SOURCE: "Two Dead Birds: A Note on The Phoenix and Turtle," in English Renaissance Studies: Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of Her Seventieth Birthday, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1980, pp. 44-55.

In the following essay, Buxton examines the historical background of The Phoenix and Turtle, and emphasizes that Shakespeare's poem represents an exhibition of pure poetry on the theme of constancy in love.

On 21 September 1586 Thomas, the elder of the two sons of John Salusbury of Lleweni in Denbighshire, who had inherited the estate some eight years before, was executed for complicity in the Babington Plot.¹ The fortunes of the house of Salusbury of Lleweni, which was the dominant family in the west of the county,² therefore devolved upon Thomas's younger brother, John, who was then twenty years of age. Within three months of Thomas's execution, in December 1586, John Salusbury married Ursula Stanley, an illegitimate but...