Review of English Studies 2005 Jackson 224 46

FRANCIS MERES AND THE CULTURAL CONTEXTS

OF SHAKESPEARE’S RIVAL POET SONNETS

by macd. p. jackson

Shakespeare’s sonnets 78^86 concern the Speaker’s rivalry with other poets andespecially with one ‘better spirit’ who is ‘learned’ and ‘polished’. Correct dating ofthese sonnets (1598^1600), on evidence independent of any supposed identi¢ca-tions of historical personages, allows pro¢table exploration of the cultural contextin which they were written.The conclusions are not that any single historical writerwas the Rival Poet, but that around 1599 Shakespeare had special reason to comparehis achievements with those of Marlowe, Chapman, Jonson, and others, who posedvarious kinds of threats to his pre-eminence, even though Marlowe was by thenno more than ‘a familiar ghost’. Francis Meres’s ‘Comparative Discourse’ in hisPalladis Tamia (1598), in particular, provided such a strong stimulus towards thecreation of the Rival Poet group as to constitute a de¢nite source.

I

Poetry is not autobiography. There is a ‘reality prior to the poem’, but the poettransmutes it, constructing a verbal object designed to evoke an aestheticresponse.1 ‘The truest poetry is the most feigning.’2 Shakespeare, like any othercreative writer, drew on his own experience of life�experience that includedmental, and therefore conceivably imaginary, events, as well as those occurringin the physical time and space of ‘the outside world’, where others might witnessand record them. But a poet brings thoughts and feelings into being in the veryprocess of ¢nding words with which to render particulars and of organizinglanguage into satisfying formal patterns. There can be no simple equation ofa ¢gure in Shakespeare’s sonnets with a historical, biological personage. Eventhe Poet is not, in any straightforward way, the ‘actual’ William Shakespeare,though he doubtless bears a resemblance.

1 The phrase ‘a reality prior to the poem’ is that of the major New Zealand poet andcritic Allen Curnow in Look Back Harder: Critical Writings 1935 1̂984, ed. P. Simpson(Auckland, 1987), 172.2 As You Like It, III. iii. 16^17. My references to Shakespeare’s plays are to WilliamShakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. eds. S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford, 1988).Shakespeare’s sonnets are quoted from The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. C. Burrow(Oxford, 2002). Plays are dated according to the chronology in S.Wells and G.Taylor, withJ. Jowett and W. Montgomery,William Shakespeare: ATextual Companion (Oxford, 1987).

The Review of English Studies, New Series, Vol. 56, No. 224� The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserveddoi:10.1093/res/hgi050

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The famous Quarto of Shakespeare’s Sonnets printed by George Eld andpublished by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 contained 154 sonnets, followed by the329-line poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’. The ¢rst 126 sonnets are mainly devoted tothe Poet’s relationship with a FairYouth, while numbers 127^52 are mainly devotedto his relationship with a Dark Woman. Sonnets 153^4 are ‘anacreontics’ aboutCupid and a hot spa, but reference in each to ‘my mistress’ links them with theDark Woman sub-sequence. Within the Fair Youth series, numbers 78^86 areusually distinguished as the ‘Rival Poet’ group.

Before proceeding further, we must ask when Shakespeare’s sonnets werewritten, and, in particular, whether the Rival Poet group can be dated. Statisticalstudies of Shakespeare’s rare-word vocabulary have, in recent years, come closeto solving the problem of dating.3 If, for example, we analyse the distributionamong Shakespeare’s plays of words that appear ten or fewer times inShakespearian drama, we ¢nd that, in proportion to overall vocabulary size,contemporaneous plays share more of these rare words than chronologicallydistant ones. Analysis of rare-word links to the plays correctly assigns thenarrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece to 1593 and 1594, andThe Phoenix and the Turtle to the seventeenth century. Groups of sonnets yieldto the same techniques. The traditional notion that the sonnets were essentiallycompleted in the period 1593^6 turns out to have been mistaken.The time-span,even for the bulk of the sequence, must be extended forward at least anotherthree or four years, and most, if not all, of the last twenty-odd addressed to theFair Youth belong to the seventeenth century. Shakespeare was working onthe sequence until at least 1603^4, and possibly until close to the date of publica-tion. For the Rival Poet group the links are overwhelmingly with plays of theperiod 1596^1604. The best indicators tend to narrow this range, the evidenceconverging on 1598^1600, both for the group as a whole and for sonnet 86in particular. One great advantage of this approach to dating the sonnets is thatit makes no assumptions about the ‘identity’ of Fair Youth, Dark Woman, RivalPoet, or any other ¢gure dramatized in the sequence. But the ¢ndings do haverelevance to such identi¢cations.

The Rival Poet mini-series runs a gamut of apologies for the Poet’s not writingoften enough, or fulsomely enough, in praise of the FairYouth. Sonnet 78 suggeststhat several poets are now courting the Youth’s favour, but in 79 they coalesce intoa single ‘other’,whomaybe‘aworthier pen’.This oscillation between‘one’and‘many’(or ‘several’) continues. In 80 the Rival is ‘a better spirit’. Sonnet 82 reverts to talkabout ‘writers’ who dedicate their words to ‘their fair subject’: they use ‘straine' d’rhetoric and ‘gross painting’. Sonnet 83, which, with its allusion to‘painting’, clearlycontinues the argument of 82, and is linked to it by use of ‘And therefore’ at thebeginning of lines 2 and 5 (as of lines 2 and 7 of 82), again mentions plural ‘others’,and yet refers in the last line to ‘both your poets’, the Speaker evidently being

3 For full references and a summary of the evidence, see appendix; this also coverssonnets 55 and 74, mentioned below.The vocabulary evidence is, by and large, accepted aspersuasive by Burrow in Complete Sonnets and Poems, 103^11.

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one of two. Sonnet 84, repeating the idea that all art can do in relation to theFair Youth’s perfect beauty is ‘copy what in you is writ’ and proclaim that ‘youalone are you’, avoids speci¢c reference to a rival or rivals. Sonnet 85 particularizes‘that able spirit’, who hymns the Fair Youth in ‘polished form of well-re¢ne' d pen’,but begs the Youth to respect ‘others’ for ‘the breath of words’, but himself forhis ‘dumb thoughts’. The ambiguity about the number of rivals is caught in the¢fth line in which the Poet says ‘I think good thoughts, whilst other write goodwords’: ‘other’ is a possible Renaissance form of the plural, but its use suggeststhat one special Rival is uppermost in the Poet’s mind. Sonnet 86, the mostpowerful of the group, is also the most detailed in its characterization of onespeci¢c Rival Poet.

Like the sequence as a whole, this mini-series revolves around oppositionsand contrasts: silence and volubility, nature and art, words and thoughts, feelingsand deeds, sincerity and feigning, inspiration and technique, and, ultimately,life and death. There are suggestions that the main Rival Poet is learned andpolished, whereas it is only through the agency of the Youth as source of creativitythat the Poet’s ‘rude ignorance’ is repaired. Sonnet 80 anticipates the nauticalimagery of 86, as the Poet contrasts the ‘saucy bark’ of his own verse with theRival’s veritable galleon, ‘of tall building, and of goodly pride’. There has beendebate over the Poet’s attitude to the Rival’s poetry: one or two critics have seenthe admissions of the Poet’s own inferiority as heavily ironic.4 But in fact theattitude implied does not remain stable, and the shifting measures of admirationand criticism are associated with the contrary indications about the numberof rivals and with the ebbing and £owing of the Poet’s con¢dence in his ownpoetic instincts and powers, as he wavers between humility and bravado.The censure of extravagant verbal ‘painting’ tends to be associated with plural‘writers’, the mention of a ‘re¢ne' d pen’ with the singular Rival. There is similarambivalence in the Poet’s attitude to the Youth, who, though in a sense beyondpraise, is chided, explicitly in the last line of 84, for being susceptible to £attery.

Sonnet 81, usually assumed to have strayed accidentally into the Rival Poetgroup, is tied into position by its diction and rhyming, and serves to connectthe Rival Poet sonnets with the preceding cluster in which the Poet contemplateshis own death (71^4) and with the poems promising immortality.5 The rivalryfor the Fair Youth’s patronage and a¡ection is one of several vicissitudes thatjeopardize the Poet’s construction of his friend as Ideal. Although in sonnet 82the Poet concedes ‘I grant thou wert not married to my Muse’, he will later speakof ‘the marriage of true minds’ (sonnet 116), and here the Youth’s availability toother poets is felt as a kind of in¢delity or promiscuity, like the Dark Woman’s.By becoming another poet’s dedicatee and object of praise, the Youth robs theSpeaker of his inspiration, ‘enfeebles’ his verse. For the Poet, this is like being

4 This view was most fully set forth in R. Gittings, Shakespeare’s Rival (London, 1960).5 See MacD. P. Jackson, ‘Aspects of Organisation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)’, Parergon,17 (1999), 109^34, esp. 126^8.

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‘struck dead’: his thoughts are ‘inhearsed’, buried in his brain as in a ‘tomb’.Sonnet 81, in which the Poet contemplates his own or the Youth’s actual deathand asserts the power (‘virtue’) of his pen to give ‘immortal life’, reinforces theintimate relation between ‘breath’ as poetic inspiration and ‘breath’ as sign ofsurvival. The Youth (as Muse) must breathe into the Poet’s verse the life that he(the Youth) will continue to have on the page that perpetuates his beauty andserves as source for the oral recitations of the ‘breathers’ of after-ages.

Sonnet 86’s distinction as the culmination of the Rival Poet series is re£ectedin its being throughout in the past tense: ‘Was it . . . that struck . . . astonishe' d . . .I was not . . . ¢lled up . . . lacked . . . enfeebled’. Sonnet 145, the ingenious tri£e intetrameters, which may be a piece of juvenilia, tells its anecdote by means ofthe past tense, but no Fair Youth poem so consistently looks back on a completedepisode as does sonnet 86.6 Another unique feature of sonnet 86 is its 6:6:2structure. In most sonnets syntax and imagery fall into patterns allied to therhyme-scheme of four quatrains plus couplet; many show traces of the Italianoctave/sestet division. Here the quatrain structure is marked by the repetitionin line 5 of the opening ‘Was it’ and the parallelism of the present participlesbeginning lines 4 and 8 (‘Making’, ‘Giving’). But, in counterpoint to this, the¢rst six lines ask two rhetorical questions, with the next six lines consisting ofanswering statements. ‘No’ at the start of line 7 is the pivotal word, introducinga series of resounding denials: ‘No, neither . . . nor . . . nor . . . cannot . . . not’.The word ‘cannot’ even creates a double negative. So lines 1^6 ask ‘Was this, orthis the reason for my silence?’, lines 7^12 say ‘No’ with emphasis and elaboration,and the couplet, lines 13^14, initiated by the adversative ‘But’, ¢nally makes thelong-withheld statement, giving the true reason for the Poet’s lack of productivity.The poetic strategy allows the Poet to characterize the Rival, while arousing thereader’s curiosity: ‘Was it this, was it that? No, no, de¢nitely not. But . . . ’:this couplet, far from being ‘tacked on’, is the last chapter of a mystery, in which,after the suspense,‘all is revealed’. Sonnets 145 and 86 are alike not only in treatingpast events, but in their theatricality: 145 builds towards peripeteia or reversal,86 towards anagnorisis or revelation.

The structure of sonnet 86 also enables the Poet to maintain his ambivalence inregard to the Rival’s poetic authority and worth. In asking ‘Was it the proud fullsail of his great verse . . . ?’ that incapacitated him, and answering that it was not,the Poet might be taken as (a) denying the greatness of his Rival’s verse, or(b) denying that its (acknowledged) greatness was the cause of his muteness.The second of these meanings is certainly dominant, but the ¢rst also impingeson the reader’s consciousness. Beyond this, Helen Vendler notes how, in theportrayal of Poet and Rival, the Poet seems to revive, as the Rival becomesmore open to attack.7 The Poet’s thoughts are at ¢rst ‘inhearsed’ as in a ‘tomb’;he is ‘struck dead’. These formulations point to total annihilation, in contrast to

6 For sonnet 145, see ibid. 128^31.

7 H.Vendler,The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 377^8.


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‘verse astonishe' d’, which becomes ‘my silence’ and ‘sick’, before the Poet simplysu¡ers a ‘lack’ of matter, and his line is ‘enfeebled’. The Rival, in contrast, is at¢rst evoked in terms of ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’. Then he is ‘byspirits taught to write j Above a mortal pitch’, which, though implying a god-likecapacity, hints at a somewhat suspect dabbling in black magic, which is developedin lines 7^10. The Rival relies on tuition and ‘aid’ from ‘compeers’ and an ‘a¡ablefamiliar ghost j Which nightly gulls him with intelligence’. And, as John Kerriganobserves, in the earlier phrase ‘compeers by night’ the Rival ‘is imagined innocturnal converse with his literary friends, with the mighty dead (as he sup-poses), or with evil wraiths’. The more spectacular claim of communicationwith dead writers ‘fades into scornful literalness if the phrase is read as a high-sounding account of the inspiration drawn from reading books by night’.8 TheRival’s ‘learning’ would begin to shade into the academic and the derivative�into a kind of moribund erudition. But it is above all the word ‘gulls’ (deceives)that focuses the disdain, or perhaps simply pugnacity, underlying the Poet’sadmiration. The implication is that the Rival’s achievement falls short of hispretensions.

Probably the right way of thinking about this ambivalence is to say that thepoem dramatizes the Poet’s ‘mixed feelings’: enmity, fear, jealousy, mockery,respect, anxiety, esteem, and distaste jostle for a place in the Poet’s attitude tohis Rival. Did Shakespeare, as distinct from the Poet as quasi- ¢ctional charactercreated for the sake of the sequence, feel that way about a real contemporary whowrote poems to and about a real Fair Youth? Or is the Rival a construct com-pounded from the sequence’s purely artistic requirements?

II

Among biographically minded commentators, a favourite candidate for RivalPoet has been Christopher Marlowe.9 Though Shakespeare’s exact contemporary,he had already achieved fame as a dramatist when Shakespeare was a mere tyro.In the movie Shakespeare in Love Marlowe gives Shakespeare the crucial leadthat will transform his abortive script of Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter intoRomeo and Juliet, and the ¢ction gestures towards a truth: Shakespeare’s historicalindebtedness to Marlowe in other works has often been noted. In The Genius ofShakespeare, Jonathan Bate re-explores the debt in terms of Harold Bloom’s‘anxiety of in£uence’.10 Bloom argued that all major writers engage in a kind of

8 The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ed. J. Kerrigan (Harmondsworth, 1986), 282.

9 Two 20th-century scholars who identify the Rival Poet as Marlowe are A. L. Rowse,Christopher Marlowe: A Biography (London, 1964), 165^89, and Shakespeare the Man(London, 1973), 76^82, and P. Ramsey, The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare’sSonnets (New York, 1979), 32^41.10 J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1997), 101^32; H. Bloom, The Anxiety ofIn£uence: A Theory of Poetry (New York, 1973). See also James Shapiro’s chapter on‘Shakespeare and Marlowe’, in Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York,1991), 75^132.


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Oedipal struggle to outdo their greatest predecessors, as they strive to di¡erentiatethemselves from their models. Bate shows that time and again Shakespearelaboured to surpass Marlowe. Shakespeare spent half his working life exorcisingthe demon who had overshadowed the beginnings of his career in the Londontheatre�the pre-eminent role model. And it was not until The Tempest that hecapped Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Bate suggests that Shakespeare’s artistic rivalrywith Marlowe�less a father than a sibling, but after 1593 a ghost�animatesthe Rival Poet series. These poems are, among other things, projections of the‘anxiety of in£uence’ that Shakespeare experienced in connection with thegreatest of the ‘University Wits’ with whom he vied as he began writing plays.

Bate recognizes that the exact nature of Marlowe’s presence in sonnet 86depends on when it was composed. In the early 1590s he was a living Rival;slain in Deptford in 1593, in the late 1590s he haunted Shakespeare as a‘familiar ghost’. We have seen that vocabulary evidence places the Rival Poetsonnets in 1598^1600. It is precisely within these years that Shakespearemakes his most direct and unmistakable allusion to Marlowe.11 In AsYou Like Itthe love-struck Phoebe says: ‘Dead shepherd, now I ¢nd thy saw of might: j‘‘Who ever loved that loved not at ¢rst sight?’’ ’ (III. v. 82^3). She is quotingfrom Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, published in 1598. Rosalind alludes to the samepoem, mentioning Leander’s drowning ‘with the cramp’ in the Hellespont ashe attempted to swim to Hero of Sestos (IV. i. 93^9). Most tellingly, sonnet 86’sphrase ‘that struck me dead’, used ¢guratively to mean ‘silenced me’ (thoughwithout losing all of the literal meaning), is paralleled in As You Like It whenTouchstone says: ‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood . . . it strikes aman more dead than a great reckoning in a little room’ (III. iii. 9^12). Thisis usually taken as a reference to Marlowe, with a glance at his death from adagger wound during an alleged quarrel over a lodging-house ‘reckoning’ orbill and an echo of Barabas’s ‘in¢nite riches in a little room’ in Marlowe’sThe Jew of Malta.12

11 But, as Shapiro, Rival Playwrights, notes, ‘The parodic recollections of Marlowe thatbegan to appear in the plays Shakespeare wrote between 1597 and 1600�including2 Henry IV, Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, As You Like It, and Hamlet�signal thecomplexity and extent of the earlier rivalry’ (pp. 81^2). Shapiro’s book, bringing togetherthree of the key poet-playwrights in my argument about the Rival Poet sonnets, exploresMarlowe’s in£uence on both Shakespeare and Jonson and the ‘mutual in£uence ofMarlowe’s two great heirs’ (p. vii).

12 As You Like It, ed. R. Knowles, New Variorum (New York, 1977), 188^90; J. Bakeless,Christopher Marlowe (London, 1938), 297. Bate (The Genius of Shakespeare, 124) points outthat in the play immediately preceding As You Like It, Julius Caesar (1599), Shakespearehad himself perpetrated his one and only killing of a poet�Cinna, who is slaughteredby the mob in III. iii; he also explores Falsta¡ ’s death in Henry V (1598^9) interms of Shakespeare’s feelings about Marlowe: ‘In 1599, Shakespeare wrote of two greatreckonings with death in little tavern rooms: Marlowe’s and Falsta¡ ’s’ (ibid. 124). The‘struck me dead’ parallel between As You Like It and sonnet 86 is noted in Shakespeare’sSonnets, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, Arden 3 (Walton-on-Thames), 282.


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In calling Marlowe ‘shepherd’ Phoebe uses an established convention ofpastoral by which ‘shepherd’ equals ‘poet’. But Marlowe had a special claim tothe soubriquet as author of the famous ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’.Doubtless circulated in manuscript, it reached print in mangled form in 1599.The irony is that the vehicle for its publication was The Passionate Pilgrim,a miscellany attributed on the title page to ‘W. Shakespeare’. Versions ofShakespeare’s sonnets 138 and 144 (as they were to be numbered in the 1609Quarto) and three sonnets excerpted from Love’s Labour’s Lost were included,along with poems known to be by other authors and several of unknownprovenance. Thus in 1599 Shakespeare�through the lack of care or scrupleof publisher William Jaggard�su¡ered the embarrassment of seeming to robMarlowe of his best-known lyric. No wonder Marlowe was on his mindas he worked on the Rival Poet cluster.

III

But it seems perfectly clear that behind the Rival Poet sonnets there also lay the¢gure of George Chapman. He has long been the main alternative candidate forRival Poet.13 But we should think in terms not of ‘either or’ but of ‘both and’.Again, the correct dating of these sonnets (about 1598^1600) is crucial.14 Asvarious commentators note, Chapman, translator of the Iliad and the Odyssey,claimed to have been inspired by the spirit of Homer himself, and in 1598 hisSeven Books of the Iliads appeared, establishing him as a poet of huge ambition. Hehad probably begun work on his translation early in the 1590s and is likely enoughto have boasted of receiving quasi- supernatural encouragement long before heset forth his claims in Euthymiae Raptus orTheTears of Peace in 1609.There Homerintroduces himself to him as

that spirit ElysianThat . . . did thy bosom ¢ll,� � � � � � � � � � � � � �

When (meditating of me) a sweet galeBrought me upon thee; and thou didst inheritMy true sense (for the time then) in my spirit;And I, invisibly, went prompting theeTo those fair greens where thou didst English me.

(ll. 75^85)

13 The case, ¢rst made by William Minto in 1874, is cogently summarized inThe Sonnets,ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1966), pp. lxiii^lxxi. G. Blakemore Evans, in his edition ofThe Sonnets (Cambridge, 1996), 193^4, cites relevant excerpts from Chapman. My Chapmanreferences are to The Poems of George Chapman, ed. P. B. Bartlett (1941; New York, 1962),and to Chapman, The Iliads of Homer, ed. R. Hooper, 2nd edn. (London, 1865), but I havemodernized Bartlett’s spelling and punctuation.

14 Readers sceptical of the evidence advanced for this dating may prefer to regard itas a provisional hypothesis to be tested by the extent to which the Rival Poet sonnets areilluminated by this historical context.


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Later in this poem Chapman worries that:

these are dreams of my retired NightThat all my reading, writing, all my painsAre serious tri£es and the idle veinsOf an unthrifty angel that deludesMy simple fancy.

(944^8)

Even later, his 1611 Iliad contained the lines: ‘That great work . . .maintains a pitchabove j All mortal powers’ (II. 419^21), which reads like a deliberate echo of ‘abovea mortal pitch’ in sonnet 86. ‘The proud full sail of his great verse’ suggests notonly Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’, but Chapman’s Homer’s ample fourteeners. JohnWebster was eventually, in the ‘Epistle’ toThe White Devil (1612), to commend the‘full and heightened style of Master Chapman’�a choice of adjectives that agreesboth with the ‘full sail’ of sonnet 86 and the ‘tall building’ of sonnet 80.15

Most signi¢cantly, the second edition of Hero and Leander, published in 1598,the same year as the ¢rst, included Chapman’s continuation of Marlowe’s Ovidiannarrative along with the original. The completed Hero and Leander was thus,in a manner of speaking, a collaboration between a living poet and a ghost.Indeed Chapman, in his dedication to his share of Hero and Leander, speaksof being drawn to his task ‘by strange instigation’16 and in the third sestiad(ll. 183^98) invokes the spirit of Marlowe to aid him: he wills his own ‘strangelyintellectual ¢re’ to ‘confer’ with the dead Marlowe’s immortal ‘soul’. Withthe 1598 publication of Hero and Leander Marlowe and Chapman merged asShakespeare’s Rival.

Even sonnet 86’s thought that the ‘a¡able familiar ghost’ ‘gulls’ the Rival Poet‘with intelligence’ is oddly appropriate to Marlowe, who had been a governmentspy.17 The innuendo would be that, in supposing himself to be receiving aidfrom the immortal shade of Marlowe himself, Chapman was misled: the ghostwas a double agent. Nobody who, delighted by Marlowe’s £uent and richlysensuous two ‘sestiads’ of Hero and Leander, perseveres with the clotted, tortuousphilosophizing of Chapman’s completion will care to disagree.

Curiously, the very phrases in which Shakespeare in As You Like It recallsMarlowe’s death (one of them recurring in sonnet 86) have precedents inChapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595), which speaks of ‘riches in a little room’(stanza 49) and ‘Ovid’s muse . . . struck dead’ (stanza 57).18 Touchstone’s adage thatincomprehension of his verses ‘strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in

15 E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford,1930), ii. 218 (modernized).

16 Poems, ed. Bartlett, 132.17 Marlowe’s activities as informer are most fully explored in C. Nicholl, The Reckoning:The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1992).18 The verbal parallels with As You Like It were noted by J. W. Walter and reportedby Agnes Latham in her Arden edition of the play (London, 1975), p. xxxiv.


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a little room’ is introduced by the thought that he himself is like the exiled Ovid‘among the Goths’ (III. iii. 5^6). Some scholars have detected in Touchstone’swords an additional allusion to the public burning in June 1599, by ecclesiasticalorder, of Marlowe’s translations of Ovid’s Elegies or ‘Amores’�a notable instanceof ‘art made tongue-tied by authority’ (sonnet 66).19 Whether or not they areright, the Marlowe^Ovid^Chapman nexus seems to have haunted Shakespeareas he wrote AsYou Like It and the Rival Poet sonnets.

Scholars who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries identi¢edChapman as Rival Poet focused on a cabal of freethinkers gathering aroundSir Walter Ralegh.20 Both Marlowe and Chapman were claimed to have beenmembers of this circle, devoted to esoteric knowledge. Shakespeare’s Love’sLabour’s Lost (1594^5), in which male dedication to book learning is exploded bythe attractions of women, was regarded as an elaborate come¤ die a' clef responding toChapman’s advocacy, in his obscure poem The Shadow of the Night (1594), of deepmetaphysical speculation based on nocturnal ‘invocation, fasting, watching’ andthe nurture of the soul as by ‘an heavenly familiar’.21 ‘No pen can anything eternalwrite, j That is not steep’d in humour of the Night’, claimed Chapman,22 and inLove’s Labour’s Lost Berowne counters with ‘Never durst poet touch a pen towrite j Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs’ (IV. iii. 322^3). Thougha speci¢c ‘School of Night’ is, in my opinion, a chimera born of a misprint,23

and equation of characters in Love’s Labour’s Lost with real-life prototypesunconvincing,24 Chapman’s friendship with Marlowe, his disdain of ‘ignorance’,his own scholastic erudition, and his emphasis on occult sources of knowledgeare well attested. And in The Shadow of the Night Chapman certainly denigrates

19 See As You Like It, ed. Knowles, 189, for a summary of commentary, and (especially)P. Reyher, ‘Shakespeare and the Death of Marlowe’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 July 1925,464; also Nicholl, Reckoning, 75. The compound ‘tongue-tied’ occurs twice in the RivalPoet series (sonnets 80 and 85).20 The Sonnets, ed. H. E. Rollins, New Variorum, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1944), ii. 284^8.The most elaborate arguments were those of A. Acheson, Shakespeare and the Rival Poet(London, 1903), and M. C. Bradbrook,The School of Night (Cambridge, 1936).21 Poems, ed. Bartlett, 19.22 The Shadow of the Night: ‘Hymnus in Noctem’, ll. 376^7 (ibid.).23 E. A. Strathman, ‘The Textual Evidence for ‘‘The School of Night’’ ’, Modern LanguageNotes, 56 (1951), 176^86. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 252^3, the King says (according tothe Quarto of 1598, sig. F2r) ‘Blacke is the badge of Hell, j The hue of dungions, andthe Schoole of night’. Here ‘Schoole’ must be a misprint for a word roughly synonymouswith ‘badge’ and ‘hue’, such as ‘suit’ (perhaps spelt ‘Shoote’ in manuscript), which wouldcomplete the threesome of parallel phrases: ‘badge of hell’, ‘hue of dungeons’, and ‘suitof night’.24 John Kerrigan’s edition of Love’s Labour’s Lost (Harmondsworth, 1982) disposed of agood deal of the conjecture that had cluttered commentary on the play. H. R.Woudhuysen,in his edition of the play (Arden 3; Walton-on-Thames, 1998), accepts ‘school’ but issceptical of the word’s ‘alleged contemporary associations’ (p. 72).


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Venus and Adonis:

Presume not then ye £esh confounded soulsThat cannot bear the full Castalian bowls,Which sever mounting spirits from the senses,To look in this deep fount for thy pretences.25

The shift from ‘ye’ to ‘thy’ ‘betrays that Chapman is hitting at an individual’,26

and the object of dismissal is the Shakespeare who presumed to cite Ovid’scouplet Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi £avus Apollo j Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua(‘Let common folk admire vile things; may fairhaired Apollo [god of poetry] serveme goblets ¢lled with Castalian water [from the spring sacred to the Muses]’)as epigraph to Venus and Adonis. As Douglas Bush observed, Chapman’s versesare ‘the protest of a mystic and moralist against a leader of the £eshly school’.27

Some jealousy of Shakespeare seems implied. In any case, whatever the relationsbetween the two men in the early 1590s, the diction and imagery of sonnet 86and the other Rival Poet sonnets are highly suggestive of Chapman.

IV

But the 1598^1600 dating of the Rival Poet group enables us to see connectionspreviously overlooked. In 1598 Francis Meres published within his Palladis Tamia:Wit’s Treasury, ‘A Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with the Greek,Latin, and Italian Poets’.28 Though largely derivative and organized as a seriesof ‘similitudes’ between the writers of antiquity and those of contemporaryEngland, this was the ¢rst ‘evaluative survey’ of Elizabethan literature, in whichMeres, with his Masters degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, made pronounce-ments and delivered plaudits with the brisk assurance of any modern EnglishDepartment academic producing his list of the year’s ‘best books’ for the pre-Christmas Sunday papers. ‘I cannot think that real poets have any competition’,

25 The Shadow of the Night: ‘Hymnus in Cynthiam’, ll. 163^4 (in Poems, ed. Bartlett).26 John Middleton Murry, as quoted in Sonnets, ed. Rollins, ii. 287.27 Quoted ibid. 288.28 I have used the facsimile, Palladis Tamia (1598) by Francis Meres, published by Scholars’Facsimiles and Reprints (NewYork, 1938); my references are to the foliation of this edition,but the spelling and punctuation of quoted excerpts have been modernized. The‘Comparative Discourse’ section of Palladis Tamia and the entries on ‘Poetry’ and ‘Poets’were edited by Don Cameron Allen in Francis Meres’s Treatise ‘Poetrie’: A Critical Edition(Urbana, Ill., 1933). Allen showed that Meres’s references to the authors of antiquity werenot based on ¢rst-hand knowledge but culled from secondary sources, especially theO⁄cina of J. RavisiusTextor, and that many of Meres’s remarks about English writers wereindebted to commentators such as Puttenham, Nashe, Sidney, Ascham, and Webbe, whoseworks, along with Meres’s, are readily available in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G.Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. 1967). However, the fact that Meres’s brief treatise was amixture of ‘pseudo-erudition and blu¡ ’ (Allen, p. 60) does not a¡ect the present argu-ment. Meres was no F. R. Leavis or Yvor Winters, but he was au fait with literary gossip.


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wrote William Blake,29 but for the ¢rst time in English literary history Meresintroduced one. Shakespeare was a major prizewinner: ‘As Plautus and Senecaare accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latins, soShakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage’(p. 282a); and he was several times numbered among the top non-dramatic poets.But he was but one of many claimants to eminence. In Meres’s opinion, theEnglish tongue was ‘mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in rare ornamentsand resplendent habiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton,Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman’ (p. 280a). There Shakespeare isbrought into the closest possible conjunction with Marlowe and Chapman.

Moreover, Meres ends his section on writers with the information that‘Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival ofhis in his lewd love’ (pp. 286b^7a), and refers the reader to the one previouslypublished account of the incident in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgement(1597). A few sentences before that, Meres mentions Ovid’s ‘banishment . . .withthe barbarous Getes’ (p. 286b). The two key elements in Touchstone’s allusion toMarlowe in AsYou Like It (the tavern killing and Ovid’s exile) are thus also broughttogether by Meres, and in the same order. And in Palladis Tamia Shakespearewould also have read that ‘As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live inPythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in melli£uous and honey-tongued Shakespeare: witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugaredsonnets among his private friends, etc.’ (pp. 281b^2a). Meres thus promulgatedthe notion of poetic in£uence or kinship that shaded into transmigration of‘genius’, or possession by a forerunner’s spirit�citing Shakespeare as by Ovid’s‘spirit taught to write’, as it were, in the very poem, Venus and Adonis, that hadeclipsed Marlowe’s Ovidian Hero and Leander in popularity, and in the sonnetsthat he was still augmenting and working into a sequence.30 Moreover, immedi-ately after Meres had made his reference to Shakespeare as supreme Englishdramatist, he noted: ‘As Musaeus, who wrote the love of Hero and Leander, hadtwo excellent scholars, Thamaras and Hercules, so hath he in England two excel-lent poets, imitators of him in the same argument and subject, ChristopherMarlowe and George Chapman’ (p. 282a). Palladis Tamia must surely have helpedprovoke the Rival Poet series.

29 Annotations to Poems by William Wordsworth, in The Poetry and Prose of William Blake,ed. G. Keynes (London, 1975), 821.

30 In dedicating the ¢rst edition of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) to ThomasWalsingham, Edward Blount speaks of ‘the impression of the man that hath been dear tous, living an afterlife in our memory’. In that formulation Marlowe is already halfway tobecoming a ‘familiar ghost’, and in publisher Thomas Thorpe’s dedication to Blount ofMarlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (1600) the materialization is complete, in thereference to ‘Christopher Marlowe, whose ghost or genius is to be seen walking in theChurchyard in at least three or four sheets’: Thorpe announces that Marlowe’s worksare now available in print at booksellers’ stalls in St Paul’s, with a punning suggestion of ahaunted graveyard. As Charles Nicholl says, Thorpe humorously ‘conveys the sense ofMarlowe’s continued presence’ (Reckoning, 70).


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In describing the supposed circumstances not only of Marlowe’s death butalso those of Robert Greene and George Peele (p. 286b), as well as of those ofFrench and classical poets, Meres may well have provided one of the stimulifor Shakespeare’s inclusion within the Rival Poet series of sonnet 81, in whichthe Poet contemplates his own death.31 This morbid theme had been handledearlier, notably in sonnet 74, where the Poet imagines himself as ‘The prey ofworms, my body being dead, j The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife’.As Dover Wilson remarked of the second of these two lines, ‘The words so pre-cisely recount the details and circumstances of Marlowe’s death that it seemsimpossible that they should not be intended to allude to them and to suggestthat Sh[akespeare], another dramatic poet, might perhaps come to a like baseend.’32 Since vocabulary evidence indicates that sonnet 74 is roughly contempora-neous with the Rival Poet sonnets that immediately succeed it in the Quarto,we have here another sign that Marlowe and his tragic end enteredShakespeare’s thoughts at this time. And again, in those predatory worms, thereis a link to AsYou Like It. Rosalind concludes the speech in IV. i that contains herreference to Hero and Leander with the statement that ‘Men have died from timeto time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (ll. 99^101). In his enthrall-ing book on Marlowe’s murder (as he shows the slaying to have been), CharlesNicholl suggests that, besides suiting Rosalind’s theme, the sentence obliquelycorrects Meres’s assertion that Marlowe was slain by a ‘rival in his lewd love’.Jonathan Bate judged this suggestion plausible, and the two lines in sonnet74 (unnoticed by Nicholl or Bate) seem to justify it.33

Even more signi¢cantly, Meres includes substantial re£ections on poets’ reli-ance on generous patronage, which is a salient concern of the Rival Poet group.Maecenas, who ‘graced poets by his bounty’, ¢nds contemporary counterparts inJames VI of Scotland,‘a favourer of poets’, and Queen Elizabeth,‘a liberal patron’,while Octavia, the sister of Augustus and ‘exceeding bountiful unto Virgil’, servesas analogue for the countess of Pembroke (pp. 284a^b). In a brief entry on ‘Poets’preceding the ‘Comparative Discourse’, Meres writes that, as the Greek and Latinpoets ‘have won immortal credit to their native speech, being encouraged and

31 Of course Shakespeare needed no prompting from Meres to be aware of his ownmortality, but sonnet 81 has usually been regarded as ‘out of place’ among the Rival Poetsonnets, and Meres’s section on poets’ deaths provides yet another parallel betweenhis ‘Comparative Discourse’ and the Rival Poet group.32 Sonnets, ed. Dover Wilson, 179. An allusion to Marlowe’s killing was ¢rst proposed byEdward Dowden (1881), as recorded in Sonnets, ed. Rollins, i. 193; but the latest editors havebeen curiously reluctant to accept it, though Evans, in his edition of the sonnets, puts thisinterpretation second among four possible meanings for the line. Evans, like others, takesthe line to refer to ‘the cowardly seizure . . . under the knife, by Death (or his alias Time)’(p. 181).Though an emblematic Death/Time normally throws a dart (or spear), Evans is ableto cite instances where it is armed with a knife (and sonnet 100’s periphrasis for Time’sscythe is his ‘crooked knife’). But that the Poet should, in this context, reduce Death/Timeto ‘a wretch’ seems highly improbable, and Evans o¡ers no parallel.

33 Nicholl, Reckoning, 73; Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, 123. As Bate says,‘Metaphorically . . .Shakespeare was the rival who killed Marlowe’ (p. 105).


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graced by liberal patrons and benefactors, so our famous and learned laureatemasters of England would entitle our English to far greater admired excellency,if either the Emperor Augustus or Octavia his sister or noble Maecenas were aliveto reward and countenance them’ (p. 278a). He also remarks on the desirabilitythat ‘our witty Comedians and statelyTragedians’ be ‘maintained, countenanced,and patronized’ (pp. 278a^b).

The repeated use of the verb ‘countenance’ in connection with patronsis especially interesting in view of the couplet of sonnet 86: ‘But when yourcountenance ¢lled up his line, jThen lacked I matter�that enfeebled mine’. In thesonnet, ‘countenance’ doubtless means both (1) ‘face, appearance’ and (2) ‘favour,support, patronage’, to quote Evans’s gloss.The fear that the FairYouth’s patronagewill be permanently transferred to some ‘worthier pen’�that he himself will nolonger be sole bene¢ciary of the Youth’s ‘grace’ (sonnets 78 and 79) and ‘bounty’(sonnet 53)�is among the Poet’s anxieties. Meres’s language of patronage hasobvious similarities to Shakespeare’s.

That Shakespeare read Meres’s ‘Comparative Discourse’ attentively seemsdemonstrated by another notable parallel. In sonnet 85 the Poet describes hisRival’s verse as ‘precious phrase by all the Muses ¢led’. This echoes Meres’spraise of Shakespeare himself: in the short paragraph that intervenes betweenthe singling out of Shakespeare as dramatist and the reference to Marlowe andChapman’s Hero and Leander, he asserted that ‘the Muses would speak withShakespeare’s ¢ne ¢led phrase, if they would speak English’ (p. 282a). TheLiterature Online search functions detect no other juxtaposition of ‘the Muses’,‘phrase’, and ‘¢led’ in the whole electronic database.34 But might not Meresbe indebted to Shakespeare, rather than Shakespeare to him? Meres, after all,knew of Shakespeare’s ‘sonnets among his private friends’. There is, however, noevidence that he himself was among these intimates of Shakespeare, and hiscommendation may well have been based on hearsay. If the connection betweenMeres’s ‘Comparative Discourse’ and AsYou Like It be granted, the in£uence inthat instance can only have been in the one direction, fromMeres to Shakespeare,since Meres did not list As You Like It among Shakespeare’s plays, and it isvirtually certain that the comedy was composed after the publication of PalladisTamia. There appears, moreover, to be a glancing reference to Meres in Hamlet(1600^1), also de¢nitely later than Palladis Tamia. Polonius’s assertion that for the

34 The Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online database is described in MacD. P. Jackson,‘Editing, Attribution Studies, and ‘‘Literature Online’’: A New Resource in RenaissanceDrama’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 37 (1998), 1^15. Scholars should notethat the Literature Online searches cannot detect whole phrases that straddle line divi-sions; such phrases can, however, be recovered by use of the proximity functions. Thetruncation symbol * is helpful in searching for singulars and plurals at the same time.I keyed in ‘Muse* NEAR ¢led’, ‘Muse* NEAR ¢l’d’, ‘Muse* NEAR ¢lde’, ‘phrase*NEAR Muse*’, ‘phrase* NEAR ¢led’, ‘phrase* NEAR ¢l’d’, and ‘phrase* NEAR ¢lde’,and checked all the contexts. There were several instances of ‘¢led phrase’ but neverin association with Muse or Muses. Literature Online does not distinguish between thespellings ‘¢l’d’ and ‘¢ld’.


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Players visiting Elsinore ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light’ recallsMeres’s selection of Plautus and Seneca as the best Roman dramatists ‘forComedy and Tragedy’�in the sentence that awards Shakespeare the Elizabethanlaurels in both genres.35

A further link between Meres’s ‘Comparative Discourse’ and Shakespearewas noted by Thomas Tyler in 1880.36 Sonnet 55 (‘Not marble nor the gildedmonuments j Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme’) owes an obviousdebt to Horace’s Odes, III. 30, and the closing lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Ovid, largely through Golding’s English translation, is an acknowledged sourceof images and ideas in other Shakespeare sonnets. Horace’s in£uence on sonnet55 is concentrated in the ¢rst quatrain. Tyler pointed out that the relevantpassages by Ovid and Horace were quoted, one after the other, by Meres asapplicable to Shakespeare and other English poets, and that Meres addeda Latin adaptation of his own, with elements also found in Shakespeare’ssonnet (Meres, p. 282a^b). Tyler argued that Shakespeare had borrowed fromMeres. His claim was accepted by some scholars but rejected by others, whothought that Shakespeare could have obtained everything he needed for sonnet55 directly from Horace and Ovid, or asserted that Meres had based his ownLatin lines on Shakespeare’s.37 Tyler’s proposal has since been ignored.

But, in view of the other connections between Shakespeare and Meres, Tylerwas almost certainly right. If Shakespeare found relevant lines from Ovid andHorace ready to hand in Palladis Tamia and combined them in the compositionof sonnet 55, he acted exactly as he did in combining Meres’s separate referencesto Ovid’s exile and Marlowe’s death into a single train of thought byTouchstone.Moreover, neither Horace nor Ovid (in the original or in Golding’s English) makesany speci¢c mention of Mars or war, as does Shakespeare in his second quatrain:

When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils root out the work of masonry,Not Mars his sword, nor war’s quick ¢re shall burnThe living record of your memory.

Ovid says Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis j nec poterit ferrum nec edaxabolere vetustas, which Golding translates as ‘Now have I brought a work to endwhich neither Jove’s ¢erce wrath, j Nor sword, nor ¢re, nor fretting age with allthe force it hath j Are able to abolish quite’.38 It is true, of course, that Ovid’s ignis

35 The point has been made in P. Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford, 1998), 265.36 Sonnets, ed. Rollins, i. 147^9, forTyler’s claim and other scholars’ reactions to it.

37 In William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1944),T. W. Baldwin concludes that Shakespeare had ‘some knowledge’ of Ovid’s Metamorphoses,in Latin as well as in Arthur Golding’s translation, and ‘some knowledge’ also of the odesof Horace ‘in the original’ (ii. 454, 524).

38 Ovid,Metamorphoses, 2nd edn., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London,1984), xv. 871^2; Arthur Golding’s translation is quoted from Sonnets, ed. Kerrigan, 241.


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and ferrum suggest war, but Iovis ira (the wrath of Jove) is normally expressed inthunderbolts: it is not synonymous with war, as is Mars. Meres’s own variation onthe classical poets provides the cue to Shakespeare’s quatrain: Non Iouis ira:imbres: Mars: ferrum: £amma, senectus, j Hoc opus vnda: lues: turbo: venena ruent(p. 282b). Meres’s Mars: ferrum: £amma is surely the basis for Shakespeare’s‘Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick ¢re shall burn’ with its notable zeugma. InOvid’s Latin even ¢re (ignis) and sword ( ferrum) are separated by the verb. Besides,Shakespeare’s ‘overturn’ seems prompted byMeres’s next lines, where he says thatalthough Cronus,Vulcan, and Jove conspire ad pulcherimum hoc opus evertendum (‘todestroy this most beautiful work’), nothing can annihilate the English poets’ ever-lasting achievement: there evertendum is from the verb evertendere, to overturn.

It seems most unlikely that Meres somehow had the chance to studyShakespeare’s sonnet 55 closely enough to recognize its sources in Horace andOvid, to quote the exact lines on which Shakespeare drew, and to add two detailspeculiar to the sonnet itself, especially since so much of his own Latin�about£ood, plague, poison, and Jove (pater ipse gentis,‘the father of humankind himself ’)is free composition bearing no relation to sonnet 55 or to either of the classicalpoems. It is much easier to believe that, in sonnets 55 and 86, as in AsYou Like Itand Hamlet, Shakespeare recalled Meres. Sonnet 55’s vocabulary links with theplays are quite compatible with composition in or after 1598. That Shakespearewas the borrower in sonnets 55 and 86 is suggested also by the fact that both theseputative echoes of the ‘Comparative Discourse’ are, like the Hamlet echo (wherethe direction of in£uence is not in doubt), of phrases within the forty lines inwhich Shakespeare receives Meres’s highest acclaim�the lines that would mostnaturally have aroused his interest.

Shakespeare’s indebtedness to a reading of Meres’s ‘Comparative Discourse’seems con¢rmed by its containing several words ¢rst used by Shakespeare afterits publication in 1598.39 One of these is ‘compeer’, which, apart from its use insonnet 86, appears nowhere in the Shakespeare canon, except in King Lear as averb. Another is ‘modern’ in the modern sense (‘pertaining to the present orrecent past’): the normal meaning in Shakespeare is ‘commonplace, trite’, butuniquely in sonnet 83’s ‘a modern quill’ the sense ‘present-day, contemporary’seems dominant. As Evans explains, behind the word may lie a concession to thesuperiority of what Shakespeare, in sonnet 106, calls an ‘antique pen’, by which hemeans a classical writer.40 Meres’s whole purpose is to concoct ‘similitudes’between ancient and modern. ‘Melli£uous’, which Meres applies to Shakespeare,occurs only in Twelfth Night (1601), where Sir Andrew Aguecheek says that Feste,who has just sung for Sir Toby and him, has a ‘melli£uous voice’ (II. iii. 52). Aswith the putative echo, by Polonius in Hamlet, of Meres’s comparing Shakespeare

39 To distinguish senses of words I have used A. Schmidt, Shakespeare Lexicon and QuotationDictionary (1st edn. Berlin, 1902; New York, 1971).

40 Sonnets, ed. Evans, 190.


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to Plautus and Seneca, the Shakespearian context is jocular. So also is that inwhich Meres’s ‘poetical’ turns up in As You Like It, when, immediately after theallusion to ‘a great reckoning in a little room’, Touchstone explains to Audrey themeaning of the adjective, which occurs three times (III. iii. 13^20), and declaresthat ‘the truest poetry is the most feigning’. The only other Shakespearian workthat uses ‘poetical’ is Twelfth Night, where it is again associated with feigning in abit of badinage: Viola, disguised as Cesario, protests that the prepared speech shewishes to deliver to Olivia is ‘poetical’, to which Olivia retorts, ‘It is the more liketo be feigned’ (I. v. 188^9). Other ‘Comparative Discourse’ words that Shakespeare¢rst uses in or shortly after 1598 are ‘disconsolate’ in Julius Caesar (1599), ‘pickledherring’ inTwelfth Night (1601),‘extinct’ (as a verb) in Othello (1603),‘portraiture’ inHamlet (1600^1),‘maker’ in Henry V (1598^9) and Coriolanus (1608), and ‘precepts’in several middle and late plays, beginning with Hamlet. Meres writes of somepoets providing ‘precepts of good life’. Both ‘precepts’ and ‘good life’ are sourcesof comedy in Shakespeare’s plays�in Polonius’s fussy o¡ering of ‘precepts’ to hisdeparting son Laertes (Hamlet I. iii. 58^80), and in Sir Toby’s and Sir Andrew’spreference for a love song over a ‘song of good life’ in the very scene of TwelfthNight that elicits Sir Andrew’s praise of Feste’s ‘melli£uous’ voice (II. iii. 34^7). Ofcourse, all these words may simply have been ‘in the air’, as it were, at the time.

V

Meres also places as ‘among our best for tragedy’ not only Shakespeare, Marlowe,and Chapman but also the poet and playwright who was to become Shakespeare’sdominant rival in the theatre during his maturity.41 This was Ben Jonson, whooften mocked Shakespearian romantic comedy but who penned a superb eulogyto preface the posthumously published First Folio collection of Shakespeare’splays. The ‘well re¢ned pen’ and ‘golden quill’ of the Rival in sonnet 85 fore-shadow the posthumous praise accorded Jonson in Jonsonius Virbius: ‘Thougreat re¢ner of our Poesie, j Who turn’st to gold that which before was lead’.42

41 There is an excellent early account of the relationship between the two dramatists inS. Musgrove, Shakespeare and Jonson (Auckland, 1957). S. Schoenbaum brie£y sifted factfrom conjecture in ‘Shakespeare and Jonson: Fact and Mythology’, in D. Galloway (ed.),The ElizabethanTheatre II (London, 1970), 1^19. Among fuller and more recent explorationsare R. McDonald, Shakespeare & Jonson/Jonson & Shakespeare (Lincoln, Nebr., 1988),Shapiro’s chapter on ‘Jonson and Shakespeare’ in Rival Playwrights, and J. P. Bednarz,Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York, 2001), discussed below. That Jonson was the RivalPoet of the sonnets has recently been argued by E. A. J. Honigmann in ‘The FirstPerformance of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in G. Ioppolo (ed.), Shakespeare Performed: Essaysin Honor of R. A. Foakes (Newark and London, 2000), 131^48, where he develops ideasbroached in his book Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries (London and Basingstoke,1982).

42 Sir John Beaumont, ‘To the memory of him who can never be forgotten, MasterBenjamin Jonson’, in D. H. Craig (ed.), Benjamin Jonson: The Critical Heritage 1599 1̂798(London and NewYork, 1990), 188.


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Admittedly, the terms of praise are commonplace. But Jonson, even morecelebrated for his ‘learning’ than Chapman or Marlowe, is curiously called tomind by the nautical imagery, and even the details of diction, of sonnet 80,which contrasts the Poet’s own ‘saucy bark’ with his Rival’s vessel ‘of tall buildingand of goodly pride’. Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England (1662) wrote,in reference to Shakespeare,

Many were the wit combats betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanishgreat galleon and an English man-of-war: Master Jonson, like the former, was built farhigher in learning, solid, but slow in his performances; Shakespeare, with the Englishman-of-war lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about andtake advantage of all winds by quickness of his wit and invention.43

Fuller’s descriptions may, of course, have been in£uenced by sonnet 80, thoughShakespeare’s sonnets seem to have been little known in the second half of theseventeenth century.44 The Shakspere Allusion-Book recorded no references tothem between 1640, the date of Benson’s partial and garbled reprint, and 1700.45

But once again we have a suggestive conjunction of dates. It was preciselyduring the period to which vocabulary evidence would assign the compositionof the Rival Poet mini-series (1598^1600) that Jonson began his niggling at theconventions of the popular theatre exploited by Shakespeare, and atShakespearian romantic ‘green world’ comedy, which so di¡ered from the urbansatirical comedy evolved by Jonson to ‘show an image of the times, j And sportwith human follies’. The phrases come from the prologue (ll. 23^4) to Jonson’sEvery Man In His Humour (1598), where he also mocks the use of ‘three rustyswords’, aided by ‘some few foot-and-half-foot words’ (ll. 9^10), to dramatize theWars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster�in obvious refer-ence to Shakespeare’s Henry VI^Richard III tetralogy.46 Since the prologue was¢rst printed in the Jonson Folio of 1616, being absent from the 1601 Quarto ofEvery Man In, it may have been a later addition associated with Jonson’s revisionof his play. But Every Man In represented Jonson’s ‘coming of age’ as a playwright,and Jonson had no doubt aired his views in conversation, whether or not theyintroduced the original performances.

In Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) Jonson went further, contrasting hisown brand of comedy,‘accommodated to the correction of manners’, in conformitywith formulae ascribed to Cicero, with plays in which ‘the argument’ is ‘of a duke

43 Chambers,William Shakespeare, ii. 245 (modernized).44 Bednarz, Poets’ War, believes that ‘The dialogue Fuller imagined as personal reparteecan be traced back to this [Shakespeare’s] series of theatrical responses to Every Man Out,Cynthia’s Revels, and Poetaster in AsYou Like It,Twelfth Night,Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet’(p. 13).45 Sonnets, ed. Rollins, ii. 327.46 Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925^52), iii. 303.References to both Humour plays are to this edition, but with spelling and punctuationmodernized.


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to be in love with a countess, and that countess to be in love with the duke’s son,and the son to love the lady’s waiting-maid: some such cross wooing, with a clownto their serving-man’ (III. vi. 195^212; Herford and Simpson, iii. 514^15). He isclearly thinking of comedies like Twelfth Night, which Shakespeare may havealready been engaged in composing: the Duke Orsino is ‘in love’ with theCountess Olivia, who becomes enamoured, not of the Duke’s son, but of hissupposed page, Cesario; and the clown Feste is a servant in Olivia’s household.47

Every Man Out of His Humour also incorporated a good-humoured joke atShakespeare’s expense. In 1596 Shakespeare ¢nally secured for his family a coatof arms and for himself the coveted title of ‘gentleman’, and in 1599 a grant wasdrawn up for John Shakespeare’s arms to be impaled with his wife’s Arden familyinsignia. The motto was ‘Non sanz droict’ (‘Not without right’).48 In Jonson’scomedy a comic coat of arms is devised for country bumpkin Sogliardo. A boar’shead or ‘a hog’s cheek and puddings in a pewter ¢eld’ are among proposedheraldic emblems, and the ‘word’ or motto eventually hit upon is ‘Not withoutmustard’ (III. iv. 83^6; Herford and Simpson, iii. 504^5).There is no malice in this,just the gentle teasing of a friend who avowedly ‘loved the man’ Shakespeare.49

But with the Humour plays the long rivalry between two playwrights who di¡eredin temperament, knowledge of the classics, and artistic bent began.

Every Man In His Humour was performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s men atthe Curtain late in 1598, and Shakespeare is prominent in the cast list of actors.He may well have taken the lead role of Bobadill, since the names are arrangedin pairs, playbill fashion, with Shakespeare’s at the top of the ¢rst column andBurbage’s at the top of the second.50 In Every Man Out Jonson outlined histheory of comic ‘humours’, a mode of characterization foreshadowed in thetitle of Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth (written 1597 and ¢rst printed1599). Jonson became a ‘dear friend’ of Chapman and collaborated with him(and Marston) on Eastward Ho (1605).51 In fact, theatrical entrepreneur PhilipHenslowe recorded that Chapman was working on ‘a tragedy of Benjamin’s plot’

47 Jonson doubtless also had in mind such Shakespearian comics as Costard in Love’sLabour’s Lost, Launce in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Launcelot Gobbo inThe Merchant of Venice, besides Dogberry, Touchstone, and their fellows. Bednarz, datingthe ¢rst performance of Twelfth Night between 6 January and 25 September 1601, seesShakespeare’s play as a deliberate response to his rival’s mockery, revelling ‘in the comicmythos Jonson dismissed’ (Poets’ War, 179, 270).48 Chambers,William Shakespeare, ii. 18^32.49 Ibid. 210.

50 The cast list was given in the Jonson Folio of 1616. See Chambers,William Shakespeare,ii. 71. The point about a playbill was well made by Frank O’Connor (Michael O’Donovan)in Shakespeare’s Progress (New York, 1961), 79^81.

51 George Chapman, Plays and Poems, ed. J. Hudston (Harmondsworth, 1998), p. xiii.In the same sentence of his ‘Epistle’ to The White Devil in which Webster commended‘that full and heightened style of Master Chapman’ he also praised ‘the laboured andunderstanding works of Master Jonson’, thus linking the two authors.


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(a di¡erent play, of course) as early as October 1598.52 There were thus strong linksbetween the ‘learned’ Chapman and Jonson. Shakespeare’s lively awareness ofJonson’s evolution of a satirical ‘comedy of humours’, so di¡erent from his ownromantic vein, is indicated in Corporal Nym’s verbal tic ‘that’s the humour of it’and his laughable obsession with the word ‘humours’ in Henry V (1598^9) and inThe Merry Wives of Windsor. The Oxford Textual Companion dates Merry Wives to1597^8, but it is not listed byMeres, and Chambers favoured 1600^1.53 It may havebeen composed at the earlier date and later revised.54 What seems certain isthat in writing, mainly in prose, ‘his sole play dealing almost entirely with con-temporary English life’55�a ‘gulling’ comedy, in which Falsta¡ ’s pretensions asseducer are exposed to ridicule�and populating it with ‘humours’ caricatures,Shakespeare was responding to a theatrical trend led by Jonson. As it happens,the play also includes a substantial excerpt from Marlowe’s ‘The PassionateShepherd to his Love’, besides a reference to Doctor Faustus (III. i. 16^28, IV. v. 65)

It must also have been within the Rival Poet period 1598^1600 that Jonson¢rst commented on a line in Julius Caesar (1599) that, according to him, read‘Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause’, which he considered ‘ridiculous’.Though the comment did not reach print until much later, Jonson’s echoes ofJulius Caesar in Every Man Out and other plays show that he knew Shakespeare’sRoman tragedy well, and he must have publicly sco¡ed at the supposed absurdityafter hearing it uttered when the play was ¢rst performed.56

James P. Bednarz has recently marshalled these and other allusions�likelyand unlikely�into an argument for Shakespeare’s full- scale involvement in thenotorious Poetomachia or Poets’ War, in which he joined Dekker and Marstonin challenging Jonson’s e¡orts to ‘to establish for himself and for his age a newparadigm of poetic authority’ based on neoclassical standards.57 It was, writesBednarz, ‘in opposition to Shakespeare’ that Jonson ‘designed comical satire todisplace romantic comedy. And it was Shakespeare who, in turn, criticizedJonson’s new approach even as he submitted to its in£uence, moving from theromantic framework of AsYou Like It through the disturbing balance of romanticand satiric sentiment in Twelfth Night to the satiric nihilism of Troilus and

52 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), 100 (modernized).53 Chambers, William Shakespeare, i. 270. E. Schafer, ‘The Date of The Merry Wivesof Windsor’, Notes and Queries, 136 (1991), 57^60, questions the evidence for the 1597 datingand stresses the comedy’s connections with Henry V. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed.G. Melchiori, Arden 3 (Walton-on-Thames, 2000), concludes that ‘the comedy could nothave been written before late 1599’ (p. 21). McDonald, Shakespeare & Jonson, accepting theearly date, considers Merry Wives in connection with Every Man In (pp. 31^55).54 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans (Boston, 1974), 52, dates the play ‘1597(revised c.1600^1)’.55 The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed.W. Green (New York, 1965), p. xxiv.56 Chambers,William Shakespeare, i. 397^8, ii. 210. MacD. P. Jackson,‘ ‘‘But with just cause’’:Julius Caesar, III. i. 47’, Notes and Queries, 246 (2001), 282^4.57 Bednarz, Poets’ War, 3.


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Cressida.’58 For Bednarz, the Poets’ War or War of theTheatres was less an alterca-tion between rival acting companies than ‘a theoretical debate on the socialfunction of drama’.59 Bednarz ignores The Merry Wives of Windsor and says nextto nothing about Shakespeare’s sonnets. The details of his fascinating caseare not all equally convincing. But there can be no doubt that around 1599Jonson became for Shakespeare a formidable ‘rival’.60

VI

The Rival Poet sonnets originated, it seems to me, in a general sense of rivalryfuelled by Francis Meres’s glib inventory of England’s top poets and playwrightsand exacerbated by the publication of Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be mylove’ as Shakespeare’s, of Marlowe and Chapman’s Hero and Leander, and ofChapman’s Seven Books of the Iliad, and the emergence of a brashly con¢dentJonson as new challenger to Shakespeare’s pre-eminence in the theatre.61 WhenSwinburne died, Yeats proclaimed ‘Now I am king of the cats’; vying with RobertLowell for recognition as the American poet, Theodore Roethke boasted of thepoems to be collected in The Far Field, ‘I’ve got old Cal beat, but really’.62 Poetsare like that: Blake was wrong. Marlowe’s untimely death ‘gave Shakespeare theopportunity to emerge from the shadow of Marlowe’s mighty line’.63 ButChapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander, with its overweening claim to havebeen inspired by the very spirit of Marlowe, reawakened an old competitiveness,with its attendant insecurities. These doubtless included the touchiness ofa country grammar-school lad about his own ‘small Latin and less Greek’,as he compared himself with the Cambridge-educated Marlowe, translator ofMusaeus, Ovid, and Lucan, with Chapman, who, according to Anthony Wood,had excelled at Oxford ‘in the Latin and Greek tongues’64 and had now staked his

58 Ibid. 13.59 Ibid. 7.

60 Bednarz (ibid. 10^11) gives the dates 1599^1600 as de¢ning the ‘¢rst phase’ of the Poets’War, two later phases continuing it to the end of 1601.61 The year 1600 saw the sudden appearance of three anthologies of poems and snippetsby most of the English writers named by Meres: England’s Parnassus, England’s Helicon, andBelvedere. Anthologies are notorious for provoking competitiveness among poets, but allthe Rival Poet sonnets may already have been written by 1600.62 R. F. Foster,W. B.Yeats: A Life, vol. i:The Apprentice Mage 1865 1̂914 (Oxford, 1997), 616 n.69; I. Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (New York, 1982), 336. Hamilton quotes a letterof 10 July 1963 from Lowell to Roethke: ‘I remember Edwin Muir arguing with me thatthere is no rivalry in poetry. Well, there is. No matter what one has done or hasn’tdone . . . one feels each blow, each turning of the wind, each up and down gradingof the critics’ (p. 336). In Shakespeare’s sonnet 86, ‘victors’ and ‘boast’ convey a ¢ercecompetitiveness, like the ‘£yting’ of 16th-century Scottish ‘makars’.

63 Bate,The Genius of Shakespeare, 105.64 Wood is quoted in Plays and Poems, ed. Hudston, p. x.


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claim to fame with his translations from Homer, and with Jonson, the mostostentatiously learned poet-playwright of the age. And Meres’s highlightingof patronage in connection with poets and playwrights was a further stimulus toShakespeare’s imagination.

In listing England’s ‘best’ writers in the lyric mode, Meres began with EdmundSpenser, who ‘excelleth in all kinds’ of poetry (p. 283a). In 1599 Spenser died.His monument would eventually describe him as ‘The Prince of Poets in hisTime’.65 Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and others lauded by Meres may have contrib-uted to Shakespeare’s picture of the Rival Poet and Poets. In fact the lines ofsonnet 85 that combine three of Meres’s words about Shakespeare himself alsobring together three that Meres applies to Drayton. Others, says sonnet 85, praisethe youth ‘with golden quill j And precious phrase of all the Muses ¢led’. Thisrecalls not only Meres’s assertion that ‘the Muses would speak with Shakespeare’s¢ne ¢led phrase, if they would speak English’ (p. 282a), but also his judgement,a few paragraphs beforehand, that ‘Drayton is termed golden-mouthed for thepurity and preciousness of his style and phrase’ (p. 281a). Literature Online recordsno other juxtaposition of ‘golden’, ‘precious(ness)’, and ‘phrase’. So again inlines 2^3 of sonnet 85, Shakespeare condenses two separate, but neighbouring,dicta in the ‘Comparative Discourse’. Drayton is yet another Ovidian: ‘MichaelDrayton’, notes Meres,‘doth imitate Ovid in his England’s Heroical Epistles’ (p. 281a).Modelled on Ovid’s Heroides, this series of verse letters exchanged by loversfrom English history had appeared in print in 1597.

KatherineDuncan-Jones’s suggestion that theRival Poet maybe a semi- ¢ctionalamalgamation of those writers with whom Shakespeare felt most competitiveappears, then, to be right.66 The Rival Poet sonnets veer between singular andplural identi¢cations of their target because the Rival is a composite creation.And they intermingle respect and disdain for the same reason. The ‘esemplasticpower’ of Shakespeare’s imagination can be seen everywhere in the Rival Poetseries, not only melding separate remarks by Meres into particular linesbut constructing characters, relationships, and scenarios that serve his Quartosequence as a whole.67 Doubtless personal rivalries and anxieties helpedenergize this process, but the ¢nal emphasis should be on the aesthetic object.It is thoroughly characteristic of Shakespeare, with his sense of contrast andstructural opportunity, to dichotomize the conventional love object into FairYouth and Dark Woman, create a love triangle in which each becomes the

65 M. Drabble (ed.),The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th edn. (Oxford, 1985), 928.

66 ‘Perhaps, indeed, the ‘‘rival poet’’ is a composite ¢gure, and the mini- sequence 76^86should be seen as exploring the theme of the speaker-poet’s sense of being threatened byother poets through a ¢ctionally amalgamated writer, drawing on several individuals, ratherthan embodying any single thread of allusion’: Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones, 65^6.

67 ‘Esemplastic’ is Coleridge’s coinage. See Biographia Literaria, ed. G. Watson (London,1956, revised 1965), 91.


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Poet’s rival for the other’s favour, and then augment rivalry in love with rivalryin poetry.68 The Quarto sequence entitled Shakespeare’s Sonnets is organized asa‘work’, greater than the sum of its parts.69

Appendix: Vocabulary and Dating

For the wider limits of 1596^1604 for sonnets 78^86 see MacD. P. Jackson,‘Vocabulary andChronology: The Case of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, RES NS 52 (2001), 59^75, which supportsand modi¢es A. K. Hieatt, C. W. Hieatt, and A. L. Prescott, ‘When Did ShakespeareWrite Sonnets 1609?’, Studies in Philology, 88 (1991), 69^109.The Rival Poet series is addressedin ‘Vocabulary and Chronology’, 69^70. The general ¢ndings of these two articles aboutthe dating of the sonnets are con¢rmed in MacD. P. Jackson, ‘Rhymes in Shakespeare’sSonnets: Evidence of Date of Composition’, Notes and Queries, 244 (1999), 213^19, and‘Dating Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Some Old Evidence Revisited’, Notes and Queries,247 (2002), 237^41. As a group, sonnets 78^86 a¡ord eight linkages through Sarrazin’s‘dislegomena’ and ‘trislegemona’ (see ‘Vocabulary and Chronology’ for documentationand discussion); six of these links are with plays of the period from 2 Henry IV (1596^7)toTroilus and Cressida (1601^2).

In The Problem of ‘The Reign of King Edward III’: A Statistical Approach (Cambridge, 1988),Eliot Slater showed that the rarer the words the stronger were the chronological links(p. 88). Among the words and senses of words in sonnet 86 (as de¢ned in Schmidt’sShakespeare Lexicon), those that occur least frequently in the Shakespeare canon, appearingin no more than three plays, are recorded below, with indications of the plays in which theyare found: ‘sail’ (metaphorical) HV; ‘inhearse’ 1HVI; ‘astonish’ (‘to amaze, to stun withfear and terror’) HV, 2HVI, JC; ‘familiar’ (‘pertaining to the house and family, attachedand serviceable to men’) Wives, Oth., 1HVI; ‘gull’ (as verb) TN, HV; ‘intelligence’ (‘mentalintercourse, terms of mutual understanding’) AYL, Cym.; ‘¢ll up’ (‘to make complete’)LLL, Oth.; ‘line’ (singular, meaning ‘verse’) TGV, AWW, Hamlet ; ‘enfeeble’ HV, 1HVI,Cym. Shakespeare’s plays may be listed in chronological order and the instances of thesewords recorded against each play, with 4 in Henry V, for example. If we then calculate¢ve-play moving totals, the highest total (8) is at As You Like It (1599^1600), with thenext highest (7) occurring at the immediately preceding Henry V (1598^9) and JuliusCaesar (1599). This evidence is supported by a comprehensive search for collocations.The following form rare links: ‘bound for’ (‘making towards’) Hamlet, Cym.; ‘ripe thoughts’TN (‘My thoughts are ripe in mischief ’); ‘taught to’AWW, AYL, 1HIV, RII; ‘strike . . . dead’(¢guratively) AYL; ‘lack . . .matter’AYL (twice), Troilus. Seven of the 11 occur within four

68 I owe this point to Brian Boyd, to whom I am grateful for reading a draft of this article.In a much shorter form it was given at a paper at the Australia and New ZealandShakespeare Association conference in Launceston, Tasmania, February 2002.69 I have deliberately avoided discussing the ‘identity’ of the Fair Youth, but it is possiblethat, as the sequence as a whole presents him, he too is a composite ¢gure constructedfrom Shakespeare’s relationship, at di¡erent times, with the two main candidates, HenryWriothesley, earl of Southampton, and William Henry, earl of Pembroke. For Pembroke asmodel for the Fair Youth, and for his patronage of Jonson, see Sonnets, ed. Duncan-Jones,50^69.


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consecutive plays of 1599^1602, As You Like It to Troilus and Cressida, and As You Like Ithas four of these, no other play having more than one. Composition contemporaneouswith AsYou Like It is thus suggested both by individual rare words and by rare collocations.

For sonnet 55 the words occurring in three or fewer plays are: ‘unswept’ Wives,Cor.; ‘sluttish’ R&J, Troilus, AWW; ‘wasteful’ (‘ruinous, destructive’) AYL, HV (twice),Macbeth; ‘overturn’ or ‘o’erturn’ 1HIV, 2HIV,HV; ‘root out’ 3HVI, Pericles,HVIII; ‘masonry’AWW; ‘oblivious’Macbeth. When the same technique is used as for sonnet 86, the peak¢ve-play moving total for sonnet 55 comes at 2 Henry IV (1597^8), with the immediatelyfollowing Much Ado About Nothing (1598) and Henry V (1598^9) a¡ording the next highesttotals. Henry V has the most actual links (3). Rare collocations associate sonnet 55 withthe plays as follows: with ‘gilded monuments’ compare ‘gilded tombs’ Merchant; ‘thesecontents’ Hamlet ; ‘Mars . . . sword . . . ¢re’ HV; ‘Mars his’ Troilus (3); ‘quick ¢re’ AWW;‘record . . .memory’ A&C; ‘all posterity’ RIII, R&J; with ‘wear this world out’ compare‘This great world j Shall so wear out’ Lear; with ‘memory . . . this world . . . to the endingdoom’ compare ‘to the ending of the world . . . shall be remembered’ HV. Nine of the13 parallels are with plays from The Merchant of Venice (1596^7) to Antony and Cleopatra(1606), and the two strongest are with Henry V, the play with the most vocabulary links.Henry V ’s use of ‘wasteful’ (in the phrase ‘wasteful vengeance’) is, moreover, the mostclosely connected with sonnet 55’s, since it appears in the context of making war againstFrance. The fact that ‘Mars his’ occurs 3 times in Troilus and Cressida (1602), and nowhereelse in the dramatic canon, also supports a dating of sonnet 55 at about the time ofHenryV(1598^9).

Sonnet 74 o¡ers few words that occur in no more than three Shakespeareplays: ‘memorial’ (as a noun) TN, Troilus ; ‘review’ WT; ‘consecrate’ (as a participlemeaning ‘devoted’) CofE, Titus (2); ‘dregs’ (‘lees, grounds’) Troilus (2). The three links withTroilus and Cressida (1602) seem signi¢cant, particularly since ‘memorial’ also links thesonnet to Twelfth Night (1601) and Troilus also a¡ords a unique adjectival use of theword. The two early instances of ‘consecrate’ in Titus Andronicus are in scenes thatwere almost certainly written by George Peele (I. i. 14, II. i. 122; see B.Vickers, ShakespeareCo-Author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays (Oxford, 2002), 148^243). Rare collo -cations are as follows: ‘Be contented’ (as an injunction) Wives, Lear; with ‘fell arrest’compare ‘this fell sergeant Death j Is strict in his arrest’ Hamlet ; ‘carry . . . away’ R&J,1HIV, Hamlet ; with ‘away . . . still with thee shall stay’ compare ‘away . . . still with methey stay’ RII; ‘his due’ 1HIV, HV (2); with ‘coward conquest’ compare ‘shameful conquest’RII and ‘vile conquest’ JC; ‘knife . . . life’ (as rhyme) LLL, TN. All fourteen parallels arewith plays from Love’s Labour’s Lost (1595^5) to King Lear (1605^6), and the best is withHamlet (1600^1). The two kinds of evidence converge on a date around the turn of thecentury.

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