Matchett, William H. The Phoenix and the Turtle. The Hague: Mouton, 1965.
(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
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Fairchild...’phoenix’ had become a descriptive term which was applied to any person or thing regarded as possessing unique excellence;...synonym for ‘paragon’, ‘distinguished,’ or ‘wonderful’
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...frequent use in reference to Queen Elizabeth
Henry VI plays we twice find the phoenix as a revenging successor rising form the ashes of the dead...(1HenryVI, IV, vii, 92-3) ... (3HenryVI, I, iv, 35-6)
In two passages the key word is ‘rare,’ and in one it is ‘nonpareil.’ In Timon the reference, with ‘flashes,’ is apparently to splendor. In AW, although the reference is somewhat ambiguous, rarity of beauty is in better accord with the context than are any details of the legends. In the Tempest, the unique phoenix is, like the unicorn, an unbelievable creature.-- In COE, ‘Phoenix’ is the name of an inn (I, ii,75) and, in Twelfth Night, of a boat (V, i, 61)
Cranmer prophesying at Elizabeth’s birth:
Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
As great in admiration as herself,
So shall she leave her blessedness to one,-
When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness,-
Shall star-like rise, as great in frame as she was,
And so stand fix’d.
Sonnet xix
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws
And burn the long-liv’d phoenix in her blood...
Donne...Epithalamion... ’these two Phenixes’ who, by becoming one, restore nature
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Henry Lytte...The Light of Britayne (1588)...Elizabeth is ‘by the grace of God: The Phoenix of the worlde: The Angell of Englande”
Frances Yates...’to her Phoenix motto of semper eadem’...(1578)
‘Phoenix Jewel,’ which is a gold and enamel medallion showing a profile of the Queen on one side and a phoenix in flames on the other.
Elizabeth was the phoenix because she was...unique
‘phoenix’ in Elizabethan poetry was used primarily as an emblem for uniqueness, rarity, beauty or splendor, and did not necessarily imply any further details of the traditional phoenix legends, although such details might be brought in when they served the purposes of an individual poem
William Fennor...Descriptions (1616)
England’s fair Phoenix, Europe’s admiration
Of matchlesse beauty, yet of vertue rare;
A kindgome’s comfortable consolation,
Who ever rarest is, yet she is rarer.
CHAPTER 6
‘THE PHOENIX AND THE TURTLE’
II: THE POEM IN CONTEXT
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Appearing as it did in Loues Martyr, Shakespeare’s poem necessarily made a statement about Essex and the Queen [as Grosart suggests, but not only a statement of praise]
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conforms to certain standards...other appended poems...deals with a Phoenix and Turtle. Less obvious, though also standard, are the basic structure of paired poems and the Platonic terminology....confirms his participation...in a general plan...
Chaucer’s The Parlement of Foules, Matthew Roydon’s elegy on sir Phillip Sidney, Lactantius and Ovid have all been suggested as Shakespeare source for PT...
Roydon’s is the most relevant...
...use of the phrase ‘the Phoenix nest’ has been taken to imply his remembering the volume in which it first appeared.
Nicholas Breton’s “Amoris Lachrimae” (1591)
The Nightingale is stopped in her throte,
And shriking Owles do make a fearefull noise,
The dolefull Ravens sing a deadly note
And little Wrennes the end of Eagles ioyes:
The Phoenix dreepes, and falcons beate their wings,
To heare how Swans of death and sorrow sings (1591, B).
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The most that we could say he borrowed from Roydon’s poem would be the general conception of assembling birds for lamentation and the inclusion in the group of an eagle and a swan--and he would not have had to go to Roydon for this conventional conception.
Breton’s poem, however, could have provided him not only with these same suggestions but with others,...a few of them quite specific.
...emphasizing the voices of the birds...
‘the bird of loudest lay’ is like a specific rejection of Breton’s nightingale, ‘stopped n her throte.’
‘shriking harbinger’ improves on Breton’s ‘shriking Owles’ rhythmically
breton’s poem...as in The Phoenix nest...we find the figure of Reason:
Oh what a wo it is to see the woes
Where nought but wo is left to looke upon,
A griefe too great for reason to disclose,
And in effect a death to studie on
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Breton’s Reason, like his nightingale, is mute; Shakespeare regains its voice.
...source for the opening stanzas of PT, I would think that not Chaucer or Ovid, certainly not Lactantius, and not even Roydon, but Nicholas Breton wrote the poem which exerted the most direct influence
The idea that Elizabeth and Essex were Shakespeare Phoenix and Turtle--a fact which the poem’s context forces us to recognize--meets resistance primarily because Elizabeth was unquestionably alive at the time of the publication of this poem purporting to commemorate her death.
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One who had hoped for great things from Essex would not have had to wait for the fact of death before losing his hopes...
...when Shakespeare lost faith in Essex, we cannot say. I have tended to relate the changes to the actual rebellion, on the basis of the internal chronological evidence in Loues martyr
Shakespeare sees the situation as already past redeeming
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...specific unsolved problem implied by the poem, the problem, that is, of the succession...
Though the queen lived on, in losing Essex she had, it might be thought, lost her future.
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...conveys an effect of the self-conscious construction of praise
‘Threnos,’ stanzaically separate, actually conceived as an individual poem for which the earlier stanzas area introduction is Reason’s response to the claims made in the anthem; it is, presumably, Shakespeare’s response to the disgrace of Essex
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These qualities were involved in the relationship; they existed, but they are past redeeming
...nothing would be gained by seeking to blame either of the principals
...understanding of Essex and the queen, from which England had reason to expect such benefit.
...has come to a fruitless conclusion
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suspect that Shakespeare, whatever his former partisanship, would have viewed the Essex rebellion with horror and would, by 1601, consider Elizabeth, whatever her undeniable glories, a failure in her supreme duty as a Queen.
‘The Phoenix and the Turtle represents Reason as reasserting itself after a tragic loss.
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‘beauty’ and truth,’ ‘fair’ and ‘true’ are, indeed, thematic words in the Sonnets, and not alone for the pretense of the lady. the young man, like the relationship of the Phoenix and the turtle, is said to embody the Platonic ideas - “both truth and beauty on my loue depends’ (sonnet 101) - which will expire when he does - ‘Thy end is Truthes and Beauties doome and date’ (Sonnet 14)
The word ‘rarity,’ proper to the Loues martyr context as the quality of he phoenix itself, appears onoy once in the sonnets, where ..it is associated with 'beauty’ and ‘truth’
Time doth transfixe the florish set on youth,
and delues the paralels on beauties brow,
‘Feedes on the rarities of natures truth,
And nothing stands but for his sieth to mow (Sonnet 60)
Venus in her wooing of Adonis:
therefore despight of fruitlesse chastitie,
loue-lacking vestals, and selfe-louing Nuns,
That ont he earth would breed a scarcitie,
And barraine dearth of daughters, and of suns;
Be prodigall, the lampe that burnes by night,
Dreies up his oyle, to lend the world his light
What is thy bodie but a swalowing graue,
Seeming to burie tha posteritie.
which by the rihgts of time thou needs must haue,
If thou destroy them not in dare obscuritie?
If so the world, will hold thee in disdaine,
Sith in thy pride, so faire a hope is slaine (11. 751-62)
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Having already praised the young man in the sonnets as the sole embodiment of Platonic ideas
Through the introduction of Reason, Shakespeare devalues the Platonic metaphor of the anthem. the possible emotional truth of any metaphor may be converted into undoubted nonsense merely by treating that metaphor as though it were a statement of literal fact.
...his commitment to poetry is not in doubt.
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After a final statement of the loss in terms of the Platonic metaphors of praise --:truth and Beautie buried be--reason moderates not only the triumph but even the tragedy by reminding us that ins spite of the magnitude of the loss, the world is not bereft of all that can be considered ‘true or faire.’ Elizabeth and Essex--she formerly a phoenix in the rarity of her glory, he a turtle in his single-minded loyalty--are now ‘these dead birds’...
The world has not come to an end...
...others of he group of poets whose work was appended to Loues Martyr did not agree.
That he was not without his own commitments is shown by Reason’s struggle in the poem.
To reduce any complex work of art to a single statement said to be its ‘meaning’ is, of course, to distort and cheapen it.