“There is no Excellent Beauty,” declared Bacon, “that hath not some Strangeness in the Proportion.” Strange and beautiful, beautiful in its strangeness, is Shakespeare's The Phoenix and Turtle—at least so it must seem to the eye that does not find (as some have found) its brilliance “frigid and perfunctory.” Read in its historical context, however, the poem insists on its own nonaesthetic oddity, forming part of a collection with which it is in many respects incongruent.

The Phoenix and Turtle was one of a number of works by prominent poets (Jonson, Marston, Chapman, and one Ignoto, besides Shakespeare) that were appended to Robert Chester's Loves Martyr.¹ This clumsy narrative poem joined with two sets of lyrics, which Chester published in 1601 and dedicated to his patron, Sir John Salusbury of Lleweni, is irredeemably strange. It tells the story of a downcast female phoenix, a victim of envy who despairs of offspring (D^r, C4^v), and of a male turtle dove, who laments the loss of his “Turtle that is dead” (R3^r). The pair are introduced by “Dame Nature,” whom Jove has commissioned to bring them together. Despite the mythical phoenix's reputation for palingenesis without the need for a mate, and despite the turtle's proverbial faithfulness to its spouse even after its beloved's death, the couple begin to burn in the flames of sexual passion. The Phoenix desires union and offspring:

          to yon next adjoyning grove we'le flye,
And gather sweete wood for to make our flame,
And in a manner sacrificingly,
Burne both our bodies to revive one name. …

(R4^v)

The Turtle walks into the kindled fire “with smiling cheare,” followed by the Phoenix, who embraces the bones from which she hopes will spring “another Creature” that “shall possesse both our authority” (S2^r). After the poem's “Finis” (the first of three signaled conclusions), a Pelican, who had been allowed to witness the loving immolation of the Phoenix and the Turtle, eulogizes them, imagining a child that will combine in itself the qualities for which the parents are distinguished: “beautie …, love and chastitie …, wits rarietie …, constancie” (S2^v). A “Conclusion” announces the birth of a new “princely Phoenix”; she is even more splendid in appearance than her mother, and her heart is filled with her father's “perpetuall love” (S3^v). On the way to its culmination, Chester twice interrupts his story with long digressions: a life of King Arthur and a descriptive catalog of the flora, fauna, and mineralia of “Paphos,” the island on which Phoenix and Turtle meet. The narrative is followed by forty-three pages of love lyrics, or “Cantoes,” some of them addressed “to faire Phoenix … by the Paphian Dove” (S3^v).

Shakespeare, like most of the volume's other writers of verses that are, as a preface announces, “consecrated” to Salusbury (Ignoto, who speaks only of a phoenix, is the exception), accepts the premise that poetry about a phoenix and turtle may make some sense. His poem, however, contradicts the “sense” of Chester and everyone else. His Phoenix and Turtle have died not only in love but in truth:

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

(56-58)

Whereas Chester, Ignoto, and Marston speak of a new Phoenix “borne,” and the others address themselves to a Phoenix and/or a Turtle who are living, Shakespeare makes clear that his birds are “dead” and have left “no posterity” (67, 59). These discrepancies have especially puzzled commentators who have decided that Loves Martyr is an allegory, the meanings of which the chorus of complimentary poets may have known.²

A. B. Grosart felt confident that Chester's Phoenix and Turtle represented Queen Elizabeth and the earl of Essex, but his theory was ridiculed in the nineteenth century soon after it was proposed. It was reasserted almost a hundred years later, with much greater subtlety and sophistication but little more persuasiveness, by William Matchett.³ Since 1913, allegorically minded readers of Loves Martyr have inclined to the view of Carleton Brown, who then proposed that the work, or at least those parts of it that told a love story, was “designed as a nuptial poem” to celebrate the marriage in 1586 of Chester's patron, Sir John Salusbury (the Turtle Dove), to Ursula Stanley (the Phoenix), illegitimate but acknowledged daughter of the fourth earl of Derby, and to congratulate them on the birth in 1587 of their eldest child Jane (the new Phoenix referred to by Chester in his “Conclusion”). Why a nuptial poem should be published fifteen years after the wedding Brown could not convincingly explain.⁴

Whether or not Brown's reading of Loves Martyr is justified, Shakespeare's poem, with its childless and defunct couple, cannot be made allegorically consonant with Chester's work. In 1601, Sir John and Ursula Salusbury were in their prime of life; ten children had been born to them, four of whom survived. One may postulate, as Brown did, that Shakespeare was little acquainted with the dedicatee and his family, and wrote The Phoenix and Turtle in “courteous compliance” with a request but with no intention to participate in an allegorical project, if indeed he were aware of it.⁵ Or one may conjecture, as E. A. J. Honigmann has done in modifying Brown's thesis, that Shakespeare, through his supposed association with the Stanleys, knew the Salusburys quite well but wrote his poem before the birth of their first child, unaware of his work's future irrelevancies and literary fate.⁶ To accept either of these hypotheses, however, would be to attribute to Shakespeare a gaucherie even more pronounced than Chester's. It would hardly be “courteous” for a poet to write so definitely of irremediable death and childlessness if he had the slightest hint that the collection to which he contributed were (even retrospectively) epithalamic. And it would be an indiscretion foolish in the extreme for a poet who knew the bride and groom to predict on the occasion of their marriage that they would, through their own idealistic choice of celibacy, die without issue:

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

(59-61)

Were Shakespeare to have been so careless or insensitive, he would have reversed the order of another act of tactlessness dramatized in 1601, when in Elsinore “the funeral bak'd meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” (Hamlet, I.ii.180-81). The Phoenix and Turtle is too radical and too assured in its pronouncements to make allowances for an imperfectly understood present or a wholly opaque future. It ought to be read, even if it must be done so speculatively, in the light of what the poet might have known, not under the shadow of an ignorance that he nowhere affects or tries to conceal.

And what did Shakespeare know? Almost certainly, Loves Martyr—or at least of it. The union of a Phoenix and Turtle, given their usual significance in myth and emblem, is so outlandish that one must believe that Shakespeare, like most of his fellow contributors to the book, took the donnée of his poem from Chester's. He accepted a task that he would complete with a genius that his predecessor utterly lacked; but it is not immediately evident that he was familiar with more than the basic given of his narrative source. Perhaps the “parliament” of the gods with which Chester's poem opens helped to remind Shakespeare of Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, which seems to have influenced his depiction of the congregation of birds at the beginning of The Phoenix and Turtle.⁷ And as Matchett has noted, there are some close verbal parallels between the Pelican's speech in Loves Martyr and Shakespeare's poem:

CHESTER'S “PELLICAN”

With what a spirit did the Turtle flye
Into the fire …,
And both together in that fire do burne
Because that two in one is put by Nature
The one hath given … beautie,
The other gives … love and chastitie:
The one hath given … rarietie
If that the Phoenix had bene separated,
And from the gentle Turtle had bene parted,
Love had been murdred in the infancie.
Without these two no love at all can be.
Let the love wandring wits but learne of these,
To die together, so their grief to ease.
Though as these two did, deaths arrest
they prove.

SHAKESPEARE

Phoenix and the Turtle fled,
In a mutual flame from hence.
Single Nature's double name,
Neither two nor one was called
Beauty, Truth, and Rarity
So they loved as love in twain
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Truth may seem, but cannot be.
To this urn let those repair
That are either true or fair;
For these dead birds sigh a prayer.
If what parts can so remain.(8)

Matchett has argued conclusively, however, that Chester is in this case echoing Shakespeare, having added the speech of the Pelican (after the original “Finis”) in an attempt to adjust his poem at the end to the conceptions of all the contributing poets who had treated his theme each in his own way.⁹ Other evidence that Shakespeare read Chester is not so strictly verbal and must be offered later in a discussion of his purpose in writing The Phoenix and Turtle. That purpose was, it will be suggested, parodic; and a parodist must work with known parallels and oppositions.

Did Shakespeare know, or know of, the Salusburys? Honigmann's suggestion that he was acquainted with them through his ties to the Stanleys, plausible despite the unlikelihood that the young Shakespeare wrote a wedding poem for the Lleweni household, remains intriguingly conjectural. There were other ways, however, in which Shakespeare might have met or learned about the nobleman to whom his poem would be dedicated. An amateur poet himself (or so he wished to be known),¹⁰ Sir John Salusbury is described by Chester as familiar in London with “Court-bewtefying Poets” who have sung “golden theames” to him.¹¹ At least one London poet made him a personal gift of his verses. Among the Salusbury papers are holograph copies of an ode by Ben Jonson and of two of the four poems Jonson contributed to Loves Martyr.¹² In the commendatory work “Epos,” Jonson speaks of “our Dove, / Grac'd with a Phoenix love” as though he were referring beneath the veil of allegory to a couple whose virtues he knew well enough to extol (Bb1^r). Since Jonson and Shakespeare had become colleagues by 1598, when the Lord Chamberlain's Men staged Every Man in His Humour and Shakespeare acted the part of Knowell, it is reasonable to believe that Jonson could have been the source of any information that Shakespeare required in writing a poem for Salusbury. This is so even if, as some believe, Jonson and Shakespeare were at odds in 1601 over issues arising from “the war of the theatres.”¹³ But then the question becomes more vexing than ever: why would Shakespeare, knowing his dedicatee, compose a work for him that appears to make little use of his knowledge? An answer may be found by looking beyond or through appearances.

The family of Sir John Salusbury was not noted for its idealization of “married chastity,” either in Shakespeare's sense of conjugal celibacy or in the more usual meaning of marital fidelity. Salusbury's mother, Catherine of Berain, was four times married and bore seven children. She was the granddaughter of Sir Roland Velville, an illegitimate son of Henry VII. John Salusbury married one of the “natural” daughters of the fourth earl of Derby, had with her ten children, and one son (named Velivel after his illegitimate forebear) from an illicit union with a woman named Grace Peake. Salusbury also harbored, if one is to judge by poems attributed to and written for him, an adulterous passion for Dorothy Halsall (his wife's sister and child of Derby and his mistress), and perhaps for other women as well.¹⁴

Ursula Salusbury once privately recorded a terse complaint about her husband's waywardness, in a ditty composed in response to verses of his in which he had celebrated the value of self-control.

I would I once might see in you
such reason for to raingne
w(ch) conquer myght your Apeatite
booth winn you fame and gayne.

finis V. S.¹⁵

But Sir John himself, operating casually in an atmosphere of sexual freedom that seems to have been almost taken for granted, was not averse to having his ranging love advertised. Some of his poems addressed acrostically to Dorothy Halsall (in one of which he refers to her as “sole solace of my harte”) were left unpublished in a family manuscript. Chester, however, not only knew of his patron's extramarital attachment, he wrote acrostic verses celebrating it, in one instance (dated 1598) intertwining Sir John's name with Dorothy's.¹⁶ The Salusbury-Halsall relationship was actually publicized by Robert Parry, another Salusbury client, in a volume of love poetry entitled Sinetes Passions uppon his Fortunes (1597), which contained six poems spelling Dorothy Halsall's name. All of these were associated by Parry with his “patron,”¹⁷ and half of them contain either Salusbury's name or initials. One might infer from these facts that Salusbury was proud of his own and his family's sexual irregularities, and was happy to have a more ethically punctilious world aware of his candid self-regard. Indeed, there is much in Loves Martyr itself to support such an inference.

The theory that Chester's work (whatever its accretions over fifteen years) was originally a wedding present, allegorically shadowing the course of love that brought the wedded pair together, is liable to a number of objections. The poem's characters do not always conform to what is known of Sir John Salusbury and Ursula Stanley—even if it is assumed that the tale of love was conceived before their second year of marriage. Unlike Sir John, the Turtle is a widower, grieving for his “Turtle that is dead” (R3^r).¹⁸ There is nothing known about Ursula that would have placed her in the position of the Phoenix, who is obligated to a lover other than the Turtle (“A dark dimme Taper that I must adore” [D3^r]), one whom she despises but must pretend to cherish (her “Beautie” and her “Vertues” are “captivate, / To Love, dissembling Love that [she] did hate” [D3^v]). Until she learns of the Turtle, the Phoenix is diffident of her ability to experience sexual passion; she has lived in a country “barren” and “saplesse” and her blood is “dead” (D3^r, D^v). But Nature assures her that the “Envie” that keeps her from loving where she can be satisfied will be overcome (D2^r). The new fire that she will taste will be “secret,” however (D2^r), enjoyed “in secrecies sweet Bower” where envy cannot reach (D2^v). Although this privacy is not incompatible with marriage, it is more suggestive of a hidden amour. Marriage is in fact never mentioned in Chester's story of the Phoenix and the Turtle; the female Phoenix proposes sex, not a wedding, which it would have been the male's place to initiate. And the two birds consummate their love without ceremony, observed only by the Pelican (whom the Phoenix angrily calls a “spy” [S^r])—a representative, no doubt, of the poet who must be aware of their union in order to celebrate it after the fact. It is true that the couple wish for progeny, and the poet as an afterthought announces the birth of “another Princely Phoenix”; but as Salusburys and Stanleys both showed in their family histories, marriage is not necessary to realize such a hope.

It is also true, however, that in the poem “chastity” is esteemed. The Phoenix insists on this virtue in her lover:

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 burne but by true Loves desire.

And the Turtle assures her,

A spot of that foule monster [n'er] did staine
          These drooping feathers …

(R4^r-v)

Yet one can infer from Loves Martyr that the value of chastity is not absolute. Chester writes at length about the felix stuprum of Uther Pendragon, whose sexual sin gave the world King Arthur (as the unblessed passions of Henry VII and the earl of Derby gave England Sir John Salusbury and the Stanley sisters [F2^v-G4^r]). The Dove himself, addressing the Phoenix in Petrarchan verses placed after the “Conclusion” of their story, finds “Chastnesse” and “Constraint” an “Enemie” rather than a friend of love (S4^r). Nor in these poems is the meaning of sexual virtue conventional. The Turtle pleads with the Phoenix,

Make not a Iewell of nice Chastity,
Muster and summon all thy wits in one,
My heart to thee sweares perfect constancy. …

(T^r)

He thus defines a chaste heart as one true to its love, not to an abstract principle or to its official vows. He and his mistress can have their chastity and their license too: “To change in love is a base simple thing. … / Deare is that Love combin'd with Chastity” (X2^v).

Viewed as a whole, then, Chester's poems constitute, instead of an allegory of wedded love, a myth that sanctions the kind of love that his patron found congenial. The title page announces his intention of “Allegorically shadowing the truth of Love,” not of specific lovers (A2^r). Readers might try to discover in Loves Martyr allusions to the Salusburys' courtship and marriage, as Marston and Jonson seemed to do in addressing their praise to living persons. Chester himself in a preface to his work requests that “the Phoenix” accept his praises (A4^r). But the bird of compliment need not be identical with the bird of passion; and a Dove like Salusbury had more than one Phoenix in more than one nest.

It is not likely, however, that Loves Martyr was written solely or even primarily to extol the wonders of “Love.” Published and dedicated to Salusbury in 1601, the book was probably meant to celebrate his new knighthood, conferred in June of that year, and indeed to declare proudly his fitness for the honor. Such an assertion may have been felt necessary because Sir John had ardent enemies (who apparently contributed to the irreversible decline of his political fortunes soon after his knighting),¹⁹ and because anyone inclined to thwart his ambitions might point with advantage to a certain lawlessness in his temperament.²⁰ In 1593 Salusbury almost killed his cousin Owen Salusbury in a duel and fled to avoid arrest. In 1600, it was reported to the Privy Council that John Salusbury's retainers had assaulted an alderman and justice of the peace. In the fall of 1601, Sir John was involved in a riot over the Denbighshire Parliamentary election.²¹ And then there was, of course, his sexual adventurism, which he took no trouble to conceal and would not have disadvantaged him had not his character been questionable on other grounds. Chester's volume would remind the world of his patron's noble origins—in the line of Henry VII, inheritor of King Arthur's mantle—and would assure anyone who doubted Salusbury's probity that the “Lion of Lleweni”²² was a true embodiment of his motto, “Posse et Nolle Nobile.”²³ Sir John was like the lion who appears in Chester's natural history, powerful but controlled—even in his just destructiveness:

          His strength remaineth most within his head,
          His vertue in his heart is compassed.
He never wrongs a man, nor hurts his pray,
If they will yeeld submissive at his feete. …
Then is't not pittie that the craftie Foxe,
The ravenous Wolfe, the Tyger, and the Beare,
The slow-past-dull-brain'd heavie Oxe,
Should strive so good a state to overweare?
          The Lion sleepes and laughes to see them strive,
          But in the end leaves not a beast alive.

(P4^v)

Furthermore, he resembled the Turtle in his potency and heroic passion, “chaste” and “constant” in his own defiantly personal way.

Despite the propaganda of Loves Martyr, Salusbury would, it seems, lose his position and influence at Court precisely because his spirit proved “ungovernable.”²⁴ The poets who attached their works to Chester's in tribute to “the love and merite” of that “true-noble Knight” (Z^r) could not have been wholly unaware that his merit was more qualified than his retainer could or did say. Ignoto and Marston write only about one or the other Phoenix, ignoring the Dove whose virtues might be comparable to Salusbury's. Chapman puts “the male Turtle” into the title of his poem but is more concerned about the Phoenix, whose “merit” has proved strong enough to bind the Dove's “instinct” but cannot suppress his need for the change and immoderation which she has made possible for him:

Her firmenesse cloth'd him in varietie;
Excesse of all things, he joyd in her measure. …

(Aa2^v)

In his “Epos,” Jonson distinguishes between “Love” and “Desire” and feels constrained to defend the Dove against an implied charge of wantonness:

          No (Vice) we let thee know,
Though thy wild Thoughts with Sparrowes wings do flie,
          Turtles can chastly die;
And yet (in this t'expresse our selfe more cleare)
          We do not number here
Such Spirites as are onely continent,
          Because Lusts meanes are spent:
Or those, who doubt the common mouth of Fame,
          And for their Place, or Name,
Cannot so safely sinne; Their Chastitie
          Is meere Necessitie,
Nor meane we those, whom Vowes and Conscience
          Have fild with Abstinence:
.....But we propose a person like our Dove,
          Grac'd with a Phoenix love. …

(Aa4^v-Bb^r)

Yet even Jonson, perhaps the closest of the London writers to Salusbury, acknowledges that the Dove's “Mind … knowes the weight of Guilt” and tactfully warns the Turtle (by assuming that he “will” be wise) to impress upon his sensual nature the moral wisdom that “Man may securely sinne, but safely never” (Bb^v).

Jonson's apparent discomfort with his eulogy was remarked by at least one of his literary adversaries from the war of the theaters. At some point in 1601, Thomas Dekker (along with Marston) had been ridiculed by Jonson in his play Poetaster. Dekker returned the favor in Satiromastix, lampooning Jonson in the character of Horace. This play spread its mockery thickly and broadly, but was especially hard on Jonson the poet and patronage seeker, in particular for his connection with Sir John Salusbury and Loves Martyr.²⁵ Like Jonson, Dekker's Horace had for a patron an amorous Welsh knight, Sir Vaughan ap Rees (the Welsh Salusbury's maternal grandfather was Tudor ap Robert Vychan).²⁶ Like Salusbury, Sir Vaughan doted on his “Rosamond, the second” (the first was Henry II's famous mistress), to whom he addressed love-notes ghostwritten by his hired poet (II.ii.47-49; V.ii.270-74). Some of these billets-doux may have been “Acrostics,” for which Horace had a reputation (I.ii.90; IV.iii.87-88) and which, as is obvious from their profusion in Loves Martyr and elsewhere, were popular with Salusbury and his penmen Chester and Parry. In Satiromastix the lust of King William Rufus for a knight's wife parallels, in Loves Martyr, the passion of King Uther for Igraine; Dekker's comical treatment of chastity and constancy (V.ii.108) seems in satiric counterpoint to the solemn pronouncements of Chester and Jonson on these subjects; and some of Dekker's language may have been meant to parody Jonson's (compare, for example, the play's phrase “let me chastly dye” [V.i.54] with Jonson's “Turtles can chastly die” from “Epos” [Aa4^v]).²⁷ Among Horace's shortcomings portrayed in Satiromastix is disloyalty to his patrons: he fawns for favor, then can turn critical of those who proffer it—as the thick-witted Sir Vaughan himself suspects before the truth is spoken openly (II.i.116-21; IV.ii.62-63). Dekker saw an opportunity to characterize as ingratitude Jonson's conscientiousness as an epideictic poet—his instinctive need to temper flattery with cautionary truth, as shown in “Epos.”²⁸ What Jonson considered tact and honesty the satirist represented as hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness.

Temporarily estranged from the difficult Jonson, it was Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who staged Satiromastix late in 1601. By making laughable the follies not only of a vexatious poet but of his Welsh patron, they would seem to have been at cross-purposes with their own playwright, whose Phoenix and Turtle had been published along with Jonson's poems in Loves Martyr, a book dedicated in all its parts to Sir John Salusbury. One should not assume, however, that Shakespeare's intentions were the same as those of the other writers who honored, however cautiously, the newly made knight. He may have been inclined by his ties with the Stanleys to provide something for a literary project undertaken on their in-law's behalf, or he may have been moved by other considerations; but he would do so entirely on his own terms.

It is not just that he composed a poem that in its complexity and depth should have embarrassed Chester—as though he wished to prove that Love and Constancy and Death were themes too exalted for the fatuous treatment they had been given in Loves Martyr. It is not even that, in general terms, he determined to offer conciseness and definition where there had been sprawling confusion, a rich comi-tragic tone instead of a preposterous one, a sense of ideals that were mysterious, wondrous, and doomed rather than a flattering, uncritical proclamation of perfection embodied or achieved. Unlike his fellow contributors to Chester's volume, Shakespeare refuses to inflect the author's myth; in The Phoenix and Turtle he creates an alternative to it. For birds who die a metaphorical death of sexual surrender he substitutes a Phoenix and a Turtle who simply and literally die. Instead of relaxing the idea of chastity, he radically restricts it, replacing a Turtle of ambiguous constancy with a couple whom, in Jonson's words, “Vowes and Conscience / Have fild with Abstinence.” Shakespeare's lovers do not hope for “posteritie”; they deny it to themselves. There is something almost “monkish” about them as they live and pass away in their celibate perfection. And indeed, the poem is formed out of a religious matrix, a specifically Catholic one, which commentators have tended to neglect in their concern with the work's supposedly “neo-Platonic” elements.²⁹

Ever since Arthur Fairchild's pioneering study of the sources and analogues of The Phoenix and Turtle, it has been taken for granted that Shakespeare's inspiration for his congress of mourning birds came from Chaucer's Parlement of Foules. The correspondences of language and situation in parts of the two poems are, as Fairchild stated, “apparent.”³⁰ But while Chaucer's fowl come together on Saint Valentine's Day to choose their mates for the coming year, Shakespeare's assemble for funeral obsequies. The different occasions and moods suggest additional influences. One suspects that Shakespeare thought of Chaucer as he read or recalled an early sixteenth-century poem of John Skelton, Phyllyp Sparowe, which mentions and depends upon Chaucer but parallels The Phoenix and Turtle in ways that the Parlement does not.³¹ Skelton's mock funeral elegy for the pet sparrow of young Jane Scrope, a pupil of Benedictine Nuns, gathers together for a requiem mass a large contingent of birds, including the “byrde of Araby … A phenex” (not in Chaucer) (513-18), the “turtyll most trew” (465), the “owle” (442),“egle” (550), “swan” (434), and “crowe” (414)—Shakespeare's entire aviary. Officiating at Phillip's services is the “Robyn Redbrest,” who “shall be the preest / The requiem masse to synge” (399-401), as the swan (more appropriately because of its color and its association with tragedy) presides over those of Shakespeare's couple:

Let the priest in surplice white,
That defunctive music can,
Be the death-divining swan,
Lest the requiem lack his right.

(13-16)

Shakespeare's “bird of loudest lay,” the herald and “trumpet” of the proceedings, may be a descendent of Skelton's “crane with his trumpe” (433) as well as of Chaucer's “crane, the geaunt, with his trompes soune” (344); it is Skelton who describes his choristers as coming “Every byrde in his laye” (394).

Interspersed throughout Phyllyp Sparowe are fragments of and references to the Roman Liturgy of the Dead: prayers and Psalms from the Vespers of the Dead (marked in the poem by Latin tags such as “Placebo,” “Dilexi,” “Heu, heu, me,” “Magnificat,” and “Lauda, anima mea, Dominum”); the Mass for the Dead, with its “Gospell,” “Pystell,” and “Grayle” (Gradual); the Absolution over the Tomb; and the Commendation of the Soul.³² Shakespeare follows Skelton in at least alluding, if very discreetly, to parts of this liturgy. The Phoenix and Turtle not only features a bird-priest singing a “requiem” (a term which need not refer to the Missa pro Defunctis,³³ though the echo of Phyllyp Sparowe suggests that it does in this instance), it seems influenced in form and language by one of the Requiem's best-known segments, the Sequence Dies Irae. The Latin hymn is composed of eighteen stanzas of octosyllabic lines in trochaics, to which is added a final prayer (“Pie Jesu, Domine, / Dona eis requiem”) in heptasyllables. Each stanza is a single-rhyme tercet, except for the last, a quatrain rhyming aabb. Shakespeare's poem too has eighteen stanzas in trochaics and contains lines of both seven and eight syllables. Beginning rather than ending with quatrains of two rhymes (abba) it concludes with single-rhyme tercets, heptasyllabic like the “Pie Jesu.” The two requiem poems share vocabulary and imagery as well as structure:

Other parts of the Burial Service also seem to have left a mark on the wording of The Phoenix and Turtle, as suggested by a number of verbal likenesses: “in conspectu Altissimi” and “in the Phoenix' sight”; “lux perpetua luceat eis” and “between them love did shine”; “Deus qui proprium est” and “Property”; “fidelium defunctorum” and “defunctive” (Shakespeare's only use of the word); “semini ejus” and “posterity”; “in aeternum” (used absolutely) and “to eternity”; “Chorus Angelorum” and “chorus”; “praeibis … ante faciem Domini parare vias ejus” and “Thou … harbinger …, precurrer of the fiend”; “eum … junxit fidelium turmis” (“turma” = “troop”) and “To this troop come thou not near.” The crow who procreates with the “breath” he gives and takes may be “Treble-dated” not because he is old or long-lived, but because, like the avian assistants in Phyllyp Sparowe, he helps the swan-priest with a ceremony that includes Vespers for the Dead: “Dominus custodiat introitum tuum, et exitum tuum: ex hoc, nunc, et usque in saeculum” (“May the Lord protect your going in and going out [cf. breathing] henceforth, now, and unto eternity” [three “dates”?]). At about the time that Shakespeare's poem was published, it should be recalled, his concern with “obsequy so strict” was on display in the argument over Ophelia's “maim'd” burial rites, and a “Chorus Angelorum” was being asked to sing Hamlet to his “rest.”³⁴ John Shakespeare was dying, and, if a recusant and without a priest, would have to face his end as did the elder Hamlet, “Unhous'led, disappointed, unanel'd,” to be buried in a service that excluded prayers for his soul.

The hint of Catholic ritual in The Phoenix and Turtle is matched by the poet's explicit resort to Roman theology. The idealization of married celibacy is, of course, primarily medieval and Catholic.³⁵ Prayer for the dead, as part of a requiem or as a private devotion, is a Catholic practice, which the English church at first retained but removed from the Book of Common Prayer in 1552 and, in the Elizabethan Homily “On Prayer,” officially condemned as pointless—Protestants believing the dead to be either in heaven or in hell where intercession could not avail.³⁶ Shakespeare speaks as though the theological implications of his statements were unproblematical. And there is evidence that as he wrote his poem he had in mind works of contemporary Catholic literature, specifically the poetry and prose of the Jesuit Robert Southwell. The influence of Southwell on Shakespeare has long been suspected but never fully investigated.³⁷ When seen in The Phoenix and Turtle, it helps to account for the “scholastic” tone, rare if not unique in Shakespeare, of some rather metaphysical passages.

The critic J. V. Cunningham recognized that certain lines of Shakespeare's poem were sharp with the precision of scholastic philosophy:³⁸

So they loved as love in twain
Had the essence but in one,
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance and no space was seen
'Twixt this Turtle and his queen:
But in them it were a wonder.
So between them love did shine,
That the Turtle saw his right
Flaming in the Phoenix' sight;
Either was the other's mine.
Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together,
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded:
That it cried, “How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.”
Whereupon it made this threne
To the Phoenix and the Dove. …

(25-50)

Arguing that Shakespeare uses terms like “essence” and “distincts” in a technical and specifically medieval sense, Cunningham defines, and claims that Shakespeare conceives of, the relationship between Phoenix and Turtle “in terms of the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity, which forms … the principle of order in the poem.” No other philosophical construct, not even neo-Platonism with its vision of the union of two in one through a process of absorption, furnishes an analogy in which two persons can share an essence yet be distinct. Shakespeare, then, must have been “acquainted with scholastic notions [and] capable of thinking and feeling in those terms.”³⁹ Perhaps so. But he need not have read Aquinas's systematic theology to have been familiar with these “notions.” They were to be found in “A holy Hymne,” Southwell's English rendering of Aquinas's Lauda, Sion, salvatorem, a liturgical celebration not of the Trinity but of the Eucharist.

In Southwell's translation is a passage that asserts Christ's whole presence, as a single unity, in the Eucharist's two “kindes,” which appear to be bread and wine but are in fact the body and blood of the Redeemer:

Under kindes two in appearance
Two in shew but one in substance,
Lie thinges beyond comparison:
Flesh is meat, blood drinke most heavenly:
Yet is Christ in each kinde wholy
Most free from al division.

(37-42)⁴⁰

Shakespeare's paradox, “love in twain / Had the essence but in one, / Two distincts, division none,” is embodied in Southwell's words: “Two in shew but one in substance … in each kinde wholy / Most free from al division.” The failure of the analogy suggested by the qualifying “in shew” (Shakespeare's lovers are real, not images) is only apparent. The “appearance[s]” (“species”) to which the hymn refers are those of the bread and wine, “under” which is a reality that is one-in-two: Christ is really and entirely present in each of the species (of the flesh that seems bread, of the blood that seems wine), and present as the “one” substance (free from “division”) composed of the “two” elements (flesh and blood) which remain “distinct.”⁴¹ The Trinity, although it is one-in-three, is a more obvious analogy for the union of two loving persons in one “essence” than is the Eucharist; but both mysteries could have contributed to the scholastic formulations of The Phoenix and Turtle.

The reason to consider Southwell an influence on Shakespeare, beyond the closeness of their wording in the passages just examined, is that Shakespeare's poem seems indebted to other writings of the Jesuit author. Southwell has an entire lyric dedicated to the praise of the celibate marriage of Mary and Joseph:

No carnall love this sacred league procurde,
All vaine delights were farre from their assent,
Though both in wedlocke bandes themselves assurde,
Yet streite by vow they seald their chast intent.

(“Her Spousals,” 13-16)

It was not their infirmity that kept them virginal, it was married chastity. In Saint Peters Complaint (part of the same collection) there is language that anticipates Shakespeare's, especially in lines that are proximate to Southwell's mention of “Turtle twins” (433): “starres: … a love” (410-11) (“stars of love” [PHT, (Phoenix and Turtle) 51]); “simples are by compounds farre exceld” (417) (“Simple were so well compounded” [PHT, 44]); “sole … Arabian trees” (453, 481) (“sole Arabian tree” [PHT, 2]); “Swan that … never sings but obsequies of death” (451-52) (“obsequy … death-divining swan” [PHT, 12-15]); “none other quintessence … Love, where I lov'de … No love more lov'de” (461, 499-501) (“So they loved as love in twain / Had the essence but in one” [PHT, 25-26]). The word “threne” (a lamentation) is used by Shakespeare only in The Phoenix and Turtle; Southwell writes of “threnes” in Saint Peters Complaint (39). Describing Christ's eyes as “Flames” as well as “mirrours,” St. Peter exclaims, “Much more my image in those eyes was grac'd, / Then in my selfe”; by “seeing things,” he says, they “make things worth the sight” (349, 367, 371-77). The Turtle, when he looked into his beloved's eyes, “saw his right / Flaming in the Phoenix' sight” (PHT, 34-35).⁴² Shakespeare's “precurrer” (6) is a hapax legomenon, inspired by the Latin “praecurrere” (“to run before”), a form of which appears in Southwell's Epistle of Comfort (“praecucurrit” [165^v]).⁴³ At a point in this prose work Southwell asserts, against Protestant and other heretics, the preeminent value of celibate “chastitie,” and (on the same page) the legitimacy of “prayer for the deade” (84^r). Surrounding these declarations, on whose theology, of course, Shakespeare's poem relies, is a vocabulary that becomes—even as it overlaps in places with the liturgical and theological language already noted—Shakespearean:

Somewhat further away in the Epistle can be discovered the “dead birds” of Shakespeare's poem (“the very byrdes … fell downe dead” [64^v]) as well as its interpenetrable “self”:

[COMFORT]

when he gave me him selfe, he restored
me unto my selfe

(37(r))

[PHOENIX]

Either was the other's mine …
.....… the selfe was not the same.

(36-38)

Of what significance is it, then, that Shakespeare should have dedicated to Sir John Salusbury The Phoenix and Turtle, a poem that violates the assumptions of the myth that was meant to suggest the patron's excellence, and that derives much of its shape and content from texts and notions of a proscribed religion? An answer can be only speculative, but there are grounds for plausible speculation in the history of the Salusbury family. That history, in Sir John's time, was very much complicated by the politics of religious allegiance. As the critic Thomas P. Harrison once recognized, the latent and overt Catholicism of North Wales in general, and the Catholic reputation of the Salusburys in particular, might have bred suspicion about John Salusbury's fitness for the public advancement that he so clearly sought;⁴⁴ and it is likely that Loves Martyr was meant to provide, among other things, reassurance about the new knight of Lleweni's orthodoxy.

The greatest stain on the family's reputation came from the participation of Thomas Salusbury, John's elder brother, in the Babington plot against the Queen. An unapologetic papist (“I have lyved a catholique, and so will I dye,” he proclaimed on the scaffold), Thomas was executed three months before John's wedding. A copy of the now famous prison-poem “My prime of youth,” by Thomas's fellow conspirator Chidiock Tichborne, is in a Salusbury manuscript, indicating that someone in the family did not fear obtaining and keeping the words of an outlaw who shared the dead Salusbury's subversive religious sentiments.⁴⁵ It seems that there were Catholics everywhere among John Salusbury's connections. A Denbighshire relative, William Salusbury (1520?-1600?), converted briefly to Catholicism, having claimed that he had been raised in that faith. John Salusbury of Rûg entered the Jesuit College at Valladolid in 1595, was ordained a priest in 1600, and was thought by an English informant ready to return to England in 1602 (he arrived in 1603 and entered the Society of Jesus two years later).⁴⁶ The Catholic Hugh Holland (author for the First Folio of a sonnet on the “Scenicke Poet, Master William Shakespeare”) was a Salusbury “cousin.” Another relation, Thomas Price, married into a Montgomeryshire family of recusants “long distinguished for its loyalty to Rome.”⁴⁷ On the Stanley side were, or had been, as Honigmann has put it, “an embarrassing number of known or suspected Catholics”: Lady Margaret Clifford, wife of Henry Stanley (fourth earl of Derby and father of Ursula); her mother-in-law, Margaret countess of Derby and her daughters; Henry's brother, Thomas Stanley of Winwick; Henry's brothers-in-law: Lords Stafford and Moreley, Sir John Arundell, and Sir Nicholas Pointz.⁴⁸ Henry's son Ferdinando, Lord Strange and later fifth earl of Derby, was thought close enough to papist sympathies to be approached by Catholics (or, according to one theory, by the devious Cecils) as candidate for a tolerant successor to Elizabeth.⁴⁹ His kinsman William Stanley turned Catholic after fighting under Leicester in the Low Countries, handed over Deventer to the Spaniards (in 1587), and spent the remainder of his life in the pay of the Kings of Spain. William's brother Edward, soldiering with him on the Continent, also defected (as did other Stanleys, and at least one Salusbury) and eventually studied for the priesthood in Rome.⁵⁰ Dorothy, Sir John Salusbury's beloved Stanley sister-in-law, was married to Cuthbert Halsall, who lost his inheritance in 1605 because of his recusancy.⁵¹

In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sir John should have given intelligence to the government about one of his enemies in a way that would have certified his own freedom from religious taint. He once wrote to Robert Cecil about a nemesis, Foulke Lloyd: “he is a knowne notorious Recusant and a harborer and mainteyner of Jesuites & Seminaries, and is a member evell affected to the state and hath not receaved the Communion theis many yeres.”⁵² Perhaps the enmity itself, with Lloyd and others, was owing in part to Salusbury's conflicts with Catholics resulting from his anger over what the “faith” had done to his brother, or from his ambition to make his mark in a world that for the most part fostered the hopes only of the religiously conformed. Whatever the case, Loves Martyr strongly implies Salusbury's anti-Roman politics. The poem's lengthy narrative of the story of Arthur emphasizes his foray into Italy and his triumph over Rome. Lucius Tiberius, “Romes great governour,” had sent Arthur a letter demanding tribute; the British king and his allies marched against Lucius, routed his forces, and would have burnt the walls of Rome had not Mordred's treachery called Arthur back to his own kingdom (H2^r-K2^r). The applauding of Britain's resistance to Roman domination was of course an act of nationalistic piety in Elizabeth's reign. When Loves Martyr was reissued in 1611, during the height of the “intellectual war” fought by James I and his theological helpers against the papacy,⁵³ the book's title was changed to The Anuals of great Brittaine, emphasizing the historical theme and thus directing attention to the triumphant anti-Roman spirit that had been present in Chester's poem from the beginning.

Shakespeare's attitude toward such ideological implications seems not indifference but demurral. In The Phoenix and Turtle he quietly but determinedly assumes a Catholic voice that Sir John Salusbury, on his own and through his poet Robert Chester, had been at pains to insist was not his. One must wonder why, and can only guess at an answer.

To have constructed a poem out of forbidden Catholic texts like the Service for the Dead and Southwell's Epistle of Comfort, Shakespeare must have been acquainted with the Roman liturgy as surreptitiously practiced or published and with sources of recusant devotional and polemical literature. That is to say, he knew Catholics and, whatever his private religious beliefs, he was trusted by them with their secrets.⁵⁴ Although apparently conforming to the legal prescriptions of the state Church, and not averse to criticizing in his plays Roman churchmen and policies,⁵⁵ he revealed at times a decided if not uncritical sympathy for the religious martyrs whose “constancy” in the face of persecution—so unlike the eccentric constancy of Chester's Martyr-to-Love—led to their deaths as “fools of time.” And he scorned “Policy, that heretic,” which for the sake of its unprincipled aspirations turned the resolute into heroic victims.⁵⁶ If Shakespeare felt compelled for some reason to contribute a poem to a volume reflecting credit on Salusbury, but if he were aware of the knight's many shortcomings, including his religious opportunism, he may well have determined to write The Phoenix and Turtle as a subtle and enigmatic insult to the man to whom he ostensibly offered homage. Not every reader would have reason to see, but it was a remarkable fact, that the poet's reflections on Love, Death, and Truth were perfectly relevant to Salusbury's character and circumstances—not in the way of congratulation but of disparagement.

Why, however, should Shakespeare have bothered to involve himself in an enterprise that demanded such cunning of his imagination? The collection in Loves Martyr of verses by eminent writers suggests that any request to a poet from an agent of Salusbury or from Salusbury himself may have been difficult to turn down as the “lion”'s fortunes rose into 1601. He was a blood relative of the Queen, who herself knighted him at midyear. She would surely not have done so had he not persuaded her of his hostility to Essex, executed after his failed uprising five months earlier. His cousins from Rûg, Captains Owen and John Salusbury, had been fierce partisans of the earl and had joined him in the rebellion—Owen (whom John of Lleweni had almost killed years earlier) dying in defense of Essex House, and his brother John suffering imprisonment. The squire of Lleweni's full recovery of his own family's good standing with the Elizabethan regime had come about because of his “ostentatious loyalty to church and state” and his opposition to the Essex faction (his cousins included) in Wales;⁵⁷ hence the loyal Salusbury received his long deferred knighthood soon after his treasonous kinsmen had been disgraced. For Shakespeare to have refused overtures from a nobleman who even before the rebellion had been building his own house with the earl's falling timbers would have been impolitic. Indeed, if The Phoenix and Turtle was commissioned and composed after the Essex Rising (Chester on his title page describes all of the additional compositions as “new”), compliance might have seemed necessary. Whatever his personal judgment of the earl in 1599, Shakespeare had publicly lauded Essex in Henry V (V.chor.30-34); and The Lord Chamberlain's Men, paid by the Essex group, had given a special performance of Richard II, with its deposition scene, on the eve of the revolt. Shakespeare's sometime patron, the earl of Southampton, was in prison and condemned to death for his role in the Rising. Was Chester's book not a critical opportunity for the playwright to be seen in the company of the other, victorious, side? Yet it seems to have been an association of convenience, not of conviction, for the honor that Salusbury certainly desired was given in The Phoenix and Turtle to dead birds that were his opposites.⁵⁸ And once the Chamberlain's Men were in the clear, the actors did not hesitate to make Sir John a butt of their satire.

If the poem were composed in deference to the Stanleys (as Honigmann has suggested), Shakespeare could hardly have intended it as a purely complimentary gesture to that family either. Because some of its members were similar to their Salusbury in-law in their attitude toward “married chastity” as well as in their politically motivated (though not always earnest) prosecution of Catholics—too many of whom bore the Stanley name—the same ironies that touched Sir John applied to them. A scholar who anticipated Honigmann in his inquiries once proposed that Shakespeare's early affiliation with the Stanleys through Lord Strange and his troupe had brought him into an “environment” where “religious zeal pitted father against son, brother against brother, wife against husband, in a monotonously recurring pattern,” and that this experience taught Shakespeare “an incomparable aloofness from all partisan religious issues.”⁵⁹ There were, of course, many more occasions than a sojourn with the Stanleys for Shakespeare to become angered and disheartened at the spectacle of sectarian conflict in his time and place. His own family probably knew the pressures and consequences of nonconformity.⁶⁰ But since his response was a protesting, ironic criticism, it is wrong to judge him aloof. He had, after all, already written Titus Andronicus, which may be read as an indictment by a morally engaged playwright of religious persecution from any quarter.⁶¹ In 1601, Ferdinando Stanley was beyond taking any offense, having been dead for seven years; and many among his Catholic relatives might not have been offended at all by a poem that defiantly accepted premises of the Old Faith.⁶² Thus Shakespeare was not necessarily imprudent to publish a subtly complaining poem like The Phoenix and Turtle, though one feels that in the political and religious climate of Elizabethan England he must have been brave to sound in it so much like a papist.

There is a final question to be raised about the Salusburys. The Lord Chamberlain's Men were mocking Sir John in Satiromastix soon after Loves Martyr appeared in print, and it is not implausible that their chief playwright had preceded them in their criticism, albeit more diplomatically. But then how is one to account for evidence that in later years Salusbury's son, Sir Henry, was well disposed toward the very acting company that had ridiculed his father? In a Salusbury family manuscript there are verses, apparently in Sir Henry's handwriting, addressed “To my good freandes m^r John Hemings & Henry Condall,” congratulating the two actors, it seems, on the publications of the First Folio—while leaving Shakespeare unmentioned.⁶³ This probably means only what other evidence shows, that Sir John's son, unlike his father, believed in reconciliation. As Honigmann points out, Sir Henry in his will left lands in trust to “various friends, including Sir Richard Trevor,” who had been Sir John's principal and bitter opponent in Denbighshire.⁶⁴ The father's enemies were not necessarily the son's. Yet about Shakespeare the Salusburys remained forever silent. One of the family wrote a memorial to Ben Jonson at his death;⁶⁵ but Shakespeare's passing went unregarded among them. Either they did not know what to make of the author of The Phoenix and Turtle, or they knew only too well.

Notes

1. Loves Martyr is quoted from the edition of Alexander B. Grosart (London: N. Trübner & Co., for the Shakespeare Society, 1878). Citations of Shakespeare's works are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

2. A. H. R. Fairchild, however, who studied Shakespeare's poem in light of its analogues and sources, concluded that The Phoenix and Turtle could be explained entirely in light of the conventions upon which it relied heavily. There was no need for a critic to seek a “special occasion” for it, or to see in it “subjective implications” (“The Phoenix and Turtle: A Critical and Historical Interpretation,” Englische Studien 33 [1904]: 374). Sir Sidney Lee thought that it could not have been “penned for Chester's book. It must have been either devised in an idle hour with merely abstract intention, or it was suggested by the death within the poet's circle of a pair of devoted lovers” (A Life of William Shakespeare, 2nd ed. [London: Macmillan, 1916], 272). For extended surveys of the critical history of The Phoenix and Turtle, see Hyder Rollins, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Poems (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 566-83; and Richard A. Underwood, The Phoenix and Turtle: A Survey of Scholarship (Salzburg: Institut für Englishche Sprache und Literatur, 1974).

3. William Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle: Shakespeare's Poem and Chester's Loues Martyr (The Hague: Mouton, 1965). Variations on the Elizabeth-Essex theory have been proposed by Thomas P. Harrison, who thought that the Phoenix was Elizabeth and the Turtle, Salusbury (“Loves Martyr, by Robert Chester: A New Interpretation,” University of Texas Studies in English 30 [1951]: 76-80); and by Marie Axton and Anthea Hume, who have separately concluded that the Phoenix is Elizabeth and the Turtle is a collective of her loving subjects (The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession [London: Royal Historical Society, 1977], chap. 8; “Love's Martyr, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle,’ and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion,” Review of English Studies 40 [1989]: 48-71). A recent survey of these views, with some evaluation of them, is offered by John Roe in his New Cambridge edition of The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

4. Carleton Brown, ed., Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (London: The Early English Text Society, 1914), lix-lxx, lxxii-lxxiii. Brown supposed that Salusbury arranged for publication merely “to gratify the literary ambition” of his friend and dependent, Chester (liv).

5. Ibid., xvi, lxxiii.

6. E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1985), 91-113.

7. See Fairchild, “The Phoenix and Turtle,” 359-68.

8. Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle, 81 n.

9. Ibid., 67-68, 80-84.

10. Brown published as Salusbury's poems written over or under his signature, or otherwise identified as his, in a Salusbury family manuscript book, as well as some of the poems that a Salusbury client, Robert Parry, included in a volume of love poetry published in 1597.

11. Brown, Poems, 23.

12. Brown, Poems, xxxii, 5-7; C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, vol. 11 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 41. Jonson's closeness to the Inns of Court (he dedicated Every Man Out of his Humour to the Inns, at which he “had friendship with divers in [those] societies”) may have put him in Salusbury's way. Salusbury was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1594, just before Marston took chambers there. John Donne (Ignoto?) was at Lincoln's Inn in 1594 and perhaps later.

13. See Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (1952; rpt. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 104, 114-15; Thomas Cain, ed., Poetaster, by Ben Jonson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 30-38. Jonson must have written at least a version of the “Epode” he contributed to Loves Martyr before 1601, since its last line was quoted in Robert Allott's England's Parnassus in 1600 (Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11:43).

14. Brown, Poems, xii-xvi, xxxviii-xxxix; Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle, 114-18.

15. Brown, Poems, xxxi.

16. Ibid., 36, 14-18.

17. Ibid., 46-56. Brown assumed that most of the poems in the second half of Parry's book, in a section entitled “The Patrone his pathetical Posies, Sonets, Maddrigalls, & Rowndelayes,” were written by Salusbury. G. Blakemore Evans has shown me extensive evidence that most of these poems were written by Parry himself. It may be, then, that Parry was ghostwriting for Salusbury, as in some cases Chester may have been.

18. Attempts to allegorize the “Turtle that is dead” as Sir John's brother Thomas, executed for treason three months before the wedding (Brown, Poems, lxiii; Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 99-100), seem strained. Matchett more plausibly explains the phrase, and the pronoun “him” used in reference to the dead bird, in light of Chester's source for the stanza (The Phoenix and the Turtle, 65).

19. Brown, Poems, xviii-xxvi.

20. See Harrison, “Loves Martyr, by Robert Chester,” 76-80. Harrison and later Honigmann (Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 97-98) have read the poem as an attempt to influence “opinion” on Salusbury's behalf.

21. Brown, Poems, xvi-xvii, xix-xxiii; Harrison, “Love's Martyr, by Robert Chester,” 79; Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 93-95.

22. A white lion was featured on the family's coat of arms (Brown, Poems, lxv).

23. See Brown, Poems, 32-33; and compare, in Shakespeare's Sonnet 94, “They that have pow'r to hurt, and will do none. …”

24. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 97, 110.

25. Dekker's satiric use of Salusbury in the play has not generally been recognized, although Tom Cain in his edition of Poetaster has noted it (283-84). Satiromastix was entered in the Stationers' Register on 11 November 1601, and printed in the following year.

26. Brown, Poems, xiii. In the Dramatis Personae of Satiromastix, the Welshman is named “Sir Rees ap Vaughan.” In the play itself, he calls himself “Sir Vaughan ap Rees” (II.i.32). All citations from Satiromastix are from The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, vol. 1, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953).

27. Also, by coincidence, Dekker burlesques lines from Jonson's An Ode to James Earle of Desmond, of which Salusbury owned an autograph copy (cf. I.ii.8-20 and Ode, 8-13).

28. In his “Epistle to Master John Selden” (1614), Jonson looked back over his career as a poet of praise and found reasons for both satisfaction and regret:

              I have too oft preferr'd
    Men past their termes, and prais'd some names too much,
    But 'twas with purpose to have made them such.
    Since, being deceiv'd, I turne a sharper eye
    Upon my selfe, and aske to whom? and why?
    And what I write? and vexe it many dayes
    Before men get a verse: much lesse a Praise. …

    (20-26; Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 8:159)

29. Robert Ellrodt, however, has found in it “more … Christian mysticism than genuine Platonism” (“An Anatomy of The Phoenix and the Turtle,” Shakespeare Survey 15 [1962]: 104). J. V. Cunningham has detected more of the scholastic than the Platonic (see note 38).

30. See Fairchild, “The Phoenix and Turtle: A[n] Interpretation,” 359-62. Underwood surveys many other “source studies” (150-89); and it should be acknowledged that the literary influences on The Phoenix and Turtle, direct and indirect, may be numerous.

31. Shakespeare writes “Philip? sparrow!” in King John (I.i.231). (“Philip” was of course the sparrow's standard cognomen.) Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of Jane Scrope's pet in letting Juliet imagine the death of a young girl's bird (Romeo and Juliet, II.ii.176-83). Peter Dronke briefly alluded to Skelton's poem as an analogue of Shakespeare's (“The Phoenix and the Turtle,” Orbis Litterarum 23 [1968]: 206). Phyllyp Sparowe is quoted from John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983).

32. See Ian A. Gordon, “Skelton's ‘Philip Sparrow’ and the Roman Service-Book,” Modern Language Review 29 (1934): 389-96. The Catholic liturgies are quoted from the Missale Romanum (Paris, 1574), and the Breviarium Romanum (Antwerp, 1618).

33. See Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 306-7. J. Dover Wilson, in an extended gloss on the term “requiem” in Hamlet, notes its different meanings, referring to its use in The Phoenix and Turtle, where, he argues, it cannot mean a Catholic “mass” because a Roman officiant would wear an alb and chasuble, not a “surplice” (What Happens in Hamlet?, 3rd ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950], 298-99). But a Catholic priest did wear a surplice in other parts of the Liturgy of the Dead. And in the Elizabethan Catholic underground, where appropriate vestments were not always available, priests were allowed to perform “sacraments or sacramental rites” (though not the mass) with only “stole and surplice” (P. J. Holmes, ed., Elizabethan Casuistry [London: Catholic Record Society, 1981], 15). Shakespeare seems to improvise his own ceremony with diverse reminiscences of official ones.

34. It is true that, as Dover Wilson and Frye have remarked, remnants of the Roman liturgy managed to survive in Shakespeare's England. The “Order for the Burial of the Dead” in The Book of Common Prayer (1559) is in fact greatly indebted to the Roman prayers and liturgies. There are some small traces of the Elizabethan Burial Service in The Phoenix and Turtle (see H. Neville Davies, “The Phoenix and Turtle: Requiem and Rite,” Review of English Studies 40 [1995]: 525-29); but most of the poem's liturgical resonances are with the prohibited rites not echoed in the English ceremonies.

35. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 403.

36. See Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer (London: Macmillan, 1949), 634-35; F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), s.v. “Dead, Prayers for the.”

37. Southwell's nineteenth-century editor, A. B. Grosart, detected scattered echoes of Southwell in Shakespeare (The Complete Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J. [London: Robson and Sons, 1872]); as did Southwell's biographer, Christopher Devlin (The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr [London: Longmans, Green, 1956]); Peter Milward, S.J. (Shakespeare's Religious Background [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973]); and F. W. Brownlow (“Shakespeare and Southwell,” in KM 80: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1987], and Robert Southwell [New York: Twayne, 1996]). I am writing an extensive study of the relationship between the two poets, a portion of which appears as “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom in Sonnet 124 and Titus Andronicus,” in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York and London: Garland, 1999).

38. J. V. Cunningham, “‘Essence’ and the Phoenix and Turtle,” English Literary History 19 (1952): 265-76.

39. Ibid., 276, 270, 265.

40. The poetry of Southwell is quoted from The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

41. Compare also “If what parts can so remain” (The Phoenix and Turtle, hereafter PHT, 48) and Southwell's “When the priest the hoast devideth, / Know that in each part abideth / All” (“A holy Hymne,” 55-57).

42. Scattered throughout Southwell's poem as well one finds “screeches” and “harbinger” (20, 71) (cf. “shriking harbinger” [PHT, 5]); “fever” (205) (“fever's” [PHT, 7]); “feind among the divels” (234) (“the fiend” [PHT, 6]); and “Heralds” (347) (“Herald” [PHT 3]).

43. The Epistle (1587-88) is quoted from the facsimile published in Vol. 211 of the series English Recusant Literature, 1558-1640 (Ilkley, England: The Scolar Press, 1974). For other indications that Shakespeare was familiar with the Epistle, see Brownlow, “Shakespeare and Southwell,” and Klause, “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom.” The best evidence so far published that Shakespeare knew Saint Peters Complaint is in Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 94-96.

44. See Harrison, “Love's Martyr.. : A New Interpretation.” Harrison is not, however, entirely reliable on the matter of the Catholic sphere of the Salusburys. He notes the conversion of William Salusbury (1520?-1600?) to Rome and his admission that he had been “brought up in the catholic faith,” but fails to report that the change was short-lived, and that William became a staunch advocate of the Protestant cause (see DNB). A. H. Dodd describes symptoms of the confessional strife that affected Salusbury and his Welsh kinsmen and neighbors (“North Wales in the Essex Revolt of 1601,” English Historical Review 59 [1944]: 348-70), supplementing and in important respects qualifying portions of David Mathew's The Celtic Peoples and Renaissance Europe: A Study of the Celtic and Spanish Influences on Elizabethan History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1933).

45. Brown, Poems, xv, 26-27. On a list of presumed “Catholicks,” drawn up in 1574 (perhaps in the interest of Mary, Queen of Scots), there is a “Sir Jhon Salisbery” of “Derbyshire.” Since such a knight is not otherwise known, it may be that the place name is a mistake for “Denbighshire,” and that the compiler, not having heard of Sir John's death in 1566, intended the father of Thomas and John (Publications of the Catholic Record Society vol. 13 [London, 1913], 92). The brother-in-law of this elder Salusbury, John Salusbury of Rûg (father of Captains John and Owen Salusbury, who would participate in the Essex Rising), is noted on the same list (109).

46. DNB.

47. Dodd, “North Wales in the Essex Revolt,” 360.

48. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 113, 119; Joseph Stanley Leatherbarrow, The Lancashire Elizabethan Recusants (Manchester: The Chetham Society, 1947), 43.

49. See Christopher Devlin, Hamlet's Divinity and Other Essays (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 74-114.

50. See Albert J. Loomie, S.J., The Spanish Elizabethans: The English Exiles at the Court of Philip II (New York: Fordham University Press, 1963), 129-181, 259; and Dodd, “North Wales in the Essex Revolt,” 357.

51. Brown, Poems xxxviii-xxxvix.

52. Ibid., xxiv.

53. See Charles H. McIlwain, ed., The Political Works of James I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918), xlix-lxxix.

54. That Shakespeare read literature from the Catholic underground in manuscript is evident from his recollections of Southwell's not yet published works in Lucrece and in Titus Andronicus, both of which appeared in 1594. See Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 94-96; Klause, “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom.” Brownlow's evidence for Southwell's influence can be considerably augmented.

55. Samuel Schoenbaum summarizes the case for Shakespeare's public adherence to the Church of England (William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 55-62). Robert Stevenson, in thoughtful but unbalanced fashion, emphasizes Shakespeare's impatience with clerics, their politics, and their religion (Shakespeare's Religious Frontier [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958]).

56. Sonnet 124. See Klause, “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom.”

57. Dodd, “North Wales in the Essex Revolt,” 355, 366. The historian J. E. Neale once suggested, without offering evidence, that John Salusbury of Lleweni had been “in London at the time of the [Essex] Rising and had taken part in its suppression. He returned to his country with a knighthood conferred by the Queen herself for his service.” (The Elizabethan House of Commons [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950], 121). Perhaps Neale misremembered Dodd's account: “For his services in quenching the embers of revolt in Denbighshire John Salusbury of Llewenni was knighted by the queen herself” (366). There are some indications that Salusbury had not always been utterly antagonistic to Essex, and may have, before the earl's difficulties in Ireland, attempted to take two sides at once (see Matchett, The Phoenix and the Turtle, 121-23, 139-41).

58. Anthea Hume, finding Loves Martyr and its appended poems all anti-Essex in intention, argues that Shakespeare must therefore have “changed his view” of Essex by 1601 and have had at that time “no relationship with the Earl of Southampton” (“Love's Martyr, and the Aftermath,” 71). Shakespeare's private views of Essex, however, remain unknown. And if Sonnet 107 refers, as is likely, to Southampton's release from the Tower in 1603, Shakespeare would seem to have still enjoyed some kind of “relationship” with him (see John Kerrigan, ed., William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986], 313-19; G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Sonnets, The New Cambridge Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 216-17). In 1605, Southampton probably hosted at his house in London a performance by the King's Men of Love's Labor's Lost (E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930], 2:330-32).

59. Stevenson, Shakespeare's Religious Frontier, 79-80.

60. Agreement has been growing that John Shakespeare's Catholic “Spiritual Testament” is genuine, and that his appearance on a list of recusants was more than a result of his fear of process for debt. See John Henry de Groot, The Shakespeares and “The Old Faith” (New York: King's Crown Press, 1946), 3-110; James G. McManaway, “John Shakespeare's ‘Spiritual Testament,’” Shakespeare Quarterly 18 (1967): 197-205; Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 116-17; F. W. Brownlow “John Shakespeare's Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 186-91. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was probably related to Edward Arden of Park Hall, a Catholic executed on less than compelling charges of treason in 1584. See F. W. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett, and the Devils of Denham (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 109.

61. Klause, “Politics, Heresy, and Martyrdom.” The play had been performed by the company of Lord Strange (“the Earle of Darbie,” as the First Quarto's title page says), who despite his stated zeal for enforcing the government's policies against recusants (see Stevenson, Shakespeare's Religious Frontier, 76-77), may have ultimately endorsed its message. Catholics, in hoping that he would succeed Elizabeth and then follow his own bent, clearly expected toleration under him. The Jesuit Robert Persons, however, was unsure about Ferdinando Stanley: “Some do thinke him to be of al three religions, and others of none. … This opinion of him may do him goode, for that al sides heerby may (perhapps) conceave hope of him” (A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland [1594-95], quoted in Stevenson, Shakespeare's Religious Frontier, 80).

62. There are epitaphic verses, which have been attributed to Shakespeare, written on the Stanley tomb at Tong (Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 78). Perhaps significantly, this is the tomb of the Catholic Sir Thomas Stanley of Winwick and of his son Edward (Ferdinando's cousin), who was once suspected of harboring priests (Devlin, Robert Southwell, 230).

63. See Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2:234-35.

64. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years,” 112.

65. Herford and Simpson, Ben Jonson, 11.41.