Here, then, is
A LOST SONNET BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day
That thereby beauty's rose might never die?
Though heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme,
To find where your true image pictur'd lies
I would not count the clock that tells the time.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And yet love knows it is a greater grief:
Look what thy memory cannot contain
Th' offender's sorrow lends but weak relief.
But thence I learn and find the lesson true,
And all in war with Time for love of you.
Chapter Seventy-Two Who was Shakespeare's Friend?
In general of Mr Shakespeare's sonnets it has been observed that there are many footprints around the cave of this mystery, none of them pointing in the outward direction.
Pickleherring will now try to clear a few things up for you, dear reader.
First, bearing in mind that at the present time this is the most difficult to obtain of Shakespeare's writings, and that the only recent edition was a catchpenny pirated job which tampered with the text to make lines addressed to a man read as though addressed to a woman, permit me to pen a few paragraphs in simple description of these sonnets. Sir, a connoisseur such as yourself can skip on down the page. Madam, please bear with me; I know that you know everything.
William Shakespeare's Sonnets were first printed in 1609, only seven years before their author's death, by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe, a fly-by-night publisher who died in an almshouse at Ewelme. The little volume is hard to get hold of because Mr S did not authorise its publication, and bought up copies where he could, and did his best altogether to suppress it, the reason being the private and indeed scandalous nature of some of the work it contained. It was his poetic diary, so to speak, much of it written for his own eyes only, and while he had every reason not to be ashamed of it, and in fact was not, at the same time I believe he would have preferred it if the poems had not been made available for public reading in his lifetime.
The volume, quarto-size, was dedicated by Thorpe to 'Mr W. H.' - William Hervey, Rizley's stepfather, who had provided him with copies of the poems. By that time, there was no love lost between Mr Shakespeare and any of the Southamptons.
The poems in the book fall into two sections - the first 126 being concerned mainly with a Friend whom the poet addresses in terms of growing intimacy, first exhorting him to marry and beget children, then praising his beauty and promising to immortalise it by means of the verse, then upbraiding him for various acts of betrayal including the seduction of the poet's own mistress. The self-love of the Friend is at all points harped upon. Yet Shakespeare persists in loving him, and in forgiving him. The rest of the sonnets, from number 127 onwards, are concerned with the poet's relationship with his mistress, the Dark Lady, a woman coloured ill who is also described as a female evil, among other choice epithets. She is as skilled at playing upon men as she is skilled at playing upon the virginals. While from several physical descriptions we learn that she is in no way conventionally beautiful, yet she possesses a sexual magnetism which the poet cannot resist. Some would not use the word love to define their need for such a woman, but Shakespeare does. Several of the poems are bitter about this Dark Lady's infidelity with the Friend, and sore on the subject of her sexual appetites, and express the poet's self-disgust at his own lust for her - sonnet 129, for instance, describes lust in action as th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Yet by the strength of the truth in the poetry Shakespeare can be said in the end to forgive the Dark Lady as he forgives the Friend.
Now then, it ill behoves the present writer to say it, but in the final analysis poetry as good as this makes biography irrelevant. It does not matter who these people were. What matters is the truth that the poet has wrung from them. Was the poet sincere? The question is stupid. The poetry is sincere. That is all that there is to be said. Shakespeare's sonnets have a smell of unmistakable necessity. As my friend the poet Martin Seemore once remarked, they were written by a man who desperately wanted to exist welclass="underline" 'to learn how to live and love truly'.
That is the real secret in the cave. Human nature being what it is, though, can I say anything about those footprints?
First, who was Shakespeare's Friend?
I hope you will not find it facetious if I answer that question by saying that the late Mr WS had several Friends. I will in any case add immediately that as I have already told you the Friend of the sonnets began as Rizley, with all those exhortations to him to marry, written at the behest of Lady Southampton, his mother.
But the Friend of the sonnets is not always Rizley.
Later, for example, it was me.
Yes, sir, I admit it. I was Shakespeare's boy, sir! On occasion, on dire or sweet occasion, and much against my will, I, Pickleherring, was the master-mistress of the great man's passion.
Madam, I do apologise, believe me. But, alas, I am not ashamed.
I had better tell you this, for your understanding. When I was playing all those female parts I had to watch my erections. I found the touch of the dresses against my genitals very provoking. I was a boy who was easily provoked. And of course my male protruberance was at all times something of a difficulty.
My skirts covered that well enough, of course, when I was wearing skirts. But there was the odd time, such as when Rosalind or Viola was swaggering about trying to look as butch as possible, when I had to mask or disguise the fact that I did indeed have a bulge between my legs.
I employed a tight, wet bandage.
But then the trouble was that this bandage sometimes made me randy in itself.
So I used to have to wank a lot, offstage, spinning myself off, before going on, to keep my man small and amenable. Such are the secrets of the profession.
Forgive an old comedian his candour, madam. No doubt you have some secrets of your own?
What you must realise is what the Puritans (albeit in their foolish way) most assuredly knew: namely, that the theatre is a temple of Dionysus. The getting of hard pricks is to the point. Your subtle fellow might come off listening to Romeo and Juliet. At the ancient festivals, where all drama was born, the procession was led by boys dressed up as girls. Forgive me, I have smaller Latin and less Greek even than You Know Who, but I believe that dithyrambs come from Dionysus Dithyrambus, the ritual song of the god, where di + thura = DOUBLE DOOR. The god is born through two doors, one male, one female. Dressed in the part of a woman, I was an initiate in ancient mysteries. It is an honourable craft, this transvestism.
Well, then, I come to the point. Although my voice was years in the breaking, years during which I piped a between-times treble that Mr S pronounced ideal for such roles as Rosalind, in other respects I was soon more a man than a boy. I spoke with a reed voice, like that merchant's daughter buried by her sisters in my mother's story - the one who had the world as a transparent apple to spin on a silver saucer. But I had something between my legs which no merchant's daughter ever had.