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HE who succeeds in persuading himself that he has
found out the secret of Shakespeare's Sonnets—always supposing the
existence of a secret—may fold his arms, and consider his mundane work
done. For him there are no more worlds to conquer. Such is
Mr. Gerald Massey's happy situation. He is perfectly satisfied
that he has found out the secret. He goes farther: he is perfectly
satisfied that nobody else ever had an inkling of the mystery; that, in
short, the Sonnets were "never interpreted before." Nothing short
of so thorough a conviction could have enabled him to build up a
monument of six hundred weighty pages to a problem, upon which the
ingenuity of a legion of speculators has been already expended in vain.
All readers who have dipped into the lumber of
annotation under which Shakespeare has been buried, are aware that this
question of the Sonnets is old ground; and it would be sheer waste of
time to recapitulate the theories which have been advanced by Schlegel,
Coleridge, Hallam, Farmer, Drake, Brown, Gervinus, and a dozen others,
down to the latest strains of the rack by Philarète Chasles, who traced
both the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke in the Inscription, and Herr
Bernstorff, who discovered in Mr. W. H. no less a personage than Mr.
William Himself. We have here to do only with Mr. Massey's theory,
which claims the right of standing alone. In his introduction Mr.
Massey puts all previous interpretations bodily out of court, and
proceeds forthwith to develop his own.
Divesting his scheme of clouds of extraneous details,
and fantastical speculations, its main features maybe briefly stated.
Mr. Massey arbitrarily divides the Sonnets into two series, one of which
he supposes to have been written for the Earl of Southampton, and the
other for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. Having grouped the
Sonnets to suit this division of subjects, he next subdivides each
series into two classes, one of which he calls Personal, to signify
Sonnets written by Shakespeare in his own person, and the other
Dramatic, a term not very felicitously chosen to distinguish the Sonnets
which he supposes Shakespeare to have written in the persons of other
people. It will be seen that, in order to support these
conclusions, Mr. Massey revolutionises the order of the poems, and
presents them in a new distribution; while he still further begs the
question of interpretation by affixing titles to them, such as
"Southampton in Love," "Elizabeth Vernon's Soliloquy,'' with a view to
forestall the judgment of the reader. The critic would be
justified in stopping the inquiry at this point, on the ground that
there is no case to go to the jury. The Sonnets as exhibited to us
by Mr. Massey are clearly not the Sonnets as they were printed in
Shakespeare's lifetime, with, we are quite warranted in assuming, the
knowledge and sanction of the poet. It is a manifest perversion of
the evidence to break up the order of the poems into fresh combinations,
and then to argue upon the imaginary results thus obtained. By a
similar process, any theory, however absurd, might be made to acquire a
certain illusory colouring of probability; and Mr. Massey's results are
not so feasible as to compensate for the violent means by which he
arrives at them. If we are to have interpretations of the Sonnets,
let them at least be founded upon the Sonnets as they have come down to
us. But granting Mr. Massey free range and licence to shuffle the
Sonnets as he pleases, let us see what is the story he extracts from
them.
The first group relates to Southampton. Shakespeare
is here supposed to have become acquainted with the young earl
immediately after he came to London. Southampton was then eighteen
years of age, and Shakespeare twenty-seven. The
Sonnets addressed in the first instance to the earl begin by advising
him to marry. The great object Shakespeare, it seems, had in view
was to get his young friend married, and Mr. Massey is of opinion that
the Sonnets were commenced solely for that purpose. The earl is
speedily in a way to gratify the poet's wishes: he falls in love with
Lady Elizabeth Vernon. The Sonnets now run in different channels.
The poet is taken into the confidence of the lovers, and writes
"dramatic" sonnets for them, to represent the shifting phases of their
courtship. Sometimes it is the earl pouring out his passion to the
lady; sometimes it is the lady, who has become jealous of her cousin,
Lady Rich; occasionally it is Shakespeare himself on various topics,
including ruminations upon his own death; and finally, after many
sentimental evolutions, comes the marriage, crowned by a sonnet, written
for the occasion. All these circumstances are supposed to be
traced consecutively in the group as selected and disposed by Mr.
Massey. Admitting the arrangement to be justifiable, and that the
sequence here adopted represents the exact order of time in which the
Sonnets were written, the evidence of the intention of the poet is
purely internal. There is not a particle of external evidence
extant to show that Shakespeare was ever acquainted with Lady Elizabeth
Vernon; that she ever confided to him her love affairs, her jealousies,
or her flirtations; that she ever engaged him to put her emotions into
verse; or that Lord Southampton ever made use of him for like purposes.
It is essential, therefore, to the reception of Mr. Massey's
interpretation that it should be fairly borne out by the text, there
being no other evidence in support of it; and that the meaning which he
believes he has found in the poems should be tolerably clear to the
reader when it is pointed out to him. But even with the aid of Mr.
Massey's luminous glosses, readers of ordinary discernment will utterly
fail to detect a trace of the circumstantial history Mr. Massey sees so
plainly mapped out in his groups. It is not possible, within any
reasonable compass, to produce adequate proofs of this. It would
require as big a book as that before us to follow Mr. Massey through his
details, and unravel his fine threads of speculation. But a single
example will show upon what slender grounds he sometimes assumes his
facts. The marriage of Southampton, which crowned the object for
which the Sonnets are alleged to have been written, and which brought
the Southampton group to a close, is the most marked and distinctive
incident in the whole. Mr. Massey tells us that Shakespeare wrote
a particular sonnet "in celebration of the happy event." Here, at
least, where the poet is commemorating the accomplishment of his
friend's felicity and the termination of his own vicarious Poetical
labours, we have a right to expect that the evidence should be
reasonably plain and explicit. This supposed nuptial Sonnet is
that numbered 116 in the original series, which begins—
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"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments." |
Mr. Massey could hardly have been
more unfortunate had he picked out as an epithalamium one of the Sonnets
on Death. The witness he has called into court answers in an
opposite direction. There is absolutely nothing relating to
marriage, or remotely suggestive of marriage, in the sonnet from
beginning to end, except the word "marriage" in the first line, and
there it is used in a figurative sense. Had Shakespeare intended
to celebrate a marriage in these verses, especially a marriage which he
is supposed to have been singing in advance for six or seven years, he
surely would not have taken such pains to conceal his purpose.
Similar instances abound. The want of agreement
between the text and the explanation is felt in almost every page where
the text is quoted. We are everywhere conscious of being subjected
to a critical pressure against which our judgment rebels. The
screw that is put upon the poems to make them fit the theory constantly
jars upon us. Other modes of getting up evidence, so to speak, are
equally open to objection. Thus, for the purpose of proving that a
close friendship existed between Southampton and Shakespeare, Mr. Massey
quotes the famous Southampton letter, the authenticity of which lies
under an ugly suspicion that need not be further characterised here.
In such a case he was bound to furnish some reasons for assuming the
document to be genuine; but he furnishes none. He tells us,
indeed, that he "feels it to be genuine," and that it "has a touch of
nature, a familiarity in the tone, beyond the dream or the daring of a
forger." But I submit that the authenticity of a document,
especially when it comes to be used in evidence, is not a matter of
feeling, but of proof; that it is not safe to set limits to the
imagination or the audacity of a forger; and that it is not consistent
with experience to suppose that forgers cannot be as natural and
familiar as other people. Again, as to Southampton's gift of
£1,000 to Shakespeare. Mr. Massey thinks that help, including
money, may have been given "when the poet most needed help, to hearten
him in his life-struggle." This is a view of the earl's patronage
which is no doubt very honourable to the patron; but if we admit the
tradition at all, we are bound to take it as we find it. We must
not modify or square it to our own notions. The story comes down
to us from Rowe, who had no great faith in it himself, and who had it
from somebody who was supposed to have had it indirectly from Sir
William Davenant. It runs to the effect that Southampton gave
Shakespeare £1,000, not "to hearten him in his life-struggle," but "to
enable him to go through with a purchase he had a mind to;" so that, if
it ever took place, it was not in the days of want, but in the golden
time of profitable investments, in which, for all we know to the
contrary, Southampton himself might have had a beneficial interest.
Smaller artifices pervade the manipulation of the
poems. Resemblances are found in passages between
which none exist, or at best only such flitting and superficial
coincidences as are incidental to verse of all forms and periods.
The inferences drawn from premises so vague are valueless.
Sometimes passages are taken from the plays and contrasted with other
passages taken from the Sonnets, and by affixing arbitrary dates to
both, certain conclusions are arrived at which Mr. Massey sets down as
facts. But facts got at in this way have no more solidity than
card houses. They tumble down at a breath. The chronology of
the plays and Sonnets is pure conjecture, and, in most cases, conjecture
groping in the dark. The dates ascribed to the Sonnets are
governed exclusively by the convenience of the argument, or what Mr.
Massey would probably call the internal evidence, which, in a matter
where there is nothing to be proved but a scheme of imaginary
circumstances, is really no evidence at all. And where this
internal evidence does not fit the occasion, it is made to fit by a
subtle and complex interpretation. Thus, sonnet 138, in which the
writer avows himself to be old, is made to supply proof that he is
young, by being relegated to a period when "a new element" had entered
into the Sonnets, and they had "become playful and ironic." This
was one of the two sonnets which were published surreptitiously by
Jaggard in 1599; "therefore," says Mr. Massey, "it must have been
written when William Herbert was in his nineteenth or twentieth year;"
that is, it must have been written in 1598 or 1599, William Herbert
having been born in 1580. But why must it have been written in
1598 or 1599? We are the more justified in asking satisfaction on
this point, seeing that the other sonnet, 144, published by Jaggard,
which comes before Mr. Massey under precisely the same conditions, is
assumed to have been written about, or immediately after, 1595.
The amount of diligence and ingenuity bestowed upon the working out of
these results is prodigious; and no one who examines the book
attentively can fail to perceive that Mr. Massey is thoroughly in
earnest, and that he implicitly believes in the integrity of the
processes by which he shapes his means to his end. All that can be
said upon that head is to deplore that his labour has not been more
judiciously laid out.
The popular notion that Southampton and Shakespeare
were intimate friends is drawn from the dedications of the "Venus and
Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece." There is really no other
evidence to show that they were even known to each other; and it is
necessary, for the sake of accuracy, to recall the reader's attention to
the fact that "Venus and Adonis" was published in 1593, and dedicated to
the earl, who at that time had not completed his twentieth year.
There is nothing in it to warrant the supposition that they were then
personally acquainted, or that the poet had been specially noticed by
his lordship. The dedication to "Lucrece," in 1594, is in a
different vein. It indicates personal knowledge, and we gather
from it that in the interval Southampton had bestowed some favours on
Shakespeare. Five years afterwards, in 1599, we learn from Rowland
White's letter to Sidney, that Southampton seldom went to court, and
spent his time chiefly at the playhouse; but that was after his
marriage, and at a time when his share in the Sonnets, according to Mr.
Massey's interpretation, was at an end. Throughout his whole
life he was very little at large in London, so that the opportunities of
cultivating such a friendship were few and brief. Mr. Massey has
examined the whole subject in two exhaustive chapters—one devoted to a
life of Southampton, and the other to the "personal friendship" of poet
and patron; and the fact that he has not added a single authentic item
to the scanty particulars previously known, shows that if the close
intimacy which he has assumed really existed, the proofs of it are yet
to be discovered.
But what are the favours his lordship conferred upon
Shakespeare? Rowe's story is astounding. That Lord
Southampton, who is said to have been a "liberal encourager of poets,"
although we have very little evidence of the fact, may have conferred
upon Shakespeare marks of his "protection," according to the wont of
patrons, is not improbable; but that he bestowed upon him at one time,
or in a series of benefactions, a sum equal to £5,000 of our present
money, is a legend of munificence which may be dismissed to the social
statistics of that happy time when houses were thatched with pancakes
and streets were paved with gold.
Upon the whole, I suspect that Lord Southampton is
under heavier obligations to Shakespeare than Shakespeare was to Lord
Southampton. Were it not for Shakespeare, in all likelihood, we
should never have heard of his lordship. His fame rests mainly,
perhaps exclusively, on his accidental relations to the poet; nor is
there much in his life, except its waywardness and strange vicissitudes,
to impart any interest to his biography. He seems to have been of
a rash and impetuous temperament, and utterly deficient in judgment.
His career was a violent coil of disasters and delinquencies.
He was perpetually getting into quarrels; and spent half his life in
prison, or under the displeasure of his superiors. His courage was
unquestionable, but it was sometimes displayed so unjustifiably as to
bring down the censure of the service in which he was engaged. His
ebullitions of passion amounted to a kind of frenzy. After having
violated the etiquette of the Presence Chamber, he struck the officer in
waiting who remonstrated with him in the discharge of his duty. He
had personal quarrels with the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Grey, and
Lord Montgomery, which in two instances led to open outrage. He
was tried with Essex for high treason, found guilty, and condemned to
death; but his sentence was commuted to imprisonment in the tower where
he was kept, till, with other State prisoners, he was liberated by the
death of Elizabeth. Several writers extolled him as a patron of
letters. Florio received his bounty. Minsheu was his
pensioner. Chapman lauded him as "the choice of all our country's
spirits." Beaumont wrote an elegy on his death. But the
panegyrics of an age of venal flattery, when the tumid language of
dedications and epitaphs had almost taken an established form, are not
the safest guides to historical characters. The wild and turbulent
life of Southampton is unfavourable to the supposition that he ever
extended any steady or substantial support to men of genius; and that he
had the power to do so is rendered doubtful by the fact that he left his
widow and children in very distressed circumstances.
The hero of the second batch of sonnets is William
Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. That Herbert bestowed some patronal
kindness on Shakespeare may be gathered from the dedication of Heminge
and Condell; and that is all that is known concerning their intercourse.
Mr. Massey fills in the meagre suggestion with ample inferences from the
Sonnets. Herbert came to London in 1598. He was then
in his eighteenth year; Shakespeare was thirty-four, an age at which Mr.
Massey says he was "getting past his sonneteering time."
Southampton was out of England, and, as he was married about this
period, his poetical connection with Shakespeare had ceased.
Herbert, consequently, had the field to himself, and he soon found
occasion to employ Shakespeare's pen in precisely the same way as it had
previously been employed by Southampton. He, too, fell in love,
and, of all people in the world, with the very lady who had just before
disturbed the repose of Southampton, and awakened the jealousy of
Elizabeth Vernon—the beautiful and notorious Lady Rich. This discovery,
however it may have dawned upon Mr. Massey through the Sonnets, comes
upon the reader with a startling effect. Lady Rich, the sister of
Essex, the Stella of Sidney, and the mistress of Mountjoy, was seventeen
years older than Herbert; she had been married to Lord Rich about
eighteen years when she is supposed to have enthralled Herbert; and at
that time, or very soon afterwards, her
liaison with Mountjoy, of which there had been broad symptoms
three years before, was a matter of public scandal. There is no
reason why a woman like Lady Rich might not throw a boy of eighteen into
a state of delirium; but remembering the notoriety of her character and
position, and especially the part she is presumed to have played in the
previous batch of sonnets, it is rather too much to ask us to believe
that, under such circumstances, Shakespeare would have lent himself to
Herbert, as he had lent himself to Southampton before, to commemorate an
infatuation so utterly discreditable to all persons concerned. Yet
this is the theory of the second series of Sonnets, as they are here
interpreted. Herbert, in short, becomes Southampton's successor as
a "begetter" of sonnets in the brain of Shakespeare, and adds to the
collection a few of his own, Mr. Massey being clearly satisfied, "for
various reasons," that at least four of the sonnets published as
Shakespeare's in Shakespeare's lifetime, with Shakespeare's knowledge,
were written by Herbert himself. Having thus got up a fresh set of
equivocal love-verses on his own account, Herbert conceived the idea of
publishing the whole, including the Southampton series. To carry
out this design—which showed a lofty indifference, if not to public
opinion, at all events to private feeling, considering that all the
persons implicated in the business were still living—it was necessary to
obtain the assent of Southampton; but there was no difficulty in that
quarter, for Southampton, as we may easily imagine, was not likely to be
scrupulous on such a point. Nothing now remained except the
sanction of Shakespeare, who acquiesced at once; "for," says Mr. Massey,
"if Southampton did not object, it was not for Shakespeare to resist."
The Sonnets were accordingly handed over to Thorpe, the bookseller, and
committed to the press. This brings us to the
much-vexed dedication. Mr. Massey adopts the solution, frequently
discussed before, that "Mr. W. H." was William Herbert, an assumption
which is disposed of by the awkward fact that Herbert had succeeded to
the title of Earl of Pembroke nine years before the dedication appeared.
Facts, however, are not considered "stubborn things" in such cases, and
Mr. Massey gets rid of this little obstruction by suggesting that the
inscription was left to Thorpe, "with the injunction that the present
title of Pembroke should he suppressed, and initials 'alone used.' "As
the title was to be accounted for by some means, this frank mode of
cutting the knot was, no doubt, as good as any other.
Whatever may be the ultimate reception of Mr.
Massey's interpretation of the Sonnets, nobody can deny that it is the
most elaborate and circumstantial that has been yet attempted. Mr.
Armitage Brown's essay, close, subtle and ingenious as it is, recedes
into utter insignificance before the bolder outlines, the richer
colouring, and the more daring flights of Mr. Massey. What was dim
and shapeless before, here grows distinct and tangible; broken gleams of
light here become massed, and pour upon us in a flood; mere speculation,
timid and uncertain hitherto, here becomes loud and confident, and
assumes the air of ascertained history. A conflict of hypotheses
had been raised by previous annotators respecting the facts and persons
supposed to be referred to in the Sonnets, and the names of Southampton,
Herbert, and Elizabeth Vernon flitted hazily through the discussion.
It has been reserved for Mr. Massey to build up a complete narrative out
of materials which furnished others with nothing more than bald hints,
and bits and scraps of suggestions. Unfortunately the tree that has been
reared with so much care does not bear, edible fruit. All readers
who approach the inquiry from a logical point of view must reject Mr.
Massey's conclusions. His theory is unsatisfactory, partly because
it reflects discredit upon Shakespeare, which most people will be
unwilling to accept without better warrant, but mainly because the kind
of reasoning by which it is made out will not bear the test of
examination. The very fulness and minuteness of the details tell
against the probability of the whole story; for whatever general
inferences might be reasonably drawn from the Sonnets, there is nothing
more unlikely than that they should yield so considerable a crop of
particulars.
The worst of it is, dropping Mr. Massey's book
altogether, that these interpretations of Shakespeare help materially to
spoil our enjoyment of him. They spread like a nightmare over the
imagination, and we must absolutely banish them from our thoughts before
we can go back to the poems with an unencumbered sense of pleasure.
But when we have banished them, and find ourselves able to read the
Sonnets again at our ease, it is like getting away into the
tranquilising repose and pure air of the country from the smoke and
uproar of the town. |
