Anne and Roger Line: The Phoenix and the Turtle

Shakespeare's The Phoenix and the Turtle was written soon after Anne Line's death. In her 1935 novel, My Shakespeare, Rise!, Clara Longworth de Chambrun proposed that the poem is a eulogy commemorating Anne Line.

Clara Longworth first suggested that St. Anne Line is Shakespeare's phoenix and Mark Barkworth, a Catholic priest who reportedly embraced her body as it hung on the scaffold before he was also executed, is the turtle. John Finnis and Patrick Martin argued more recently that St. Anne Line is the phoenix and her husband Roger is the turtle.

(Clare Asquith has proposed) that the "bird of loudest lay" represents the composer William Byrd, who was a Roman Catholic convert, and that the crow is the Catholic priest Rev. Henry Garnet, SJ. Martin Dodwell argued further that Shakespeare used St. Anne and Roger Line to symbolise the Catholic Church itself, as disinherited and rejected by England.

Colin Wilson and Gerard Kilroy have proposed allusions to Anne Line in The Tempest and in Sonnet 74. Martin Dodwell has suggested that the fate of Anne and Roger Line symbolizes the rejection of Catholicism by England, and that Shakespeare returns to this allegorical representation in the play Cymbeline. 

Proponents of the Catholic interpretation have suggested various identities for the poem's birds, but the interpretation that has the most traction is that the phoenix commemorates St. Anne Line, a Roman Catholic executed at Tyburn in 1601 [...]. (Anne) was arrested at a Candlemas liturgy and convicted of harbouring a Catholic priest, which led to her execution. Her body was retrieved from the common grave in the road and one of the Jesuits who knew her hinted that a secret requiem Mass was later offered for her. It was suggested that (her) requiem Mass provided the setting for Shakespeare's poem. The advocacy of prayers for the dead ("these dead birds") in the final line of the poem corroborates this interpretation.

Several critics, including Clare Asquith and David Beauregard, have noted that the poem ostensibly references Catholic liturgy and possibly the writings of the Catholic priest and poet Rev. Robert Southwell, SJ, who translated the Latin hymn Lauda Sion and also authored a poem praising the married chastity of St. Mary and St. Joseph. John Klause argued that the poem has various parallels to the Dies Irae of the Liturgy for the Dead, but suggests that its Catholic imagery satirises conventional Protestant attitudes (...) and that it is a subtle protest against the lauding of Sir John Salusbury, whose imagined death (Robert Chester) supposes the poem celebrates.

The 'turtle' is the turtle dove.

SOURCES

• go.gale.com (Martin Dodwell)
• hyperleap.com
• poetryfoundation.org
• supremacyandsurvival.blogspot.com (John Finnis and Shakespeare and Catholicism)
• Wikipedia

- - -

The Phoenix and the Turtle

by William Shakespeare

Let the bird of loudest lay

On the sole Arabian tree

Herald sad and trumpet be,

To whose sound chaste wings obey.

But thou shrieking harbinger,

Foul precurrer of the fiend,

Augur of the fever's end,

To this troop come thou not near.

From this session interdict

Every fowl of tyrant wing,

Save the eagle, feather'd king;

Keep the obsequy so strict.

Let the priest in surplice white,

That defunctive music can,

Be the death-divining swan,

Lest the requiem lack his right.

And thou treble-dated crow,

That thy sable gender mak'st

With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st,

'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.

Here the anthem doth commence:

Love and constancy is dead;

Phoenix and the Turtle fled

In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain

Had the essence but in one;

Two distincts, division none:

Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;

Distance and no space was seen

'Twixt this Turtle and his queen:

But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine

That the Turtle saw his right

Flaming in the Phoenix' sight:

Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appalled

That the self was not the same;

Single nature's double name

Neither two nor one was called.

Reason, in itself confounded,

Saw division grow together,

To themselves yet either neither,

Simple were so well compounded;

That it cried, "How true a twain

Seemeth this concordant one!

Love has reason, reason none,

If what parts can so remain."

Whereupon it made this threne

To the Phoenix and the Dove,

Co-supremes and stars of love,

As chorus to their tragic scene:

threnos

Beauty, truth, and rarity,

Grace in all simplicity,

Here enclos'd, in cinders lie.

Death is now the Phoenix' nest,

And the Turtle's loyal breast

To eternity doth rest,

Leaving no posterity:

'Twas not their infirmity,

It was married chastity.

Truth may seem but cannot be;

Beauty brag but 'tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried be.

To this urn let those repair

That are either true or fair;

For these dead birds sigh a prayer.