pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine,
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
But what of Shakespeare’s own experience of love? It is often pointed out that while his plays brim with hopeful, ardent suitors and erotic teasing, they are mostly silent when it comes to the experience of lifelong, marital love. This is surely related to Shakespeare’s own early marriage to a woman eight or nine years older than he, who was pregnant by him. Anne Hathaway was a rare catch, a twenty-six-year-old orphan with some property of her own, able, unlike most women of her age, to make her own decisions about love and sex. But Shakespeare was only eighteen when they married, and most of what we know about him – granted, not very much – suggests that it wasn’t an entirely happy union. It produced two adult daughters as well as a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. But Shakespeare spent most of his working life away from Anne, in London. He returned to her at Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of his career, but if his last will and testament is anything to go by, it was hardly an ardent reunion. His main will leaves her absolutely nothing – it all went to Susanna, the older daughter, and her husband – except, famously for a late codicil, leaving Anne ‘my second-best bed with the furniture’. However you play it, it’s not a compliment.
More significant, perhaps, than all of that is the fact that there are so few images of happy married life in Shakespeare’s plays. Here is a man who can describe everything – war, lust, the pleasures of drunken debauchery, the agonies of young love, the furies and dementia of the old, the pleasures of male friendship – but who hardly ever gives us the state that is supposed to be at the centre of Tudor (and modern) social existence: marriage. Again and again, ill-matched lovers are briskly yoked together at the end of the play, and we are not encouraged to look ahead at what follows. The rare displays of marriage in action are hardly reassuring – think of the black, bleak compact of Lady and Lord Macbeth, or of the guilt-stricken lust of Hamlet’s mother and uncle. We know that Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining a strong, sustaining, lifelong love, because he does as much in one of his greatest sonnets:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Yet it seems that in his own experience, Love was Time’s fool, and did indeed alter over months and years, if not weeks. Indeed, there is a disturbing loathing when it comes to describing love and sex between older people. The circumstances are hardly normal, of course, but remember Hamlet turning on his lustful mother:
O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,
And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,
Since frost itself as actively doth burn
And reason panders will …
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty …
In spirit, this is very close to one of the most ferocious poems Shakespeare ever produced, the notorious sonnet about the devastating effects of lust, a kind of madness that can destroy human happiness:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action: and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad.
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The sexual self-hatred that seems to underlie this sonnet can easily tip over into disgust for the object of love; and the following seems to me to be a poem that is not playful or clever, but essentially hating. It’s apparently about ‘false compare’, or poetic overstatement, but the images we take from it are the black wires and the reeking breath:
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And
