Venus and Adonis and Lucrece: The Earl Behind the Books

Shakespeare’s first two published poems were dedicated to a young earl still under Lord Burghley’s control.

Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, was nineteen when Venus and Adonis was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 18 April 1593, and twenty when The Rape of Lucrece was entered on 9 May 1594. He reached legal adulthood at twenty-one on 6 October 1594. Both registrations therefore fell within his minority, while his custody and marriage arrangements remained under Lord Burghley’s control.¹, ², ³

Neville knew that household and the young earl within it.

The child in Burghley’s house

After Southampton’s father died, Lord Howard of Effingham bought his wardship and transferred custody and marriage arrangements to Burghley. Southampton entered Burghley’s care in late 1581 or early 1582 and spent much of his youth at Cecil House.³

In his declaration of 2 March 1601, written after the Essex rising, Neville recalled his earlier acquaintance with Southampton. Explaining his greeting at the Drury House meeting discussed below, where he found Southampton and Sir Charles Danvers, he wrote:

because I had never spoken with my Lord since he was a child in my old Lord Treasurer’s house⁴

Neville’s “old Lord Treasurer” was Burghley, who had died in 1598. Neville places their earlier acquaintance in Burghley’s household, but gives no date for their last conversation.⁴

The relevant legal cutoff is 6 October 1594, Southampton’s twenty-first birthday. Until then he remained a minor: Venus and Adonis had been registered roughly eighteen months earlier, and Lucrece only five months earlier. Neville’s word “child” need not mean a small boy. If he was referring broadly to Southampton’s years as Burghley’s ward, that period extended beyond both registrations. His wording does not tell us how near to its end they had last spoken.¹, ², ³, ⁴

A letter from Southampton in Neville’s house

On 6 May 1600, Sir Robert Drury wrote from London to Neville, then ambassador in France, about a letter from Southampton that had not reached him. His opening insists on the accuracy of an earlier report: “Sir, I did not a whit mistake what I writ unto you concerning the letters.” As proof, he invokes Humphrey Fludd’s account:

Humphrey Fludd, who hath been here with the Commander of Dieppe, assureth me he saw my Lord of Southampton’s letter to me, upon a table in your house, laid down amongst many other letters.⁵

The letter was addressed to Drury, but Fludd had reportedly seen it lying among the papers in Neville’s house. Drury also mentions a letter from Secretary Robert Cecil, which Cecil had told him was sent in Neville’s packet. Returning to Southampton’s letter, Drury suggests neglect, then expressly declines to suspect deliberate injury:

and for the other, it might very well be lost not being cared for by anybody. […] I will not be jealous that you would willingly do me any wrong⁵

“Jealous” here means suspicious. Drury stands by his account of where Southampton’s letter had been seen, but closes by saying he will not believe Neville intended to wrong him. Why Neville was so concerned with this letter is unclear. The house may have been Neville’s residence in Paris: in February 1600 he had used Drury’s return to England to send intelligence to Cecil.⁵

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Sir Robert Drury to Henry Neville, 6 May 1600. The National Archives, PRO 30/50/2, fols. 97–98. Cropped below the signature; Southampton’s name is boxed in red. Reproduced with the permission of The National Archives. Source and transcription.

Southampton presents the plan

Neville’s earlier visit to Essex and his later meeting with Southampton were different encounters. In his declaration of 2 March 1601, Neville says that he visited Essex after the middle of October 1600. Essex asked about foreign affairs and spoke of his hopes of regaining the queen’s favour. Neville insists:

But in all his talk I protest I did not hear him use any undutiful speech of the Queen or the state.⁴

Henry Cuffe, Essex’s secretary and Neville’s longstanding acquaintance, subsequently pressed him to meet Southampton and Sir Charles Danvers. Cuffe assured him that nothing would be attempted against the queen’s person or estate. After repeated delays, Neville went to Drury House on 2 February 1601. It was Southampton who then presented the plan, explaining that Essex had authorized him to disclose “a matter of great secrecy and importance.”⁴

Southampton made the case for Essex to reach the queen with enough armed supporters to prevent his enemies from barring access. Men would seize the court gate and the guards’ halberds; sympathetic lords would receive Essex and accompany him into the royal presence. Southampton sought Neville’s advice, and he and Danvers answered the practical objections Neville raised. At the close, Neville records:

In conclusion they prayed me to think of it because it was new unto me⁴

Cuffe arranged the approach; Southampton explained and argued for the enterprise. Neville’s declaration records the attempt to enlist him, together with his objections and his subsequent refusal to act against Cecil. Chapter 6 gives the fuller account of the Essex crisis.⁴

A later alliance

Neville and Southampton then spent nearly two years in the Tower together. Neville joined Southampton there on 1 May 1601, and both remained imprisoned until James’s accession. They were released together in April 1603: the king’s letter of 5 April ordered Southampton’s release and added Neville’s, and both were free by 10 April. The Sonnets chapter examines that shared change of fortune.⁶

On 2 April 1604, Neville was named to the Commons committee considering Southampton’s restitution: the parliamentary restoration of the earl’s rights after his conviction for treason.⁷

Less than three months later, they faced another arrest. On Sunday 24 June 1604, James and his council ordered Southampton, Henry Danvers, Lord Danvers, and Neville into custody. Henry was the brother of Sir Charles Danvers, who had been executed for his part in the Essex rising. Historian Neil Cuddy, in his 1989 article on Anglo-Scottish union and James’s court, records:

their papers were seized and the suspects interrogated, but they were released next day after ‘several examinations’.⁷

The accusation concerned Southampton’s supposed intention to kill Scots close to the king. Cuddy places the episode amid disputes over James’s plans to unite England and Scotland and the privileged access of his Scottish attendants to the king. It was an allegation circulated by Southampton’s enemies.⁷

Southampton later became Neville’s “champion” in the contest for the secretaryship. In the description reported from their political opponent Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, Neville was Southampton’s “dear Damon.” The allusion is to Damon and Pythias, the classical exemplars of faithful friendship: one risked his life as surety for the other. Here it identifies Neville as Southampton’s especially close and trusted ally. Chapter 9 follows their campaign through the letters, including Southampton’s own hopes and doubts about Neville’s appointment.⁸

A promise and its answer

In 1593, years before the Tower and the secretaryship campaign, Venus and Adonis addressed Southampton with a nervous question: would the writer offend him by offering these “unpolished lines”? A year later, Lucrece opened with a declaration: “The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end.” Uncertainty had become assurance.¹, ²

The dedication of Venus and Adonis offers Southampton the power to turn the writer’s public risk into success:

TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE
Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,
and Baron of Titchfield.

Right Honorable,

I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to
your Lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so
strong a prop to support so weak a burden; only if your Honor seem
but pleased, I account myself highly praised and vow to take advantage
of all idle hours till I have honored you with some graver labor.
But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it
had so noble a godfather and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it
yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honorable survey, and
your Honor to your heart’s content, which I wish may always answer
your own wish and the world’s hopeful expectation.

Your Honor’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare. ¹

The uncertainty is sustained through a series of images. Southampton is a prop supporting a burden, a godfather to a possibly deformed child, and the judge of a doubtful harvest. The writer asks for approval and promises “some graver labor” in return. “The first heir of my invention” announces a beginning in print; it need not mean the first thing the writer had ever composed.¹

Lucrece answers the promise of greater gravity. Its dedication is shorter, but the commitment is larger:

TO THE RIGHT
HONORABLE, HENRY
Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,
and Baron of Titchfield.

The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end; whereof this
pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. The warrant
I have of your honorable disposition, not the worth of my untutored
lines, makes it assured of acceptance. What I have done is
yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted
yours. Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime,
as it is, it is bound to your Lordship, to whom I wish long life
still lengthened with all happiness.

Your Lordship’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare ²

The writer now claims a warrant for acceptance in Southampton’s disposition. Past work, future work and personal devotion all belong to him. The modest description of “untutored lines” survives, but it no longer creates doubt. The relationship is presented as secure.

In her 2011 study of a verse letter attributed to Southampton, literary scholar Lara Crowley distinguishes the conventional flattery of the first dedication from the intimacy and affection of the second. That judgment concerns the whole address: the change from asking whether a gift will offend to declaring an enduring attachment.⁹

How unusual was this dedication?

A computational study carried out for this book compared 804 dedications from 638 books dated 1590–1600. The Lucrece dedication ranked second overall for the personal character of its address—within the top quarter of one percent of the sample. Five methods examined whom the writer addressed, expressions of personal attachment, direct address and the balance between intimacy and public formality. Their individual results were:

Two methods placed it in the top three; all five placed it in the top two percent.¹⁰

The dedication ranked first was William Vaughan’s The Golden-grove (1600), addressed to his own brother, Sir John Vaughan. It begins with Cato repeatedly naming his brother as the person he loved best, then turns to the author’s own affection. Vaughan writes of “our mutual love” and his wish:

to impart unto you the just half of my substance, nay in a manner all my substance.¹⁰

In Lucrece, the gift likewise extends beyond the book in hand: “What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours.” Its declaration of love without end stands beside a dedication grounded explicitly in brotherhood. The combined ranking is exploratory, but the consistently high placement gives numerical support to the exceptional personal character of the address.¹⁰

The motto on the title page

Before the dedication presents the name William Shakespeare, the title page of Venus and Adonis presents a Latin phrase that James Leyland connects with the Neville family motto:

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
— Venus and Adonis (1593), title page; Ovid, Amores 1.15.35–36

“Let the crowd admire base things; may golden-haired Apollo supply me with cups full of Castalian water.” The Neville motto, Ne vile velis, means “Desire nothing base.” Vilia and vile are forms of the same Latin adjective: the plural “base things” and the singular “anything base.” The correspondence is present in the Latin itself.¹¹

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The title-page epigraph enlarged; the box marks Vilia. Venus and Adonis (1593), Bodleian Libraries, Arch. G. e. 31 (2). Image © Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, 2015; Shakespeare Documented.

Both phrases use the accusative neuter of vilis, “base” or “worthless”; only the number changes.

The full declension is given in the note.¹²

Leyland draws attention to its position at the beginning of the first published work carrying Shakespeare’s name as author. He proposes that the quotation also recalls the Neville motto: a family identity suggested before the printed dedication supplies the public name. Shakespeare’s name appears beneath the address to Southampton on the following leaf, A2r.¹¹

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Venus and Adonis (1593), title page. The epigraph begins Vilia miretur vulgus. Bodleian Libraries, Arch. G. e. 31 (2). Image © Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, 2015; Shakespeare Documented.

Ovid’s lines contrast the crowd’s tastes with the poet’s desire for inspiration and lasting fame. That literary declaration may also carry the personal allusion Leyland proposes. The later poems and jokes explicitly playing on the Neville motto, examined in the Sonnet 121 chapter, show how readily the family name could invite such wordplay.¹¹

Collatinus in Neville’s Dionysius

Neville’s annotation in the 1546 Greek edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Roman Antiquities, now at Audley End, names Tarquinius Collatinus. The same note appears in the Coriolanus chapter for its reference to Ancus Martius. Here the other name brings us to Lucrece’s husband.¹³

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Dionysius, Roman Antiquities (1546), Audley End copy, p.45. Published image.

The note begins:

Hic omissi sunt Ancus
Martius et Tarquinius Collatinus

“Here Ancus Martius and Tarquinius Collatinus have been omitted.” It continues that sixty-two years must be added to make the calculation come right.¹³

The annotator likely wrote Collatinus in error: the missing king is Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, whose thirty-eight years, added to Ancus Martius’s twenty-four, supply the missing sixty-two. Collatinus appears as a consul earlier on the same page. Familiarity with the story of Lucretia and her husband may also have brought his name to mind.¹³

The Argument to The Rape of Lucrece places Collatinus at the beginning of the action. During the siege of Ardea, the Roman commanders compare their wives:

[…] men of the army meeting one evening at the tent of Sextus Tarquinius,
the King’s son, in their discourses after supper every one
commended the virtues of his own wife; among whom Collatinus
extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife Lucretia.¹⁴

Collatinus’s praise leads to the visit at which Sextus Tarquinius sees Lucrece. Collatinus is her husband; Sextus, the king’s son, is her assailant.

“Deep policy”

The Argument to Lucrece makes the story explicitly political: a royal crime leads to the overthrow of the monarchy. After Lucrece’s death, Lucius Junius Brutus denounces “the tyranny of the King,” moves the people to act, and brings about a change of government:

[…] the people were so moved that with one consent and a general
acclamation the Tarquins were all exiled and the state government
changed from kings to consuls.
— Lucrece, Argument¹⁴

Richard Field printed Lucrece in 1594. That year he also printed William Jones’s translation of Justus Lipsius’s Politickes, a work addressed to those who govern or advise in public states. The two books bring classical narrative and contemporary political counsel to the same press.¹⁵

The promised “graver labor” thus follows sexual violence into revolution. Tarquin’s violation of Lucrece, hospitality and royal obligation becomes the occasion for expelling his family. Brutus, who has protected himself by appearing foolish, now reveals his intelligence and directs the grieving men towards political action:

But now he throws that shallow habit by
Wherein deep policy did him disguise, […]
— Lucrece, lines 1814–1815¹⁶

Political survival through a managed public appearance connects this passage with Neville’s education under Savile and his engagement with Tacitus. The disguise belongs to the classical story; the poem calls it “deep policy.” Feisal Mohamed’s 2019 study places Brutus’s prudence and pursuit of political interest at the centre of its interpretation.¹⁶