William Barksted, and "Mirrah"
An acolyte, friend and admirer of William Shakespeare?
I recently wrote of Edmund Shakespeare, William Shakespeare’s younger brother, as knowledge of his family and milieu helps us both to understand the great playwright and to set him in relief. (Edmund Shakespeare followed his brother into the world of the theatre, and came to a rather sad end.)
This is also the case if we look at his friends and contemporaries. Shakespeare’s friendship and rivalry with the classically-trained playwright Ben Jonson is well known; Jonson provided a laudatory poem for the First Folio, and clearly held the poet in the highest esteem.
The Elizabethan / Jacobean literary world was flourishing. Education was bringing many more people into the spheres of poetry and drama. My (modern) readers will have encountered the great playwrights of the time - Christopher Marlowe, and his untimely death; perhaps John Webster and his extraordinary The Duchess of Malfi. Perhaps they will have studied Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling at school, or seen The Revenger’s Tragedy.
I’d be willing to lay a wager, though, that very few have heard of Anthony Munday, who was a proper, professional writer, turning out plays and masques, including for royal processions. And, of course, there were dozens of lesser poets and playwrights crowding the scene, drinking deep in the taverns, living, loving and versifying with the best of them. Each one helps us to set William Shakespeare into his context, and so to understand what makes him unique.
One such poet is William Barksted, a bright and inventive young man, steeped in the theatrical world, a dreamer, too. There are many similarities between the two Williams: both were players, and both were poets and playwrights. Barksted was, very probably, a child player with the Queen’s Revels, and wrote a couple of long poems, including Mirrah the Mother of Adonis: or, Lustes Prodegies, 1607, when he was 18 years old. He had experienced the thrill of the stage; now he wanted to write for it.
Shakespeare was at the heights of his fame - King Lear had just been staged, and the 1608 folio would display his name with extravagant prominence; and also Macbeth, with its smoky, doom-laden hints of the Gunpowder Plot, and its knowledge of the new world order as exemplified in the person of King James I.
Attracting the notice of this playwright would be both useful and fascinating for any thrusting youngster in the same world - for professional and for personal reasons. Barksted may have had other theatrical contacts: the preliminary poem to Mirrah is signed I.W., who may - just possibly - be John Webster. Barksted, we know, acted in Ben Jonson’s Epicene in 1609 (a play about a boy disguised as a woman), and he completed John Marston’s play, The Insatiable Countesse, when the latter was arrested, with his friend Lewis Machin, who also gave commendatory verses to Mirrah.
The reason this poem is significant is that it's a "prequel" to Venus & Adonis. This means that it’s both a compliment to William Shakespeare, and also a way of "cashing in" on its undoubted fame. It shows how well known the poem and its poet were.
Like Venus & Adonis, Barksted’s source is Ovid. It tells the story of Adonis' mother, Mirrah, who has an incestuous relationship with her father. (Barksted also wrote another poem responding to Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Hiren, or, The Faire Greeke.)
The poem’s epigraph is taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica: “Nansicetur enim pretium, nomenque Poetae.” It’s rather charmingly mispelled, and should be “nanciscetur enim pretium nomenque poetae,” meaning “he will win the prize and name of a poet” - a bold statement from a young man seeking fame. (Never mind the context, which talks of poets eschewing haircuts and baths.)
It’s a delightful, clever poem, even despite its subject matter; but it’s not Shakespeare. We don’t get much of a sense of Mirrah’s psychology; or of, as with Venus & Adonis, a sense of eroticicism or humour. The rhymes are dutiful rather than illuminating, and the versifying is straightforward, with none of Shakespeare’s knottiness or irony.
Barksted clearly knew his myths, as the poem refers to many Ovidian stories, including Hermaphroditus and Actaeon. But instead of using them as a spring-board into an exploration of deeper themes, he sticks very much to the surface.
What’s also interesting is that at the end, Barksted directly compliments the elder poet:
“But stay my Muse in thine owne confines keepe,
& wage not warre with so deere lou'd a neighbor
But hauing sung thy day song, rest & fleepe
preserue thy small fame and his greater fauor:
His song was worthie merrit (Shakspeare hee)
sung the faire blossome, thou the withered tree
Laurell is due to him, his art and wit
hath purchast it, Cypres thy brow will fit.”
It’s tactful: Shakespeare’s brow is worth the poetic laurell; whereas Barksted’s only suits the cypress. Barksted is seeking to delight and please the older man, whilst also, using the same material, placing himself within the same poetical lineage, an apprentice showing what he can do to an acknowledged master.
I think Barksted knew Shakespeare; was even star-struck by; I think Shakespeare had seen the boy in plays. I wonder, too, if Barksted might have known Edmund Shakespeare, the younger brother and player. Barksted seems to have liked a drink (unlike Shakespeare) and perhaps, like so many, he drank his talents away.
Whether he did or not, it’s intriguing to speculate, and that world of roistering, drinking players and playwrights comes just that little bit closer to us. We don’t know what Shakespeare’s response was, but he must, surely, have been flattered, as the young boy lit his own lesser flame, hoping to take on the torch and light the way into a glittering future.
It is a shame that Barksted doesn’t seem to have fulfilled his youthful promise. He did become an adult actor; but aside from the Marston play, we have little evidence of anything else that he wrote; and what evidence we have of his life sees him going to bawdy houses and abusing constables.
When he died, he was commended as “Will Baxted, a late well known fine comedian." He left behind his valiant work, and the sense of a link to greatness.