Letting the storm borrow their wilderness
And waiting for its idle strength to spend.
Which, when it had, the sun unburst his heat
And drew the vapours steaming from the ground
And with his stupid vapour hung the air
Till everything became itself again.
Among their drying stones the lizards lurked
And from the hill the lions swung their way,
Drooping their heads and blinking in a dream
As if the sky had never touched their peace.
Then, after they had passed, I saw a man -
A figure made of stone who stood whereat
That torrent had splashed down, sudden and strong.
Thinking I saw him move I held my breath
But he was stone and still and blind as silence.
And all around him in the working grass
The insects hummed, and birds' wings rushed again,
And all the noises heard themselves once more.
This next little excised passage came where Helena made her entrance in Scene 3 of the first Act, just after her guardian the Countess has spoken of love as 'this thorn' which belongs to 'our rose of youth'. No doubt the speech is too abrupt and not a little obscure, but (again) I think that its excision takes sympathy away from Helena who as she exists in All's Well That Ends Well lacks the essential dash of poetic feeling that's necessary to her deeds. Without lines like these, her pursuit of Bertram, and her use of the bed-trick, can strike the audience as repellent.
Anyway, picking up the image just expressed by the Countess of Rousillon, Bertram's mother, in Love's Labour's Won I had to say as Helena:
A counterfeit of silence is the rose -
For it's substantial fire, a patient palace
Listening to ghosts, a sorrow in sunlight.
Then there is this, which must come from Act IV, when Helena is in the widow's house in Florence, about to perform her trick on Bertram:
Far, far from such festivity of flesh
I dream in ignorance of sanctuary,
Night-compassed.
How may the swarming sun the hive of flesh
Exhaust our quintessential sense, madam?
All men are strangers! O rivers, rivers,
Solve in your too bright burden of reflection
The hubbub of an overhanging noon,
And by your volubility hush up
The synonyms of Echo.
Where this came in, God only knows, but I consider it a shame to have lost so much imagery of pretty fishes, which again adds beauty to the part of Helena:
Those rainbow waters vellumy
Are all the pages of my book:
A kind of prick-fish, stickleback,
And ticklish trout in the binding.
Roach, bleak, loach, minnow, pickerel -
A perch voracious for her own blind eyes
In the frowsty primer of my blindness.
Lavish as gudgeon, the dropsical carp
Came at my call, to troll the sun
Through nibbling nets of moss, or dusk,
Wounded with tench.
And - exhalations smouldering the far water -
The swans drift down on me with Lethe in their wings.
I have this written out as verse, but it may be prose. Here, with your permission, I might mention a private theory of my own - namely, that there are several passages given to female characters in Shakespeare which have been taken for prose but which sound, in fact, quite new and original verse-rhythms. The later speeches of Lady Macbeth, for example, which are printed in the Folio as prose, are to my ear really verse, and very fine verse at that. When I spoke them I delivered them always in measure, and Mr Shakespeare never stopped me. Those lines drawn out in monosyllabic feet seem to me as wonderfully effective as any he wrote. The speeches in the sleep-walking scene, for instance, if spoken as verse, have a very great majesty.
You have had enough of Love's Labour's Won, have you, friends?
Very well, then. But just one speech more, before I put the sheets back in the envelope. This must surely belong at the end, where in All's Well Helena never seems to have sufficient to say to Bertram to make it true in any sense that all ends welclass="underline"
Helena (to Bertram)
Do not suppose I love you less because
My heart beats words to cheat the meaning out
Of love I cannot cheat so beat with words.
I have had carnal knowledge of the night
And move within the rose's jurisdiction.
Because I lack wet willow's simple touch
Do not suppose I love you overmuch.
Chapter Sixty-Eight Was Shakespeare raped?
Have you ever noticed how very queer Mr Shakespeare's two long narrative poems are?
I mean Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both published in this period when the theatres were closed down on account of the plague, both written therefore before his thirtieth birthday.
In the first a mannish woman rapes a womanish man, but he proves impotent.
In the second a man is excited by the idea of his friend's wife being chaste and rapes her, but the rape gets a bare eight lines out of the whole 1855. Before the rape, the poem lingers in a dream-like way over everything it invokes for our inspection: the doors and locks of the victim's house, the wind that blows down the corridors, Lucrece's discarded glove, her bedroom, her 'yet unstained' bed, her body's beauty - five gloating stanzas of the last, including a description of her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, / A pair of maiden yokes unconquered / Save of their lord. After the rape, the poem quickly enters the victim's mind and becomes her long rhetorical complaint before she kills herself. Although the presentation of the ravisher Tarquin is adequate, it is plain that the poet identifies more easily with the raped woman Lucrece.
I think that in both poems Shakespeare was looking back eleven years or so, towards that summer of 1582, when perhaps he played Adonis/Lucrece to Anne Hathaway's Venus/Tarquin in the fields of Shottery.
Was Shakespeare raped?
I think it not impossible. His Venus is not Ovid's Venus. She is not even much of a goddess. She is an older woman having her way with a country boy she has kidnapped.
Venus rapes Adonis, but she doesn't get what she wants. That much is made apparent at the climax:
Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter:
All is imaginary she doth prove,
He will not manage her, although he mount her;
That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy,
To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.
Tantalus was punished in Hades by being inflicted with a great thirst and placed up to his chin in water which receded whenever he tried to drink. The last line means there has been no penetration.