Shakespeare's Shrieking Harbinger: The Phoenix and the Turtle and the end of the Tudor Myth

Without being flagrantly treasonous, Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle counters the encomium to Elizabeth and panegyric to the impending Jacobean succession that most critics agree underlies the allegory of Robert Chester’s Love's Martyr, the collection in which it was published in 1601. Beneath its linguistic and ironic opacity, The Phoenix and the Turtle sustains an undertone of bitterness and mourning, inverting the collection’s conventional epideixis and declaring Shakespeare’s resignation to a tragic historicity. That this resignation denotes more than a passing poetic conceit can be recognized in Shakespeare’s transformation in the period around the publication of Love's Martyr from primarily a comic dramatist into primarily a tragedian.

When Shakespeare is thought to have composed The Phoenix and the Turtle in 1600-01, he had recently begun his period of great tragedies with Julius Caesar, and was possibly working on Hamlet. Probably finishing All’s Well that Ends Well several months after the publication of The Phoenix and the Turtle, the only remaining comedy Shakespeare wrote after the Jacobean succession of 1603 was Measure for Measure which flirts too closely with tragedy to be convincingly identified as a comedy. The genre of Troilus and Cressida remains in dispute, and its intractable generic palimpsest supports the contention that Shakespeare’s art was undergoing a fundamental transformation on the level of generic thematization across the period from the composition and publication of The Phoenix and the Turtle in Love's Martyr through his emergence as a tragedian in the livery of the Stuart king.

According to the allegorical interpretations of Marie Axton and Anthea Hume, Love's Martyr endorses Elizabeth’s recent condemnation of Essex who is represented by the “turtle that is dead” of Chester’s title poem, whom they associate with the idea of “False Love.” The poem, according to this interpretation, contains subtle praise of the Phoenix, Elizabeth, as the “True Love [that] is Troths fweete emperizing Queene,” to whom the living Turtle, the English people, have turned from their former adoration of Essex.

Chester’s poem comprises the main body of the collection, which is followed by an Appendix beginning with four pseudonymous poems, after which comes Shakespeare’s contribution, followed by works by John Marston, George Chapman, and Ben Jonson. Whether Chester intended a condemnation of Essex or not, the latter three poets, along with the as yet unidentified “Ignoto” and the ostensibly collaborative “Vatum Chorus,” all seem to treat the same theme without contradicting its literal terms: the Phoenix mates with the Turtle in the flames of their funeral pyre out of which a glorious new Phoenix rises to renew Nature and initiate a new era.

In the context of the myth tradition, as well as of the conventional association of Elizabeth with the Phoenix symbol (e.g. in Cranmer’s prophecy in Act V of Henry VIII), it is impossible to avoid associating the “allegory” in the subtitle of Love's Martyr with the passing of the Tudor dynasty and the initiation of the Stuart dynasty. References to the patron’s family and other apparent allusions recognized by critics can only be understood as sharing the same narrative with this allegory of dynastic succession which they can not have completely displaced for the immediate readership.

Had Shakespeare merely remained silent on the issue of the new Phoenix, as did most of the other poets, his poem would, like the others, appear to acquiesce in Chester’s mythopoesis. As with his comedies of the same period, however, he interjects a problem into the simple comic resolution which successfully has preserved the short poem’s enigmatic character. He not simply omits a new Phoenix, which might have justified the hypothesis of some critics that this is merely a badly written poem, but he explicitly attributes them “no posterity” creating a dissonance which is the poem’s most striking effect for every reader familiar with the conventional myth.

This dissonance reverberates against the entire encomium of Love's Martyr, rendering Shakespeare the owl of the troop, the “shrieking harbinger” of “the fiend,” the “augur” of the end of the eternal return of the new Phoenix from the ashes of the old. That is, the end of the cycle of rebirth of whatever this bird is understood “allegorically” to “figure.” But as his own poem interdicts such augury, the owl poet, to fulfill his commission, must sneak into the wedding/funeral as “the bird of loudest lay” which readers at first mistake for the Phoenix of the title. Shakespeare in 1601 was the most famous of the Love's Martyr poets and therefore the “loudest,” but his identification in the poem with the owl can be made first by noting that every description of the song of the mythological phoenix identifies it as the most beautiful of any bird on earth. Nowhere is it attributed with great volume, and never is great volume equated with beauty in music. Secondly, this “bird of loudest lay” is clearly meant to pass for the Phoenix, as it is placed on the “sole Arabian tree,” but at lines 22-23 we discover that it is not the Phoenix, because it is summoning the fowls to the Phoenix’s funeral. We then suppose that it is the new Phoenix who has risen from the ashes of the old to officiate at its funeral. But at line 59 we learn that the Phoenix and the Turtle have left “no posterity.”

This barrenness ironically makes Shakespeare’s Phoenix appropriately unique among poetic Phoenixes, but it turns what is essentially a comedy, or more precisely a tragicomedy, into a problem play. Readers must return to the beginning of the poem to clarify their inevitable initial misreading, where they again find an obscure bird on the Phoenix’s tree. The theme of return to origin is too intimately interwoven with the Phoenix symbol for this circular reading to be taken for granted as the accidental consequence of bad or inattentive poetry. It is in the course of this necessary second reading that the ironies of the poem’s obscure language and their deconstructive effects can begin to emerge. Here it becomes clear that banishing the owl in the second stanza itself implies the danger the owl would augur. As with the new Phoenix, Shakespeare might simply have omitted any mention of this owl if his intention were to interdict bad tidings from the ritual proceedings. Instead, the second stanza illustrates a little thesis on the futility of censorship. That censorship is an issue in the composition of Love's Martyr is suggested by the claim by the Vatum Chorus in the Invocation to the Appendix that

In addition to the kind and learned, there are some so “envious” in these Times that we are not free to express our Zeale (a controversial term for the Reformation) openly, but must exercise our invention to escape their incrimination. Shakespeare, in this context, invents his interdiction of the “shrieking harbinger” to augur a prophecy of doom which he is not, in these envious Times, free to write.

Each of these poets takes a different approach to the theme introduced by Chester, and all seem consonant with Chester’s allegory. I disagree with critics, such as Marie Axton and Anthea Hume, who assert that Shakespeare’s poem also expresses this fulsome praise of Elizabeth. On the contrary, its ironic realism points to the unattainability of True Love—in its reified Platonic form— in the earthly realm of the sensible. By refusing to compromise her idealistic fantasies, in destroying Essex, the queen destroyed her best hopes for a successor, along with England’s and the poet’s own. Using concepts traceable to Plotinus,[i] Shakespeare sends the Phoenix and Turtle home to the transcendent hypostasis of the One,[ii] and resigns himself to the carcasses that are left behind on Earth:

The perfect union of Love and Constancy, the ideal to which each, as separate human functions, continually aspires, is symbolized in the “mutual flame” (PT 23) of the Phoenix and Turtle, but Love and Constancy, although they continually burn with desire for each other inevitably destroy each other, as it is in the nature of constancy to be destroyed by new love, and in the nature of love to be extinguished by enforced constancy.

It is in this regard that Reason becomes confused in the anthem by two such incompatible properties existing together. Shakespeare’s Reason is Neoplatonic Reason, which, according to the Plotinian tradition, although a function of the intelligible, is able to perceive only the sensible, until it learns to ascend to pure ideas through contemplation of the unity of the One. Plotinus could have inferred this idea from a number of Plato’s dialogues.[iii] The most famous example is the “allegory of the cave” in the Republic (Book VII), which describes the ascent of human intelligence out of the cave of the sensible into the light of the intelligible where it is able to perceive the sun, an explicit symbol of the Good, the peak of Plato’s metaphysical hierarchy.

Theories of an historical allegorical subtext to the poem tend to ignore the identity of Reason and to concentrate on the identities of the Phoenix and Turtle. Although several scholars contend that the bitter opposition to the party of Essex by Salusbury, the patron of the collection, precludes the possibility of Shakespeare’s poem being dedicated to Essex,[iv] Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, seems to have been aligned with Essex, who, by 1601, was the leader of a radical Protestant faction, against Robert Cecil and the conservative establishment.[v]

It is possible that Shakespeare knew Essex only as the patron of the Earl of Southampton, frequently identified as the young man of the sonnets, or that his support of Essex was withdrawn after the failed rebellion (both of which have been suggested), but it is also possible that Shakespeare was a sincere patriot who mourned the fall of the Tudor dynasty, whose divine right he appears to argue for throughout his history plays, and that he preferred an alliance with old English aristocracy to the passing of the succession to a Scottish branch of the royal family.[vi] The evidence of the poem suggests that Shakespeare’s interests included practical, as well as idealistic considerations: that in having become associated with the Essex faction, however implicitly, he could have expected some greater preferment at court if the relationship between Elizabeth and Essex had been amended. At least one performance of Richard II at the Globe seems to have been timed to imply an association of Essex with Bolingbroke, and a portion of the chorus’s lines in the fifth act of Henry V is “designed as a rallying cry to elicit cheers from admirers of the Earl of Essex.”[vii]

The final imprisonment and beheading of Essex came on the heels of a number of disturbing political developments, including the burning of a great deal of poetry viewed as seditious (including some of Marston’s), as well as the imprisonment and torture of certain poets and writers (including Jonson). Despite Feuillerat’s contention that it is “one of Grosart’s wildest hypotheses” (181), if Shakespeare’s Turtle is taken for Essex, contemporary political events justify the remorseful mood of the poem.

Whether or not the Turtle is taken to represent Essex, several factors suggest that the contemporary reader would have understood Shakespeare’s Phoenix as Elizabeth, not the least of which is Shakespeare’s own reference to the young queen as a “maiden phoenix” in Henry VIII (V,iv,39), as well as the circulation of the ‘Phoenix Jewel,’ ‘a gold and enamel medallion showing a profile of the Queen on one side and a phoenix in flames on the other.’[viii] However, a second common interpretation of the poem arises from the customary Elizabethan use of dedicatory poetry collections as allegorical representations of their patrons’ families (Roe 44). According to this view, the Turtle would represent the patron of Love’s Martyr, the Earl of Salusbury; the Phoenix, his late wife, while the new Phoenix, who is praised in all the collected poems except Shakespeare’s would represent their fourteen-year-old daughter, Jane. But Shakespeare’s Phoenix and Turtle leave “no posterity,” and their childlessness stands in contrast to the rest of the collection as well as to the legendary Phoenix, which— although it had come by Elizabethan times to be regarded primarily as a symbol of uniqueness, emphasizing the myth that only one Phoenix lived on earth at a time— was still widely known as the fabulous bird that arose from its own ashes every five hundred years, giving credence to the notion that the miracle of “resurrection” was demonstrated in nature. By assigning “no posterity” to the Phoenix and Turtle, Shakespeare alters the familiar and expected story line, drawing the reader's attention to the disparity between his version and traditional renditions. “No posterity,” is not a casual oversight, but a premeditated contradiction.

Other than the attempt to associate some of Shakespeare’s birds with characters from Elizabethan society, allegorical interpretations tend to rely on the evidence of the context of the poem both in terms of the London of 1601, and in terms of the other poems in the collection. Little attention is paid to evidence internal to the poem itself, in which few narrative events actually take place. Reference is made, first to the upcoming funeral, and then to the bygone death of the Phoenix and Turtle, but the only actual event is Reason’s decision to sing a threnos to the dead birds.

While there is little support for any allegorical interpretation proposed thus far within the poem itself, there is a great deal of evidence of coherent metaphysical ideas. Ellrodt gives compelling evidence for the “philosophical poem inspired by the Phoenix myth: Le Phoenix de Jean Edward du Monin, published ‘A Paris. chez Guillaume Bichon’ in 1585” being one of Shakespeare’s sources, which treats of the Phoenix in a classical four-part allegory. In the French source: “The many levels of significance are not disguised under an allegory but plainly set forth[ix]…Du Monin has fused Christian theology and Neoplatonic philosophy. His God is the One of Plotinus…divine unity…reflected in the human soul” (Ellrodt 104).

The interpretation of Shakespeare’s Phoenix as Elizabeth or Salusbury’s widow attempts to define the allegorical level of the poem, but the Phoenix as a poetic symbol carried anagogic, and tropological significance which had already been explicitly reduced to Neoplatonic terms by Du Monin. Shakespeare’s anagogic Neoplatonism, however, just as does his literal and allegoric narrative, differs from its customary use in Elizabethan erotic poetry.

Despite the general consensus that Neoplatonic concepts permeate the poem, what these concepts are and how they are used have kindled an ongoing debate. J. V. Cunningham suggests that Shakespeare’s use of Neoplatonic terminology, or the terminology of Neoplatonism after it had been filtered through Latin scholasticism, was equivalent to the modern use of clichés such as “‘regression,’ ‘libido,’ ‘flight from reality,’ and inferiority complex’” in line with Freudian psychoanalysis (76). But Shakespeare carries his poetic use of Neoplatonism well beyond mere terminology. The middle third of the poem is apparently a versification of a scholastic discussion of the Plotinian concept of The One and its unattainability in material existence. Although Reason struggles throughout the anthem to reconcile itself to the unity of Love and Constancy, it finds that these two elements cannot exist as a single entity in material reality, but must pass into the world of Intellect to which there is no material access. The most explicit reference of the poem to Platonic metaphysics, as it was understood by the Elizabethans occurs in two verses of the anthem:

…the terminology is obviously scholastic, and its context is the doctrine of the Trinity. To avoid the Arian heresy,’ Thomas says, ‘we must avoid the terms diversity and difference so as not to take away the unity of essence; we can however, use the term distinction...so also to avoid taking away the simplicity of the divine essence we must avoid the terms separation and division, which apply to parts of a whole...’ (ST, 1.31.2)” (Cunningham 87)

Cunningham takes this echo of Thomism as evidence that Shakespeare’s subject is the doctrine of the Trinity, but St. Thomas himself appropriated these concepts directly and indirectly from Plotinus and the Neoplatonic metaphysical tradition. The practice of using Neoplatonic terminology to discuss Christian theology goes back at least as far as the fifth century. According to Paul Oskar Kristeller:

Plotinus added a more explicit emphasis on a hierarchical universe that descends through several levels from the transcendent God or One to the corporeal world, and on an inner, spiritual experience that enables the self to reascend through the intelligible world to that supreme One (52).

These hierarchical levels were interpreted by Christian theologians in various combinations as the persons of the trinity.

…Neoplatonism supplied practically all later Greek Church Fathers and theologians with their philosophical terms and concepts, most of all that obscure father of most Christian mysticism who hides under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite (Kristeller 53).

In his Mystical Theology, Pseudo-Dionysius refers to his trinitarian theology expounded in a book no longer extant:

…how the divine and good nature is called one, how triple; what Fatherhood and Sonship are in it…how, from the immaterial and undivided good, the lights at the heart of goodness were born and remained, not departing from the abiding that is coeternal with their shooting forth, in it and in themselves and in one another. (ll. 116-133)

This discussion of the Son and the Father arising coeternally out of the good reflects Plotinus’s discussion of the hypostases of Soul and Intellect arising out of the One. The practice of discussing Christian theology in Neoplatonic terms, exemplified in Dionysius, was legitimized in the West by Augustine who attributes his conversion to Christianity to Neoplatonic influences.

Shakespeare is using the same ideology that had been appropriated from the pagan Neoplatonists by the church fathers in order to lend the doctrine of the Trinity greater authority in the eyes of the pagans they were defending themselves against. However, to reduce the poem to a discussion of the Trinity alone is merely to focus upon its possible anagogic level at the expense of the allegorical. Furthermore, the overtones of despair in the poem would not be appropriate to a hymn to the mystery of the holy Trinity.

The poem’s discussion of Neoplatonic metaphysics is not altogether abstract; it does remain within the clearly defined context, albeit largely by Chester (or possibly Salusbury), of the funeral of the Phoenix and Turtle, but the events depicted do not unfold unequivocally. The identity of the “bird of loudest lay, on the sole Arabian tree” (1-2) has been the subject of a great deal of speculation. It seems probable that, similarly to the childlessness of the avian couple, this phrase is a calculated obfuscation. Many first-time readers familiar with the myth— of which most educated Elizabethans were aware from a wide range of sources— would naturally take this to be a reference to the Phoenix of the poem’s title. On discerning, however, that the occasion to which the “bird of loudest lay” is summoning “all chaste wings” is the funeral of the Phoenix, the reader must go back and reexamine the opening lines of the poem. The bird nevertheless remains unnamed.[x]

This ambiguity reflects the confusion of Reason over whether the Phoenix and the Turtle are one or two. One of the oldest and most widespread attributes of the phoenix myth concerns the beauty of the song it sings in praise as it gazes on the passage of the sun. But the bird of most beautiful lay and that of loudest lay are two very different creatures. The bird of loudest lay on the sole Arabian tree, is an impostor, a substitute for the true “New Phoenix” who, if all were right with the world, would be doing the funereal honors, as prescribed by the ancient myth.

With this contradiction, Shakespeare once again points to the disparity between the real and the ideal. Not only is the bird of loudest lay mistaken on first glance for the beautiful and exalted ideal, when it is only a vulgar substitute, but many elements in the poem are similarly ambiguous. Shakespeare names four other birds, invited to or prohibited from the funeral. The poem has been discussed in terms of the medieval tradition of Parliaments of Fowls, and indeed, Royden’s Phoenix Nest which includes all of Shakespeare’s birds seems to follow that tradition closely, but as it was Shakespeare’s usual practice to use texts as points of departure for his own unique artistic statements, he has selected from Royden and Chester’s birds to create a unique parliament. While appearing to follow a time-worn formula, he words his stanzas ambiguously.

That the identity of the shrieking harbinger is the owl has been asserted many times by critics. He may seem a possible candidate for the bird of loudest lay owing to the “shrieking” in the first line following upon the “loudest lay” of the first line of the previous stanza. He has however been forbidden to attend. The fever’s end he augurs is not the cooling of recovery, as in the customary resurrection of the phoenix out of the fire, but the cooling of death. The total life-span of the phoenix through many deaths and rebirths, from at least the time of Hesiod, was equated with the Great Year, a period varying from culture to culture, but comprising many centuries and often equated with the duration of human history. The owl’s presence at the funeral of the Phoenix would signal a true fever’s end, a termination of the cycles of rebirth, rather than a time of renewal as is unambiguously implied in the rest of Love’s Martyr,.

Shakespeare seems to forbid the attendance of the owl, but in the deterring of a messenger, he does not denied the truth of the message. He may be discussing his own role as commissioned poet. He has been enjoined to contribute his work, whether for money or political exigency, but he has also been enjoined not to augure the impending doom he perceives. A notation on the collection’s title-page refers to “ideas engendered by thoughts freer than the time,” implying that all the poets were concealing their true thoughts in their allegories.

If we therefore read “come thou not near” ironically, the following stanza lends itself to a similar double entendre:

If the symbol of the Phoenix in Love’s Martyr is taken to imply the succession of Elizabeth by James, as the phoenix imagery of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII does explicitly, the poetry cannot be taken as seditious. If taken as sarcasm, however, the denial of access to minor birds of prey, while permitting the entry of the biggest predator of them all, may be a further indictment of the discretion of the queen, who, after the defeat of the Spaniards, had been exalted as a sagacious peacemaker and wise protector of her people, whom she saved from tyranny,.

Owing to the widespread notion that the life-long silent swan sang a singly beautiful melody as it was dying, this stanza has been read by almost all critics as sufficient poetic warrant for the appropriateness of that bird’s presence at funerals. The line, however, does not read, “let the swan be our priest,” but “let the priest be our swan.” The priests of Reformation England were involved in the great Elizabethan religious innovations. The reign of Mary had threatened to defeat the hopes of Protestant reform in England and return that nation to spiritual bondage to Rome, but Elizabeth succeeded in restoring the English church to the theological principles of the Tudor revolution. If in the poem Shakespeare’s tone of despair is owing to what he perceived as the death of the Tudor revolution and of his own fond hopes, the English priest in his surplice white, was no longer a singer of hymns to a glorious future, but a chanter of England’s swan song. “That the requiem lack its right” is a homophone for the tautological “rite,” an augur of the return to Catholicism that was to be feared following the accession of a Scottish king. Scotland had throughout the Reformation been, along with France and Spain, a Catholic ally of Rome against the Elizabethan Protestants.

Again, this bird has received a great deal of attention in terms of its appropriateness to the Phoenix’s funeral. The popular belief that it gives birth with its breath, associates it with the phoenix who, according to legend, also breeds asexually. It is quite likely, however, that sophisticated Elizabethans were well able to discern that that sort of reproduction was myth and not physiology. The skepticism expressed by Sebastian in The Tempest (3.3.23) with regard to the actual existence of a phoenix indicates that disbelief in the Physiologus tradition was not unheard of. We can read a tone of sarcasm into the crow’s epithet, as a symbol, not of the miracle of asexual reproduction in nature, but of its patent impossibility. Elizabeth was outspokenly criticized for her refusal to grant audience to Essex, and for banishing him from court. It was his house arrest and his extended condition of exile from the queen’s presence that created the “court of exiles” that led to outright rebellion for the fomenting of which he was eventually executed. The anthem which follows upon the verse dedicated to the crow, treats throughout of the mystery of unity in division. The crow serves to introduce that paradox in the disparity between his mythological ideal, as a bird that need not have sexual intercourse to procreate (despite its treble-dated age), and harsh reality, which is that no being— not even a queen— can have offspring without physical conjugation.

The introduction of the anthem is contains explicit indications that Shakespeare fulfilled this commission reluctantly. Anthea Hume gives compelling evidence that “in celebrating James as the New Phoenix, Love’s Martyr gave support to the policy for which Cecil was working: hence the poem may have been in part a bid for his favour or his continuing favour” (64). Because Shakespeare agreed to contribute to the collection, she assumes that he joined in the ideological support of Cecil. But John Roe finds evidence that:

Jonson, Marston, and Chapman were all collaborating closely with each other. But Shakespeare was on a different plane, being known by now as the creator of Falstaff, of the second tetralogy, of Twelfth Night...and possibly...Hamlet...Chester’s patron would have been glad to have Shakespeare in the volume on the latter’s own terms. (Roe 45)

I venture to take the speculation a step further by suggesting that Shakespeare, already in political trouble for his association with the failed Essex faction, and wishing to avoid the imprisonment that was the lot of a number of his less subtle or less talented colleagues, could have been easily coerced into contributing to a political statement that he personally had no heart in. In introducing the anthem and later the threnos (48-49) explicitly, he gives the impression of going through the motions of constructing a poem according to a prescribed formula.

The announcement of the anthem is followed by the abrupt proclamation: “Love and constancy is dead.” Here is Shakespeare’s real meaning. This is not a statement of perpetual renewal, but of final departure of the highest ideals of life. The tone is brusque and offhand. It is a statement of realism and resignation. Following the two stanzas cited on page four above, whose Plotinian ideas must now be seen in an ironic context, Shakespeare reveals his partisanship:

Consistent with the Phoenix and Turtle theme, the poet continues to talk in terms of the mutual relationship; it is only for the right of the turtle, however, that he makes his plea. Essex had assumed an understanding with Elizabeth. While couched in a great deal of flamboyance and with conventional expressions of courtly romance, it was nevertheless fundamentally a political affair. Similarly to the use of “right,” Shakespeare again chooses to end his stanza with an ambiguity. The word “mine” has been interpreted usually as merely the literal first person possessive or as the figurative gold mine in which each found the other’s spiritual treasures. I suggest that it is a reference to . The ambiguity is again between the ideal spiritual myth and the naked revolutionary reality. In the next stanza:

Again Shakespeare purports to make a conventional poetic play on the terminology of Platonic love to describe a romantic relationship. While the significance of the term “property” to scholastic metaphysics has often been remarked, I find that it reinforces the ambiguity of the previous word “mine.” Property as a metaphysical quality of being is in scholastic thought more or less synonymous with its single nature. Shakespeare proclaims that an entity of a single property should by reason bear a single name. In the era of the birth of capitalism, however, the term “property” had a strong connotation of ownership, such as in an example from 1489: “Paston Letters. III. 349 Tyll it myth be undyrstond wedyr the propyrte ware in the Kyng or in my lord.” Furthermore, the word “appalled” also has variant definitions: Spenser’s Faery Queene. iv. vi. 26 Therewith her wrathfull courage gan appall, and: 1530 Palsgrove 433/1, I appalle, as drinke dothe or wyne, whan it leseth his colour, or ale whan it hath stande longe. Je appalys. This wyne is appaled all redy.” These share the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary of “To cause to fade or cease to flourish” from the root, “to pale.” The conventional reading of this verse that the scholastic quality of proprietas is astounded and dismayed that what has two names is actually a single nature, if the tone is changed, may imply that property has ceased to flourish because the names of Essex and Tudor remained divided, despite assumptions to the contrary.

We may now read the trinitarian or Neoplatonic metaphysics of the two stanzas cited above in another way:

In order to remain free from accusation of treason either to Elizabeth for supporting rebellion, or to James for opposing his succession, Shakespeare produced a plausible allegorical discourse on the truth of Platonic Love, but undelying these stanzas is a continuation of the irony of the crow’s asexuality. It is a logical paradox that that which is twain can have a single essence, and it is therefore, except in the terms of Neoplatonic metaphysics or abstract poetry, impossible. Just as impossible is the idea that in exiling Essex, first to the Irish campaigns, and then to the north of England, any understanding could have been knit between Elizabeth and him. “Two distincts, division none” and “hearts remote yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen” are absurd expressions. “But in them it were a wonder” has been taken to imply that only in such an exalted couple as the Phoenix and Turtle could such a paradox seem natural. It can easily be seen as reiterating the accusation against Elizabeth that continual enforced separation was a strange way to carry on a courtship.

After developing through the anthem the paradox of unity in division, Shakespeare introduces the character of Reason which is unable to resolve the contradictions with which it is confronted. This is a necessary step in the evolution of individual human reason in Plotinus:

Here Reason performs its function of bringing the soul to the limit of understanding through arguments concerning the “…absolute absence of limitation and determination seen primarily as the absence of duality, making analytic description impossible” (Harrison 237). Reason is the principle in Neoplatonic and scholastic thought of reduction of the universal into the specific, a process of division.[xi] In its Neoplatonic context, the exclamation of surrender of the Reason is the necessary step which impels it to a higher form of understanding outside of Plato’s cave.

.…arguments lead us even further. They not only show soul what it is; they also lead it to see that the knowledge it has…derives from a higher form of thinking, the divine intellect which, unlike it, does not need to work through long logical processes, but possesses knowledge in a different and superior way. (O’Meara 104)

The whole purpose of the critical purification of our minds by negation which Plotinus requires of us if we are to pass beyond Intellect to the first principle of reality is to reveal to us the eternal source of being, intellect, good and unity…It is the shock of this coupled affirmation and negation which drives us beyond the highest intelligible perfection, prevents us from settling down comfortably in the universe in which our perfected minds discover themselves, and pushes us on to an obscure awareness of something greater and better than any possible thought can contain (239).

…up to this stage, he thinks. But carried out by the wave, as it were, of intellect itself, lifted up high by it as it swells, so to speak, he suddenly saw, not seeing how, but the sight, filling the eyes with light, does not make him see another through itself, by the light itself was the sight seen. Enneads (VI. 7. 36. 6-12) (O’Meara 103)

This experience was not a simple process of philosophic understanding as Plato’s published dialogues imply, but a higher state which Plotinus attributed to Plato, which he claimed to have experienced, and which he promised to his adherents. It was this promise of transcendent union with the One that attracted early Christian theologians like Pseudo-Dionysius.

Then [Moses] abandons the seen things themselves and also those who see [them], and enters into the truly mystical darkness of unknowing. There, belonging entirely to what is above all and to nothing [else], whether himself or another, he shuts out all cognitive apprehensions and emerges in the altogether intangible and invisible. By the inactivity of all knowledge, he is united in his better part with the entirely unknown. And by knowing nothing, he knows superintellectually. (ll. 78-87)

Although Shakespeare’s poem gives every appearance of participating in the familiar Neoplatonic progression to a higher state of consciousness, his Reason can offer only poetry:

Here Shakespeare resolves the opposition he has set up throughout the poem of exalted ideals, to base reality. Reason reaching the limit of its understanding, trapped in the paradox of an impossible unity, is forced to concede to the higher authority of Love. Rather than any transcendent union with the One, however, Reason can offer only a bit of poetry. It is interesting to note that Reason’s exclamation: “How true a twain seemeth this concordant one,” besides its evident meaning as a statement of disbelief at the unity of what seems rationally separate, namely the separate elements of intelligible being that are unified in the One, can also refer to what is by right, unified, the names of Tudor and Essex, remain truly twain. His poetry is no longer the exaltation of the glorious destiny and highest ideals of English history, but a simple capitalist venture, politically or financially dictated by the exigencies of the moment. In the threne which closes the poem, he relinquishes his nursery rhyme-like abba trochaic stanzas for a series of lyrical triplets.

The five stanzas which close the poem acknowledge the end of the exalted ideals of human history and confirm the failure to achieve renewal in a “New Phoenix.” The poet enjoins the reader to share in his lamentation of what has been lost, and to make the best of what remains on earth.

Shakespeare intends poetry to exemplify the state of Plotinian transcendence in which the light itself is the sight seen. But it is as poor a substitute for true union with the One as the bird of loudest lay is for the Phoenix. Those critics who have understood his poem to be a negative allegorical assessment of contemporary politics[xii] have neglected to acknowledge as well its negative assessment of contemporary Neoplatonic principles. Sebastian’s comment in The Tempest on the likelihood of the existence of the phoenix tell us nothing of Shakespeare’s personal conception of the fabulous bird. The poem does not end with a transcendent Plotinian vision of light itself, but with a sigh from the depths. For once the poetic ideal has been removed, we are forced to recognize that, on earth, those who are true are never fair, those who are fair are never true, and that the Phoenix and the Turtle are nothing more than two dead birds.

[i] Usually credited with the foundation of Neoplatonism in Alexandria in the fourth century

[ii] The One is associated by G. B. Harrison in the Cambridge History with Plato’s concept of “(the Good), from which everything of value comes…(100).

[iii] (Phaedrus, 249d-252a; Symposium, 210a-211c) discussion of beauty Phaedrus (251a-256e)…love as recognition, remembrance, Phaedo,…happiness lies in escape from the body and blissful vision of the Forms in a higher existence. (O’Meara 101) …Plotinus identifies the human good, the goal of life, as divinization, as ‘assimilation to god’ (Plato, Theatetus, 176b, quoted by Plotinus)(102)

[iv] (Hume, Feuillerat, Brown) (182)

[v] Thomson 109

[vi] Matchett 135

[vii] Thomson points out that “there is no getting away from the fact that Essex is compared to a king of England,” and that “in 1599, Hayward published the First part of the life and reign of King Henry IIII , with an ecstatic Latin dedication to the Earl of Essex” (135).

[viii] Matchett 23; also see 1603 Knolles Hist. Turks (1621) Ded., Her late sacred Majestie,.. the rare Phoenix of her sex, who now resteth in glorie. 1583 Stubbes Anat. Abus. ii. (1882) 8 Such a vertuous Ladie and Phenix Queene. (OED)

[ix] The Phoenix symbol is said to praise ‘L’illustrissime Phoenix de France’, Charles de Bourbon, Archbishop of Rouen, a Catholic uncle of Henri IV whose claim to the throne was urged by the Guises. But it also expresses the excellence of Monarchy, as contrasted with oligarchy and with Democracy: the mob is described as an ‘antiphoenix’...It serves a more personal end when Du Monin proudly poses as a lonely Phoenix among the poet-owls of his age...Religious symbolism is not wanting. Like the Phoenix, the Catholic Church is one, yet united with the ‘greater Phoenix’, ‘ce Phoenix Christ unic’

[x] Among the theories advanced are: the nightingale, the peacock, and the phoenix itself (Wilson 202)

[xi] Its Latin root in rationem gave the word “reason” more specific mathematical connotations than it carries today: “1570 There are…three reasons or meanes of measuring, which are called commonly dimensions. Billingsley Euclid xi. def. i. 312” (OED).

[xii] See Wilson Knight and Carlton Brown