The Phoenix and the Turtle

• 1. Introduction

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  The Phoenix and the Turtle is a 67-line poem by William Shakespeare, first published in 1601 as part of a larger collection appended to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr. It has been called "the first great published metaphysical poem", and yet when it first appeared, it had no title at all. The label listeners know today is a conventional one, added later to name the two birds at the poem's heart: the mythological phoenix and the turtle dove.

  At the poem's surface, two birds have died. A funeral is arranged for them; some birds are invited, others excluded. The phoenix and the turtle dove represent perfection and devoted love. Their union, the poem insists, created a kind of logic-defying oneness that the world could not hold. And then it ends with a prayer for the dead lovers, leaving nothing behind.

  That sparse summary conceals centuries of argument. Who were these birds? Was this a coded tribute to a Welsh courtier and his wife? A veiled elegy for a Catholic martyr executed at Tyburn? A political gesture by a playwright who feared he had backed the wrong side? The poem's deliberate obscurity has invited, and firmly resisted, every attempt to decode it.

• 2. Love's Martyr and Its Company

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  Richard Field printed Robert Chester's Love's Martyr for the London bookseller Edward Blount in 1601. Chester's poem is a sprawling allegory tracing the relationship between a phoenix and a turtle dove, complete with the story of King Arthur, a history of ancient Britain, and Welsh etymologies for British town names. It culminates with the joint immolation of the two birds and the birth of a new creature from their ashes.

  Chester addressed his dedication directly to the Phoenix, whom he envisaged as female, and the Turtle as male. His prefatory verse runs: "Phoenix of beautie, beauteous, Bird of any / To thee I do entitle all my labour." What followed in the published volume was a supplementary gathering of poems described as "Diverse Poeticall Essaies" by "the best and chiefest of our moderne writers". Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Shakespeare all contributed; the anonymous figures "Vatum Chorus" and "Ignoto" appear as well.

  Shakespeare's poem appears after the brief introductory verses, and John Marston responds to it directly, calling it a "moving epicedium" and countering its grief over the lovers' childlessness by pointing to the new being born from the flames. Chapman adds detail on the Phoenix's generosity toward the Turtle. Jonson closes with a vision of the Phoenix whose judgment is "Clear as a naked Vestal, / Closed in an orb of Crystal."

  The unused sheets of that first quarto later passed to a different publisher, Matthew Lownes, who reissued the collection in 1611 under the new title The Annuals of Great Britain. The poem then disappeared from print until 1640, when it surfaced in John Benson's collected edition, Poems Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent.

• 3. The Logic of Perfect Love

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  Shakespeare's poem describes something philosophically unusual: a love so complete that it dissolves the boundary between two separate beings. The lines "So they lov'd, as love in twain / Had the essence but in one; / Two distincts, division none" echo the language of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, where distinct persons share a single essence. Several scholars have traced the poem's intellectual architecture to Renaissance Neoplatonism and to three strands of medieval Catholic thought: mystical union, spiritual friendship, and spiritual marriage.

  The phoenix and the turtle dove are mismatched by nature. The phoenix is immortal; the turtle dove is mortal. In conventional myth, the phoenix dies and rises again from its own ashes. By placing these two together as equal lovers who die together, Shakespeare creates a paradox: the immortal dies for good, and the mortal's death erases not just a life but an entire category of perfect love from the world.

  The poem draws on an older tradition of the "parliament of birds", in which various avian figures stand in for human roles or virtues. Shakespeare invites certain birds to the funeral and explicitly bars others, reinforcing the idea that what has been lost was rare and exclusive.

  The poem concludes not with resurrection but with mourning. John Marston felt compelled to answer this, insisting elsewhere in the collection that the couple's union produced "glorious issue". Shakespeare's choice to leave the lovers without posterity was pointed enough that his contemporaries noticed.

• 4. John Salusbury and the Welsh Connection

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  Sir John Salusbury, a Welsh courtier at the court of Elizabeth I and a member of the powerful Salusbury Family of Wales, is the individual to whom Chester explicitly dedicated Love's Martyr. From this, scholars argued that all the poems in the collection, including Shakespeare's, were written to honour Salusbury and his wife Ursula Stanley, the illegitimate daughter of Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby.

  Carleton Brown made this case in detail in 1913. A problem stands at the centre of it: Salusbury and Ursula are known to have had ten children, while the poem insists on the couple's "married chastity" and grieves the lovers' failure to leave any posterity. John Marston also comments on the childlessness within the same collection. Brown tried to resolve this by arguing the poem was written before the couple had children, and only published much later.

  Later critics began splitting Chester's poem from Shakespeare's. John Klause suggested that Chester's allegory treats death as symbolic of marriage and sexual surrender, while in Shakespeare's poem death is literal and final. G. Wilson Knight proposed a more unusual reading: that the poem actually celebrates Salusbury's devotion to his sister, for whom Salusbury had himself written a poem.

  The complications surrounding Salusbury run deeper than his family size. His cousin Owen Salusbury was killed while participating in the Earl of Essex's 1601 rebellion. His brother Thomas Salusbury had been executed years earlier after the Babington Plot. Sir John himself was knighted for helping to suppress the Essex rebellion. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen later argued that Salusbury was therefore "love's martyr" in a specifically political sense, someone who placed loyalty to Elizabeth above loyalty to his own kin.

• 5. The Queen, the Earl, and a Dangerous Play

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  Queen Elizabeth I was repeatedly associated with the phoenix during her lifetime. In the play Henry VIII, partly written by Shakespeare, she is called the "maiden phoenix". Two panel portraits attributed to Nicholas Hilliard are known as the "Phoenix" and "Pelican" portraits, named for jewels the queen wore as personal badges. Both birds appear in Chester's main poem.

  Katherine Duncan-Jones and Henry Woudhuysen proposed that the "session" mentioned in Shakespeare's poem refers to the parliament of 1601, in which Elizabeth made a speech about the symbolic relationship between herself and her people, sometimes called her Farewell Speech. They built on the earlier work of Marie Axton, who argued that Elizabeth functions in the poem as both birds simultaneously, representing her monarchical and human aspects, while the Turtle also incorporates the body of the people as a whole.

  A more politically charged identification was first proposed by A. B. Grosart in 1878: that the poem refers to the relationship between Elizabeth and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. William Matchett revived this reading in 1965. Essex was executed in early 1601, the same year the collection was published. Shakespeare had links to Essex's main ally, the Earl of Southampton, and his play Richard II, depicting the overthrow of a monarch, had been performed at the request of Essex's supporters just before the rebellion.

  Peter Ackroyd and James P. Bednarz both argue that Shakespeare may have contributed to Chester's collection precisely to distance himself from Essex. Bednarz writes that "Shakespeare's name, subscribed to his poem in Love's Martyr shows his accommodation to the political order without endorsing any specific political position." James P. Bednarz also warned against what he called "appliqué literalism" in reading allegory, and Helen Hackett described the poem as one that "incites deciphering, but at the same time firmly rebuffs it."

• 6. A Catholic Martyr at Tyburn

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  Clara Longworth first suggested in the 1930s, in her novel My Shakespeare, Rise!, that the poem is a cryptic Roman Catholic eulogy. The poem's final line advocates prayers for the dead, which aligns with Catholic liturgical practice rather than Protestant doctrine of the period. Several critics, including Clare Asquith and David Beauregard, have identified references to Catholic liturgy within the poem, and John Klause traced various parallels to the Dies Irae from the Liturgy of the Dead.

  The interpretation with the most scholarly traction focuses on St. Anne Line, a Roman Catholic who was executed at Tyburn in 1601 and later canonised by the Roman Catholic Church. Anne Line's husband Roger was arrested at a prohibited Catholic Mass, imprisoned, and then exiled; he died on the European continent a few years later. After his death, Anne worked for the Jesuits in London. She was arrested at a Candlemas liturgy and convicted of harbouring a Catholic priest. One of the Jesuits who knew her later hinted that a secret requiem Mass had been offered for her after her body was retrieved from a common grave in the road.

  Longworth proposed that the requiem Mass for Anne Line provided the poem's setting, and identified her as Shakespeare's phoenix. She identified the turtle as Mark Barkworth, a Catholic priest who reportedly embraced Anne Line's body as it hung on the scaffold before he too was executed. John Finnis and Patrick Martin later argued instead that the turtle represents Roger Line, Anne's husband.

  Asquith and Martin concurred on another identification within the poem: the "bird of loudest lay" represents William Byrd, the composer and Roman Catholic convert. The crow, in their reading, is the Catholic priest Rev. Henry Garnet, SJ. Martin Dodwell extended the allegory still further, arguing that Shakespeare used Anne and Roger Line to symbolise the Catholic Church itself, disinherited and rejected by England. One complication arose: the identification had partly rested on the belief that the Lines had no children, mirroring the poem's childless couple. It has since been established that they had a son named John, who was raised by relatives.