[In the following excerpt, Roe studies critical approaches to The Phoenix and Turtle, surveys its relation to literary tradition, and evaluates the work stylistically.]

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Not least in presenting problems for interpretation is the fact that as well as possessing inherent complexity, The Phoenix and the Turtle is only one¹ of several poems by various hands collected by Robert Chester, himself the fullest contributor, in a volume called Loves Martyr which was published in 1601.² Attempting to puzzle out internal and external correspondences calls to mind the predicament of the man in a sequence of New Yorker cartoons who, after contriving to arrange various floating jigsaw shapes of land into an island on which he triumphantly stands, sees approaching other men on their islands with whom he must now attempt to form a peninsula. Before looking at the poem in specific detail, we need to address the question of its place in the wider context of historical, especially personal, allegory, which in turn means surveying the main arguments that have been presented over the past century.

A. B. Grosart, who published an edition of Loves Martyr in 1878, was convinced that throughout the book the Phoenix stood for Queen Elizabeth and the Turtle for the Earl of Essex. While the identification appears to strike him as so obvious as not to require proof, he was soon challenged by Furnivall, who, in rejoinder to Grosart's sentimental observation of 'the great Queen's closing melancholy and bursts of weeping with the name of Essex on her lips', pointed out that she did not stick at ordering the earl's execution.³ Even if we were to accept such death-bed accounts as authoritative, they could not have been anticipated two years earlier. The poem, after all, shows the Phoenix and the Turtle dying together. But despite these objections the theory continues to command a small following, the most appealing recent proponent being William H. Matchett, who concludes that Grosart was right even if the dates were wrong. Elizabeth effectively died with the earl: 'Though the Queen lived on, in losing Essex she had, it might be thought, lost her future.'⁴

Other scholars, while much less convinced of Essex's part in the allegory, still maintain that the Queen is the Phoenix. Elizabeth Watson, writing principally about Chester's contribution (and assuming that Shakespeare followed his lead), proposes the identification with the Queen and then says that the Turtle need not represent anyone particularly; 'the allegory operates on the spiritual plane . . . the emphasis is on the consummation of the Phoenix's virginal nuptials in death rather than on any personal relationship of the Queen's'.⁵ Marie Axton, applying the ideas of Ernst Kantorowicz's book, The King's Two Bodies, brings attention back to Shakespeare's poem and argues that the key relationship of The Phoenix and the Turtle is that of the Queen to her subjects, both parties being represented by either bird.⁶ Her argument corresponds effectively to the two-inone strategy which carries the poem's central thrust and gains, like Watson's, in not tying the Queen to the fate of a particular contemporary. However, like all attempts to decode the allegory of a poem which remains wilfully elusive on the point of human identifications, this attractive idea carries an irreducible element of speculation.⁷

In a somewhat different corner is the bizarre identification of the Turtle with Giordano Bruno, who, whatever his relationship with Elizabeth, has the undeniable allegorical advantage of having been burnt in fact.⁸

Yet another proposal, and one which, if it had not already been expressed, somebody would be bound to put forward, is that Shakespeare himself is either the Phoenix or the Turtle. The idea is at least as old as Alfred von Mauntz, who interprets the poem as symbolising Shakespeare's break with Southampton.⁹Kenneth Muir and Sean O'Loughlin were to adapt and modify von Mauntz's identifications, placing greater emphasis on the poem as an expression of its author's creativity and capacity for self-renewal. While keeping biographical aspects in mind, they see The Phoenix and the Turtle essentially as a phase in Shakespeare's imaginative development.¹⁰ Along roughly similar lines is G. Wilson Knight, who, in an argument apparently favouring Platonic bisexuality, asserts that 'the Turtle signifies the female aspect of the male poet's soul'.¹¹

All the above readings, based wholly or in part on eminent contemporaries, pay in the view of some scholars insufficient regard to the role of Loves Martyr's dedicatee, Sir John Salusbury (or Salisbury). Such is the opinion of Carleton Brown, who edited the poems (though not Loves Martyr) of both Chester and Salusbury, giving detailed consideration to the biographies of both men.¹²

The 1601 title page has as its heading 'Loves Martyr: or Rosalins Complaint', which recurs on an inner page as 'Rosalins Complaint, Metaphorically applied to Dame Nature at a Parlament held (in the high Starchamber) by the Gods, for the preservation and increase of Earths beauteous Phoenix'. What follows is a long account interweaving natural and patriotic history. The patriotic part consists of the story of King Arthur, which the person of Nature recounts to the Phoenix.¹³ Following this she gives a lengthy account of mineral, plant, and animal life, with special attention to their properties both real and supposed. A section on birds, which may well have inspired Shakespeare when he came to the chorus of mourners in his own poem, leads into a dialogue between the Phoenix and the Turtle as the latter helps in the preparation of the Phoenix's funeral pyre and at last joins her on it. The pelican sings a funeral lament and Chester's generous contribution finally closes with some 'Cantoes' of prayers and vows made for the Phoenix by her 'Paphian Dove'.

In Brown's eyes, the Turtle is Salusbury and the Phoenix his wife, Ursula Halsall, or Stanley, the illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Derby. They married in 1586 and soon had two children, a daughter called Jane (the recreated Phoenix) in 1587, and a son named Harry in 1589. Brown meets objections that two is one child too many for the self-reproducing Phoenix by arguing that Chester may have composed the essential part of Loves Martyr not later than 1587. Not everything need be that early; some poetry unrelated to the Phoenix story, such as the interpolated verses on King Arthur, may have been finished shortly before publication, when it is generally assumed that Jonson, Shakespeare, and the other contributors wrote theirs, and when, as Brown neatly observes, Jane Salusbury at the age of fourteen would be reviving memories of her mother, the Phoenix, in her prime.¹⁴ Brown further comments (p. lxxii) that the contributors who swell the volume at the end generally concur in this view of family succession, only Shakespeare appearing to dissent from it. Leaving aside the other poets' role in the enterprise, Brown turns to the question why Chester would have written Loves Martyr with its accent on mourning in 1587. A marriage has been celebrated, a child born; where is the grief in all this? Chester in fact describes two mourning phases in his verses: the first concerns the Turtle, who 'wanders seeking of his love' and who informs the Phoenix that 'my teares are for my Turtle that is dead' (Grosart, pp. 131-3), and the second involves the Phoenix with the Turtle upon their resolving to die together on her funeral pyre.¹⁵ Mention of a second turtle complicates matters, as we may imagine, but Brown is equal to answering this. The records show no sign of a former wife or mistress; indeed, had one existed Ursula Stanley may well have demurred at appearing as her replacement. The person the Turtle grieves for, according to Brown, is not a woman but a man: this is Sir John's brother Thomas, executed for treason in September 1586, three months before John and Ursula were married.¹⁶ This works perfectly well in terms of dates and significant events: Chester writes (in 1587) a poem of private consolation which expresses hope for future good cheer. In 1601, when the recently knighted Sir John's fortunes were at their height (Brown, p. xviii), the moment seemed suitable to bring out a volume in tribute to the way the Salusburys had weathered their setbacks. Chester duly collected together what he had written, scribbled out a bit more, and then enlisted the services of Jonson and his fellows to give the book a few degrees' extra sophistication.¹⁷ Where Brown's argument runs into difficulties is over the matter of poetic style; it is hard to believe that the amorous courtliness underlying the passages between Chester's Phoenix and Turtle (even if tending more towards Platonic than erotic love) was in reality intended to include sentiments about a dead brother. The surface reading is the more likely one: the Turtle is grieving over his mate, and the Phoenix, recognising the virtue of true devotion, opens her breast to him. They expire together in a passionate observance of the ideal of chastity which they both share:

Then I command thee on thy tender care,
And chiefe obedience that thou owst to me,

That thou especially (deare Bird) beware
Of impure thoughts, or uncleane chastity:
For we must wast together in that fire,
That will not burn but by true Loves desire.¹⁸

None the less, Brown's argument that Loves Martyr pays allegorical respect to the Salusburys' hopes, misfortunes, and achievements is by and large acceptable, despite the persisting awkwardness of the missing Turtle's identity. As he points out, the other poets who make up the 'Chorus Vatum' subscribe to the terms of flattery laid out by Chester. Jonson refers affectionately to 'our Dove', and Marston speaks of the new Phoenix, 'arising out of the Phoenix and Turtle Doves ashes', which is 'now growne unto maturitie' (Brown, p. lxxi). Such details convince Brown that the Salusburys' first daughter plays a key role in Chester's poem. Marston also takes care to paper over the cracks glaring in the edifice of Shakespeare's contribution: these are that the pair of birds vanish 'leaving no posterity'. As he follows him, Marston delicately points out that Shakespeare, despite his good intentions, has not quite told the truth about them:¹⁹

O twas a moving Epicidium!²⁰
Can Fire? can Time? can blackest Fate consume
So rare creation? No; tis thwart to sense,
Corruption quakes to touch such excellence,
Nature exclaimes for Justice, Justice Fate,
Ought into nought can never remigrate.
Then looke; for see what glorious issue (brighter
Then clearest fire, and beyond faith farre whiter
Then Dians tier) now springs from yonder flame?

It may of course be that Shakespeare deliberately bows off stage, enabling Marston to make the corrective gesture, as Empson supposes (Signet, p. 1676a), but such a move is at odds with the self-contained nature of his poem; Marston has to struggle a bit to get things going again. Brown is probably right to feel that Shakespeare is out of step with the other members of the chorus in not genuflecting in the Salusburys' direction. Empson (p. 1674a) trenchantly argues the reverse on the grounds that ignoring a patron's wishes would be unthinkable at the time. That would have been true for Shakespeare in 1593 or 1594 (as we have seen); but would it now? Of the 1601 contributors, Shakespeare was undoubtedly the feather in the Chester-Salusbury cap. Jonson was still establishing his career; despite successes with his first plays, he had not reached the pinnacle of fame he was to achieve with Volpone and the great comedies of 1606 to 1614. Besides, as we have already observed, he appears to have had a close connection with the family. Marston's fortunes were always checkered, and he was not in a position to sneer at patronage. Another contributor, George Chapman, was a careful man who had helped bring Hero and Leander to posthumous birth under the auspices of the Walsingham family; he was not likely to miscue the possibility of profitable self-ingratiation with the reviving Salusburys. The publication of Eastward Ho! (1605), written by all three, shows in addition that Jonson, Marston, and Chapman were all collaborating closely with each other. But Shakespeare was on a different plane, being known by now as the creator of Falstaff, of the second tetralogy, of Twelfth Night, and very possibly, by this time, Hamlet. He had also written the mysterious 'sugred Sonnets', which everyone knew about but which few people had seen. . . . It is entirely probable that Chester's patron would have been glad to have Shakespeare in the volume on the latter's own terms. Apart from Southampton, this knight of the shires was the only man in England who could boast of possessing Shakespeare's name.

Despite Shakespeare's disconnectedness from the family part of the exercise, it is likely that he took his theme from Chester's Phoenix and Turtle story, and that he even, as Fairchild tries to demonstrate (see above, p. 44, n), examined the relevant stanzas of Loves Martyr quite closely. Shakespeare, as any survey of his sources at once makes clear, drew inspiration from other literary works rather than directly from history, politics, or philosophy (a practice which in its way bears out Sidney's argument in The Apology for Poetry for literature's supremacy over other disciplines). Chester's dialogue between the Phoenix and the Turtle on passionate chastity, and the Pelican's following verses, are among the best things in his overlong poem and at least state lucidly and readably, and with a sense of drama, the arguments on ideal love which were normally confined to prose treatises—all of which, including even Hoby's Castiglione, tend towards dry abstraction. Shakespeare probably found them interesting enough to respond to them with his own poem. This is to argue that his subject is neither the Queen nor anything to do with historical allegory, but the paradox of pure eros, or passionate propriety, and the measure to which Neoplatonic solutions . . . may enter human affairs.

However, before turning to the poem proper we should at least consider one other recent attempt to make sense of Shakespeare's poem in connection with the part played in Loves Martyr by Chester and the Salusburys.

This is E. A. J. Honigmann's study, in which he follows Brown very closely in giving prominence to the Salusburys. The main difference from Brown is that Honigmann argues for the closeness, even intimacy, of Shakespeare with the family. To find the connection he revives a speculation of E. K. Chambers' that Shakespeare was the William Shakeshafte who belonged to the Lancashire Hoghton household.²¹ If this were true it would help link him with the Derbyshire Stanleys in the early 1580s—a period which gives otherwise virtually no clue as to Shakespeare's whereabouts and activities.²² If Shakespeare did know the Stanleys this early, then he would be on the scene for Ursula Stanley's marriage to Salusbury, and able to join Chester in his poetic enterprise. This, then, is Honigmann's most original contribution to the debate: far from accepting a commission for Chester's volume only in 1601, and then according to Brown in a distant, disengaged manner, Shakespeare wrote from a position close to the household. Honigmann largely accepts Brown's theory about the lost Turtle being Thomas Stanley but thinks that Shakespeare wrote his piece in 1586, before the birth of Jane Salusbury, and possibly even before the wedding had taken place.²³ This is because Shakespeare's poem salutes the death as so final, whereas Chester's 'Conclusion' celebrates a 'new uprising bird' (Grosart, p. 142), which Brown, as we have seen, identifies as the Salusburys' daughter Jane.

Honigmann's attempt to connect Shakespeare intimately with the Stanleys in the decade before the 1590s weaves a more than usually elaborate conjectural tissue; but space precludes doing more than raise a quizzical eyebrow at it here. However, some important objections (which he anticipates without really answering) occur to his method of accounting for the writing of the poem at such an early stage. The Phoenix and the Turtle belongs to the group of poems described on the title page as 'new compositions'. Honigmann's contention that this meant modern, as distinct from such older material as that of the 'venerable Italian' Torquato Caeliano (whom Chester, giving his work an antique flavour, purports to have translated), does not convince. It was a customary publisher's device to tempt readers by advertising work as the most recent done by a poet.²⁴ Then there is the question of stylistic conception. Would Shakespeare have written such a poem in the mid-1580s? Honigmann imagines that it is enough to answer this question by pleading Shakespeare's undoubted virtuosity by the age of twenty-two, citing the youthful accomplishments of such as Milton in support. But that ignores the rather more significant doubt whether the form is characteristic of the kind of poetry being written in 1586, the year of Sir Philip Sidney's death. Sidney, indeed, provides a good yardstick, for he had produced at least one poem which resembles at points The Phoenix and the Turtle. This is the 'Eighth Song' from Astrophil and Stella, the following stanzas of which may have influenced Shakespeare as he wrote (allowing for some metrical differences, e.g. the use of heptasyllabic metre in the first couplet and octosyllabic in the second of each stanza, as opposed to Shakespeare's use of outer and inner rhyming quatrains, with nearly perfect heptasyllabic metre until the threnos):

Sigh they did, but now betwixt
Sighs of woe were glad sighs mixt,
With armes crost, yet testifying
Restless rest, and living dying.

Their eares hungry of each word,
Which the deere tongue would afford,
But their tongues restraind from walking,
Till their harts had ended talking.

But when their tongues could not speake,
Love it selfe did silence breake;
Love did set his lips asunder,
Thus to speake in love and wonder.

(Ringler, p. 218)

But Sidney is much more bound by the restrictions of the pastoral narrative mode he adopts, his song overall bearing a more obvious, hence more reduced referential focus than the enigmatic, emblematic terms of Shakespeare's poem. As the latter supersedes Sidney's straightforward effect of pleasing melancholy, it produces a comparatively more sophisticated, assured marshalling of complex ideas, while its lapidary, gnomic manner is characteristic rather of slightly later Metaphysical poetry than the school of Astrophil.

Because of its uniqueness within the Shakespearean canon, it is hard to establish stylistic parallels between The Phoenix and the Turtle and his other work. But, as Heinrich Straumann observes, at about the time of the publication of the poem, Shakespeare's belief in the human (predominantly female) embodiment of such qualities as beauty, truth, and 'grace in all simplicity' seems to falter; figures such as Ophelia, Cressida, Desdemona, and Cordelia can for various reasons no longer offer that inspired confidence in love that the heroines of the great comedies optimistically promised.²⁵ 1601 seems an appropriate date for a poem which, while still pledging faith in an ideal love, despairs of its earthly incarnation.

Honigmann, like the majority, if not all, of those scholars who look for a personal or historical key to the poem's meaning, pushes speculation to the limits in order to secure his argument. None the less, he is surely right to argue that Shakespeare consulted Chester's verses and incorporated their 'mystical-allusive' manner in his response (Honigmann, p. 109), though he probably did not do so until Ben Jonson showed him Chester's miscellaneous compilation. If The Phoenix and the Turtle points anywhere outside itself, the direction it indicates is doubtless a literary one.

THE POEM AND LITERARY TRADITION

Because the tone of The Phoenix and the Turtle is 'detached and impersonal', it does not follow, as Brown assumes, that it is 'frigid and perfunctory' (p. lxxiii). On the contrary, recent commentary has found that it possesses great resonance; the quarrel turns rather on matters of emphasis. Whereas Robert Ellrodt finds it to be 'throughout funereal', Prince, whose imagination it particularly fired, describes even its analytic terminology as having 'a kind of ethereal frenzy'; Peter Dronke agrees with him, though in more muted accents, in finding the mood of the poem exhilarating.²⁶ Then there is the question of what traditions combine in The Phoenix and the Turtle. Ellrodt (pp. 100-8) gives a broad survey of the classical, Platonic, and Petrarchan influences, while J. V. Cunningham tries to show that the central part, or anthem, reflects the medieval scholastic refinement—and consequent displacement—of Platonic (specifically Plotinian) thought. Again, there is the matter of the birds' emblematic value: how much of this is received wisdom, and how far is it original to Shakespeare?

As I have already argued, Shakespeare seems to take some of his cues from Chester; but Fairchild, who demonstrates this aspect thoroughly, also sees evidence of Chaucerian influence (Fairchild, pp. 360-2). The bestiary, specifically avine, tradition is well represented in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules; this poem contains all the birds Shakespeare mentions, and its fuller, pleonastic description of them may help explain some of the later poet's apparently enigmatic paraphrases. For example, Chaucer speaks of 'The wedded turtel with hir herte trewe' (line 355), which tells us why the Phoenix and the Turtle are ideally mated in Shakespeare's poem. (The observation is of course also made by Chester.) But, concerning the phoenix especially, there are ancient traditions which may be operating through or separate from Chaucer as well as Renaissance modifications of the bird's legend. Early Christian poets, such as Lactantius in the De Ave Phoenice, adapted the description of the phoenix given by Herodotus to religious purposes and identified it as a type of chastity in opposition to the cult of Venus.²⁷ This was no doubt influential in producing the already noted Renaissance (and Shakespearean) insistence on the bird as an example of rarity or chastity rather than on its capacity for self-renewal from its own cinders. But precisely how such influence exerted itself is much less clear. Petrarch, a strong force on later Renaissance poetry, sometimes referred to Laura as a phoenix, which doubtless suggested to his imitators that the bird was an ideal symbol for a mistress who combined beauty and virtue. In 1593 a miscellany called The Phoenix Nest was published, in which appeared Matthew Roydon's elegy for Sidney. The poem displays a number of birds which listen to a (human) speaker's lament for Astrophil (Sidney); this elegist commends the rare love of Astrophil and Stella (though he does not call either of them phoenix or turtle) and impresses upon his audience that such a love is unlikely to be seen again. Elements of Roydon's poem suggest similarities with both Chester²⁸ and Shakespeare; but it also departs from Shakespeare (in particular) in some of its ideas. Such is the prevalence of the phoenix-as-rarity motif in Elizabethan poetry that identifying influences or sources is a daunting task.

ARGUMENT AND STYLE

The Phoenix and the Turtle does not in fact display the supremacy of any one particular tradition; its very succinct use of emblem allows it to integrate and exchange meanings without (as a longer narrative might be compelled to do) opting for one over another. In this way the poem maintains variety, charging its statement with various degrees of meaning which in turn reward the tone.

Variety expresses itself as the poem alternates between poles of significance. The birds named in the opening stanzas contrast and complement one another: the acceptable music of 'the bird of loudest lay' opposes the harsh voice of the screech-owl; the eagle registers its own distinctions, commanding, yet not tyrannical; the white swan alternates with the black crow. Underlying the choice of choric birds may well be the scheme of the four elements, since the Phoenix represents fire, the soaring eagle the empyrean or air, the swan water, and the crow earth.²⁹

Various, too, are the interpretations invited by the opening line. Is this the Phoenix or some other bird? Mention of the 'sole Arabian tree' indicates but does not confirm that the Phoenix is intended.³⁰ Other candidates are the 'crane, the geaunt, with his trompes soune' (Parlement of Foules, line 344), the cock, the lark, and the nightingale.³¹ In fact no bird may be particularly signified, only aspects of birds. If we read the lines metonymously, the 'herald' announces not himself but some great person whom he serves. This is not to deny outright the possibility that the Phoenix may be its own trumpeter but to stress that function rather than identity is what matters. Similarly, the synecdoche of 'chaste wings' seems to indicate the Turtle (on the evidence of Chaucer's example—see above). Attempts at exclusively identifying the 'bird of loudest lay' tend to ignore that the Turtle is equally relevant to the opening statement, since the poem concerns itself with its relationship with the Phoenix and nowhere else in the first five stanzas does the Turtle appear. The summons accordingly issues on behalf of the Phoenix and is heard and understood primarily and most naturally by the Turtle. The opening stanzas' modification, fashioning, and refinement of emblematic allegory is what gives the poem its air of confident self-possession.

Once this pattern of fluent alternation has been established, the poem is ready for its painless shift into abstract, antithetical terminology. Concepts replace creatures as the anthem begins (line 21): love, constancy, distance, essence, possession, property, reason, confusion. Love affirms itself by contradiction, with its traditional opponent, reason, apparently acquiescing in the manoeuvre, as propositions find their formulation according to an inexplicable yet infallible logic. In fact, the notion that distance should not defy love but reinforce it is quite familiar. John Donne's poem 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning' carries an assurance from lover to loved one that,

We by a love so much refin'd
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, hands to miss.

(Grierson, p. 50)

Donne's poem informs the reader sufficiently of its context, a temporary separation between lovers as one of them leaves to go on a journey, whereby a Neoplatonic argument can be seen to meet an immediate need for consolation. We may assume that once he has returned the lovers will again experience the physical union that absence for the moment denies them, though the poem shows too much delicacy to make this an obvious part of its promise. But Shakespeare's Neoplatonism thrives on no such human assurance; the Phoenix and the Turtle are dead and gone for ever. It is not a question of a little bit of abstinence being good for the soul. All that it has to feed its faith is its own supreme confidence in its power of expression. Pared down to essentials, the poem seems hardly more than an exercise in declamation; what makes it all the more formidable is its ability to find a tone equal to Donne's in expansiveness without enjoying similar terms of recovery and return.

Although the abstract middle stanzas are brilliantly turned, everything they achieve lies within the Renaissance habit of antithesis and its stylistic deployment of oxymoron. None the less, they convince the reader that what they describe is rare and astonishing. Whether the art of paradox does this alone or whether thematic depth is sounded is not easy to decide. Critics have run their irony detectors over its surface without coming up with anything positive.³² If The Phoenix and the Turtle achieves its statement without the dramatic personal underpinning of 'A Valediction: forbidding mourning', it also does without the ironic advantage of a poem such as Andrew Marvell's 'The Definition of Love', which is similarly patterned on antithetical clauses. Those who believe, for example, that Shakespeare joined Chester's enterprise perhaps reluctantly find the poem discreetly mocking; but others are equally convinced that he made use of the occasion to address a national concern. The poem's control of allegorical method allows us to summon forth a number of competing readings without providing us with the assurance that any one of them holds the key. The critical practice of regarding the poem as a meditation on its own stylistic medium (which at one time was applied to all poetry) has long been discredited; but here is one poem which appears none the less to benefit from such an analysis.³³ Even so, to take the line that the poem regards itself as its subject still seems not to be enough to account for all that it achieves. We should broaden such self-reflexive terms, despite the self-enclosed appearance of the work, and acknowledge rather that its subject is love which finds an ideal expression of itself in the poem. Such a love is to be despaired of in life, as the threnos with its emphatic negatives makes clear, but the capacity of art to contemplate it helps partially to overcome the disillusion.

Much of the success of the poem derives from its engendering fresh images for stale terms, a facility which in turn mirrors both the generative power and regeneration. No little part of this virtuosity lies in its two subtle shifts in key: first from the invocation to the anthem, then from the anthem to the threnos. The threnos's triple rhyme introduces a new elegiac cadence without abandoning the argumentative procedure which has so far maintained antithesis. Two-in-one becomes three-in-one as the ideational pattern of the opening line of the threnos ('Beauty, truth, and rarity') demonstrates. But duality, the necessary medium for expressing hopes of recovery or redemption, persists as a part of the design, even as the earlier antithetical clamour gives way to a mood of sadness and surrender. Take, for example, the tripartite pronunciation of the following stanza:

Death is now the phoenix' nest,
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.

(54-6)

Are they or are they not both dead? The antithesis 'Death'—'nest' (taking 'nest' to be a place of nurture) modulates through the concept 'loyal' and comes to 'rest' in 'eternity'. The birds have died, but the Turtle's loyalty survives. Do they in some sense live on in it, or are we to see such loyalty as something which, though expressed through them, also transcends them? It is important that the dualism should be formulated in this broader syllogistic pattern: for, while maintaining an antithetical nature, the argument appears like a synthesis to evolve. The beauty of the solution is that it manages to strike a note of affirmation in its final prayer, assimilating but not discounting the persistently negative rejoinders.

As with death, so with sex:

Leaving no posterity,
'Twas not their infirmity,
It was married chastity,

(59-61)

strikes some readers as a light-hearted Falstaffian quip on a prim pair,³⁴ and others as a compliment in good faith. Of course it is natural for marriages to require chastity, but that means barring access from outside, not within. Yet the point of the lines lies perhaps in the Platonic distinction between the reality of physical reproduction and its idea. It is not entirely true that the Phoenix and the Turtle leave no posterity, since all those who are 'either true or fair' (line 66) are in some degree descended from them. Unhappily, the true and fair appear not to be one and the same, for the line reads 'true or fair'. This ironic observation is not one that disables the ideal side of the poetic argument, since it follows logically from what has been stated previously. According to Platonism, a beautiful appearance signifies an inner spiritual goodness (fairness indicates truth); but according to the poem, only ideally is this so. With the death of the Phoenix and the Turtle the ideal conjunction is severed. None the less, the birds remain as an inspiration to anyone who is true or fair to try to restore it, so that disbelieving reason might once more see division grow together. . . .

Notes

¹ Matchett (p. 77) thinks that it might be intended as two poems (the threnos being the second), in keeping with the paired contributions of the other poets in the group apart from Chapman. Despite some questionable conclusions, Matchett's full-length study is very informative on matters of tradition and context.

²Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint. Allegorically shadowing the Truth of Love, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle (London, 1601). In 1611 the old sheets of Chester's book were reissued by a different publisher with a new title page: The Anuals [sic] of great Brittaine, the only known copy of which is in the British Library. Shakespeare's poem is unheaded; 'The Phoenix and the Turtle' first appears as a title in the Boston editions of Shakespeare's Poems and Works (1807). Some editors prefer to omit the second 'the' (see Rollins, pp. 559-61).

³The Poems of Robert Chester (1601-1611). With verse contributions by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, etc., ed. Rev. A. B. Grosart (1878), p. 239. For Furnivall, see Rollins, p. 669.

⁴ Matchett, p. 193. He goes on to suggest (p. 202) that this is why Shakespeare and other former supporters of Essex wrote no elegies for the Queen in 1603.

⁵ 'Natural History in "Love's Martyr'", Renaissance and Modern Studies 9 (1965), 124.

⁶ 'The Phoenix is at the same time a figure for Elizabeth and for the monarch's body politic in which the poets see their own political identity as subjects. The Dove is at once a symbol for the love and fidelity of the monarch in her capacity as a natural woman, and for the love and fidelity of her subjects' (The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (1978), p. 119).

⁷ Marie Axton is followed, with slight qualification, by Anthea Hume, who explores the framework of Loves Martyr as a whole to find evidence, especially in Chester's contribution, of a deliberate discrediting of Essex as false love, the earl thus being seen as a false turtle in contrast to Grosart's true one ('Love's Martyr, "The Phoenix and the Turtle", and the aftermath of the Essex rebellion', Review of English Studies New series, 40 (1989), 48-71). While carrying some plausibility, this reading allows Chester more subtlety than is normally attributed to him in claiming that he was trying to assess the Queen's state of mind following the rebellion (p. 63); she is also forced to disregard the argument put forward compellingly by Carleton Brown for placing the poem's dedicatee, Sir John Salusbury, at the centre of Loves Martyr's interest (see below, pp. 44-5).

⁸ See Roy T. Eriksen, ' "Un certo amoroso martire": Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" and Giordano Bruno's De gli eroici furori', SpS, 2 (1981), 193-215.

⁹ 'Shakespeares lyrische Gedichte', Jahrbuch, 28 (1893), 274-331.

¹⁰The Voyage to Illyria (1937), pp. 131-2.

¹¹The Mutual Flame (1955), p. 185.

¹²Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester, EETS, Extra Series, n. 113, 1914 (for 1913). Brown challenges Grosart's identification (pp. vii-x) of Chester with the Hertfordshire JP, resident at Royston, and favours Robert Chester of Denbighshire, who appears with Salusbury and Ben Jonson in Christ Church MSS 183 and 184. This lesser luminary is a more likely candidate for patronage; Brown thinks he may have been chaplain to the Salusburys (pp. xlvii-liv).

¹³ It is here that Elizabeth Watson finds that Chester's purpose is to offer an allegorical tribute to the Queen, Arthur initiating a line which culminates in Elizabeth (see Watson, pp. 124-5).

¹⁴ What Brown does not tell us is that the Salusburys had eight more children after Jane and Harry. See Matchett (p. 119), who uses the point (not such a strong one) against him and in support of Grosart.

¹⁵ The spirit in which this occurs is not far removed from Shakespeare's poem, and it is easy to suppose that he sifted through Chester's laboured poem, organizing its dissipated drift into his own gnomic stanzas. Evidence that he consulted Loves Martyr is produced by A. H. R. Fairchild in 'The Phoenix and Turtle: a critical and historical interpretation', Englische Studien, 33 (1904), 337-84.

¹⁶ Brown, pp. lxiii-lxiv.

¹⁷ Jonson's association with the Salusburys is confirmed by the presence of writings of his in the family papers (see above, p. 43, n, and Brown, p. liv).

¹⁸ Grosart, pp. 135-6. The Phoenix symbolised constancy and chastity, and Chester's stanza makes it clear that the fire is that of passion finding its true consummation in a pure heart.

¹⁹ Some scholars think that this poem is anonymous because it is unsigned; but the title page describes the 'new compositions' as being by authors 'whose names are subscribed to their several workes', which means presumably that a poet's name follows the group of poems he has submitted. Marston's name follows the fourth poem after Shakespeare's and all four poems seem to be interlinked. Ben Jonson's name occurs twice, each time after two poems. Chapman, like Shakespeare, appears to have contributed a single poem. The name 'Ignoto' appears only once, following two short poems on the nature of the phoenix which precede Shakespeare's. It may be assumed that these were convenient generalised descriptions borrowed from an author of unknown identity. Jonson, Chapman, and Marston all seem to be working as a team reinforcing each other's praise of a particular lady's virtues.

²⁰ Grosart, p. 185. 'Epicidium' means 'funeral ode' and would appear to refer to Shakespeare's immediately preceding threnos.

²¹ Chambers, Shakespearean Gleanings, 1944, pp. 52-56. Chambers elsewhere mentions the verses on the Stanley tomb at Tonge Church which William Dugdale ascribed to Shakespeare in 1644 (see Chambers—William Shakespeare, 1, 551ff).

²² E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: the 'lost years', Manchester, 1985, pp. 59-60.

²³ Honigmann, pp. 105-9.

²⁴ See the discussion on The Passionate Pilgrim, p. 59.

²⁵ Straumann, Phönix und Taube, Zurich, 1953, pp. 50-2.

²⁶ Robert Ellrodt, 'An anatomy of The Phoenix and the Turtle', S. Sur. 15 (1962), 99; Prince, p. xliv; Peter Dronke, 'The Phoenix and the Turtle ', Orbis Litierarum 23 (1968), 220. Authenticity has long ceased to be a problem, despite the poem's unusual and even unique appearance within the Shakespearean canon. The fact that it was twice published unchallenged under Shakespeare's name in his lifetime, while none of the attributions to Jonson et al. in the same volume have drawn dissent, argues strongly for his authorship. Malone had no doubt that it was genuine, though the mid-nineteenth century experienced a current of scepticism which persisted until Grosart published his edition (here at least his influence has been positive). Furnivall doubted it was Shakespeare's in 1877, but later changed his mind. Lee, in successive editions of his Life of Shakespeare, moved from doubt and disapproval to firm acceptance. Though a few dissenters survived earlier this century, recent opinion is almost unanimous in its conviction and admiration. See Rollins, pp. 561-3.

²⁷Lactantius: the Minor Works, trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald, O. P., in The Fathers of the Church, LIV (1965), 219. Baldwin connects Shakespeare via Lactantius to Ovid, Amores 2.6. Ovid's bird is in fact a parrot, but Baldwin observes that in Metam. 15 he treats of a phoenix and argues for a combination of sources (see Genetics pp. 363-73).

²⁸ Those interested in Brown's theory of the dates of composition of Loves Martyr should consult Rollins' edition of The Phoenix Nest, where it is shown that Roydon most likely composed his elegy shortly after Sidney's death in October 1586, early enough for Chester to have consulted it for his own poem on the Salusburys. See The Phoenix Nest, ed. H. E. Rollins, 1931, pp. 115-18.

²⁹ Compare Luc, 1009, 'The crow may bathe his coalblack wings in mire.'

³⁰ Baldwin (Genetics, p. 368) and Dronke (p. 208) both argue in favour of the phoenix and cite Lactantius, who describes the bird as being distinguished for sweetness, though not power, of voice.

³¹ For respective arguments see Ronald Bates, 'Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and Turtle'", Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955), 23-6.

³² Alvarez reminds us that all this lamentation is over a couple of 'dead birds'; but such an observation signals the beginning rather than the end of speculation. See A. Alvarez, 'Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle', in Interpretations, ed. John Wain, 1955, p. 16.

³³ Walter J. Ong provides a good example in, 'Metaphor and the twinned vision', Sewanee Review 63 (1955), 193-201.

³⁴ See Bates, 'Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and Turtle'", p. 28.