, a move that must have seemed at least mildly eccentric, if not actively willful, for playwriting was not an esteemed profession, and its practice, however accomplished, gained one little critical respect.
    Yet this was precisely the world that Shakespeare now wholeheartedly embraced. He never dedicated anything else to Southampton or any other aristocrat, or sought anyone’s patronage again. He wrote for publication only once more that we know of—with the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle , published in 1601. Nothing else bearing his name was published with his obvious consent in his lifetime, including the plays that he now turned to almost exclusively.
    The theatrical scene that Shakespeare found was much altered from two years before. For one thing, it was without his greatest competitor, Christopher Marlowe, who had died the previous year. Marlowe was just two months older than Shakespeare. Though from