Labeo and Shakespeare on the Ladies' Toilette

Edward de Vere & Ludovico Ariosto

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Shakespeare's Ladies: Hall's Labeo satire misses the point.

Labeo and Shakespeare on the Ladies' Toilette

I have recently cited lines from the first book of satires of Joseph Hall meant as satirical comment on Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, and other of his related sonnets. Hall objects to the anti-Petrarchan style of the poems though he does not use the term. It is not even clear that he was aware that there was such a mode. Few were and Shakespeare was the rare poet to utilize it.

As evidenced by the English poetry of the late 16^th century, the state of knowledge of Italian poetry covered a comparatively narrow range. The Group of 1573 — much the subject of my Shakespeare in 1573: Aprenticeship and Scandal (2021)¹ — included great fans of Ludovico Ariosto's plays and lyric poetry. George Gascoigne and the young courtier who went under the moniker of Si fortunatus infoelix both included translations from these in the anthology An Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573).

It was Ariosto's work in the romantic mode, however, almost entirely through his book-length poem Orlando Furioso, that later took literary England by storm. Outside of Shakespeare, Gascoigne and Si fortunatus infoelix, few were influenced by his plays or lyric poems.

The Italian modes that the English University Poets knew well were the Petrachan and the pastoral style of Jacopo Sannazzaro. These, too, Shakespeare knew well. He found himself disparaged as a poet, by Hall, in his own lifetime, under the accusation that he merely copied the styles of Sir Philip Sidney. Just who copied who and to what extent is an interesting topic. Both, however, were deeply influenced by Sannazzaro.

Hall goes on to describe a lady's use of cosmetics according to the poetry of Labeo:

Fain would she seem all frixe and frolic still.

Her forehead fair is like a brazen hill

Whose wrinkled furrows which her age doth breed,

Are daubed full of Venice chalk for need

Her eyes like silver saucers fair beset

With shining amber, and with shady jet,

Her lids like Cupid's bow-case, where he hides

The weapons that doth wound the wanton-ey'd:²

Still infused with the deference of chivalric address, like most educated men in England, he pillories Shakespeare for imagery he finds laughable. What woman would be anything but offended to be described in such a way?

I have discussed, in my Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022)³, the strong evidence for the influence of Ercole Bentivoglio on certain parts of Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet. In particular, he wielded, in Hamlet's speech to Ophelia, the anti-Petrachan Italian's habitual disparagement of women's cosmetics the which they used to “make fools of men”. I quote from the form the passage took as Hall would have seen it played on stage.

Ham. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.

*

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another; you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance⁴

Again, more than one example was likely in Hall's mind.

Ham. Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come.⁵

In Italy, these lines would display the particular stamp of Bentivoglio of the School of Ferrara. The school that was the pride of the literary Renaissance. That included Ariosto, Cinthio and others who were regular sources for the works of Shakespeare.

There is neither space here to give more examples for comparison, unfortunately, nor time to provide more that a swatch of bland prose translation.

Dei modi delle donne: e quei sian belle E quai sian brutte, e come noi fan stolti. E concludiam che son ben rare quelle Che non mettano in opra la cerosa E che non si stropiccino la pelle.6	Of the ways of women: by which they are beautiful And which they are ugly, and how they make us fools. It is concluded that those are rare who do not put ceruse to work and do not stretch tight their wrinkled skin.

Bentivoglio also wrote the play I Fantasmi, a then-modernized adaptation of Plautus' play Mostellaria, which Shakespeare would seem clearly to have known from the evidence left behind in the German translation of the Hamlet of 1589. The latter would soon be composing plays of his own based closely on his beloved Plautus.

Lavinia, in that adaptation, might almost serve as a backgrounder on Hamlet's comments to Ophelia. Her paramour, Fulvio, whom she loves naively, and his friends, could easily have provided the example which arrived at these lines:

I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me; I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious; with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape,

or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between heaven and earth? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.⁷

Normally lacking self-awareness, Fulvio thinks he, too, is in love, until the reality of his situation shows up in the person of his father who he has defrauded. Lavinia suffers the expected fate. Again, I provide the details in my book on the subject.

It must be admitted that disparagement of women's cosmetics was a common feature of Puritan prose literature also. It is highly unlikely that Shakespeare was unaware of that literature. But context shows us that his and Joseph Hall's motivations come entirely from another source.

1Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Shakespeare in 1573: Aprenticeship and Scandal (2021), https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B096GSQV14/

2Warton, Thomas. Satires by Joseph Hall (1824). 161-2.

3Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. Back When Ophelia Jumped Off a Cliff: the Hamlet of 1589 (2022). https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WC94FGW/

4The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, III.i.

5The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, V.i.

6Bentivoglio, Ercole. Raccolta... Satirici, 224.

7The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, III.i.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• More on Thomas North as Shakespeare and author of Arden of Feversham. June 14, 2021. “This is also the reason why the title pages included the address of the shop that was selling the book.”
• A 1572 Oxford Letter and the Player’s Speech in Hamlet. August 11, 2020. “The player’s speech has been a source of consternation among Shakespeare scholars for above 200 years.  Why was Aeneas’ tale chosen as the subject?”
• Gutenberg, proto-Hack Writers and Shakespeare. May 26, 2020. “A less well known effect of the Reformation was that many young Catholic men who had taken religious orders in order to receive an education began to lead lives at large from monastic discipline.  Like Erasmus and Rabelais they took up the pen.”
• Shakespeare’s Funeral Meats. May 13, 2020. “Famous as this has been since its discovery, it has been willfully misread more often than not.  No mainstream scholar had any use for a reference to Hamlet years before it was supposed to have been written.”
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.
• Check out the Letters Index: Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford for many letters from this fascinating time, some related to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.