published another poem in like vein, but far more mature in temper and
execution. The digression (ll. 939-59) on the destroying power of Time,
especially, is in an exalted key of meditation which is not sounded in
the earlier poem. The metre, too, is changed; seven-line stanzas
(Chaucer's rhyme royal, _a b a b b c c_) take the place of six-line
stanzas. The second poem was entered in the 'Stationers' Registers' on
May 9, 1594, under the title of 'A Booke intitled the Ravyshement of
Lucrece,' and was published in the same year under the title 'Lucrece.'
Richard Field printed it, and John Harrison published and sold it at the
sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul's Churchyard. The classical
story of Lucretia's ravishment and suicide is briefly recorded in Ovid's
'Fasti,' but Chaucer had retold it in his 'Legend of Good Women,' and
Shakespeare must have read it there. Again, in topic and metre, the poem
reflected a contemporary poet's work. Samuel Daniel's 'Complaint of
Rosamond,' with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to 'Lucrece' in even
closer relation than Lodge's 'Scilla,' with its six-line stanza, to
'Venus and Adonis.' The pathetic accents of Shakespeare's heroine are
those of Daniel's heroine purified and glorified. {77a} The passage on
Time is elaborated from one in Watson's 'Passionate Centurie of Love'
(No. lxxvii.) {77b} Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to
the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first. He addressed him in
terms of devoted friendship, which were not uncommon at the time in
communications between patrons and poets, but suggest that Shakespeare's
relations with the brilliant young nobleman had grown closer since he
dedicated 'Venus and Adonis' to him in colder language a year before.
'The love I dedicate to your lordship,' Shakespeare wrote in the opening
pages of 'Lucrece,' 'is without end, whereof this pamphlet without
beginning is but a superfluous moiety. . . What I have done is yours;
what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.'
Enthusiastic reception of the poems.
In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal to the world of
readers, and the reading public welcomed his addresses with unqualified
enthusiasm. The London playgoer already knew Shakespeare's name as that
of a promising actor and playwright, but his dramatic efforts had
hitherto been consigned in manuscript, as soon as the theatrical
representation ceased, to the coffers of their owner, the playhouse
manager. His early plays brought him at the outset little reputation as
a man of letters. It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, but in the
restricted role of adapter for English readers of familiar Ovidian
fables, that he first impressed a wide circle of his contemporaries with
the fact of his mighty genius. The perfect sweetness of the verse, and
the poetical imagery in 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece' practically
silenced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes on the part of
the seriously minded. Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of
the eulogies in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had
gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus. 'Lucrece,'
wrote Michael Drayton in his 'Legend of Matilda' (1594), was 'revived to
live another age.' In 1595 William Clerke in his 'Polimanteia' gave 'all
praise' to 'sweet Shakespeare' for his 'Lucrecia.' John Weever, in a
sonnet addressed to 'honey-tongued Shakespeare' in his 'Epigramms'
(1595), eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although
he mentioned the plays 'Romeo' and 'Richard' and 'more whose names I know
not.' Richard Carew at the same time classed him with Marlowe as
deserving the praises of an English Catullus. {79} Printers and
publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands
of eager purchasers. No fewer than seven editions of 'Venus' appeared
between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617. 'Lucrece' achieved a
fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare's death.
Shakespeare and Spenser.
There is a likelihood, too, that Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare's
poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of
Shakespeare's admirers. It is hardly doubtful that Spenser described
Shakespeare in 'Colin Clouts come home againe' (completed in 1594), under
the name of 'Aetion'--a familiar Greek proper name derived from [Greek
text], an eagle:
And there, though last not least is Aetion;
A gentler Shepheard may no where be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought's invention,
Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.
The last line seems to allude to Shakespeare's surname. We may assume
that the admiration was mutual. At any rate Shakespeare acknowledged
acquaintance with Spenser's work in a plain reference to his 'Teares of
the Muses' (1591) in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' (v. i. 52-3).
The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death
Of learning, late deceased in beggary,
is stated to be the theme of one of the dramatic entertainments wherewith
it is proposed to celebrate Theseus's marriage. In Spenser's 'Teares of
the Muses' each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on
the literary and dramatic effort of the age. Theseus dismisses the
suggestion with the not inappropriate comment:
That is some satire keen and critical,
Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.
But there is no ground for assuming that Spenser in the same poem
referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the
recent death of 'our pleasant Willy.' {80} The name Willy was frequently
used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation
to the baptismal name of the person referred to. Sir Philip Sidney was
addressed as 'Willy' by some of his elegists. A comic actor, 'dead of
late' in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is
no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator
that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately
sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton. {81a}
Similarly the 'gentle spirit' who is described by Spenser in a later
stanza as sitting 'in idle cell' rather than turn his pen to base uses
cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare. {81b}
Patrons at court.
Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of
actors and men of letters. His genius and 'civil demeanour' of which
Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other
noble patrons of literature and the drama. His summons to act at Court
with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was
possibly due in part to personal interest in himself. Elizabeth quickly
showed him special favour. Until the end of her reign his plays were
repeatedly acted in her presence. The revised version of 'Love's
Labour's Lost' was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition
credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into
being a little later. Under Elizabeth's successor he greatly
strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the
Queen's appreciation equalled that of James I. When Jonson wrote in his
elegy on Shakespeare of
Those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James,
he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare's plays by the poet
and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich
during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign.
VII--THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY
The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.
It was doubtless to Shakespeare's personal relations with men and women
of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France,
the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to
great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth
century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue
was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the
English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy
to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591,
when Sir Philip Sidney's collection of sonnets entitled 'Astrophel and
Stella' was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any
conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the
appearance of Sir Philip Sidney's volume the writing of sonnets, both
singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this
country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. {83} Men and
women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to
celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same
patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more
or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his
successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no
aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron's ears by
a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who
habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste,
applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius
when the fashion was at its height.
Shakespeare's first experiments.
Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of
his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in 'Love's
Labour's Lost,' probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in 'Romeo
and Juliet' are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine
Helen, in 'All's Well that Ends Well,' which bears traces of very early
composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously,
if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet,
'Phaeton to his friend Florio,' which prefaced in 1591 Florio's 'Second
Frutes,' a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. {84}
Majority of Shakespeare's sonnets composed in 1594.
But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593,
after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman's patronage for his earliest
publication, 'Venus and Adonis,' that he became a sonnetteer on an
extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive
outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed
between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and
thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his
growing age was a conventional device--traceable to Petrarch--of all
sonnetteers of the day, and admits of no literal interpretation. {86} In
matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from
the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his
sonnetteering efforts occasionally and at irregular intervals during the
nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in
1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594
be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is
made to Queen Elizabeth's death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and
a final act of homage on Shakespeare's part to the importunate vogue of
the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external,
points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it
exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full
height.
Their literary value.
In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach
levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be
matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the
mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling,
the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which
are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink
almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both
their excellences and their defects Shakespeare's sonnets betray near
kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest
poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal
jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early
dramatic efforts as 'Love's Labour's Lost' and 'Romeo and Juliet.' There
is far more concentration in the sonnets than in 'Venus and Adonis' or in
'Lucrece,' although occasional utterances of Shakespeare's Roman heroine
show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them. The
superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be
attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of
years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical
exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform
condensation of thought and language.
Circulation in manuscript.
In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not
publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript. {88} But their
reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his
unreadiness to give them publicity. A line from one of them:
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14), {89a}
was quoted in the play of 'Edward III,' which was probably written before
1595. Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare's
'sugred {89b} sonnets among his private friends,' and mentions them in
close conjunction with his two narrative poems. William Jaggard
piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos.
cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in his 'Passionate Pilgrim.'
Their piratical publication in 1609. 'A Lover's Complaint.'
At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surreptitiously sent to press.
Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was
a camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was professionally
engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely
disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors'
control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the
creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any
literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he
pleased, without reference to the author's wishes. Thorpe's career as a
procurer of neglected 'copy' had begun well. He made, in 1600, his
earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe's translation of the 'First
Book of Lucan.' On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the
publication of 'Shakespeares Sonnets,' and this tradesman-like form of
title figured not only on the 'Stationers' Company's Registers,' but on
the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld to print the manuscript, and
two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, to distribute it to the
public. On half the edition Aspley's name figured as that of the seller,
and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June, {90}
and the owner of the 'copy' left the public under no misapprehension as
to his share in the production by printing above his initials a
dedicatory preface from his own pen. The appearance in a book of a
dedication from the publisher's (instead of from the author's) pen was,
unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds,
an accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication. Except
in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and
1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his
works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his
plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices
were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary
condition of the law of copyright. He cannot be credited with any
responsibility for the publication of Thorpe's collection of his sonnets
in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of
appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas
(the metre of 'Lucrece') entitled 'A Lover's Complaint,' in which a girl
laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth. The poem, in a gentle
Spenserian vein, has no connection with the 'Sonnets.' If, as is
possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early
days.
Thomas Thorpe and 'Mr. W. H.'
A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe's preface and his part in the
publication has led many critics into a serious misinterpretation of
Shakespeare's poems. {91} Thorpe's dedication was couched in the
bombastic language which was habitual to him. He advertised Shakespeare
as 'our ever-living poet.' As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he
called himself 'the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,' and in
resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture a partner in the
speculation, 'Mr. W. H.' In the conventional dedicatory formula of the
day he wished 'Mr. W. H.' 'all happiness' and 'eternity,' such eternity
as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his
own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe's 'First Book
of Lucan' in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in
the trade. 'W. H.' was doubtless in a like position. He is best
identified with a stationer's assistant, William Hall, who was
professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring 'copy.' In 1606 'W.
H.' won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his
operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year 'W. H.'
announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem--'A
Foure-fould Meditation'--by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been
executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed 'W. H.')
vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove. When
Thorpe dubbed 'Mr. W. H.,' with characteristic magniloquence, 'the onlie
begetter [_i.e._ obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,' he
merely indicated that that personage was the first of the
pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare's
sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue. In accordance with
custom, Thorpe gave Hall's initials only, because he was an intimate
associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of
friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to
render it probable that the printing of his full name would excite
additional interest in the book or attract buyers.
The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly
addressing, under the initials 'Mr. W. H.,' a young nobleman, to whom the
sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary
principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those
of the type to which Thorpe's efforts were confined. {93} There was
nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view
there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe's methods of business.
His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely
by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no
position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare's private
life. Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career,
belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from
that in which Thorpe pursued his calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe's
aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication
with any cryptic significance.
No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by
the initials 'Mr. W. H.' Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy
(although the contrary has often been recklessly assumed) with William,
third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. {94} But were complete proofs of
the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe's
'Mr. W. H.' The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his
succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord
Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at
any period of his life by the symbols 'Mr. W. H.' In 1609 Pembroke was a
high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all
the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been
exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular
distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in
later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted
with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament
rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of
servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe's address to 'Mr. W. H.'
belongs to the biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the
scope of Shakespeare's biography. {95a}
The form of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme
adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French
sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects
their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt,
and generally pursued by Shakespeare's contemporaries, his sonnets aim at
far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They
consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and
the quatrains rhyme alternately. {95b} A single sonnet does not always
form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the
period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same
train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more.
The collection of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance
of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of
fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen
sonnets, and in Thorpe's edition opens the volume.
Want of continuity. The two 'groups.'
It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the
order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to
detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected
narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. {96}
It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that
all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and
all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were addressed to a woman. This
division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty
of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the
masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining
forty there is no clear indication of the kind. Many of these forty are
meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi.
cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time
(cxxiii.), or 'benefit of ill' (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.),
the last of the first 'group,' does little more than sound a variation on
the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a
boy. {97} And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the
poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi.
xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second 'group' (cxxvii.-cliv.)
have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No.
cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the
virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv.
is a playful lyric in octosyllabics, like Lyly's song of 'Cupid and
Campaspe,' and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly's
songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv.
soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid's fire.
{98}
Main topics of the first 'group.'