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The Two Noble Kinsmen 1613-14; 'our loss' in the Prologue probably refers to the Globe fire of 1613
2.2. The depiction of truth in William Shakespeare’s works
Since the First Folio claims that Shakespeare wrote history plays, I believe there is a lot to be said for believing not only that he did, but that he did so only in those plays and no others; proof should always come before description. Of course, the proof is mixed; Elizabethan generic vocabulary is infamous for its sponginess: such hybrids as The Tragedy of Richard II, The Tragedy of Richard III, The History of Troilus and Cressida, The Real Chronicle History of King Lear, and A Fun Conceited History called The Taming of a Shrew can be found on contemporary title pages. The generic divisions in the Folio, on the other hand, seem to belong to a particular style of discourse: F1 is a company volume, and I have no doubt that its division of plays into Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies reflects company understanding of the repertory, and thus, I assume, William Shakespeare's understanding.
Allie Esiri, Editor of “Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year”, explores moments of truth throughout Shakespeare’s work.
Following her anthologies A Poem for Every Night of the Year and A Poem for Every Day of the Year, she has spent the last three years (and a lifetime) researching our greatest poet for her latest collection, Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year. According to Allie, between his plays and his poems, Shakespeare has much to impart on this year’s theme for National Poetry Day: Truth.
Shakespeare's truth encompasses a wide range of concepts. Extracting a single stable sense of truth from Shakespeare is as pointless as extracting one from life, which adds the subject of truth to an ever-growing list of topics on which he has elaborated from every angle. There is no side of any point that Shakespeare has not taken and then disrupted with equal brilliancy, whether in identity politics, power struggles, passion, history, or war. The case of Macbeth exemplifies Shakespeare's ongoing ambivalence about reality. Macbeth is spurred on to commit his criminal deeds by the fact of who he is and will become, rather than by lies. However, it is also a fact that is both his undoing and inescapable: he knows he cannot be killed by someone who is born of a woman, and he dies at the hands of just such a man. Truth surges alongside his nefarious rise and follows him to his demise, fulfilling Banquo's wise warning: 'often-times, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of darkness say us facts, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray's / In deepest consequence'.
While "truths" drive Macbeth to evil, truth's vicious struggle to crack the surface and be recognized foreshadows Shakespeare's most noble moments. Lucrece refuses to be shamed by the abuse committed against her and speaks out in a powerful passage that has been mirrored by the #MeToo campaign. The eponymous victim of the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, who was raped by her husband's mate, declares, "My sable ground of sin I will not paint / To conceal the reality of this false night's abuses." She swears revenge on her husband before disclosing the rapist's name, then gives her life for the sake of reality. Lucrece's mistreatment is mirrored in Shakespeare's bestselling work (during his lifetime), the narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which begins, "Love is all real, Lust is full of forgèd lies." Love and beauty are often associated with the path of nature and the nature of reality in the works, especially the sonnets. For example, Sonnet 101: ‘With his color fixed, reality needs no color, / Beauty needs no pencil, beauty's truth to lay'. The young man to whom the verse is addressed in the especially melodramatic Sonnet 14 is no less than the personification of these virtues: ‘Thy end is Truth's and Beauty's doom and date.' ‘“Beauty is fact, truth beauty,” – that is everything / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” riffed Keats later.
While in Shakespeare's sonnets, honesty and beauty go hand in hand, this does not mean that truth is always flattering. To say the least, Sonnet 130, which begins, "My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," and then goes on to enumerate other ways in which his lover falls short of the natural world's beauty expectations, is a risky gambit. In the end, the poet saves himself by saying that his love is more remarkable because it is genuine. It's difficult not to ask if his addressee objected to being portrayed so candidly, but then we recall A Midsummer Night's Dream and how "true love never did run smooth."
In reality, it's possible that Shakespeare of Sonnet 130 is being a little deceitful. Just eight sonnets later in the series, the poet argues that lovers should not be truthful because self-deception makes relationships more enjoyable.
It's hard to say why these sonnets were written in this order or which was written first, but it's likely that the lover of Sonnet 138 had gained something from the reception of the earlier, more honest attempt. This sonnet begins: ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her though I know she lies, / That she might think me some untutor’d youth, / Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.’ In Shakespeare's work, truth plays no fixed part, being as important to the delivery of justice as it is to the execution of evil. Truth has the power to derail a romantic affair just as it has the power to create a loving relationship, and truth has the power to both discover and kill beauty. Given Shakespeare's hazy attitude toward reality, it's likely that he, like Hamlet, is much more skilled at doubt than truth. Even though Hamlet turns out to be a horrible boyfriend, he is at least capable of one beautiful love poem: Hamlet writes this to Ophelia early in their respective struggles to get a firm grasp on the facts about the world they inhabit:
Doubt thou the stars are fire.
Doubt that the sun doth move.
Doubt truth to be a liar.
But never doubt I love.
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