introduction to Lord Beaconsfield, resolved to make the best of the
occasion, by extracting, if possible, from that astute political sage
the secret of success in life. It might take the form, he thought, of a
little practical advice. For that advice, explaining the object with
which it was asked, he accordingly applied. “Yes,” said Lord
Beaconsfield, “I think I can give you some advice which may possibly be
of use to you. Never trouble yourself about The Man in the Iron Mask,
and never get into a discussion about the authorship of the Letters of
Junius.” In all seriousness we think it is high time that the “closure”
should be applied to a debate on another “mystery” of which every one
must be tired to death, except perhaps those who contribute to it. If
some progress could be made towards the solution of the Mystery of
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, if there was the faintest indication of any dawn
on the darkness, even the wearied reviewer would be patient. But the
thing remains exactly where it was, before this appalling literary
epidemic set in. During the last three or four years scarcely a month
has passed without its “monograph,” many of these treatises, mere
replicas of their predecessors, differing only in degrees of stupidity
and uselessness. Mr. Cuming Walters’ volume, sensible enough and
intelligent, we quite concede, simply thrashes the straw. It professes
to be an original contribution to the question. There is not a view or
theory in it, which is not now a platitude to every one who has had the
patience to follow this controversy. It analyses the Sonnets; they have
been analysed hundreds of times. It asks who was W. H.; it answers the
question as it has been answered _usque ad nauseam_. It discusses the
dark lady, and lands us in the same shifting quagmire of opinion in
which Mr. Tyler and his coadjutors and opponents have been floundering
for the last four years. It assumes, it rejects, it questions, it
suggests, what has been assumed, rejected, questioned, and suggested
over and over again. Indeed, it may now be said with literal truth that,
unless some fresh discovery is made, nothing new, whether in the way of
absurdity or sense, can be advanced on this subject. But books are
multiplied with such rapidity and in such prodigious numbers in these
days, that they thrive, like cannibals, on one another. The last comer
is simply its forgotten predecessor in disguise.
But platitude is the very last charge that can be brought against Mr.
Jesse Johnson’s contribution to the curiosities of Shakespearian
criticism. The theory advanced here is, that Shakespeare never wrote the
Sonnets at all, that he was quite unequal to their composition, that the
author of them “was probably fifty, perhaps sixty, and that he was
besides a man of genius, which Shakespeare certainly was not. I would
not,” says Mr. Jesse Johnson, “deny to Shakespeare great talent. His
success in and with theatres certainly forbids us to do so. That he had
a bent or a talent for rhyming or for poetry, an early and persistent
tradition and the inscription over his grave indicate. And otherwise
there could hardly have been attributed to him so many plays, besides
those written by the author of the Sonnets.” Shakespeare may have been
equal to trifles like _Hamlet_ or _Lear_--for Mr. Jesse Johnson would be
the last to dispute the claim made for Shakespeare as a hard-working
playwright clearing his twenty-five thousand dollars a year (Mr. Jesse
Johnson is calculating his income according to the present time)--but
“to Shakespeare working as an actor, adapter or perhaps author came a
very great poet, one who outclassed all the writers of that day, and it
is the poetry of that great unknown which, flowing into Shakespeare’s
work, comprises all or nearly all of it which the world treasures or
cares to remember.” If we told Mr. Jesse Johnson, and all who resemble
Mr. Jesse Johnson, the truth about their productions, we are quite
certain of one thing--but the one thing of which we are certain it
would, perhaps, be good taste in us to leave unsaid.
Of a very different order is Mr. Samuel Butler’s _Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Reconsidered_. This is the work of a scholar, but of a scholar mounted
on a hobby-horse of unusually vigorous mettle. Mr. Butler begins with a
tremendous onslaught on the theories of the Southamptonites, the
Herbertists and the anti-autobiographical party; and in this part of his
work he has certainly much to say which is both pertinent and plausible,
nay, in our opinion, convincing. But he is less successful in
construction than in demolition. His own contention is, that the Sonnets
are undoubtedly autobiographical, and very derogatory to Shakespeare’s
moral character. He is satisfied that “Mr. W. H.” was the youth who
inspired them, not the youth who simply collected, or procured them, and
gave them to Thorpe, but that this youth was neither the Earl of
Southampton nor the Earl of Pembroke, nor, indeed, any one of superior
social rank to the poet, though this has always been assumed. Adopting
the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone that the key to the youth’s name is to
be found in the seventh line of the twentieth sonnet,--
“A man in hew all _Hewes_ in his controlling.”
and deducing, with them, from Sonnets cxxxv., cxxxvi. and cxliii. that
the youth’s Christian name was William, Mr. Butler believes, as they
did, that the youth’s name was William Hughes, or Hewes; and Mr. Butler
is inclined to identify him, though he speaks, of course, by no means
confidently, with a William Hughes, who served as steward in the
_Vanguard_, _Swiftsure_ and _Dreadnought_, and who died in March,
1636-7. Mr. Butler supports his theories with hypotheses which an
impartial judge of evidence will find it difficult to concede. In the
face of Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv. the contention that the youth
was not in a superior social station to the poet cannot be maintained
with any confidence. There are still graver difficulties in the way of
supposing that the Sonnets were written between January, 1585-6 and
December, 1588. That they could be the work of a young man between his
twenty-first and his twenty-fourth year, and have preceded by some four
years the composition of _Venus and Adonis_ and the _Rape of Lucrece_,
is simply incredible; but it is a question which cannot be argued, for
we have nothing but mere hypothesis to go upon. Mr. Butler’s
arrangement and interpretation of the Sonnets are, moreover, purely
fanciful. When Mr. Butler would have us believe that some of the Sonnets
in the second group, from cxxvii. to clii., are addressed to and concern
not the woman, but the youth, he asks us to accept a theory which is not
only revolting, but which sets all probability at defiance. Similarly
absurd, he must forgive us for saying, is his grotesquely repulsive
interpretation of Sonnet xxxiv. Nor is there anything to justify the
interpretation placed on Sonnets xxxiii. and xxxiv. or the collocation
of cxxi. All that can be said for Mr. Butler’s exceedingly ingenious and
admirably argued theory is, that it supports a view of the question
which, if it admits of no positive confutation, produces no conviction.
No theory, based on an arbitrary arrangement of these poems and on
positive deductions drawn, or rather strained, from most ambiguous
evidence and from pure hypotheses, can possibly be satisfactory.
The problem presented in these Sonnets is undoubtedly the most
fascinating problem in all literature, and it is as exasperating as it
is fascinating. It appears to be so simple, it seems constantly to be on
the verge of its solution, and yet the moment we get beyond a certain
point in inquiry, the more complex its apparent simplicity is discovered
to be, the more hopeless all prospect of explaining the enigma. Take
the difficulty of assuming, what seems to be obvious, that they are
autobiographical. Here we have the poet, and that poet Shakespeare,
admitting the world into the innermost secrets of his life, taking his
contemporaries, without the least reserve, into his confidence, inviting
and assisting them to the study of his own morbid anatomy, and, in a
word, stripping himself bare with all the shameless abandon of Jean
Jacques and of Casanova. Everything that we know of Shakespeare seems to
discountenance the probability of his having any such intention. No
anecdote, with the smallest pretence to authenticity, couples his name
with scandal. The theory which identifies him with the W. S. of
Willobie’s _Avisa_ has no real basis to rest on, and without
corroboration is absolutely inadmissible as evidence. Whatever
Shakespeare’s private life may have been, it is quite clear that he
carefully regarded the decencies, and would have been the last man in
the world to pose publicly in the character presented to us in the
Sonnets. If the poems are autobiographical, we can only conclude that
they were published without his consent, and even to his great
annoyance. This may certainly have been the case, and is indeed often
assumed to have been so. But even then it is, to say the least, curious,
that there should have been no tradition about the extraordinary story
which they tell, especially considering the distinction of the _dramatis
personæ_. Assuming that the youth, who is their hero, was a real person,
he must, judging from Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii. and cxxiv., have been
conspicuous in the society of that time; assuming the rival poet to be a
real person, he must have been equally conspicuous in another sphere,
while Shakespeare himself, at the time the Sonnets were published, was
the most distinguished poet and playwright in London. It is, therefore,
extraordinary that all traces of an affair in which persons of so much
eminence were involved, and which would have furnished scandal-mongers
with the topics in which such gossips most delight, should have entirely
disappeared. We must either conclude that posterity has been very
unfortunate in the loss of records which would have thrown light on the
matter, or that Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew nothing of the facts,
and contented themselves with the poetry; or, lastly, that what we may
call the fable of the Sonnets, the drama in which W. H., “the dark
lady,” and the rival poet play their parts, is as fictitious as the plot
of _The Midsummer Night’s Dream_ or _The Tempest_.
It is not our intention to support any of the numerous theories which
pretend to give us the key to these Sonnets, still less to propose any
new one, but simply to show that the enigma presented by them is as
insoluble as ever, and that all attempts to throw light on it have
served to effect nothing more than to make darkness visible and
confusion worse confounded. Let us briefly review the facts. In 1609,
Thomas Thorpe, a well-known Elizabethan bookseller, published a small
quarto volume, entitled _Shakespeare’s Sonnets_, having apparently not
obtained them from the poet himself, and to this volume was prefixed the
following dedication:--“To the onlie begetter of these ensuing Sonnets,
Mr. W. H., all happiness and that eternitie promised by our ever-living
poet wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T.” Here
begins and ends all that is certainly known about W. H. and his relation
to these poems. No one knows who he was; no one knows what is exactly
meant by the word “begetter,” whether it is to be taken in the sense of
inspirer, whether that is to say W. H. is the youth celebrated in the
Sonnets--“the master-mistress” of the poet’s passion, or whether it
simply means the person who got or procured the poems for Thorpe,--in
which case the identification of the initials is of no consequence,
unless we are to suppose that the youth who inspired them presented them
to Thorpe. Mr. Sidney Lee, in his very able paper in the _Fortnightly
Review_ for February, 1898, and in his Life of Shakespeare, argues that
there is no proof that the youth of the Sonnets was named “Will,” though
this has always been assumed to be the case. The evidence on which the
point must be argued will be found in the puns on “Will” in Sonnets
cxxxiv.-vi. and cxliii. It seems to us, we must own, that the balance of
probability, though not certainly in favour of the affirmative,
decidedly inclines towards it. Granting then,--for it is, after all,
only an hypothesis,--that the initials W. H. are those of the youth
celebrated in the Sonnets, to whom are they to be assigned? The youth,
whoever he was, is represented as being in a social position superior to
that of the poet; he has apparently rank and title; he has wealth; he is
young and eminently handsome, his beauty being of a delicate, effeminate
cast; he is highly cultivated and accomplished; he is on terms of the
closest intimacy with the poet, by whom he is passionately beloved; he
lives a free, loose life, and he intrigues with his friend’s mistress.
Passing by all preposterous theories about William Harte, William
Hughes, William Himself and the like, we come to the two names which
seem worth serious consideration, William Herbert, third Earl of
Pembroke, and Henry Wriothesly, third Earl of Southampton. The Pembroke
theory, with Mr. Thomas Tyler’s corollary identifying the “dark lady”
with Mary Fitton, has been adopted by Dr. Brandes in his work on
Shakespeare just published. But the difficulties in the way of accepting
it are insuperable. They have been admirably discussed by Mr. Sidney
Lee in the article to which we have referred. In the first place, while
Shakespeare must have been on terms of more than brotherly intimacy with
the youth of the Sonnets, there is no evidence at all that he had ever
been in any other relation with the Earl than in the ordinary one of
servant and patron. The words of Heminge and Condell, in the dedication
of the first folio to Pembroke and his brother, merely state that they
had both of them “prosequted” him with favour; in other words, been to
him what they had been to many other dramatists and men of letters; and
that is the only evidence of any connection between Shakespeare and
Pembroke. Tradition was certainly silent about any relations between
them, for Aubrey, as Mr. Lee has pointed out, though he has collected
much information about both, says nothing about their acquaintanceship,
though he mentions Pembroke’s connection with Massinger, and
Southampton’s with Shakespeare. But Thorpe’s dedication is conclusive
against Pembroke. In 1609, Pembroke, who had succeeded to the title on
the death of his father in January, 1601, was Lord Chamberlain, a Knight
of the Garter, and one of the most distinguished noblemen in England. Is
it credible that Thorpe would address him as Mr. W. H., more especially
as in the other works which he inscribed to him,--and he inscribed
several,--he is careful to give him all his titles, and to address him
with the most fulsome servility? Again, Pembroke, as Mr. Lee points out,
was never a “Mister” at all. As the eldest son of an earl, he was
designated by courtesy Lord Herbert, and as Lord Herbert he is always
spoken of in contemporary records. The appellation “Mr.” was not, as Mr.
Lee observes, used loosely, as it is now, and could never have been
applied to any nobleman, whether holding his title by right or by
courtesy. Whatever allowance may be made for a poet’s passion and fancy,
some weight must be attached to the insistence made in the Sonnets on
the youth’s delicate and effeminate beauty. It is true that we have no
portraits of Pembroke before he arrived at middle age, but those
portraits justify us in concluding that he could never, at any time,
have been distinguished by beauty of the type indicated in the poems.
Against all this the advocates of the Pembroke theory have nothing to
place but conjectures, a series of insignificant coincidences and the
assumption that the woman in the Sonnets is to be identified with the
woman who bore Herbert a child, Mary Fitton. The publication of Sonnet
xliv. by Jaggard, in 1599, shows that the intrigue between the youth and
the dark lady, which is the central event of the Sonnets, was already,
and had probably been for some time, in full career, while there is no
evidence that Pembroke was involved with Mary Fitton before the summer
of 1600. But what finally disposes of this theory is the testimony
afforded by Lady Newdigate-Newdegate’s recently published _Gossip from a
Muniment Room_. Indispensable requisites in the lady of the Sonnets are,
that she should be dark, a “black beauty” with “eyes raven black,” with
hair which resembles “black wires,” and that she should be a married
woman; but the portraits--and there are two of them--of Mary Fitton,
show that she had a fair complexion, with brown hair and grey eyes; and
she remained unmarried, until long after her connection with Pembroke
had ceased.
The theory which identifies W. H. with the Earl of Southampton is
slightly more plausible, but the difficulties in the way of accepting it
are, in truth, equally insuperable. This theory has at least one great
point in its favour. Shakespeare was acquainted, and it may be inferred
intimately acquainted, with Southampton, as the dedications of _Venus
and Adonis_ and the _Rape of Lucrece_ indicate. Of his affection and
respect for this nobleman he has left an expression almost as remarkable
as the language of the sonnets. “The love I dedicate to your lordship is
without end.... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours:
being part in all I have devoted yours. Were my worth greater, my duty
would show greater.” This bears a singularly close resemblance to Sonnet
xxvi.,--
“Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written embassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit,
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it.”
And there is much in the Sonnets which can be made to coincide with what
we know of Southampton. But, as we push inquiry, difficulties of all
kinds begin to swarm in on us. The first is, as in the case of Pembroke,
with the dedication. To say nothing of the fact that “W. H.” is not “H.
W.”--the possibility of the appellation of “Mr.” being applied to one
who had been an Earl since 1581, and who had twice been addressed in
dedications by his full titles, and that by Shakespeare himself, is a
wholly inadmissible hypothesis. To argue that this was merely “a blind,”
is simply to beg the question. If the Sonnets were addressed to
Southampton, they must have been written between 1593 and 1598. In 1593
Southampton was in his twenty-first year, in 1598 in his twenty-sixth;
Shakespeare, respectively, in his thirty-first and thirty-fifth year.
Now, what is especially emphasized in the sonnets is the youthfulness of
the young man to whom they are dedicated, and the advanced age of the
poet. In Sonnet cviii. the youth is addressed as “a sweet boy,” in
cxxvi. as “a lovely boy,” in liv. as “a beauteous and lovely youth”; in
xcv. his “budding name” is referred to, while the poet speaks of
himself as “old,” as “beaten and chopped with tanned antiquity,” as
being “with Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn.” And so, as has
been more than once pointed out, we have this anomaly--a man of
thirty-four describing himself as a thing of “tanned antiquity” in
writing to “a sweet and lovely boy” of twenty-five. No one could have
been less like the effeminate youth of the Sonnets than Southampton. All
we know about him, including his portraits, indicates that he was
eminently masculine and manly. Again, it is matter of history that he
greatly distinguished himself on the Azores expedition in 1597,
acquitting himself with so much gallantry that, during the voyage, he
was knighted by Essex. To this expedition, which must have involved one
of those absences of which we hear so much in the Sonnets, to this
exploit and this honour, which afforded so much opportunity for
peculiarly acceptable compliment, Shakespeare makes no reference at all.
There is nothing to indicate that the youth of the Sonnets had gained
any military or political distinction, had taken any part in public
life, or had ever been absent from England. To assume with Mr. Lee that
the Sonnets were written in or before 1594, and therefore before
Southampton had become distinguished, is to involve ourselves in
inextricable difficulties. Even Mr. Lee admits that Sonnet cvii. must
have reference to the death of Elizabeth in 1603. With regard to the
supposed references to Southampton’s relations with Elizabeth Vernon, no
certain, or, to speak more accurately, no even plausible inferences can
be drawn in any particular: all that they can be reduced to are degrees
of improbability.
If, again, we accept the theory of Tyrwhitt and Malone, supported by Mr.
Butler, and suppose that W. H. was some obscure person, we are
proceeding on mere hypothesis, and a hypothesis seriously shaken by the
plain meaning expressed in Sonnets xxxvi., xxxvii., and cxxiv.
The enigma of these Sonnets is, we repeat, as insoluble now as it was
when inquiry was first directed to them. Whether they are to be regarded
as autobiographical, as dramatic studies, as a mixture of both, as a
collection of miscellaneous poems, as written to order for others, as
mere exercises in the sonnet-cycle, or as all of these things, is alike
uncertain. Our knowledge of the time of their composition begins and
ends with the facts, that some of them were, presumably, in circulation
in or before 1598, that two of them had certainly been composed in or
before 1599, and that all of them had been written by 1609. The rest is
mere conjecture; and on mere conjecture and mere hypothesis is based
every attempt to solve their mystery. If certainty about them can ever
be arrived at, it can only be attained by evidence of which, as yet, we
have not even an inkling. The probability is, that it was Shakespeare’s
intention, or rather Thorpe’s intention, to baffle curiosity, and,
except in the judgment of fanatics, he has certainly succeeded in doing
so.
For our own part we are very much inclined to suspect, that they owed
their origin to the fashion of composing sonnet-cycles, that those
cycles suggested their themes and gave them the ply; that the beautiful
youth, the rival poet, and the dark lady are pure fictions of the
imagination; and that these poems are autobiographical only in the sense
in which _Venus and Adonis_, the _Rape of Lucrece_, _Romeo and Juliet_
and _Othello_ are autobiographical.
LANDSCAPE IN POETRY[31]
[Footnote 31: _Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson._ By Francis
T. Palgrave.]