THE FOUNTAIN OF BLOOD IN SHAKESPEARE AND SALVE DEUS

by John Hudson
www.darkladyplayers.com
The suggestion of Amelia Bassano Lanier as the principal author of the
Shakespearean works, made in the November 2009 issue of The
Oxfordian, has understandably raised questions about the points of
connection between the plays and her volume of poetry Salve Deus
(1611). The resemblances in literary style are easiest to see for the final
Cookham poem which uses a similar literary form (and some similar
language) to A Midsummer Night’s Dream —for instance about dust,

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cobweb, birds warbling and so on. However that still leaves the peculiar
1840 line crucifixion poem Salve Deus, which gives its name to the
collection. A full explanation needs to address this as well. I will first
consider the overall form and then some aspects of the content.

Salve Deus and its many prefaces has a strange literary structure that
features different kinds of audience address. It uses the conventions of a
multiple frame-narrative and resembles an ongoing commentary to the
audience about a play performance, addressed to various concentric
circles of audience. The performance onstage is a historical religious
play-within-a-play featuring Jesus, Pilate’s Wife, the Virgin Mary, an
angel and so on. These characters occasionally speak directly, but mostly
are dumb, their actions being narrated in the third person. Then there is
the main 2 person contemporary play into which they are set, comprising
the narrator and writer (Amelia herself), and the Countess of Cumberland
who does not speak, but who the narrator sometimes addresses,
suggesting the relevance to her life of what has been happening.

The next concentric circle of the audience includes noble ladies like the
Queen and Mary Sidney, who would perhaps have been seated in a box in
the theater. Beyond them is the audience of virtuous readers in general.
The narrator addresses each of these audiences separately. Finally, to
complicate the matter further, inside the address to Mary Sidney there is
the unusual theatrical device of a masque-within-the-play, in which Mary
Sidney and classical characters are actors. So the peculiar overall
structure of the volume---which has never been adequately explained---
appears to be the result of the author using a theatrical model.

To relate the Shakespearean plays to this satirical crucifixion story in

terms of content, I will take the highlight of the Salve Deus poem and will

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consider some Shakespearean equivalents. Towards the end of the poem
the following appears, as the last two stanzas of one verse and then an
octet:

His hands, his feete, his body, and his face, 

Whence freely flow'd the rivers of his grace. 

Sweet holy rivers, pure celestiall springs, 

Proceeding from the fountaine of our life; 1730
 Swift sugred currents that salvation brings, 
Cleare christall streames, purging all sinne and strife, 
Faire floods, where souls do bathe their snow-white wings, 
Before they flie to true eternall life: 
Sweet Nectar and Ambrosia, food of Saints, 1735 
Which, whoso tasteth, never after faints.

The unusual language refers to the blood of Christ as a ‘river’ or a

‘spring’, proceeding from a ‘fountain’, in which winged souls will ‘bathe’
their wings. In the standard edition, Suzanne Woods comments that this
“extended transformation of Christ’s blood is not characteristic of
Jacobean poetics.” Indeed it is not. It is characteristic of Shakespearean
satirical depictions of allegorical Christ figures.

My first example is Julius Caesar, where at Caesar’s death people drink

the “reviving blood” from his wounds, so that his body is compared to a
fountain “like a fountain with an hundred spouts/ Did run pure blood;
and many lusty Romans/ Came smiling and did bathe their hands in it””
(2,2,77-9). Indeed they are invited to “bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood/
up to the elbows” (3,1,106). The fountain of blood reappears in Salve
Deus, where the winged souls bathe their wings rather than their arms.
The word ‘bathe’ is used in both instances. Turning now to Macbeth, both
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have hands covered in gore, and in one case
“hangman’s hands” (2,2,27) like those used to drawing and quartering
corpses. Once more the same terms found in Salve Deus are used to
describe the source of that blood “the spring, the head, the fountain of
your blood” (2,3,96). Titus Andronicus offers another example, where a

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“crimson river of warm blood/Like to a bubbling fountain” (2.3.23-4)
flows from Lavinia’s lips, and with her amputated hands, her three
wounds resemble “a conduit with three issuing spouts” (2,3,29). All three
of these characters, Caesar,Duncan and Lavinia have been compared to
Christ figures in the Shakespearean literature. The language used of all of
them resembles the depiction of Christ in Salve Deus. Finally the overall
theme of Salve Deus has been compared to the Rape of Lucrece, and as
Bowen notes some of the references, for instance to the red and white,
appear to have been directly derived from the poem. It also refers in
anticipation to blood being used to ‘wash’ (1258), before a reference to a
‘purple fountain’ (1785) and crimson blood bubbling ‘in two slow rivers’
(1789).

It seems most likely that the crucifixion imagery of Salve Deus is related
to the similar grotesque imagery used in the Shakespearean plays. Since
there is no obvious reason why a Jacobean poet would borrow such
peculiar imagery from these Shakespearean plays (which were no longer
being performed and not readily available in print), this provides
additional support for the suggestion that they were all created by the
same hand.
References
Bowen, Barbara. “Beyond Shakespearean Exceptionalism”. Shakespeare Matters:
History Teaching, Performance. Ed. Lloyd Davis. Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 2003. 209-221.

---. “The Rape of Jesus; Aemelia Lanier’s Lucrece”. Marxist Shakespeares. Eds.
Jean E. Howard and Scott C. Shershaw. London: Routledge, 2001. 104-127.

Geddes,Louise. "The wounds become him" : sacrifice, honor and the hazard of
much blood in Shakespeare's Roman plays. PhD. thesis. CUNY.2009.

Kirschbaum, Leo. ‘Shakespeare’s Stage Blood and Its Critical Significance’ PMLA
vol 64. no. 3. (1949) 517-29.

Woods, Susanne. The Poems of Aemelia Lanier: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993.