SOURCE: “The Phoenix and Turtle (Cambridge),” in Shakespeare in His Context: The Constellated Globe: The Collected Papers of Muriel Bradbrook, Vol. IV, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 74-91.

[In the following essay, Bradbrook examines the literary and biographical themes in The Phoenix and Turtle.]

Only after the revived taste for Donne and the Metaphysicals did this strangely neglected masterpiece receive its due. Some have called it frigid, a trifle. Middleton Murry in the early 1920s was one of the first to recognise its power, built on paradox yet cunningly avoiding oxymoron. It is exceptionally well attested; it was signed and printed at first in Vatum Chorus (Marston Chapman and Jonson formed the quartet). This issued as with separate title page, in appendix to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr or Rosalin's Complaint, Allegorically shadowing the truth of love in the constant fate of the Phoenix and Turtle, published by Edward Blount in 1601. F. T. Prince dismissed Chester as ‘rubbish’, and another critic describes this collection of the personal bard of Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, Denbighshire, as ‘an attempt to sell the unsaleable’. The new title page reads ‘Hereafter follow Diverse Poetical Essaies on the former subject, via the Turtle and Phoenix. Done first by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular works; never before extant. And now consecrated by them all generally, to the love and merit of the true noble knight, Sir John Salisburie. Dignum Laude virum, Musa vetat mori.’

Shakespeare's contribution is his highest achievement in what the last century termed the Grand Style or the Sublime. Indeed a paean to Sublimation in many senses, from the chemical to the psychological, its paradoxes lie not only in its theme but in its literary context in Shakespeare's writings. It was the work of the author famous for Venus and Adonis, to which it serves as palinode, rather than of the dramatist who in this same year (1601) wrote the most deflationary, the least sublimatory, of his plays, where he built a style from a despair, Troilus and Cressida. I don't know that anyone has remarked on the complete dichotomy of these two works. The ‘prologue arm'd’ of Troilus and Cressida would appear to refer to the armed prologue of Jonson's Poetaster, and the quartet who combined so amicably were engaged in the War of the Theatres, some on one side, some on the other.

A link between Shakespeare's two works is provided by the Chaucerian connections. In 1598 Thomas Speght's edition of Chaucer's works made him accessible to a whole generation of poets. The five acts of Shakespeare's play roughly correspond to Chaucer's five books; the influence on his poem derives not only from the list of the birds from The Parlement of Foules—all that Ann Thompson¹ will allow—but also I think from The Boke of the Duchesse and perhaps The Hous of Fame. It is a matter of tone and address; the delicate blend of intimacy and hierarchy, only to be learnt in the enlarged family atmosphere of the court, was reinforced by those still lively oral traditions that are lost to us. Chaucer's is poetry for performance; The Boke of the Duchesse was written in 1369 to be recited in the presence of the bereaved John of Gaunt—who mourned Blanche sincerely but as a prince was required quickly to make another marriage. Chaucer, who like his lord was about twenty eight years of age, would recite his verse from a little pulpit to the ducal household.

The dream of the bird fable provides a delicate sense of distance along with the intimacy of inner meaning which is known only to an immediate circle. Small, eloquent in their song, sensuously quick yet aerily free from mortal limitations, birds can embody Eros at his most ardent and least carnal. This is at the other end of the spectrum from the voluptuousness of Venus and Adonis. Paradoxes of intimacy and remoteness arise in a small community close-knit yet maintaining a precise hierarchy, maintaining ‘distance and no space was seen’.

The specific rite invoked by Shakespeare, as Peter Dronke showed long ago in a learned article,² is partly that of the Bird Requiem or Bird Mass, deriving from Ovid, used by Skelton in the pretty burlesque of ‘Lament for Phyllip Sparowe’; but also a choir of birds singing lauds in a tree in Chorus, as in the poem also attributed to Skelton, The Armony of Birds

wherein did light
Birds as thick
as stars in the sky
Praising our Lord
Without discord
In goodly armony

In Skelton's requiem:

To Jupiter I call
Of heaven empyreall
That Phillip may fly
Above the starry sky
To tread the pretty wren
That is our Lady's hen:

At the end of The Parlement of Foules the full choir in a rondel celebrates St Valentine

Now welcom somer with thy sonne softe
That hast this wintres weders over-shake,
And driven awey the longe nightes blake!
Seynt Valentyn, that art ful hy on-lofte,
Thus singen smale foules for thy sake …

(680-84)

(Shakespeare's Love's Labours' Lost ends with a song of the Cuckoo and the Owl.) Chester's extraordinary anthology is Chaucerian in its presuppositions, since its frame is a medieval debate between Nature and the Phoenix, reminiscent of Chaucer's The Parliament of Foules, with medieval herbal-, bestiary-, lapidary-sections (plants, trees, fish, jewels, animals, birds), a dreamlike approach to Paphos' Isle, where the Phoenix meets the mourning Turtle Dove. On the way a lengthy history of King Arthur represents perhaps a Spenserian strain, which the alternative title, Rosalin's Complaint, with its suggestion of Spenser's Rosalind in The Shepherds' Calendar, supports. The narrative line, insofar as there is one, blends celebration with lament. The Phoenix and Turtle give themselves in turn not to each other but to ‘blessed Phoebus, happy happy light’; they become one with that ‘pure, perfect fire’ so that ‘one name may rise’. The Pelican, type of self-sacrifice, watches and celebrates ‘a perfect form of love and amity’.

Genre-criticism and lines of biographic speculation cross and recross each other, but I shall begin by looking at Shakespeare's poem in its context of Vatum Chorus. Shakespeare was accustomed to harmonise with his fellow actors, to absorb or transform their part in performance, but here he leads the way, being the elder as writer (though five years younger than Chapman).

For Robert Ellrodt ‘truth and beauty vanish from the earth, the tone is throughout funereal’.³ The stanza form (quatrains of an enclosed couplet between two flanking outer lines) was to be used by Tennyson for In Memoriam. The rhythmic force and pulse is slow, is that of a funeral procession, where the mourners walk in pairs, the outflankers bearing emblems or trophies, moving to the sound of muffled drums, tolling bells, the final echo of cannon, as in the great state London funeral for Philip Sidney. Even today, in our reduced rituals, a funeral rite creates the strongest of emotional surges and is so used in centres of political turbulence, from Ireland to the Cape.

Paradoxical euphoria may surge up when a life's full significance is revealed in its close; the bereaved often feel this exaltation. This poem carries religious overtones which have been noted from Fairchild onwards.⁴ The paradox uniting Phoenix and Dove is analogous to the union between the second and third persons of the Trinity, which would be familiar to Shakespeare in the hypnotic rhythmic repetitions of the Athanasian Creed, ordained for recital in every church in England on festival days:

So they lov'd as love in twain,
          Had the essence but in one,
          Two distincts, division none,
Number there in love was slain.

The creed opens:

And the Catholick faith is this; that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity:
Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Substance:
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son and another of the Holy Spirit;
But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit is all one; the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.

Christ is also one ‘not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God!’

The very lengthy creed sets up a processional pulse and motion which Shakespeare achieves in much shorter space

So between them Love did shine
          That the Turtle saw his right,
          Flaming in the Phoenix' sight;
Either was the other's mine.

Like those of Dante's Beatrice, the eyes of the Phoenix confer a new level of being, but the Turtle and the Phoenix are not equal in greatness, only in purity of intent. In his plays, Shakespeare had reserved and would reserve his plainest monosyllabic style for the core of intense action.

I must be gone and live or stay and die.

(Romeo and Juliet III.v.11)

Or

Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

(Macbeth V.i.37-8)

(I feel such lines recall some physical experience, perhaps the execution of Lopez, the old Portuguese doctor hanged, drawn and quartered, 7 June 1594) or

You do me wrong to take me out o' the grave

(King Lear IV.vii.44)

(indeed the whole exchange between Lear and Cordelia.) Or

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun

(Cymbeline IV.ii.47)

(much used in funerals. I have heard Peggy Ashcroft recite it on one such occasion.)

The Phoenix and Turtle is embedded in action unclear to us; the element of drama is palpable, but interpretation, which would be direct in the performance and to the original and privileged witnesses, is to us ambiguous. Credal affirmation is self-authenticating, provided it is climactic; yet Carleton Brown saw the poem as but ‘an ingenious exercise’,⁵ and for C. H. Herford and M. R. Ridley (as late as 1935) ‘a trifle’; ‘for them there was no climax in the variety of rhythmic appeal, the triad of modulations: assembly, anthem, threnos.’ If Walter J. Ong,⁶ was moved to quote Eliot's Four Quartet, F. T. Prince was moved to cite Mallarmé (and indeed Eliot himself made use of Mallarmé in one of the most enigmatic passages of his work)

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axletree …

(Four Quartets ‘Burnt Norton’ ii.1-2)

The maximum of resonance and the minimum of particularity is carried in the opening lines

Let the bird of loudest lay
          On the sole Arabian tree,
          Herald sad and trumpet be.

Chaucer's ‘crane, the gyant with his trompe's sound’, Shakespeare's own ‘cock the trumpet of the morn,’ or, as Wilson Knight was convinced,⁷ the Phoenix herself, have all been offered as interpretations of the bird; but if Shakespeare had wanted to specify he would have done so. The power to refrain from specific associations at the beginning demands negative capability. The last line of the stanza, ‘to whose sound chaste wings obey’ might suggest birds or angels. The necessary absence of the specific is a condition of the sacramental.

The trumpet call is followed by the anthem or theme; the final threnos, or lament, is composed by Reason, assenting to the paradoxes that through the death of Phoenix and Turtle, some quality of being ‘true’ and ‘fair’ descends upon the mourners. Dronke pointed out that medieval poems of Nature that show an ascent to heaven, permit also a descent with some rarity as a gift for men.

In print, Reason's threnos, separated from the anthem by a richly decorative border, carries a change of rhythm from quatrains to terzains—even slower, weightier and as monosyllabic in their openings. These are the words of Committal; the procession has halted; the conclusion is an urn. It is as if the Mutability Cantoes had ended at the pillars of Eternity, a word used by Shakespeare in the second terzain.

Death is now the Phoenix nest:
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternitie doth rest.

Shakespeare allows no second Phoenix to be born from the pyre, as does Marston in the next set of verses. Yet the true and the fair will come to ‘sigh a prayer’, though ‘Truth and Beauty buried be.’ Prayer, an act at once solitary and yet communal, is an incomplete utterance. The optative and the imperative moods blend, as here. The immediate context, Vatum Chorus, is introduced in two stanzas by Robert Chester, here describing himself as The Author, with a Request to the Phoenix, who is entitled as patron of all his labour

Accept my home-writ praises of thy love
And kind acceptance of thy turtle dove.

Written, I believe, in Denbigh, they now celebrate the Phoenix' ‘kind acceptance of thy Turtle dove’ that is, presumably, some recent graces she has bestowed. Is he, as another turtle, speaking for himself or for Salusbury? The poems, written ‘to the love and merit of the true noble knight’, are put forward by the main author, who suggests ‘some deep read Scholler fam'd for poesy’ should sing of her

Yet I, the least and meanest in degree
Endeavour'd have to please in pleasing these.

Vatum Chorus then takes over with an invocation to Apollo and the Muses, which some have considered burlesque and which certainly is rejected by Jonson. Drinking to their honourable friend ‘in a Castalian bowl, crown'd to the brim’ they also invoke ‘the ever youthful Bromis’ in verses far from transcendent, but they intend to be ‘varied from the multitude’. This poem is related by Newdigate to Jonson's Ode to James Earl of Desmond.⁸ A second pair of stanzas is addressed to Sir John, protesting that the poets indulge no ‘mercenary hope’

But a true Zeal, born in our spirits,
Responsible to your high merits
And an invention, freer than the Times.

Joining in a Castalian bowl was surprisingly friendly; for three of the Quartet were in the autumn of 1601 involved in the War of the Theatres; Cynthia's Revels being entered in the Stationers Register 23 March 1601, to be followed by Satiromastix, entered 11 November, whilst Poetaster followed a month later, both Jonson's plays being for the Chapel Boys. Love's Martyr must be later than June 1601, when Salusbury received his knighthood from the Queen.

Shakespeare's company had staged Satiromastix; Chapman had moved from collaboration with Jonson for Henslowe to the Children of Paul's, who also staged Satiromastix, and in his book Reavley Gair suggests that Marston, who had in 1599 inherited his father's estate, was financing them.⁹

Love's Martyr, therefore, appeared at the height of the three-cornered contest between the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the children's companies, when Shakespeare was also working on Hamlet and Marston on Antonio's Revenge.

The very feeble stanzas by Ignoto which open the Chorus must have come from someone who was grand enough to be obvious as prime instigator, and are devoted to the Phoenix. They play on ‘born’ and ‘burn’ used (it seems) in a metaphoric sense.

Shakespeare follows, then Marston's four verses, describing what Shakespeare so pointedly omits, the birth of a new Creature, created jointly by the Phoenix and Turtle, therefore, surely, something other than another Phoenix. He does not define this same Metaphysical God, Man or Woman but calls for Rapture to raise his Muse above thought, that labours with this birth. He is numbed with wonder at this

                                                                                                    divinest Essence,
The soul of heavens labour'd quintessence

and on the new Phoenix which contains nought to be corrupted, he bestows the name Perfection:

By it all Beings deck'd and stained,
Ideas that are idly fained
          Only here subsist invested.

(was this a hit at Drayton whose Idea had appeared in 1593?)

Marston then changes to Shakespeare's type of quatrain to address Perfection: to produce whom, Nature has been storing up Virtue and Beauty. But in his final Hymn he finds even the name Perfection unworthy of this new birth, ‘as firm and constant as Eternity’. Rejecting ‘Heavens Mirror’ and ‘Beauty’ as too near the senses, ‘Deep Contemplation's wonder’ is his final choice, since

No suburbs, all is mind
                    As far from spot as possible defining

adding here a Senecal gloss that the difference between men and gods is that men have a spiritual element but the gods are entirely spiritual in all parts. In one or two critics this has foreshadowed Marvell's The Definition of Love:

My Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.

If Marston will not even ascribe a sex to the new creature, Chapman, in Peristeros or the Male Turtle, identifies himself with the Turtle and sees the Phoenix as feminine. ‘All love in smooth brows born is tomb'd in wrinkles' yet ‘she was to him the analysde world of pleasure’

Like him, I bound th'instinct of all my powers
In her that bounds the Empire of desert,
And Time nor Change (that all things else devoures
But truth eternis'd in a constant heart)
Can change me more from her, than her from merit,
That is my form and gives my being spirit.

In terms of Marston's distinction she is a goddess. For Chapman, as for his patron Ralegh in Walsinghame ‘true love is a durable fire in the mind ever burning’.

Ben Jonson concludes the Chorus with four poems: a Prelude, a lengthy Epode or Epos, The Phoenix Analysde and Ode (enthusiastike), the last two in quatrains.

First, in jaunty terzains, all the gods, including those of the earlier Vatum Chorus are dismissed as unworthy; he will bring his own true fire. His Epode describes the little kingdom of the inner man. Vice must be expelled, the heart must stand spy for Reason. Love as Desire must be kept out, but not that Love which is ‘a golden chain let down from Heaven’ which

In a calm and godlike unity
                    Preserves community.

Interrupted by a ‘vicious fowl’ who denies the possibility of such chaste love, he declares this is neither Abstinence nor Impotence. If the divine Phoenix bestows the wealthy treasure of her love, making his fortunes swim, the Dove will be ‘fearful to offend a Dame of this excelling frame’. In a short verse Jonson describes the Phoenix as a woman, though the fairest creature naturally born is but a type of what she is. The final ode extols her wit, judgement and voice, but implying the brightness is not that of earthly beauty:

Retire, and say her graces
Are deeper than their faces:
Yet she's nor nice to show them,
Nor takes she pride to know them.

A copy of this concluding Ode is found in a Bodleian MS headed ‘To L.C. of B,’ the kinswoman of Sir John Harrington, who is identified as the author on the title page. This led Bernard Newdigate, on the strength of Jonson's other poems to the Countess of Bedford, in 1937 to identify her as the Phoenix, attesting Jonson's dedication in a copy of Cynthia's Revels.

Newdigate is, to my mind, an extreme case of the biographical identification disease (or BIDs). Jonson's poems, I think, establish that the Phoenix and Turtle are not literally married. He retains trace of the assertiveness and contradictoriness that had appeared so strongly in the plays of the War of the Theatres; he, unlike Chapman, does not identify with the Turtle, and he makes no use at all of the legend of the funeral pyre or any of the ‘fable’.

Before turning to the biographical aspect, I must add one other feature of the literary context, the volume of 1593, The Phoenix Nest, collected poems in honour of Philip Sidney, prefixed by ‘The Dead Man's Rite’ a vindication of Sidney's uncle, the late Earl of Leicester, from the slanders of the pamphlet known as Leicester's Commonwealth, published in 1584: collected by one R. S. of the Inner Temple, Gentleman, it follows the printing of Sidney's own verse in 1593. Marie Axton has shewn Leicester's close connexion with the Inner Temple;¹⁰ and the connexion is, therefore, presumably through him. The anthology includes verses by Lodge, Breton, Peele, the Earl of Oxford, Thomas Warton. There is nothing ascribed to Sidney's closest friends, Dyer and Fulke Greville, but Matthew Roydon's Elegie or Friends passion for his Astrophill, something of a forerunner of Vatum Chorus, opens the collection at Nature's assembly. The ‘tree that coffins doth adorn’ grows in a circle with ‘black and doleful Ebony’ for an assembly of birds

Upon the branches of those trees,
          The aery winged people sat,
Distinguished in odd degrees,
          One sort in this, another that,
                    Here Philomel that knows full well,
                    What force and wit in love doth dwell.
The sky bred eagle, royal bird,
          Percht there upon an oak above,
The turtle by him never stirr'd,
          Example of immortal love.
          The swan that sings about to die,
          Leaving Meander, stood thereby.
And that which was of wonder most,
          The Phoenix left sweet Araby,
And on a Cedar in this coast
          Built up her tomb of spicery
                    As I conjecture by the same
                    Prepared to take her dying flame.

A mourner appears to lament immortal Astrophill in the best-known lines

A sweet attractive kind of grace,
          A full assurance given by looks
Continual comfort in a face,
          The lineaments of Gospel books

leading into an account of his love for Stella. A storm arises, the birds all lament, the Phoenix sets fire to her nest but her ashes are dispersed in the tempest, so no second Phoenix will ensure. The Eagle ascends with the news to Jove, and so the dreamer wakes (only now do we learn this is a dream vision). The poems which follow are much more of a miscellany on love, including several poems about the Queen.

Roydon, a friend of Chapman and a famous mathematician, may have attracted Shakespeare's attention when he was asked to contribute to a collection which came from another of the Inns of Court, the Middle Temple. The significance of this connection will require a direct entry into the area of biographical interpretation; and I must therefore briefly summarise what is known of Sir John Salusbury, whose life was carefully investigated by Carleton Brown, to whose work little has since been added.

John Salusbury (1566 or 1567-1612) was the second son of John Salusbury, squire of Lleweni in Denbighshire, and his wife Catherine of Berain, who was an illegitimate descendent of the Tudors. After her husband's death she remarried three times bringing a useful network of relatives to her son. John became the heir when in September 1586 his elder brother Thomas, a confessed Catholic, was executed for conspiracy in the Babington Plot. He promptly married Ursula Halsall of Knowsley an illegitimate but acknowledged daughter of the fourth Earl of Derby; they had ten children.

After eight years, in 1595, Salusbury was appointed Squire of the Body to the Queen. A Welshman who was a follower of Cecil might not seem unfitted for this honorary post; but for the brother of an executed traitor it was a special mark of favour, implying trust and intimacy. Under a female monarch duties did not include the bed-chamber attendance that made Robert Carey ask it as his only favour when in 1603 he bore the news of accession to James I; but the post gave admittance to the most privileged inner circle of the private apartments, where the trusty Welsh entourage, such as Kate Parry, really had the Queen's close ear. To be a Squire of the Body meant that Salusbury had a cachet of loyalty conferred; and of course theoretically it gave the opportunities for access which, if Salusbury and the Queen had been disposed to physical lovemaking, could easily have been arranged. In fact her Squires of the Body were all rather innocuous characters (John Lyly was one, promoted to amuse the waiting concourse of attendants).

The year before this promotion, Salusbury had been made a member of the Middle Temple, and so by the time he received the further honour of knighthood in June 1601, he had had a chance to make the acquaintance of its members. He was also made deputy lieutenant for Denbighshire. All this must have been welcome indeed since, by the summer of 1601, it was clear that the Queen, beginning to show her years, would not be there much longer to patronise the Welsh. In December 1601, Salusbury, now honoured by the publication of his praise, was elected to Parliament as member for Denbigh, but not before he had fought a pitched battle in the churchyard at Wrexham with a rival candidate, Sir John Trevor; and thereafter his fortunes declined. Robert Cecil gave him no opportunity for approaching the new king in 1603; he fell into financial trouble and never returned to court.

Salusbury, a colourful character, fostered masques and plays in Denbigh. He lived on that coast where Sir Gawain travelled in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where local lords ruled regally.

The MS Peniarth 539OD in the National Library of Wales preserves a collection of plays and masques from Lleweni from c.1600 to 1660, which Reavley Gair worked on and at one time thought of including in a book on provincial academies. Salusbury's own poems are in Carleton Brown's EETS volume (Extra Series No 113, 1914). I think MS Peniarth 539OD might throw light on Love's Martyr as a Welsh composition, but the Vatum Chorus was clearly an appendix by Londoners. Of these Marston was himself a member of the Middle Temple and Ben Jonson had strong links for he had recently dedicated Cynthia's Revels to the Inns of Court generally and Poetaster to Richard Martin, a prominent younger member of the Middle Temple who had been the Christmas Prince in the Revels of 1598-1599, an occasion which saw the expulsion from the society of one of its own poets, John Davies, author of Astraea, for an assault on Richard Martin (see my John Webster, Chapter II). Jonson dedicated Poetaster with the words:

A thankful man owes a courtesy ever … I send you this piece of what may live of mine; for whose innocency as for the author's you were once a noble and timely undertaker … posterity to owe the reading of that, without offence to your name, which so much ignorance and malice of the times then conspired to have suppressed.

Martin had interceded with Lord Chief Justice Popham on Jonson's behalf in the quarrel. Had he asked Jonson to contribute to Vatum Chorus, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile differences with Marston, Jonson would have felt the obligation of ‘a thankful man’? Martin might have been Ignoto.

Chapman had been a follower of Essex, whose patronage of the Middle Temple had been abruptly ended by his rebellion and execution earlier in 1601; but Sir Henry Wotton resided there, and so did, from time to time, Walter Ralegh, Chapman's earlier patron and patron of Roydon. Shakespeare's company had played for the Middle Temple and were to do so again.

The occasion, as I have said, was the conferring of a knighthood on Salusbury in June 1601. I would think that the metropolitan connections came through his Inn, a centre of literary activity, and had little to do with his own bard, Chester. But now at last I come to the direct examination of biographic interpretations, particularly the identity of the Turtle and the Phoenix (as reversing the previous order) they are cited on the title page of Vatum Chorus. And I shall confine myself to two recent interpretations, those of Ernst Honigmann in Shakespeare, the Lost Years¹¹ and of Marie Axton in The Queen's Two Bodies—though I believe Mrs Axton has also lectured on the subject and may have developed new points. Ever since he edited King John for the Arden series in 1954, and dated it in the winter/spring of 1590-91, Honigmann has been engaged in filling in Shakespeare's ‘lost years’, and in the thirty intervening years he has grown, as might be expected, more convinced and doctrinaire. He has uncovered a number of connections with Lancashire. Shakespeare's membership of the company of Ferdinando Lord Strange, for six brief months fifth Earl of Derby, who played at the Rose in the spring of 1592 giving Harry the VI is probable enough. After Derby's death they became the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Honigmann associated a number of other plays with these years, and he accepts that by-no-means-proven theory that when on 12 September 1581 Alexander Hoghton of Lea in his will commended to his brother William Shakeshafte, with some bequests, that this was Shakespeare (then aged 17). In September 1586, when Salusbury married Ursula Halsall, it is Honigmann's contention that Shakespeare wrote The Phoenix and Turtle. He would be 22, seven years before he composed Venus and Adonis.

It is true that Honigmann has traced a number of Lancashire men with Shakespearean connections—John Cottom, John Weever, Thomas Savage; that his firm conviction about the early start sprang in the first place from his own devotion to Peter Alexander and his theory about Henry VI and Richard III. But he is steadily adopting more and more unlikely theories, among which I would place his views on The Phoenix and Turtle. Ursula's rank as acknowledged if illegitimate child of an Earl of Derby would not give the sort of elevation he supposes above the son of the illegitimate daughter of the Tudors! And after fifteen years of marriage and ten children the absence of progeny (which he thinks was corrected by Marston by referring to their eldest daughter as the new Phoenix) becomes as difficult as the presentation of this piece as ‘never before extant’. He thinks this means ‘not published’. Above all, however, these biographical pinpointings become more important for him than the poetic experience itself.

This would not greatly matter, if the biographic speculations were not so readily taken up by others. I was very depressed to read in the recently published work of Marie-Thérèse Jones-Davies, doyenne of French Shakespeareans, that she has adopted Honigmann's views without any demur. In Shakespeare: Le Théâtre du Monde,¹² she speaks of the poem as ‘sa première œuvre composée sans doute plus de dix ans avant sa publication, l'année même du mariage en 1586’. Her new biography is bound to be widely influential in the country of Abel Lefranc where biographical speculations have always flourished—although in her subsequent literary discussion of the poem (pp. 220-23) Mme Jones-Davies makes no use of Honigmann—and I suspect she incorporated him at the last minute.

Honigmann does not appear to have read Marie Axton's Chapter VIII in The Queen's Two Bodies, where she identifies the poem as an affirmation of political faith. The Queen is both Phoenix (in her body politic) and Dove; her subjects' loyalty transcends the personal and yet they are mortal; hence each is seen as Phoenix and Dove. Those who heard Quentin Skinner's lecture on the emergence of the idea of the State, as transcending all who participate, will realise that this notion was very slow to emerge; there are beginnings in Bodin and in Hobbes, but whilst all were prepared to advise a Prince, or define the duties of citizens in a republic, whilst demogogues' rule or tyrants' were equally abhorrent, the notion that the mutual loyalty of subjects is to prince and prince to an overriding power—the State itself—was left to the unacknowledged legislators like Shakespeare. There were no political definitions; the ageing queen refused to name her successor, and hence the desperate cry of some subjects that she must be immortal, the mask of eternal youth created by Hilliard in painting and by poets—particularly John Davies in his Hymnes of Astraea (1599) with his acrostics of Elizabeth Regina. Sir John Salusbury could have known Davies at the Middle Temple; he himself wrote acrostics of an ambiguously erotic kind addressed to his sister-in-law!

Mrs Axton works through Chester's part of the poem, interpreting this in terms of the views of poets in 1601. I have not myself paid enough attention to it to take a stand on this. Wilson Knight also worked through it in his book The Mutual Flame where the poem is related to the Sonnets, the Phoenix becomes the fair youth, the dove the poet, and the bi-sexual nature of the Divine Hermaphrodite is finally achieved. Kenneth Muir, in his early Voyage to Illyria¹³ had also seen the Phoenix as Southampton—this view had been put forward as early as 1893 by von Maunt but encounters the problem that the collection is meant for the honour of Salusbury, after his honouring by the Queen; and this implies, I think, that at some level they are represented in the Turtle's constancy and the Phoenix' bestowal of her love and favour upon him. Of course levels of meaning are not excluded; the only critic to dwell on this appears to be the Swiss, Hermann Straumann, who in his little booklet Phönix und Taube favours the Southampton identification but also stresses Mehrdeutigheit—multiplicity of meaning.¹⁴

Such, I think, was the creation of small intimate groups. There was the core meaning, clear to the inner circle, perhaps reinforced in performance; but such praise—or satire—was generally applicable, and could be transferred to the new contexts. Chester might well have made Ursula Salusbury a Phoenix in Lleweni and Elizabeth a Phoenix in London, or Jonson have diverted his Epode in the direction of the Countess of Bedford. The transcendent being, the Phoenix-to-be, for Shakespeare was produced by ‘Choice being mutual act of all our souls’ which made ‘merit her election’

                                                                                                                        and doth boil
As 'twere from forth us all, a man distilled
Out of our virtues

(Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.346-8)

—this transcendent being, the Great Leviathan, was still envisaged politically as a Monarch; though as Marston said not to be defined as God, Man or Woman. Mrs Axton makes some pertinent quotations from contemporary works that deal with the succession and imply the King of Scots as heir. Many were already in correspondence with him, among whom had been Essex. Plays on the succession took the form of dramas about the succession in Henry VIII's time, such as Thomas Lord Cromwell. Shakespeare, unable to express anything directly in drama by reason of the censorship, produced this enigmatic powerful credo for society debating the issues. Psychology observes that mourning may often be done in advance; the elegy on Sidney gave him the lead—in the legend of the Phoenix dying to be reborn, gave him the theme. None of the other poets used this in their tributes, though Marston comes nearest.

I would then, see the poem generally in the same light as Mrs Axton but I want to add a caveat and a few additional pieces of supporting evidence that have recently emerged from the iconographic studies of Elizabeth in her last years. The caveat rises from the dangers of biographical investigatory disease, whereby the historical basis takes precedence over the poetry itself. For me, the poetry is primary. It doesn't make much odds whether one can identify John Cottom, John Weever or Thomas Savage as people whom Shakespeare encountered, even if they all came from the Catholic strongholds of Lancashire.

The Phoenix was an icon for an old woman. So the septuagenarian Churchyard used her for the Queen in Churchyard's Challenge of 1593; also in 1595 in ‘A few plain verses of Truth against the flattery of time’, to

call your poets to account
for breaking of your bounds
in giving of your fame to those
fair flowers that soon that soon shall fade
and clean forget the white red rose
that God a Phoenix made.

Elizabeth herself used the Phoenix as image in the Armada Jewel which she gave to Francis Drake. It was perhaps a witty reference to the fireship in his naval action. The cult of Elizabeth as divinity began, according to Roy Strong's latest work Gloriana,¹⁵ after the end of her last wooing by Alençon, in 1582-4; she was past childbearing, marriage was no longer the answer to the succession. Her deification by Ralegh, Spenser, and in pageantry, with Hilliard's painted Mask of Eternal Youth created rituals which towards the end of the 1590s were felt to be difficult to sustain. The Arthurian continuity of the monarchy gave to Chester's history of King Arthur a Spenserian resonance; and as Mrs Axton notes, the whole volume was reissued in 1611 under the new title of The Annals of Great Britain or a Most Excellent Monument wherein may be seen all the Antiquities of the Kingdom; but this was the precise moment when the Arthurian legend was being strongly revived in the Arthurian claims in masque and tourney for Henry, Prince of Wales. It was quite topical. The phoenix image revived in 1604 for King James's Royal Entry in Dekker's device for the pageant at Soper Lane, Nova Felix Arabia—but only in the pun; the mourning female figure of Britannia Arabia was transformed by joy, whilst the boys of St Paul's represented the chirping of a tree full of birds.

In our crucial year of 1601, John Donne, most fashionable of poets, had ruined his career by his secret marriage to his employer's niece, Ann More; but Donne was able to revive the Phoenix image as a double being in ‘The Canonization’;

The Phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it
So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

Later he was to describe ‘two Phoenixes’ in the marriage ode for Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. The Queen often referred to herself as married to her country and so did James (‘the whole isle is my wife’); but he would never have conceded that a greater thing than he was born of the faithful union.

An addition has been recently made to the links between portraits and poetry in the last years of Elizabeth in the article by Mary C. Erler, ‘Sir John Davies and the Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth’.¹⁶ Roy Strong also associated this portrait with Davies' Hymnes of Astraea, but I think the credit must go to Dr Erler. In addition to Astraea, Davies wrote an entertainment which the Lord Keeper (Donne's alienated employer) gave at Harefield House in August 1602, and another given by Robert Cecil at his house in the Strand in December 1602—the last that Elizabeth was ever to attend (it is described in Manningham's Diary).¹⁷ It appears that the Rainbow Portrait, still the property of the Cecils at Hatfield House, is closely connected with this entry.

There was a contention between a maid, a wife and a widow. The very curious headdress worn by Elizabeth in the portrait had been identified earlier as that of the Thessalonian Wife, as delineated in J. J. Boissard, Habitus Variorum orbis gentium which also depicts a maid and a widow; Frances Yates made this identification in Astraea but Mary Erler also finds a Roman triad which is relevant in pose and gesture. She identifies the eyes and ears on the Queen's mantle as representing the Intelligence of state—and Cecil controlled Elizabeth's intelligence service. In the entertainment the Queen was presented with a rich robe by an Emissary of the Emperor of China and this bright sun-coloured mantle may well represent it, a gift from the wisdom of the East and the lands of sunrise. Her flowery bodice represents the eternal spring of her beauty, whilst the face is even younger, more rounded than the Hilliard mask conventionally prescribed. A warm radiant sensory glow emanates from the Queen. Many other symbolic details are interpreted in this portrait, which Dr Erler thinks may be a posthumous deification or glorified memorial of the Queen. She would have been flattered by the image; some of the jewels are identifiable with devices presented to her.

But Shakespeare's Funeral Rite is still to be explained unless, as I have said, the perceptive may do their mourning in advance of the event. This may suggest why the ardent vision broke out at the same time as the harshest disillusion of all that Hector and Troilus believed in. At the Inns of Court there was painful knowledge that behind Davies' vision of the Eternal Spring of Astraea there lurked a gaunt form shaken with rage, grey hair under the auburn wig, an uncertain temper that meant her maids of honour had to be dragooned into their rota of service. Shakespeare's credo of Quia impossibile est was not really addressed either to the Queen or to Salusbury. To identify the theme is not to tie it to biographical detail. A decade after she was dead Shakespeare was to write the prophecy of Elizabeth in his last play:

                                                                                                                                                      when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden Phoenix,
Her ashes new create another heir.

(King Henry VIII, V.iv.39-41)

It was, we now see it, a fatally inadequate one. But in public life Shakespeare wrote neither elegies for Elizabeth nor welcomes to James; he was writing Othello and Measure for Measure, plays of dark questioning.

Yet the Queen herself in her last Golden Speech to Parliament had given voice to the doctrine that the love of the people created the greater harmony of joint government, as she gracefully gave way on the subject of monopolies:

Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my reign that
I have reigned with your loves.

Notes

1. Ann Thompson Shakespeare's Chaucer (Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 1978).

2. Peter Dronke ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ Orbis Litterarum vol. XXIII (1968).

3. Robert Ellrodt ‘An anatomy of “The Phoenix and Turtle”.’ Allardyce Nicoll, (ed.), Shakespeare Survey 15, (1962).

4. A. H. N. Fairchild Englische Studien XXXIII (1904).

5. Carleton Brown Poems of Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (London, Early English Text Society, 1914), Extra Series 113.

6. Walter J. Ong ‘Metaphor and the Twinned Vision.’ Sewanee Review, vol. LXIII, Spring 1955.

7. G. Wilson Knight The Mutual Flame (London, Methuen, 1955).

8. Bernard H. Newdigate The Phoenix and Turtle (Oxford, The Shakespeare Head Press, 1937).

9. W. Reavley Gair The Children of Paul's (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982).

10. Marie Axton The Queen's Two Bodies (London, Royal Historical Society, 1977).

11. Ernst Honigmann Shakespeare, the Lost Years (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985).

12. Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies Shakespeare: Le Théâtre du Monde (Paris, Balland, 1987, p. 49.) ‘It was his first work, composed certainly more than ten years before its publication in 1586, the year of the marriage.’

13. Kenneth Muir and Sean O'Loughlin Voyage to Illyria (London, Methuen, 1937).

14. Hermann Straumann Phönix und Taube (Zurich, Artemis-Verlag, 1953).

15. Sir Roy Strong, Gloriana (London, Thames and Hudson, 1987).

16. In Modern Philology, vol. 84 No. 4 (1987), pp. 359-71.

17. Robert Parker Sorlien (ed.) Manningham's Diary (Hanover, University of New England Press for the University of Rhode Island Press, 1976).