Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of “The Phoenix and Turtle.” by James P. Bednarz (review)

The resistance offered by the slippery blend of ambiguity and paradox in “The Phoenix and Turtle” to any simple decoding through political or religious contexts makes it an attractive text for the current moment in literary scholarship: Shakespeare’s riddle reminds us that language ceaselessly strives to express the personal, immaterial, and abstract, even if it cannot fully sever itself from involvement in worldly antagonisms. Perhaps the major contribution of James P. Bednarz’s excellent new study is to refocus our attention on the intellectual ambitions of Shakespeare’s “poetic theology,” though it also contributes to other discussions by (for instance) disrupting narratives of Shakespeare’s move away from patronage poetry after The Rape of Lucrece. Bednarz offers in place of such accounts evidence of Shakespeare’s literary self-consciousness and his involvement in contemporary poetic circles and trends, and argues that Shakespeare should be seen as a (if not the) founder of metaphysical poetry.

Bednarz’s achievement in making a book-length study of a short lyric poem comprehensive but still eminently readable is due to both the clarity of his prose and the variety of ways in which he approaches the poem. The book begins and ends by narrating the critical and poetic currents in which the poem has been caught up, starting from Emerson’s public challenge to scholars to decode its mysteries, and concluding with its influence on the poetic thought of Keats and T. S. Eliot. Bednarz begins his argument proper by clearing the decks of the “keys” to the poem, most of which have descended (with minor variations) from Alexander B. Grosart’s identification of the Phoenix as Elizabeth and the Turtle as Essex. In support of his rebuttal, he can point to the obvious unlikelihood that Shakespeare would have openly portrayed Elizabeth’s death while she was still alive and to strong evidence that Sir John Salusbury, dedicatee of Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr in which the poem is included, was opposed to the Essex faction and hence an improbable patron for a poem seeking to rehabilitate the earl’s memory. If Bednarz declines to consider that Shakespeare wrote in a fabular mode that would almost inevitably have been read by contemporaries as political allegory, his arguments for Shakespeare’s political tact are nonetheless convincing.

There follows a solid account of the social networks that brought together the four well-known poets who contributed to the “Poetical Essays” section of Chester’s volume: Shakespeare, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson, in that order. Bednarz makes the compelling suggestion that the structure of this section represents the new generation of Marston and Jonson responding to the older poets Shakespeare and Chapman (94). He then refurbishes J. V. Cunningham’s argument for the centrality of Trinitarian (as opposed to Neoplatonic) language to the poem’s physical paradoxes, before leading the reader away from flimsy theological readings: “What we find in ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ . . . is deliberately startling, as Shakespeare anchors his poem in the paradoxical anti-logic of scholasticism, amplified by allusions to politics, alchemy, natural philosophy and optics. . . . He did so because he was intrigued by the possibility of adapting the psychological dynamic of Trinitarian paradox to questions of human desire” (109). Bednarz weighs arguments over the poem’s attitude to ritual, from Richard McCoy’s belief in the death of ritual to Cleanth Brooks’s and Lynn Enterline’s arguments for the poem itself as commemorative ritual (152–54). The final part of the book is dedicated to placing Shakespeare’s poem in a poetic genealogy. Bednarz suggests Skelton’s “Philip Sparrow” and Matthew Roydon’s elegy for Sidney as ancestors to “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and he points to Marston’s description of the “‘Metaphysicall’” conceit of Shakespeare’s poem, arguing that Shakespeare should take pride of place from Donne as the first metaphysical poet...