Southwell: tantalising links to Shakespeare

My starting point in this endeavour was a slim volume entitled St Robert Southwell, Collected Poems (Manchester: Fyfield books. 2007. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney). I had purchased this book without ever really reading any of the material apart from the famous poem: 'The burning Babe'. I began with Part I on page 1 with text under the heading '[Epistle]'.

Poetes by abusing their talent, and making the follies and feynings of love the customary subject of their base endeavours, have so discredited this faculty that a Poett a lover and a lyer, are by many reckoned but three words of one significacon.

[Source: 'Waldegrave Manuscript, Stonyhurst MS A,v.27)

Apart from guiltily recognising a feature of many of my own early 'base endeavours' in verse, I was immediately and forcefully struck by his linking of a 'Poett a lover and a lyer'. These words took me straight back to my role as a teenage Oberon in Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' (1595-96) which formed a 'set book' for my 'O' Level exam in English Literature in 1969.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

[Theseus, in Act V Scene 1] 

Shakespeare's reference to the 'lunatic, the lover and the poet' seems uncannily close to RS's 'a Poett a lover and a lyer'. Was this simply a coincidence? Merely a case of two sixteenth century poets thinking alike? Or were they influenced by a common source? Or did one poet borrow from the other? Thence to an obvious question: did the poets actually know each other?

Regarding the last question, I have discovered some tantalising links between RS and Shakespeare (WS).

Courtesy of Sylvia Morris. See link on right.

Sylvia Morris maintains a fascinating blog on William Shakespeare and has herself written about links between RS and WS. She notes that the text of the Epistle I quote above ('Poetes by abusing their talent...'), although circulating in manuscript before RS's death in 1595, was actually published in 1616 with the addition of the words: 'To my worthy good cosen Maister W. S. Worthy Cosen'.

Is 'W.S.' a reference to William Shakesepeare? If not, who was 'W.S.'? Who decided to add the details of the addressee? Why?

WS died in 1616, was it judged then safe to include a reference to his name? Was this because WS was a recusant Catholic?

Joseph Pearce presents a very strong case in favour of WS's catholicism. See:


The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 2008.
Through Shakespeare's Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 2010.

For a summary of the evidence Pearce adduces to support his claim, see: The Catholicism of William Shakespeare.

Pearce is also convinced that RS and WS knew each other. His evidence includes the following:

• In London, WS enjoyed the patronage of the Earl of Southampton, a known Catholic who seems to have had RS as his confessor.
• In his poem Decease Release, RS wrote about the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Many believed she was a martyr for the Catholic faith.  RS likens her unto 'pounded spice': 'God's spice I was and pounding was my due.' In King Lear (1605), the title character's use of the phrase 'God's spies' may be a play on the words 'God's spice.'  It may also be a coded reference to Jesuits, such as Southwell, who were  'God's spies' under the heretic and repressive  Elizabethan and Jacobean regime. God's spies became themselves 'God's spice,' pounded to death so as to gain their martyr's reward in heaven.
• Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice were written in the same year RS was martyred (1595). In the latter play, for instance, it has been suggested that Antonio is a thinly-veiled personification of a Jesuit.  This would add deeper meaning to the courtroom scene which recreates Southwell's own trial. Shylock demands that, according to the law, he has a right his pound of flesh, taken from nearest to the heart of Antonio.  In the show trial of RS, the law demanded that he should be hanged, drawn and quartered, with his heart being riipped from his body whilst still alive. Portia's speech on the 'quality of mercy' becomes a plea to Queen Elizabeth to show this same mercy toCatholics loyal to the faith of their fathers and families.
• Pearce argues that the text referred to above proves WS and RS knew each other: 'To my worthy good cosen Maister W. S. Worthy Cosen'.
• He also refers to the argument that Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lecrece  were influenced by RS and may well represent an attempt to deal with a grave matter, even if presented under a different guise. Some commentators interpret Venus and Adonis as a reference to Elizabeth (Venus), Burghley (the boar who kills Adonis) and Southwell or any martyred Catholic (as Adonis).

Michael Woods in In Search of Shakespeare (2005) refers to other links in the plays and cites WS's reference to a 'naked new-born babe' in Act 1 Scene 7 of  Macbeth (?1599-1606):

And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

He compares this imagery to that in RS's most famous poem, the Burning Babe:

A pretty babe all burninge bright did in the ayre appeare
Who scorched with excessive heat, such floodes of teares did shedd,
As though his floodes should quench his flames, which with his teares were fedd.

Another point of comparison is this excerpt from RS's New heaven, new warre

With teares he fightes and wynnes the feild
His naked breste stands for a Sheilde
His battering shot are babishe cryes
His Arrowes lookes of weeping eyes
His Martiall ensignes cold and neede
And feeble fleshe his warriers steede.

'These few dittyes'

RS goes on to explain in his Epistle to WS that, despite the its abuse by some poets, the art of verse is good and its use allowable in matters of devotion. Many parts of scripture are in verse and Christ Himself made a hymn the conclusion of his last Supper. The Church has provided a pattern to all men to know the 'trew use of this measured and footed style'. He prays that his 'course thridds' (coarse threads, rough and ready verse) may show how well 'Verse and Vertue suite together'.

Th Epistle closes with some intriguing word-play:

In the meane tyme with many good wishes I sende you these few dittyes(,) add yowe the tunes and let the meane* I pray yowe be still a part in all your Musicke.

*meane [ mean, mene] (from Old Fr. moien , or meien : ‘middle’ ) English term referring originally to the middle part of a three-voice polyphonic texture. English usage was complicated because even in the late 16th century ...an alto part might also be called a meane, a contra, a counter or a Countertenor. [From Oxford Music online]

'add yowe the tunes' / 'all your Musicke': is RS to be understood literally here, as referring to a composer who will set his verse to music sung in parts? Or metaphorically, as referring to a poet who will take RS's 'course thridds' and 'goe forward in the same or to beginne some fyner peece'?