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HOW few of all who
read Shakspeare's works, or continually repeat his name, and make
world-wide preparations for keeping his birthday, have any conception of
the man! He who, of all poets, comes nearest home to us with his
myriad touches of nature, is the most remote in his own personality. We
only reach him figuratively at best. We think of him as the chief
star of the Elizabethan group, large and luminous above the rest.
Nor have we any glass to draw him sufficiently close to us. We
know that somewhere at the centre sits the spirit of all that
brightness, however veiled in light. Shakspeare's own
life—Shakspeare himself—is at the heart of it all; and yet he is nowhere
visible; though he was a man, and one of the most intensely human that
ever walked our world. It is our present purpose to endeavour to
get at the man himself, and make out his features so far as our means
will allow, by extracting what spirit of Shakspeare we can from his
works, putting particular pressure on the Sonnets, and clothing that
Spirit as best we may in the facts of our poet's outer life.
Shakspeare's starting-place for his victorious career
was the fine vantage-ground which England had won when she had broken
the strength of the Spaniard, and sat enthroned higher than ever in her
sea-sovereignty. Old times and an old faith had been passing away.
In the year of our poet's birth we learn that the sum of two shillings
was paid by the Corporation of Stratford for defacing an image of the
ancient faith in the chapel.[1] The fires of
Smithfield had but recently smouldered down, and fierce in the minds of
Englishmen was the memory of 'Bloody Mary.' The stage of political
life was trodden by heroes and poets, statesmen and sea-kings. Old
customs still lingered in the land. Even the citizens of London
went forth on a May-morning to gather hawthorn-bloom; and country places
like Stratford had their cucking-stool for scolds, and their fines and
stocks for idle apprentices and servants; their brewers compelled by law
to brew a good and wholesome 'small drink' for a halfpenny a gallon;
troops of strolling players, who had taken the place of the wandering
friars of old, and won a warmer welcome up and down the country side.
In the midst of this time of change of stirring life, of hopeful
expectation, our Shakspeare was born, literally in the very heart of
England; of good healthy yeoman blood, belonging to a race that has
always been heartily national, and has clung to its bit of soil from
generation to generation, and fought for it, too, in the day of the
country's need. No doubt Nature stores up much health and
freshness of feeling, love of green things, and songs of birds and quiet
appreciation of all out-of-door sights and sounds in men like these—and
some day it all finds expression, and breaks into immortal flower, when,
in the fulness of time, the Burns or Shakspeare is born.
We know but little of the childhood of our greatest
Englishman, although we find recorded a few homely facts of his father's
life. In the year 1558 John Shakspeare was fined four pence for
not keeping his gutters clean.[2] In the year
1552 he was doing business as a glover, and in 1556 he brought an action
against Henry Field for unjustly detaining eighteen quarters of barley,
which looks as though he were then a maltster or farmer. In 1579
he is styled a yeoman. He was in pretty good circumstances when
the poet was born, having a small landed estate near Stratford and
property in the town. It appears as though he met with a great and
sudden reverse of fortune about the year 1578. In 1587 we find him
in prison for debt and in 1592 his name is in a list of persons who are
supposed to stay away from church through fear of process for debt.
It is pleasant to know that Shakspeare could have his fair share of a
mother's tenderness, and was not compelled too early to fall into the
ranks by his father's side and fight the grim battle against poverty,
with childhood's small hands and weary feet. The boy was about
fourteen years of age when the experience of penury came, which no doubt
made him look wistfully at times up the London-road, and long for the
great City that lay so far in the distance. This change of fortune
must have made a deep impression on the boy's mind and character.
He was in all likelihood educated at the Free-school
so long as the father could spare him from work. But we do not
doubt that he helped his father in his business, and that probably
included looking after sheep on the bit of land they possessed or hired,
killing the sheep and selling the meat, dealing in the wool that grew on
the sheep and in the gloves made from the wool. Labour was not so
minutely divided in those days as it now is, besides which, we know how
men in the circumstances of Shakspeare's father will try to live by a
multiplicity of means in a small way, and grasp at any chance of staying
the down-hill tendency.
At eighteen years of age, Shakspeare was married to
Ann Hathaway, the daughter of a yeoman, at Shottery. It has been
surmised that our gentle Willie's Eve was formed for him by the hand of
Love during a deep sleep of the soul; that he threw the hues of his
young imagination round her, and found himself married before he well
knew where he was! There is not much, however, to give countenance
or colour to this theory. Certainly she was eight years older than
himself, and he has in his works left a warning to others against doing
as he did. But she is said to have been eminently beautiful, and
she was undoubtedly fond of him to the last; for we find that she begs
to be laid in the same grave with him. There is no reason to
suppose that he ran away from her because he did not like her.
Another supposition obtains—that he was compelled to quit Stratford on
account of a propensity for deer-stealing. But the poor fellow did
not need Sir Thomas Lucy's deer to drive him forth into the world in
search of a living. We must remember that his wife had very
recently presented him with twin children; and the increasing poverty
of his father would be another incentive to his leaving Stratford for
London. In all probability he had a good introduction to the
theatre, or his engagement as a sort of apprentice to some player may
have been made before leaving Stratford. After he entered the
Blackfriars Theatre, we lose sight of him altogether for at least four
years. These four years, doubtless, include the hardest part of
our poet's struggle for fame and fortune which was at that time really a
struggle for his living. We hear of him, although Mr. Dyce thinks rather
apocryphally, in 1559, when he has been four years in London.
Mr. Browning tells us there are two points in the
adventure of the Diver-
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'One—when, a Beggar, he prepares to plunge!
One—when, a Prince, he rises with his pearl!' |
Our poet had now made his plunge,
and emerged into daylight once more. If we could have asked him
what he had grasped in the gloom, he might probably have told us a
handful of mud, having experienced the worst of his theatrical life.
He had become a player and a part proprietor of the Blackfriars Theatre.
But he had also found his pearl. They had set him to vamp up old
plays, put flesh on skeletons, and adapt new ones; and he had discovered
that he also could create characters upon the whole better than he could
act them. During this time he had been working, invisible to us,
at the foundations of his future fame.
We should have still fewer facts of Shakspeare's life
than we have, were it not for his evident ambition to make money, and
become a man of property. We do not think he ever forgot those
little mouths at Stratford, waiting to he fed by his hand; and we
believe him to have been as frugal in his life as he was indefatigable
in his work. He had seen enough of the ills and felt enough of the
stings of poverty in his father's home. In the year 1597 he is
able to buy one of the best houses in Stratford, called New Place.
In the next year he sells a load of stone to the Corporation for 10d.
From this little fact we may infer that alterations were going on at New
Place. He had made a nest, and was, perhaps, preparing for the
time when he could quit the stage, and retire to Stratford. He is
also doing business as a maltster. Some of his country friends
want him to buy, and he does buy; others want him to lend, and he is
able to lend. In July, 1605, Shakspeare makes his
largest investment. He purchases for the sum of £440 — £2,000 of
our money — half of the lease of tithes, to be collected in Stratford
and other places, which has some thirty-one years to run. He is
now about to leave the stage as player and manager, and live at
Stratford, where he can look after his tithes, which we find he does
pretty sharply. He has bought houses and lands, and applied for a
grant of arms to his father, and has shown every desire to found (like
Scott) a county family of his own name; to possess a bit of this dear
England in which he could plant the family tree, and go down to
posterity
that way. He appears to have been truly thoughtless and
careless of fame, and to have flung off his works to find their own way
as best they could to immortality. Indeed, it was for his interest
as proprietor of a theatre to attract people to see his plays acted, not
to publish books to amuse them at home. Others might print or
misprint his poems, and he seems to have taken no public notice of it.
We now turn to his life in London and what is said of
him there. His first rising is sun-like, with the mists about
him—the mists of malice and envy. The earlier writers for the
stage are jealous and disgusted that a mere player, a
factotum for the theatre, should enter the arena with 'college
pens' and classical scholars. And but for these mists, the breath
of slander, we should not know when or where the new orb was first
visible on the horizon. Our poet, however, takes no notice of
them, but ascends serenely on his upward way. Most assuredly he
had to fight for his place, and struggle arduously at starting to win
it. This child of Nature would be looked upon as a bastard by the
learned, with no Greek or Roman godfather to stand sponsor for him.
He tried his best at times, as we may see, to appear classical, and
stuck into his work all the mythological allusions and Latin words he
could get together; at which his enemies laughed and made fun—thus
forcing him more and more to that reliance on nature which was to raise
him so high above all his artificial, euphuistic, over-classical
contemporaries. They might laugh, without—Nature was too strong
within him. The audience at the Blackfriars was unsophisticated
enough to prefer Shakspeare's more natural drama to the learning and
classicism of others, which was annoying, indeed, to all second-hand
poets. This strife betwixt the natural and what was thought the
true art runs through all we hear of Shakspeare. There was many a
gird at him and his want of learning and his wit not being college-bred.
Bacon we know thought Latin the only language for immortality. Luckily
Shakspeare did not. This strife would be bitter at first. It
mellowed afterwards into the humour of the 'wit-combats,' but it
reappears all through. We get a hint of it from Shakspeare himself
in Sonnet 78:
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'But thou art all my Art, and dost advance
As high as Learning, my rude ignorance.' |
We doubt not that our poet in his quiet way gave his opponents as good
as they sent. We know how he mimicked and mocked their
affectations.[3]
If we may judge by what Shakspeare's contemporaries
have recorded, we cannot think they knew what majesty of mind was
amongst them. His personal impression was not of the Ben Jonson
kind. Big Ben made his impression by gross physical size, and
stamped it with his full weight. He took care to bequeath his body
as well as his mind to us. We know how much flesh he carried.
We know his love of good eating and strong drink; his self assertiveness
and lust of power. We know that he required a high-tide of drink
before he could launch himself and get well afloat, and that amongst the
Elizabethan song-birds he was named, after his beloved liquor, a
'Canary' bird. One cannot help fancying that Shakspeare, as he sat
quietly listening to Ben's brag, got many a hint for the fattening and
glorifying of his own Falstaff. How different it is with
Shakspeare! We get no hint of him in his cups. The names
they give him, however, are significant. They call him the 'gentle
Willie,' the beloved, the 'honey-tongued.' Fuller's image gives us
an impression that Ben Jonson was no match 'for Shakspeare in mental
quickness when they met in their wit-combats at the 'Mermaid.' Ben
carried most in sight; Shakspeare more out of sight. Ben also
appears to indicate that Shakspeare had at times a Mercutio-like flow of
wit when his high spirits were in flood, which he, for one, felt to be
over-whelming. 'His wit,' says Ben, rather ruefully, 'was in his
own power; would the rule of it had been so too!' for, 'he flowed with
that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped.'
But, for the rest, there is not much to show us what the man Shakspeare
was. They can tell us the shape of Greene's beard, which he
'cherished continually, without cutting; a jolly long red peak, like the
spire of a steeple, whereat a man might hang a jewel, it was so sharp
and pendant;' the nasal sound of Ben Jonson's voice, and his face
'punched full of eyelet holes like the lid of a warming-pan.' But
they tell us nothing in this kind about Shakspeare, man or manner, and
that we think tells us much. He was so commonly human, so much of
a worthy friend and good fellow in general, they almost forgot to notice
anything in particular. We know they thought him a man of sweet temper
and ready wit, honest and frank, of an open and free nature, very gentle
and loveable, and as sociable a good fellow as ever lived. And,
indeed, he must have been the best of all good fellows that ever was so
wise a man.
One great cause of Shakspeare's contemporaries
telling us no more about him is still in operation against our making
him out in his works. He was so unconscious of self as to be
purely reflective of all passing forms. If he had been a lesser
man, he would have shown us more of himself. But Shakspeare's
nature is all mirror to the world around him. A more conscious
mail would have managed to make the darkness which hides him from us a
sort of lamp-shade which should concentrate the light on his own
features, when he looked up in some self-complaisant pause. Not so
Shakspeare: he throw's all the light on his work, and bends over it so
intently that it is most difficult to get a glimpse of his face.
Our sole chance is to watch him at his work, and note his human leanings
and personal relationships.
In 'the first heir of his invention,' 'Venus and
Adonis,' we may learn one or two out of door facts of the poet's life.
Whether he was a deer-stealer or not, it is certain he had been on the
track of a hare. He knew poor puss's form, and had often seen her
powdering the dew-drops into mist as she ran. He is intimately
acquainted with her habits. At the mention of her name his
thoughts are all off a coursing at once, and his feeling is in full cry.
He had the English sense of sport in his blood, such as runs through the
whole race from peer to poacher. He was likewise a genuine lover
of horses, and could show off the 'points' of a thorough-bred in a
description that would tell at Newmarket. In these early poems,
which were most probably written in the country, we find the youth of
Shakspeare all in flower.
The sonnets of Shakspeare afford us, if we can but
understand them aright, the most certain means whereby we can get at the
man. Nothing else except the two prose dedications speaks to us so
assuredly with his own voice, or tells us so unmistakeably what were his
own feelings and thoughts under various interesting circumstances of his
own life. And this voice of the man Skakspeare has all the
changing tones of his temperament, ranging from the grace of buoyant
youth to the sober sadness of that early autumn of his age.
Some of these sonnets are majestic as those of Milton, but clothed in a
richer vesture of imagination.
Our difficulty is to get the right interpretation of
the sonnets, and know when Shakspeare is really speaking in his own
person, and where he gives utterance to the thoughts and feelings of
another. We often hear the voice of Shakspeare; we know the voice,
and yet we do not get at the man. It is as though he were speaking
in the next room; there is a partition-wall between us. We follow
the voice, according to some theory of interpreting the sonnets, but
when we get into the next room Shakspeare is not there. Still, the
voice, like that of the ghost of Hamlet's father, keeps breaking in,
compelling us to follow it. The chief cause of this intangibility,
and the main reason why so many of these sonnets, seemingly personal, do
not strike straight home to us with the full force that is coiled up in
their lines, must be sought for in the conditions under which they were
written. Shakspeare is not always communicating directly with us.
He was not the man to miss his mark, whatever that may have been, only
we are not exactly the objects of his aim. We must stand in the
right position to judge of what is going on; we must get the relations
of the writer and the reader rightly adjusted before we shall hear the
voice of Shakspeare with any certainty, or find out one half the hidden
meanings lurking in these sonnets. What, then, are the conditions
under which the sonnets were written?
A work by Francis Meres, entitled 'Palladis Tamia,
Wit's Treasury; being the Second Part of Wit's Commonwealth, 1598,'
contains the following passage:— 'As the soul of Euphorbus was thought
to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet wittie soul of Ovid was in
mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspeare; witness his
Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets
among his private friends.'
In 1609 a volume containing 154 Sonnets, the
undoubted productions of Shakspeare, was given to the public by a
'stationer,' Thomas Thorpe, who evidently had not obtained them
from the author himself. Prefixed to the work was the following
inscription:—
TO . THE . ONLIE .
BEGETTER . OF .
THESE . INSVING . SONNETS .
MR . W . H . ALL
. HAPPINESSE .
AND . THAT . ETERNITIE .
PROMISED .
BY .
OVR . EVER-LIVING . POET .
WISHETH .
THE . WELL-WISHING .
ADVENTVRER . IN .
SETTING .
FORTH .
T. T. The
earliest editors of Shakpeare's works did not trouble themselves about
the sonnets. Others, not knowing what to make of them, would like
to have had them quietly dropped. Malone considered that 126
of them were addressed to 'W. H.,' and 26 to a lady. Steevens held
a similar opinion, but he maintained they were composed in the 'highest
strain of affectation, pedantry, circumlocution, and nonsense,' and, he
did not reprint them because the 'strongest Act of Parliament that could
be framed would fail to compel readers into their Service.' Gildon
gave it as his opinion that the sonnets were all in praise of
Shakspeare's mistress. Chalmers believed that the 'youth' so
frequently apostrophized was Queen Elizabeth, she being nearly sixty
years old when the earliest of them were written! Farmer, on a
contrary tack, thought the initials 'W. H.' indicated William Harte,
nephew of the poet, who was born after most of the sonnets were
composed. Boswell considered it probable that W. H. was one of the
friends concerned, and that he furnished the printer with a copy, but he
felt satisfied that the poet, in writing, had neither himself nor any
one else in view. Dr. Drake hit upon Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton, as the man, but did not know how to prove it.
Mr. Bright struck upon the track of William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke,
and fancied that he was the ' W. H.' of the inscription. He
thought it over, laboured at the subject far some fourteen years, and
then was anticipated in making known his discovery. Mr. Bright
made it in 1818, and Mr. Boaden announced it in 1832. Poor Mr.
Bright! he wasted a good deal of time, but he escaped the infamy of
persistently blackening the character of Shakspeare for the sake of a
pet theory. With nothing but Thorpe's inscription to rest on, he
contended that ' W. H.' was the Earl of Pembroke, and the object of the
sonnets. Mr. Charles Armitage Brown followed in this direction.
He grouped the sonnets into poems, and accommodated facts as best he
could to his theory. Mr. Hunter also thinks the sonnets relate to
transactions between Shakspeare and William Herbert. Now the
sonnets have fairly given scope to much ingenious speculation. But
this Herbert hypothesis, read in the light of Thorpe's inscription, is
the most perilous and unsatisfactory of all. It offers a slenderer
bridge over the difficulty than that which leads into Mahomet's
Paradise. We have no positive proof that Thorpe himself knew the
full particulars of the sonnets, or the right relations of persons.
He does not tell us how he came by them, but he sent them into the world
with the inscription printed above.
That inscription is the sole ground on which the
sonnets and the loving friendship of Shakspeare have been awarded to
William Herbert. And yet he was not 'Mr. W. H.' when the book was
printed, in 1609. He had been Earl of Pembroke for eight years,
and had previously been Lord Herbert. So that if Thorpe was aware
of the real facts of the case, and became one of the connivers at an
intended mystery, it was just as easy to reverse the initials of Henry
Wriothesley as to print those of William Herbert, and there is no gain
to the Herbert hypothesis. Either Thorpe did not know all, and so
he may have leaped to a wrong conclusion, or he
did know and may have hidden the Earl of Southampton as cleverly
as though it had been the Earl of Pembroke. Shakspeare had then
left London. In the year of publication the Earl of Pembroke was
governor of Portsmouth. Where Southampton was we do not clearly
trace. He may have been in Holland. The thing was darkly
done. Possibly William Herbert may have collected the Sonnets, and
Thorpe may have inferred that he was their 'only begetter.' Be
this as it may, we have Shakspeare's sonnets and Thorpe's inscription,
to read them as we are able, and interpret them as we best can.
But it is capable of positive, absolute, and overwhelming proof that
William Herbert could not in any sense have been the sole begetter of
those sonnets. No word was ever publicly addressed to him by
Shakspeare. We have no knowledge of any intimate acquaintanceship
recorded during Shakspeare's lifetime, and
William Herbert did not come to London till the summer of
1599. According to a letter of Rowland White's [4]
to Sir Robert Sydney, dated April, 1591, 'My Lord Harbert hath, with
much adoe, brought his father to consent that he may live at London, yet
not before the next spring.' But he does not arrive until the
summer of 1599. And all we hear of him at that time is that, when
he was not ill, he devoted himself to the practice of arms.
Whereas Shakspeare's 'sugred sonnets among his private friends' were
known to Meres, and spoken of by him in 1598—spoken of, too, as being of
sufficient extent and importance to warrant public recognition by a
writer remarkable at times for his compressed brevity. This notice
shows us Shakspeare's friends already acquired, his sonnets written and
known to a circle of admirers. That they were well known, which
takes time when poetry is in MS., we should gather from his 'witness,'
and his classing them with the published poems.
One upholder of the Herbert hypothesis maintains that
the Sonnets referred to by Meres must have been lost! Still, it is
the Sonnets of Shakspeare, never before imprinted, that we
hear of again in Thorpe's collection, and the advertisement implies an
understanding on the subject. Readers had heard of them in MS.,
but the only public mention of them that we hear of is this by Meres.
But there is further evidence that these are the Sonnets known to Meres.
Mr. C. Knight has shown that a certain sonnet (the 94th), and
consequently the group to which it belongs—by no means one of the
earliest written—must have been composed before the year 1596, because
this last line of it—
'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,'
is quoted in 'Edward the Third,' a play which has been attributed to
Shakspeare. This play was entered on the register of the
Stationers Company, December lst, 1595, after it had been performed
'sundry times' at different theatres. So that we may fairly assume
it to have been composed in 1594, when
William Herbert was fourteen years of age, and five years before he came
to London! He was then a student at New College, Oxford.
But we have further proof. In the 27th Sonnet there is a beautiful
image which has been transferred to the play of 'Romeo and Juliet,' and
more richly wrought out in the well-known lines—
|
'Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear.' |
In the 127th Sonnet we read this singular defence of a lady's dark
complexion and dark eyes:—
|
'In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or, if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame;
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace:
Therefore my Mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited; and they mourners seem
At such.' |
And this sentiment of the eyes
mourning, and a pale face being your only purity, in a time when so many
ladies paint, is reproduced in 'Love's Labour Lost,' which was produced
not later than in 1592. In Act 4th, Scene 3rd, Biron says:—
|
'O, if in black my lady's brows be decked,
It mourns that painting, and
usurping hair,
Should ravish doters with a false aspect;
And therefore is she born to make
black fair.' |
Another repetition
so curiously complete we shall scarcely find in in all Shakspeare!
How, then, could the Earl of Pembroke be the ' sole begetter' or the
object of Shakspeare's Sonnets?
Seeing how untenable is the Herbert hypothesis, and
knowing how strong are the claims of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of
Southampton, M. Chasles has lately tried a new reading of the Dedication
to the Sonnets. He argues that it is a kind of monumental
inscription done by two different hands, and the first part should run
thus:—'To the only begetter of these insuing Sonnets Mr, W. H. wisheth
all happiness, and that eternity promised by our ever-living Poet
'—meaning that William Herbert dedicates the Sonnets to the Earl of
Southampton. Thorpe then adds, 'The well-wishing Adventurer in
setting forth.—T. T.'
Now really to have to wrench the word 'wisheth ' from
its present place in that way is a far greater violation of probability
than either of three other possible conjectures on the subject, viz.,
that Thorpe may have meant 'sole begetter' in the sense of obtaining the
Sonnets for the press, or that he did not know what W. H. was 'sole
begetter' in the Elizabethan sense, or that he concealed the Earl of
Southampton with the reversed initials of his name. The
inscription is all one. If the printers had made a mistake and run
it on, Thorpe was there to correct it. But his own phraseology
makes that impossible, and carries us over any possible break. Mr.
Bolton Corney thinks it was an oversight on the part of Thorpe to add
his 'well-wisher' so close to the 'wisheth.' This is a most
unfortunate observation in relation to his adopted theory, for it must
be obvious to all who consider how fond were the Elizabethan
Sonnetteers, Shakspeare especially, of the figures
Anadiplosis, or the Redouble, and Epanalepsis, or
the
Echo-sound, that Thorpe has been trying to imitate them in his
'wisheth' the 'well-wisher,' and managed to produce a figure of
repetition or alliteration in the sense, which he fancied smart, and
which certainly serves the purpose of proving the inscription to be all
one.
But it is time we had done with this dedication of
the Sonnets. Readers have already been kept too long on the
outside of the subject. If Shakspeare had written it, that would
have given to it a very different value, and any amount of time and
trouble would have been justly spent in trying to fathom its purport.
But he did not write it, and there is nothing left for us to do except
to study what he did write, and let the facts of the inner life shape
the external theory. It is of the highest importance to solve the
puzzling question, Who was the ' begetter' of the Sonnets? And,
without venturing to speak with certainty upon so difficult a point, we
propose to submit to our readers some of the grounds upon which this
character may very plausibly be ascribed to Southampton. Whatever
may be thought of this interpretation, assuredly no other has yet been
suggested which will bear a moment's examination.
Shakspeare wrote his Sonnets with a direction so
plain and palpable that, as he says, every word almost tells the name of
him for whom they were written:—
|
'Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument.'—Sonnet 76. |
Amongst the few
precious personal relics of our poet are the short prose epistles in
which he inscribes his two poems to the Earl of Southampton. They
are remarkable revelations of his feeling towards the Earl. The
first—the 'Venus and Adonis'—is shaded with a delicate reserve, and
addressed to the
patron; the 'Lucrece,' printed one year afterwards, glows out
full-hearted in a dedication of personal love for the
friend. The difference is so great and the growth of the
friendship so rapid, as to indicate that the 'Venus and Adonis' was sent
to the Earl a long time before it was printed.[5]
Any way we have it recorded, in 1594, by Shakspeare himself, that the
relationship of poet and patron was so close, the friendship had so far
ripened, that Shakspeare could dedicate 'love without end,' and
he uses these never-to-be forgotten words:—
' What I have done is yours. What I have to do is yours;
being part in all I have devoted yours.'
Which we read as implying an understanding between them of work then in
hand. Southampton, he says emphatically, is a part in all that he
has devoted his. What work in hand should this be, devoted to
Southampton, save the Sonnets which he was then composing? It
seems probable that the first group of Sonnets was sent to the Earl
before the 'Venus and Adonis' was dedicated to him, and that the Sonnets
led to the looking up of the poem, which had been written some time
before, and the giving of it to the press now a patron had been secured.
In Sonnet 16 the poet speaks of his 'pupil' pen; and in Sonnet 26
he sends a 'written embassage' to the Earl, and, to our thinking,
distinctly promises something in print. Take this meanwhile, he says,—
|
'Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspèct,
And puts apparel on my tattered loving,
To show we worthy of thy sweet respect;
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee,
Till then, not show my head where thou may'st prove me.' |
That is a positive allusion to the
poet's public appearance
for the first time: the putting on of apparel in print—the
daring to boast in public—the showing of his head where he may be
proved—all illustrate this view. This may be as much a private
dedication of the 'Venus and Adonis' as the 'epistle' afterwards was a
public one. It is curious to notice that the shade of personal feeling
in the earliest Sonnets is exactly like to that of the
first dedication: it is reticent and noticeably modest.
There is no large profession of love—no great gratitude. The
writer stands at gaze on the picture he paints. He chiefly praises
his patron's youth and beauty, and urges him to marry. His
freshness of colouring has all the tenderness of spring-tints. And
there is as rathe a tenderness in the writer's feeling as in the
picture's youthfulness. Moreover, we have the young man's age
preciscely reckoned up in Sonnet 16—
'Now stand you on the top of happy hours:'
—which shows us that the youth has sprung lightly up the ladder of his
life, and now stands on the last golden round of boyhood. He is,
we should say, eighteen or nineteen. The Earl of Southampton was
born October 6, 1573, which would give the year 1591-92 for this Sonnet
to have been written in, and Shakspeare's first public proclamation of
Southampton's patronage—in which he vows 'to take advantage of all idle
hours' till he has 'honoured him with some graver labour'—was in the
next year. There is an expression in the Dedication remarkably
like to that of the opening Sonnet. In the one, Shakspeare hopes
the young Earl may answer to the world's 'hopeful expectation;'
in the other be calls him the 'world's fresh ornanment,' and
'only herald to the gaudy spring.' Both are stamped with the same
date; both point out the Earl as the 'expectancy and rose of the fair
state.'
In this, the earliest group of Sonnets, the poet uses
many arguments which all circle round the one idea that this comely
noble of Nature should not be so niggardly and unthrifty as not to leave
the world some copies of his beauty when he dies. But underneath
the surface of these Sonnets, with their quaint play of conceit and
sparkle of wit, there seems to us a quiet depth of wisdom. Either
Shakspeare was engaged to write them by those who sought to see the
young Earl married, or else he felt a most fond and fatherly anxiety
that the youth should not linger in the garden of Armida; for the
distant admiration, the innocent flattery, the far-fetched comparisons,
all play into the hands of a grave purpose. The writer knows there
is nothing like true marriage, a worthy wife, the tie of children, and a
happy home, to bring the young wild life into keeping of the highest
law.
There are two points we would here notice more
particularly. One is the distance at which Shakspeare pays his
respects. There is no talk of favours, and but little of
friendship; he speaks of 'merit' on the one side, and 'duty' on the
other. This shows that these Sonnets were written very early
in the intercourse. It also proves that the person who printed the
Sonnets, however ignorant of details, had sufficient guidance to put the
first group in its right place. Next—and here we feel an endearing
touch of Shakspeare's nature—the youth is so evidently
fatherless, that it seems strange the fact should have been
hitherto overlooked. In Sonnet 10 he is charged with not inclining
his ear to the advice given to him that he should marry. Thus—
|
'Seeking that
beauteous roof to ruinate,
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.' |
We find the same use made of the verb
'to ruinate' in Henry VI., Part iii., Act 5—
'I will not ruinate my father's house.'
Of course the roof would not need repairing if it were not going to
decay. Accordingly we find that Southampton's father—head of the
house—died in 1581, ere the young Earl was quite eight years old, and
within four years of that time his elder brother died.[6]
Again in Sonnet 13 the poet urges—
|
'Who
lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold,' |
And—although aware that the lines may
not be confined to the literal reading—we cannot avoid thinking that the
underlying fact was in the poet's mind when, in the same Sonnet, he
wrote—
|
'Dear my love, you know
You had a father; let your son say so.' |
Also, in Sonnet 3, he tells the
Earl—
'Thou art thy Mother's glass.'
There is no mention of his
having a father living. This, we believe, made the poet
express himself in a more paternal manner.
The group we shall next consider is the one relating
to a rival poet, for that would seem to have been one of the earliest
written.
Mr. Brown, in his 'Autobiographical Poems of
Shakspeare,' remarks, 'who this rival poet was is beyond my conjecture;
nor does it matter.' But it does matter much; for if this poet
should prove to be Marlowe, that one fact alone would be of sufficient
force to deal the death-blow to the Herbert hypothesis which Mr. Brown
laboured at so ingeniously, and, as we think, so vainly. Because
Marlowe died in June, 1593, when William Herbert was thirteen years and
four months of age; and, in our opinion, nothing but the blindest belief
in the Herbert hypothesis, which, of necessity, shifts the date at which
the greater portion of the Sonnets were written, could possibly have
obscured the fact, so patent to us, that Marlowe
was the other poet. There is circumstantial evidence of
this in every line and touch of Shakspeare's description. Marlowe
was a dramatic celebrity before Shakspeare, and we have no doubt there
was a time when Shakspeare looked up to him and was somewhat led captive
by his lofty, flamboyant style. He would fully
appreciate the sensuous bodily beauty, so to speak, of many of Marlowe's
lines. He would give him full credit for having struck out a new
spring of the English Helicon, with the impatient pawing hoof of his
fiery Pegasus, in his use of blank verse. He prized his genius, if
he could not respect the man. We find that he quotes a line from
Marlowe's poem, 'Hero and Leander,' in the play he was probably writing
that same year when the poem was first printed. But his finer ear
and truer taste would soon detect a good deal of bombast in the 'mighty
line,' and he would see that the great glow of Marlowe's imagination had
in it a swarthy smoke, and poetry never attained the true
regulus of colour, or came from the furnace pure gold. All this
and more we discover in Shakspeare's description of the rival poet:—
|
'Was it
the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No: neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished,—
He, nor that affable familiar ghost [7]
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence.
But when your countenance filed up his line,
Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.' |
No other English
poet could have sat for that portrait so well as Marlowe:—
'He of tall building and of goodly pride.'—Sonnet 80.
The proud full sail of his great verse gives the very picture, the
viva effigies of Marlowe's poetry—the characteristic that is
foremost in the minds of all who are acquainted with his King Cambyses'
vein. Who does not recognise 'Faustus,' his necromancy, and his
boasts of what he will have the spirits do for him? Who does not
see that Shakspeare, thinking dramatically, has identified Marlowe with
'Faustus' and thrown him on the stage, where, in vision—if it be not an
actual fact that the play was running at the Curtain Theatre while
Shakspeare was composing that Sonnet—he sees his familiar Mephistophiles
'gulling him nightly' with such intelligence as that 'in Hell are
all manner of delights;' and the drama of Dr. Faustus is played once
again in Shakspeare's Sonnet. In other hints and signs we
recognise Marlowe, and no other, as the man whom Shakspeare meant where
he speaks of the 'strained touches of his rhetoric,' and his 'gross
painting' when the rival has, no doubt, laid the flattery on very
coarsely. In all probability the Earl had looked over Marlow's
'Faustus' in MS., making some suggestions, of which the poet would be
proud and make ample boast. This it was, Shakspeare confesses,
that probed his infirmity—made him feel jealous, and keep silence. That
there is a touch of jealousy and a good deal of rivalry in these Sonnets
relating to the 'other poet,' is apparent and generally admitted.
And in this aspect there is no poet who could make such an appeal so
justly to Shakspeare's feelings as Marlowe. Marlowe was the
rival poet at the opposition theatre in Shoreditch. He was then in
the full flush and high tide of his brief and brilliant success.
'Tamderlaine the Great,' 'Faustus,' the 'Jew of Malta,' 'Edward II.,'
had come crowding on the stage one after the other, with Alleyne playing
his best in the principal characters. Heywood, writing forty years
afterwards, celebrates Marlowe as the best of poets, and Alleyne as the
best of players. But there was a nobler element in Shakspeare's
jealousy of Marlowe. It stands revealed in these Sonnets that he
felt more than Southampton's 'filing up his line' or his being drawn to
the other theatre, Shakspeare shuddered at what he saw and heard of
Marlowe behind the scenes. He felt a most fatherly fear for his
youthful friend, and he cries,—
|
'Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety?' |
Whose character does that hit as
it does Marlowe's, according to the tenor of all contemporary testimony?
Other poets and writers besides Marlowe and
Shakspeare were patronised by the Earl of Southampton. Nash
dedicated his 'Life of Jack Wilton' to the Earl (1594), and he says, 'A
dear lover and cherisher you are as well of lovers of poetrie as of
poets themselves.' Florio, in dedicating his 'World of Words'
(1598) to the same nobleman, says, 'In truth I acknowledge an entire
debt, not only of my best knowledge, but of all; yea, of more than I
know or can, to your bounteous Lordship, in whose pay and patronage I
have lived some years, to whom I owe and vowe the years I have to live.
But, as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your
honour hath infused light and life.' Chapman, in a dedicatory
Sonnet, calls the Earl 'the choice of all our country's noble spirits.'
Braithwayt inscribes his 'Scholar's Medley' (1614), to him, as
'Learning's best favourite.' And Minsheu also attests the Earl's
munificence to literary men. But of all who dedicated to him, or
were familiar with him, Marlowe is the man described by Shakspeare.
And as he died in June, 1593, at least two groups of the Sonnets must
have been written before that date, neither of which could possibly have
been 'begotten' by the Earl of Pembroke.
It has been asked by supporters of the Herbert
hypothesis how it is, if Southampton was the begetter of the Sonnets,
that Shakspeare has not celebrated the Earl's exploits—not offered him
any comforting words in his misfortunes, or congratulations on his
release from prison. The answer is, Shakspeare has done all this,
in his own way, in these very Sonnets. The heroic part of the
Earl's nature was, no doubt, carefully treasured up in Shakspeare's
dramatic works. But his character and career, and his love for the
'faire Mistress Vernon,' through all its touching history, are bound up
with the Sonnets. Speaking of these he says,—
|
'Oh let my Books be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast.' |
And so they are. How could any
one suppose that our great-hearted poet would ever forget all about such
a friend who had held out the hand of help to him[8]
when he was struggling in deep waters, and found for him a firmer bit of
foot-hold than he had ever before attained; or imagine that he could
lose sight of his promise made in public when he proclaimed his love to
be 'without end'? We might depend upon it, even if we failed to
prove it, that Shakspeare's soul was not of that shallow, sonnetteering
kind, and that his promises were all fulfilled.
Up to the present time it has been generally, though
not universally, maintained that the first 120 Sonnets were all
addressed to a male friend of Shakspeare, and that our poet outdid all
his contemporaries in flattering his patron after the sonnetteering
fashion [9]—whilst men like Hallam could scarcely
swallow the difficulty of believing that Shakspeare 'should so prostrate
himself at the feet of an Earl to fear his frown and call himself the
'slave'—the 'sad slave'—of a boy, and have wished they had never been
written.[10] But, upon a very close examination
of the Sonnets,
we find the assumption to be perfectly unwarranted. In the
first twenty Sonnets, for example, where Shakspeare speaks to his friend
directly, we are not left in any doubt as to the sex: there are
sixteen distinct allusions to his being a man. Elsewhere, when the
poet speaks in person, we frequently find the 'him' and 'his,' which
(when not used in a proverbial saying) tell the sex. But passing
on from those Sonnets to which the 26th is natural L'Envoy, we come upon
a series, numbering at least sixteen, and
through the whole of them there is no allusion to a man.
The feeling expressed is more passionate, and the phrase has become more
movingly tender; far closer relationship is sung, and yet the object to
whom these Sonnets are written never appears in person.
There is neither 'man' nor 'boy,' 'him' nor 'his.' How is this?
Surely it is not the wont of a stronger feeling and greater warmth of
affection to fuse down all individuality and lose sight of sex.
That is not the way of Nature's or of Shakspeare's working. With
further looking-on we must believe that these said Sonnets, which we
take for our third group, were not addressed to a man, but to a woman.
All the negative evidence shows it was not a man, and all the positive
evidence indicates a woman. Not that Shakspeare is here wooing a
woman in person. We do not suppose that he would write so many
Sonnets to a woman, and leave out the sex. May we not read them as
written on the subject of Southampton's courtship? When we
remember Shakspeare's own words,—'being a part of till I have devoted
yours,' and 'you and love are still my argument'—there is nothing very
startling in the supposition that Shakspeare should have devoted Sonnets
to his friend's love for Elizabeth Vernon. We find the young
nobleman had done his best to follow the poet's early advice.
In a letter of Rowland Whyte's,[11] dated September
23, 1595, we learn that—
'My Lord Southampton doth with too much familiarity court the faire
Mistress Vernan, while his friends, observing the Queen's humours
towards my Lord of Essex, do what they can to bring her to favour him;
but it is yet in vain.'
It may be maintained that the story of Southampton's courtship is partly
told in these sixteen Sonnets. It is not Shakspeare who speaks,
but Southampton to his lady. This will account for the passion and
tenderness, and, at the same time, for the absence of all mention of the
sex of the person addressed, which would naturally result
from the poet's delicacy of feeling.[12]
Again and again we may see how he was fettered in expression on this
account. For illustrative evidence let the reader begin with the
50th Sonnet. There we find the lover on a journey, the end of
which lies far from his beloved, and he is so heavy-hearted that the
horse he rides is 'tired with his woe,' and plods dully on. In the
next Sonnet he says if he were only coming back to her he should 'spur,'
even though mounted on the wind. Note also the use he makes of the
word 'desire' and the horse neighing.[13] Then
comes the thought (Sonnet 48), how careful he was, before leaving home,
to lock up each little trifle for safety; but she who is his dearest
jewel, his 'best of dearest' and his 'only care,' is left out:—
'Thee have I not locked up in any chest.'
Sonnet 44 implies that the lover is across sea, as we know the Earl of
Southampton was several times; [14] but have no
reason to think that Shakspeare ever was—still, his thoughts will fly to
her in 'tender embassy of love,' and come back to him assured of her 'fair
health' (Sonnet 45), and, in absence, he has her portrait—
|
'With my
love's picture then my eye doth feast,
And to the painted banquet bids my heart.' |
And he rejoices richly in possession.
Various expressions point to a woman as the object of address. In
Sonnet 57 he is her 'slave,' and she his 'sovereign;' her 'servant,'
which implies the mistress; only the poet was fettered in
expression. And in the next Sonnet he says:—
'That god forbid that made me first your slave.'
What god? if not Cupid, god of love, as the whole Sonnet illustrates,
which would be meaningless if addressed from man to man. More
feminine still, if possible, is the illustration in Sonnet 61. He
cannot sleep at night for seeing her image, and he asks—
|
'Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry;
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?' |
In all these
Sonnets it is the speaker who is so far away.
On the return from abroad, we find the poet saying in
a kind of general address to Love—
|
'Sweet lore, renew thy force.
Let this sad interim like the ocean be
Which parts the shore where two contracted-new
Come daily to the banks.' |
That image, we surmise, symbols the
fact that Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon had been
newly affianced before the Earl went on his late journey.
To take one of Southampton's journeys, we learn that
he left London February 8th, 1598. The 'fair Mistress Vernon'
'passed her time in weeping.' It was proposed by his friends that
he should marry her before he left, so bitterly did she take to heart
the thought of his going. Circumstances prevented this, and his
Lordship departed—after feasting Mr. Secretary, and having plays and
banquets—leaving 'behind him a very desolate gentlewoman, that almost
wept out her fairest eyes.' He came back in the November of the same
year. And it is curious to connect herewith the three sonnets, 97,
98, 99, commencing—
'How like a winter hath my absence been!'
and yet he tells us it was spring, summer, and autumn all the while; and
he gives us this rich bit of love-poetry, which would seem strangely out
of place if sent to a man:—
|
'Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion of the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
The forward violet thus did I chide;
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells,
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair.[15]
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.' |
Would Shakspeare have written thus to
a man? Luckily, we can make him answer for himself. It
often happens that we are enabled to prove a sonnet not personal by the
aid of those which are personal. And in Sonnet 21 he says—
|
'So is it
NOT with me as with that
Muse
Stirred by a painted beauty to his verse,
Who heaven itself for ornament doth use
And every fair with his fair doth rehearse,
Making a complement of proud compare
With sun and moon, with earth and sea's rich gems,
With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare.' |
After which he would not be likely to compare his friend to that same
'painted beauty' by doing the very thing he had denounced.
Such lines, we submit, were never written to any man
as from Shakspeare himself, but they might well arise from the poet
taking Southampton's courtship for his theme. Coleridge was not
without grounds for thinking Shakspeare's Sonnets were addressed to a
woman.[16] Poet-like, he felt that there were
such gusts of passionate fragrance in the feeling, and such
'subtle-shining secresies' in the expression of some of them, as a woman
only could have called forth. The flowery tenderness, the playing
with all beauties of external nature as the beloved's shadow, and
looking on the flowers as 'figures of delight' drawn after her pattern;
the affectionate endearment of epithet, the fondling of the miniature,
the almost epicurean sense of possessing the treasure which he will not
look at often for fear of 'blunting the fine point of pleasure' (Sonnet
52), the love-sickness in absence, and the rapture of return, are all
essentially amatory; all tell of a pure passion for a pure, beautiful
woman. Shakspeare's dramatic instinct was too keen for him to have
violated the natural fitness of imagery, as he is made to do, by our
reading all these Sonnets as addressed to a man. For example, a
woman might be likened to Adonis, because of his youthful, beardless
beauty and his modesty (Sonnet 53); but it would hardly do to liken a
man who was a soldier and a famous fighter to Helen,
'Painted newly in Grecian tires!'
Or take the imagery in Sonnet 114, where the speaker says his love hath
the alchemic power—
|
'To make of monsters and things indigest
Such Cherubins as your sweet self resemble.' |
Then there is Sonnet 93, which Oldys
fancied Shakspeare had addressed to his wife on her infidelity. It
is quick with the fears of a lover trembling into suspicions lest his
mistress should not prove true—
|
'How like Eve's Apple doth thy beauty grow,
If thy sweet virtue answer not thy show!' |
In the previous Sonnet he says:—
'Thou mayst be
false and yet I know it not.'
In Sonnet 88 he alludes to a possible contingency, and there says:—
|
'Against myself I'll fight,
And prove thee virtuous tho' thou art forsworn.' |
In Sonnet 125 the love is a 'mutual
render, only me for thee.’ Sonnet 87 looks like a lover's quarrel and a
possible parting, The lover says:—
'Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing.'
And this is followed by three other pathetic Sonnets on the same
subject:—
|
'Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I'll myself disgrace, knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;
Be absent from thy walks:' |
which hardly applies to Shakspeare at
the theatre, but is applicable to Southampton about the Court! He
continues:—
|
'Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;
Now while the world is bent my deeds to cross,
Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow.' |
What this can have to do with
Shakspeare personally has never been shown. He was not a man of
deeds. What it may have to do with the Earl we shall see, if
we call to mind how he returned to England [17] in
October, 1597, and the Queen frowned on him—she being 'on tiff' with
Essex—because, while in command of the 'Garland,' he had dared to pursue
and sink a vessel of the enemy without Monson's orders. And here
he challenges his love to do what the Queen or Fortune, with her
injustice cannot do—make his proud spirit bow. This Sonnet is
quick with the feeling of a wronged heroic soul, written in the very
life-blood that ran from wounds unfairly given, and a most perfect
representation in motive, time, circumstance, when applied to the Earl.
In this connection let us look at Sonnet 36, and we shall perceive a
meaning never before discovered:—
|
'Let me confess that we two must be twain,
Altho' our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Tho' in our lives a separable spite;
Which tho' if after not lore's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from lore's delight.
I may not evermore acknowledge thee,
Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame;
Nor thou with public kindness honour me,
Unless thou take that honour from thy name:
But do not so; I love thee in such sort,
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report.' |
Apply that to Shakspeare, and you can
make nothing of it. It will not even fit in with the supposed
affair of the two friends and one mistress, as the poet is not made to
call himself the guilty one in that! Apply it to Southampton, and
you have the two lovers and the parting enforced by the Queen. He
has been forbidden to see his mistress, or she him; and were he to do
so, or were she to notice him for others to see, it would injure her
good report. They must to all appearance be 'twain,' although one
in love, so that she may not be a sharer in his 'blots.' There is
but one respect in their love, but a separable spite in their
lives. The 'separable spite' of Southampton's and Mistress
Vernon's lives was the spite of Elizabeth.[18]
Rowland Whyte, in a letter dated February 1st, 1597, makes a remark
which is very apposite to our purpose and illustrative of the personal
history of these lovers. He says, ['My Lord of Southampton is
much troubled at her Majesty's strangest usage of hym.[19]
Some body hath plaied unfriendly parts with hym. Mr. Secretary hath
procured him license to travell. His fair Mistress doth wash her
fairest face with too many tears. I pray God his going away bring
her to no such infirmity which is, as yt were, hereditary to her name.'
Here, apparently, we find that Elizabeth Vernon is driven to the verge
of madness. What the Queen's treatment was of her maids that
wished to marry we may gather from the letter of Mr. Fenton to John
Harington,[20] in which, speaking of the Lady M.
Howard, he tells us the Queen will not let her be married, 'saying, I
have made her my servant, and she will make herself my mistress,' which
she shall not. Moreover, she 'must not entertain ' her lover 'in
any conversation, but shun his company, and be careful how she attires
her person not to attract my lord the Earl.' This writer says her
Majesty frequently 'chides in small matters, in such wise as to make
these fair maids often cry and bewail in piteous sort.'
We have only internal evidence whereby we can judge
whether the Sonnets are or are not personal; and where the internal
evidence fits some outer fact which we can identify, we have a right to
adopt the reading that is compatible with both. In this respect
our reading will make the Sonnets alive with realities where no meanings
have hitherto been found. We will now ask the reader to turn
back with us to Sonnet 30, the subject of which is the loss of
friends—'precious friends'—very nearly related, who died long ago:—
|
'When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new-wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in Death's dateless night,
And weep afresh Love's long-since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanisht sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily, from woe to woe, tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.' |
We cannot attach this to Shakspeare
himself by any known facts of his life; yet it is something very
special. The lost friends were most dear—'precious
friends'—friends, we should say, in the closest relationship. The
next Sonnet says:—
|
'How many a
holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye,
As interest of the dead!' |
The loss is the sorrow of a
life-time; the relationship one of the nearest to nature; and the deaths
occurred years ago. If we suppose Shakspeare to be speaking, we
simply do not know what he is talking about, as so often occurs through
the personal theory. The first loss that Shakspeare had up to the
time of writing, and the only one, so far as we know, was the loss of
his boy. Indeed, this could not have occurred; for if the Sonnets
were personal, they would be amongst the earliest written, because they
indicate that it is a
newly-found friend, who is to fill the empty place of those old
ones who are gone:—
|
'Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,
And there reigns Love and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.' |
Shakspeare's son died in August 1596,
but clearly that loss will not bear the description in any way. If
we turn to Southampton's life, we shall find the very loss of these
'precious friends,' and the precise lapse of time also. His father
had died (as we have already stated) when Henry Wriothesley wanted two
days of being eight years old; and about four years afterwards his elder
brother died. That phrase 'lacking' has in it a touch of parental
relationship. And as we read the Sonnet, this new love of the Earl
for Elizabeth Vernon has come to him to replace the old, and restore to
him all he had lost; that which death hid away he has found in her.
She comes to him
|
'Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give,
That due of many now is thine alone.' |
The subject being death, will account
for the graver tones that make the poetry so solemn and splendid.
When we read these as a portion of Shakspeare's 'sugred
Sonnets among his private friends' it adds a novel significance to
the words of Meres. These are
love-Sonnets, which was what Meres meant by his epithet; but
love-Sonnets in so peculiar a fashion that if their true nature was such
as we have been supposing, and he had any inkling of it, he would be
compelled to generalise. He does not say sonnets to his
friend or friends, but among his private friends. This was
in 1598, the year in which the Earl of Southampton and Elizabeth Vernon
were married;[21] therefore these sonnets, which are
ante-nuptial, if written on the subject of the Earl's love, must have
been amongst those mentioned by Meres, for they have the essence of his
meaning. And who were Shakspeare's 'private friends'? We
have his own positive evidence that Southampton was one, and a very dear
one. No amount of negative evidence will alter that or dethrone
the Earl to whom he dedicated. The sole evidence on behalf of the
Earl of Pembroke is that of the players, or rather of the writer of the
dedication to the first folio edition of Shakspeare's plays, whose
gratitude was probably quite as much a lively sense of future favours to
himself as it was a sense of any past favours to Shakspeare.
Southampton, we know, was a private friend of our great poet. And
it is only the most natural thing in the world that Elizabeth Vernon
should be his friend also.
We mentioned an image in Sonnet 27 which reappears in
'Romeo and Juliet,' where the reader will find that it occurs in Romeo's
very first exclamation at seeing Juliet for the first time. This
27th Sonnet, according to our reading, is one of the earliest devoted to
Southampton's love for Elizabeth Vernon—the first as they are arranged.
And we think the figure placed too pointedly where it reappears not to
have some significance. It suggests the possibility that this lady
of the Sonnets may be glanced at in Juliet! Looked at in this
light, the question of Juliet—
'Art thou not Romeo and a Moutague?'
comes upon us with renewed force; for the fact is, that Southampton was
a Montague by the mother's side, she being Mary, daughter of Anthony
Browne, first Viscount Montague, and his name, Wriothesley, beginning
with a letter different from the first letter sounded, may be alluded to
in what has always seemed a little bit of the Nurse's nonsense in the
fourth scene of the Second Act of this drama:—
'Nurse.—Doth not rosemary and Romeo
both begin with a letter?
Romeo.—Ay, Nurse; what of that? both with an R.
Nurse.— Ah, mocker! that's the dog's name: R is for the dog. No;
I know it begins with some other letter; and she hath
the prettiest sententious of it, of you and Rosemary, that it
would do you good to hear it.
Romeo.—Commend me to thy lady.'
Here perhaps is an
aside on the part of the poet to his friends. It seems also
exceedingly probable to us that we get another
aside that glances at our reading of the Sonnets in the previous
scene of this same Act. Mercutio says of Romeo in love, 'Now is he
for the numbers Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his lady was but a
kitchen-wench; marry,
she had a better love to be-rhyme. her.' Supposing the
theory now under consideration to be the right one, the perfection of
the banter here—as between Shakspeare and Southampton—would lie in an
allusion unperceived by the audience, but well known to poet and patron.
That such asides were frequent at that time we have no doubt
whatever. |
