= The_Phoenix_and_the

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= The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle =
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Introduction
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'The Phoenix and the Turtle' (also spelled 'The Phœnix and the
Turtle') is an allegorical poem by William Shakespeare, first
published in 1601 as a supplement to a longer work, 'Love's Martyr',
by Robert Chester. The poem, which has been called "the first great
published metaphysical poem", has many conflicting interpretations.
The title "The Phoenix and the Turtle" is a conventional label. As
published, the poem was untitled. The title names two birds: the
mythological phoenix and the turtle dove.

The 67-line poem describes a funeral arranged for the deceased Phoenix
and Turtledove, to which some birds are invited, but others excluded.
The Phoenix and Turtledove are emblems of perfection and of devoted
love, respectively. The traditional attribute of the Phoenix is that
when it dies, it returns to life, rising from the ashes of its prior
incarnation; the Turtledove, by contrast, is mortal. The poem states
that the love of the birds created a perfect unity which transcended
all logic and material fact. It concludes with a prayer for the dead
lovers.

Publication
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'The Phoenix and the Turtle' was first published in 1601, as part of a
collection of poems by different authors, including John Marston,
George Chapman, and Ben Jonson, which was appended as a supplement to
'Love's Martyr', a long poem by Robert Chester printed by Richard
Field for the London bookseller Edward Blount. The unused sheets of
the first quarto were subsequently acquired by another publisher,
Matthew Lownes, and reissued in 1611 under a different title, 'The
Annuals of Great Britain'. The poem did not appear in print again
until 1640, when it was included in John Benson's collected edition of
Shakespeare's poems, 'Poems Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent.'

Context
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The title page of the original edition of Chester's 'Love's Martyr'
explains its content:

'Love's Martyr: or Rosalins Complaint. Allegorically shadowing the
truth of Loue, in the constant Fate of the Phoenix and Turtle. A Poeme
enterlaced with much varietie and raritie; now first translated out of
the venerable Italian Torquato Caeliano, by Robert Chester. With the
true legend of famous King Arthur the last of the nine Worthies, being
the first Essay of a new Brytish Poet: collected out of diuerse
Authenticall Records. To these are added some new compositions of
seuerall moderne Writers whose names are subscribed to their seuerall
workes, vpon the first subiect viz. the Phoenix and Turtle.'

Chester prefaced his poem with a short dedication addressed to the
Phoenix and Turtledove. The Phoenix is envisaged as female and the
dove as male:

:Phoenix of beautie, beauteous, Bird of any
:To thee I do entitle all my labour,
:More precious in mine eye by far then many
:That feedst all earthly sences with thy savour:
:Accept my home-writ praises of thy love,
:And kind acceptance of thy Turtle-dove

Chester's main poem is a long allegory in which the relationship
between the birds is explored, and its symbolism articulated. It
incorporates the story of King Arthur, and a history of ancient
Britain, emphasising Welsh etymologies for British towns. It
culminates with the joint immolation of the Phoenix and Turtledove,
giving birth to a new and more beautiful bird from the ashes. It also
includes several allegorical love poems within it, supposed to have
been written by the Turtledove to the Phoenix.

It is followed by a brief collection of "Diverse Poeticall Essaies" by
the "best and chiefest of our moderne writers, with their names
sub-scribed to their particular workes". These include, in addition to
Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston and the
anonymous "Vatum Chorus" and "Ignoto". All the poems use the same
imagery. The series is introduced by Vatum Chorus and Ignoto, followed
by Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', which ends with
mourning for the death of the perfect lovers, "leaving no posterity".
Marston then seems to reply to Shakespeare's "moving epicedium", by
referring to the couple's "glorious issue": the being born from the
flames. Chapman adds more detail on the relationship, saying that the
Phoenix provided every variety of life to the Turtle, "She was to him
the Analysed World of pleasure, / Her firmness cloth'd him in
variety". Jonson ends with an idealisation of the Phoenix, whose
judgment shines as "Clear as a naked Vestal, / Closed in an orb of
Crystal."

Interpretations
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'The Phoenix and the Turtle' is interpreted as an allegory of an ideal
marriage. In addition the poem can be seen as an elucidation of the
relationship between truth and beauty, or of fulfilled love, in the
context of Renaissance Neoplatonism.

The concept of a symbolic perfect love between two very different
beings, one immortal and one mortal, may be associated with the
Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as suggested in the lines "So
they lov'd, as love in twain/ Had the essence but in one;/Two
distincts, division none." The poem also suggests the confluence of
three other lines of medieval Catholic tradition: the literary
traditions of mystical union, spiritual friendship, and spiritual
marriage. Shakespeare introduces a number of other birds, drawing on
earlier literature about the "parliament of birds", to portray the
death of the lovers as the loss of an ideal that can only be lamented.

Several attempts have been made to link the lovers of the poem to
historical individuals, though others have argued that the poem should
not be interpreted with "appliqué literalism", in the words of James
P. Bednarz. Exponents of the New Criticism such as I. A. Richards and
William Empson emphasised the unresolvable nature of the text's
ambiguities. Helen Hackett argues that the poem "incites deciphering,
but at the same time firmly rebuffs it." Some of the more prominent
attempted decodings of the allegory with reference to real individuals
are listed below:

John and Ursula Salusbury
===========================
Because Chester dedicated the main poem to the Welsh statesman Sir
John Salusbury and his wife Ursula Stanley, it has been argued that
all the poems in the collection, including Shakespeare's, also
celebrate the couple. Salusbury was a courtier at the court of
Elizabeth I, and was a member of the powerful Salusbury Family of
Wales. His wife Ursula was the illegitimate daughter of Henry Stanley,
4th Earl of Derby. A difficulty with this view is the fact that the
couple are known to have had ten children, but the poem refers to the
relationship as a childless "married chastity". This is commented on
elsewhere in the collection by John Marston, and all the poems in the
collection emphasise the chaste and spiritual nature of the
relationship, the couple's only child being the mysterious being born
from their bodily deaths. The identification of the Salusburys as the
subject was first argued in detail by Carleton Brown in 1913. Brown
tried to resolve the problem by arguing that it was written after the
birth of the couple's first child, but not published until many years
later. Later writers have sometimes argued that while Chester's
'Love's Martyr' may be intended to celebrate the couple, Shakespeare's
own poem does not. John Klause suggests that the "death" implied in
Chester's work is symbolic of marriage and "sexual surrender", but in
Shakespeare's poem death is literal. G. Wilson Knight suggested that
the poem celebrates chaste love because it is about Salusbury's
devotion to his sister, for whom Salusbury himself had written a poem.

Queen Elizabeth
=================
Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuysen adopt a variation of the
view that the poem refers to Salusbury and the queen, arguing that the
"session" mentioned in the poem is the 1601 parliament, in which
Elizabeth made a famous speech about the symbolic relationship between
herself and her people, sometimes referred to as her Farewell Speech.
They draw on the earlier work of Marie Axton, who argued that
Elizabeth herself is both birds, in her monarchical and human aspects,
but that the human aspect (the Turtle) also includes the body of the
people as a whole. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen suggest that Salusbury
represents the people.

Some scholars interpret the child of the phoenix as a reference to
Elizabeth's heir, James VI of Scotland. This imagery was used in 1604,
when James arrived in London, but this would have been problematic in
1601, when Elizabeth was still alive.

The theory that both Chester's and Shakespeare's poems were intended
to refer to the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert Devereux,
Earl of Essex was first proposed by A.B. Grosart in 1878, and was
revived by William Matchett in 1965. Many authors who reject the
identification of the lovers as Essex and Elizabeth nevertheless argue
that the events of Essex's rebellion and execution in early 1601 may
lie behind some of the more obscure symbolism in the poem and the
others in the collection. Sir John Salusbury had been knighted for
helping to suppress the rebellion, while his cousin Owen Salusbury was
killed while participating in it. Sir John's brother, Thomas
Salusbury, had been executed after the earlier Babington Plot against
Elizabeth. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen argue that Salusbury was
"love's martyr" for putting devotion to his queen above his family.
Peter Ackroyd and James P. Bednarz both argue that Shakespeare may
have written the poem to dissociate himself from Essex, with whom he
was implicated because of his links to Essex's main ally the Earl of
Southampton, and because his play about the overthrow of a monarch,
'Richard II', had been performed at the request of the rebels. For
Bednarz "Shakespeare's name, subscribed to his poem in 'Love's Martyr'
shows his accommodation to the political order without endorsing any
specific political position."

Catholic martyrs
==================
Another interpretation, first proffered in the 1930s by Clara
Longworth in the novel 'My Shakespeare, Rise!' is that the poem is a
cryptic Roman Catholic eulogy and is part of the contention that
Shakespeare was a secret Catholic sympathiser. The advocacy of prayers
for the dead ("these dead birds") in the final line of the poem
corroborates this interpretation. Several critics, including Clare
Asquith and David Beauregard, have noted that the poem ostensibly
references Catholic liturgy and possibly the writings of the Catholic
priest and poet Rev. Robert Southwell, SJ, who translated the Latin
hymn 'Lauda Sion' and also authored a poem praising the married
chastity of Saint Mary and Saint Joseph. John Klause argued that the
poem has various parallels to the 'Dies Irae' of the Liturgy for the
Dead, but suggests that its Catholic imagery satirises conventional
Protestant attitudes expressed in Chester's poem, and that it is a
subtle protest against the lauding of Sir John Salusbury, whose
imagined death he supposes the poem celebrates.

Proponents of the Catholic interpretation have suggested various
identities for the poem's birds, but the interpretation that has the
most traction is that the phoenix commemorates St. Anne Line, a Roman
Catholic executed at Tyburn in 1601 and subsequently canonised by the
Roman Catholic Church as a martyr. St. Anne Line and her young husband
Roger were separated when he was imprisoned and then exiled after
being arrested at a prohibited Catholic Mass. He died on the European
continent a few years later and St. Anne began working for the Jesuits
in London. She was arrested at a Candlemas liturgy and convicted of
harbouring a Catholic priest, which led to her execution. Her body was
retrieved from the common grave in the road and one of the Jesuits who
knew her hinted that a secret requiem Mass was later offered for her.
It was suggested that this requiem Mass provided the setting for
Shakespeare's poem. The identification was corroborated by the belief
that, like Shakespeare's couple, the Lines had no children. However,
it has been proven since that they had a son named "John", whom
relatives adopted.

Clara Longworth first suggested that St. Anne Line is Shakespeare's
phoenix and Mark Barkworth, a Catholic priest who reportedly embraced
her body as it hung on the scaffold before he was also executed, is
the turtle. John Finnis and Patrick Martin argued more recently that
St. Anne Line is the phoenix and her husband Roger is the turtle. They
concur with Clare Asquith that the "bird of loudest lay" represents
the composer William Byrd, who was a Roman Catholic convert, and that
the crow is the Catholic priest Rev. Henry Garnet, SJ. Martin Dodwell
argued further that Shakespeare used St. Anne and Roger Line to
symbolise the Catholic Church itself, as disinherited and rejected by
England.

External links
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* [https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/2wi0jk Facsimile of the
first quarto of 'Love's martyr' (1601)] (Folger Shakespeare Library)
* [https://archive.org/details/robertchesterslo00ches Edition of
'Love's Martyr' by A. B. Grosart (1878)] (Internet Archive)
*
*
*
[https://archive.org/details/letTheBirdOfLoudestLayByWilliamShakes-speare
Public domain recording of 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'] (Internet
Archive)
*
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130329031401/http://phoenixandturtle.net/bibliography.htm
Partial bibliography] for Clifford Stetner, 'Shakespeare's "Shrieking
Harbinger": Seasonal Pattern, Genre, and the Shapes of Time in the
"First Folio" and "The Phoenix and the Turtle"' (Ph.D. dissertation,
City University of New York, 2008).

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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phoenix_and_the_Turtle