"O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds."[597]
They used to relate in London how his comrade Burbadge, who played Richard III, having a rendezvous with the wife of a citizen, Shakespeare went before, was well received, and was pleasantly occupied, when Burbage arrived, to whom he sent the message that William the Conqueror came before Richard III.[598] We may take this as an example of the tricks and somewhat coarse intrigues which are planned, and follow in quick succession, on this stage. Outside the theatre he lived with fashionable young nobles, Pembroke, Montgomery, Southampton,[599] and others, whose hot and licentious youth gratified his imagination and senses by the example of Italian pleasures and elegancies. Add to this the rapture and transport of poetical nature, and this kind of afflux, this boiling over of all the powers and desires which takes place in brains of this kind, when the world for the first time opens before them, and you will understand the "Venus and Adonis, the first heir of his invention." In fact, it is a first cry, a cry in which the whole man is displayed. Never was seen a heart so quivering to the touch of beauty, of beauty of every kind, so delighted with the freshness and splendor of things, so eager and so excited in adoration and enjoyment, so violently and entirely carried to the very essence of voluptuousness. His Venus is unique; no painting of Titian's has a more brilliant and delicious coloring;[600] no strumpet-goddess of Tintoretto or Giorgione is more soft and beautiful:
"With blindfold fury she begins to forage,
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil....
And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth;
Her lips are conquerors, his lips obey,
Paying what ransom the insulter willeth;
Whose vulture thought doth pitch the price so high,
That she will draw his lips' rich treasure dry."[601]
"Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin."[602]
All is taken by storm, the senses first, the eyes dazzled by carnal beauty, but the heart also from whence the poetry overflows: the fulness of youth inundates even inanimate things; the country looks charming amidst the rays of the rising sun, the air, saturated with brightness, makes a gala-day:
"Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,
And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun riseth in his majesty;
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."[603]
An admirable debauch of imagination and rapture, yet disquieting; for such a mood will carry one a long way.[604] No fair and frail dame in London was without "Adonis" on her table.[605] Perhaps Shakespeare perceived that he had transcended the bounds, for the tone of his next poem, the "Rape of Lucrece," is quite different; but as he had already a mind liberal enough to embrace at the same time, as he did afterwards in his dramas, the two extremes of things, he continued none the less to follow his bent. The "sweet abandonment of love" was the great occupation of his life; he was tender-hearted, and he was a poet: nothing more is required to be smitten, deceived, to suffer, to traverse without pause the circle of illusions and troubles, which whirls and whirls round, and never ends.
He had many loves of this kind, amongst others one for a sort of Marion Delorme,[606] a miserable deluding despotic passion, of which he felt the burden and the shame, but from which nevertheless he could not and would not free himself. Nothing can be sadder than his confessions, or mark better the madness of love, and the sentiment of human weakness:
"When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."[607]
So spoke Alceste of Célimène;[608] but what a soiled Célimène is the creature before whom Shakespeare kneels, with as much of scorn as of desire!
"Those lips of thine,
That have profaned their scarlet ornaments
And seal'd false bonds of love as oft as mine,
Robb'd others' beds' revenues of their rents.
Be it lawful I love thee, as thou lov'st those
Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee."[609]