construction of the vituperative sonnets. Again a comparison of this
series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true
character. Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in
his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren.
Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as
Shakespeare's a 'fierce tigress,' a 'murderess,' a 'Medusa.' Barnabe
Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female 'tyrant,' a
'Medusa,' a 'rock.' 'Women' (Barnes laments) 'are by nature proud as
devils.' The monotonous and artificial regularity with which the
sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted
their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France.
In Shakespeare's early life the convention was wittily parodied by
Gabriel Harvey in 'An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student's Loove
or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating
reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as
are here discoursed.' {121} After extolling the beauty and virtue of his
mistress above that of Aretino's Angelica, Petrarch's Laura, Catullus's
Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey
suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a
poisonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind as passionless as
a block.' Finally he tells her,
If ever there were she-devils incarnate,
They are altogether in thee incorporate.
Jodelle's 'Contr' Amours.'
In France Etienne Jodelle, a professional sonnetteer although he is best
known as a dramatist, made late in the second half of the sixteenth
century an independent endeavour of like kind to stifle by means of
parody the vogue of the vituperative sonnet. Jodelle designed a
collection of three hundred sonnets which he inscribed to 'hate of a
woman,' and he appropriately entitled them 'Contr' Amours' in distinction
from 'Amours,' the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein. Only
seven of Jodelle's 'Contr' Amours' are extant, but there is sufficient
identity of tone between them and Shakespeare's vituperative efforts
almost to discover in Shakespeare's invectives a spark of Jodelle's
satiric fire. {122} The dark lady of Shakespeare's 'sonnets' may
therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy. It is
quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned
siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful
hands. But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of
'the dark lady' in the sonnets. It was the exacting conventions of the
sonnetteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions,
that impelled Shakespeare to give 'the dark lady' of his sonnets a poetic
being. {123} She has been compared, not very justly, with Shakespeare's
splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of 'Antony and Cleopatra.'
From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both. There
is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare's personal
environment the original of 'the dark lady' of his sonnets than for
seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.
IX--THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON
Biographic fact in the 'dedicatory' sonnets.
Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shakespeare's sonnets
there lurk suggestive references to the circumstances in his external
life that attended their composition. If few can be safely regarded as
autobiographic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of
the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he
sought to fill in the circle of that patron's literary retainers. Twenty
sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled 'dedicatory'
sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and
without disguise to be a patron of the poet's verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi.,
xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., cvi.) In one
of these--Sonnet lxxviii.--Shakespeare asserted:
So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.
Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron's readiness to
accept the homage of other poets seemed to be thrusting him from the
enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron's esteem.
The Earl of Southampton the poet's sole patron.
Shakespeare's biographer is under an obligation to attempt an
identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined
so explicitly. The problem presented by the patron is simple.
Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.
Sing [_sc._ O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).
The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only
patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research. No
contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that
Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank. A
trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare's
close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of
his 'Venus and Adonis' and 'Lucrece', penned respectively in 1593 and
1594. According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare's first adequate
biographer, 'there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of
this patron of Shakespeare's that if I had not been assured that the
story was handed down by Sir William D'Avenant, who was probably very
well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted;
that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable
him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to. A
bounty very great and very rare at any time.'
There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of
Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the
sonnets as the poet's patron. Three of the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets
merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion
which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that
prefaces 'Lucrece.' That epistle to Southampton runs:
The love {127} I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof
this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety. The
warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my
untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance. 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; meantime,
as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life,
still lengthened with all happiness.
Your lordship's in all duty,
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences:--
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
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,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul's thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter'd loving
To show me 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. {128}
The 'Lucrece' epistle's intimation that the patron's love alone gives
value to the poet's 'untutored lines' is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which
doubtless reflected a moment of depression:
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp'd by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
'Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage; {129}
But since he died and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.'
A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet
xxxviii.:
How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.
The central conceit here so finely developed--that the patron may claim
as his own handiwork the _protege's_ verse because he inspires
it--belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation.
When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets entitled 'Delia' to
the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same
note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as
Shakespeare. Daniel wrote:
Great patroness of these my humble rhymes,
Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .
O leave [_i.e._ cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . .
Whereof the travail I may challenge mine,
But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.
Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the 'Lucrece' epistle.
Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his
patron is 'part of all' he has or is. Frequently do we meet in the
Sonnets with such expressions as these:--
[I] by a _part of all_ your glory live (xxxvii. 12);
Thou art _all the better part of me_ (xxxix. 2);
My spirit is thine, _the better part of me_ (lxxiv. 8);
while 'the love without end' which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton
in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as
'eternal love' (cviii. 9), and a devotion 'what shall have no end' (cx.
9).
Rivals in Southampton's favour.
The identification of the rival poets whose 'richly compiled' 'comments'
of his patron's 'praise' excited Shakespeare's jealousy is a more
difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron. The rival poets
with their 'precious phrase by all the Muses filed' (lxxxv. 4) must be
sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have
shared his patronage. The field of choice is not small. Southampton
from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of literary men. In
1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the
contemporary world of letters. {131a} Thomas Nash justly described the
Earl, when dedicating to him his 'Life of Jack Wilton' in 1594, as 'a
dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets
themselves.' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets.
The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary
practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595,
yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less
ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm.
Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally
reckoned among Shakespeare's literary acquaintances, {131b} wrote to
Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his 'Worlde of
Wordes' (an Italian-English dictionary), 'as to me and many more, the
glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and
life.'
Shakespeare's fear of a rival poet.
Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that _protege_ of
Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an 'able' and
a 'better' 'spirit,' 'a worthier pen,' a vessel of 'tall building and of
goodly pride,' compared with whom he was himself 'a worthless boat.' He
detected a touch of magic in the man's writing. His 'spirit,'
Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been 'by spirits taught to write
above a mortal pitch,' and 'an affable familiar ghost' nightly gulled him
with intelligence. Shakespeare's dismay at the fascination exerted on
his patron by 'the proud full sail of his [rival's] great verse' sealed
for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lxxxvi.)
Barnabe Barnes probably the rival.
There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare's
laudation of the other poet's' powers. He was presumably a new-comer in
the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into
admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement. 'Eloquence and
courtesy,' wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, 'are ever bountiful in the
amplifying vein;' and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually
blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends
achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them. All
the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival's identification
with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of
Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary
critics certain to prove a great poet. His first collection of sonnets,
'Parthenophil and Parthenophe,' with many odes and madrigals
interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, 'A Centurie of
Spiritual Sonnets,' in 1595. Loud applause greeted the first book, which
included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French
poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and
at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. 'Ah, sweet content, where
is thy mild abode?') Thomas Churchyard called Barnes 'Petrarch's
scholar;' the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him 'go forward in maturity as
he had begun in pregnancy,' and 'be the gallant poet, like Spenser;'
Campion judged his verse to be 'heady and strong.' In a sonnet that
Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the 'virtuous' Earl of
Southampton he declared that his patron's eyes were 'the heavenly lamps
that give the Muses light,' and that his sole ambition was 'by flight to
rise' to a height worthy of his patron's 'virtues.' Shakespeare
sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord's eyes
that taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned's wing,
And given grace a double majesty;
while in the following sonnet he asserted that the 'worthier pen' of his
dreaded rival when lending his patron 'virtue' was guilty of plagiarism,
for he 'stole that word' from his patron's 'behaviour.' The emphasis
laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton's
'gracious eyes' on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his
patron's 'virtue' on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets
directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested
race for Southampton's favour. In Sonnet lxxxv. Shakespeare declares
that 'he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [_i.e._ his rival]
affords.' Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard's
practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but
Barnes twice applies the word to his poems of love. {134a} When, too,
Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the
relations of himself and his rival with his patron--
My saucy bark inferior far to his . . .
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
he seems to write with an eye on Barnes's identical choice of metaphor:
My fancy's ship tossed here and there by these [_sc._ sorrow's
floods]
Still floats in danger ranging to and fro.
How fears my thoughts' swift pinnace thine hard rock! {134b}
Other theories as to the rival's identity.
Gervase Markham is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the
potent influence of his patron's 'eyes,' which, he says, crown 'the most
victorious pen'--a possible reference to Shakespeare. Nash's poetic
praises of the Earl are no less enthusiastic, and are of a finer literary
temper than Markham's. But Shakespeare's description of his rival's
literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nash than
the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes.
Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival's genius and of its
influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was
more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman than by that of
any other contemporary poet. But Chapman had produced no conspicuously
'great verse' till he began his translation of Homer in 1598; and
although he appended in 1610 to a complete edition of his translation a
sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in the coldest terms of formality,
and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a
distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies that he had no
previous relations. {135} Drayton, Ben Jonson, and Marston have also
been identified by various critics with 'the rival poet,' but none of
these shared Southampton's bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare
applies to his rival's verse specially applicable to the productions of
any of them.
Sonnets of friendship.
Many besides the 'dedicatory' sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth
of wealth and rank, for whom the poet avows 'love,' in the Elizabethan
sense of friendship. {136} Although no specific reference is made
outside the twenty 'dedicatory' sonnets to the youth as a literary
patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good
ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or
friendship also have Southampton for their subject. The sincerity of the
poet's sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to
illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young
Maecenas.
Extravagances of literary compliment.
Extravagant compliment--'gross painting' Shakespeare calls it--was more
conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years
of Elizabeth's reign than in any other epoch. For this result the
sovereign herself was in part responsible. Contemporary schemes of
literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous
passion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of
letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen's incurable greed of
flattery. {137} Sir Philip Sidney described with admirable point the
adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by
literary dependents. He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed
interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him 'to
be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.' 'You shall dwell upon
superlatives . . . Your soule shall be placed with Dante's Beatrice.'
{138a} The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets
that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed
to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that
patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the
style that Sidney described. {138b}
Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.
Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that
the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediaeval romance lived again
in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection
for him was unalterable. Hundreds of poets openly gave the like
assurances to their patrons. Southampton was only one of a crowd of
Maecenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own
names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and 'placed
them,' in Sidney's apt phrase, 'with Dante's "Beatrice."'
Illustrations of the practice abound. Matthew Roydon wrote of his
patron, Sir Philip Sidney:
His personage seemed most divine,
A thousand graces one might count
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.
To heare him speak and sweetly smile
You were in Paradise the while.
Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles
Howard, that 'his good personage and noble deeds' made him the pattern to
the present age of the old heroes of whom 'the antique poets' were 'wont
so much to sing.' This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid
account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of
adulation. {140a} Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as 'my
best-best lov'd.' Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk's
undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love,
'the admired virtues' of the patron's youth
Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse
That it could scarcely utter naked truth. {140b}
Dr. John Donne includes among his 'Verse Letters' to patrons and
patronesses several sonnets of similar temper, one of which,
acknowledging a letter of news from a patron abroad, concludes thus:
And now thy alms is given, thy letter's read,
The body risen again, the which was dead,
And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.
After this banquet my soul doth say grace,
And praise thee for it and zealously embrace
Thy love, though I think thy love in this case
To be as gluttons', which say 'midst their meat
They love that best of which they most do eat. {141}
The tone of yearning for a man's affection is sounded by Donne and
Campion almost as plaintively in their sonnets to patrons as it was
sounded by Shakespeare. There is nothing, therefore, in the vocabulary
of affection which Shakespeare employed in his sonnets of friendship to
conflict with the theory that they were inscribed to a literary patron
with whom his intimacy was of the kind normally subsisting at the time
between literary clients and their patrons.
Direct references to Southampton in the sonnets of friendship.
We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the Earl of
Southampton, and the view that that nobleman is the hero of the sonnets
of 'friendship' is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can
be deduced from the vague eulogies in those poems of the youth's gifts
and graces. Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth,
whether it be vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton
without the least straining of the words. In real life beauty, birth,
wealth, and wit sat 'crowned' in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the
handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the
poet's verse. Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of
his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was
'as fair in knowledge as in hue.' The opening sequence of seventeen
sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and
beget a son so that 'his fair house' may not fall into decay, can only
have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet
unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of
his family. The sonnetteer's exclamation, 'You had a father, let your
son say so,' had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his
father's death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598.
To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable. The
'lascivious comment' on his 'wanton sport' which pursues the young friend
through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the
picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously associates itself
with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both
at Court and, according to Nash, among men of letters. {142}
His youthfulness.
There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of
'friendship' must have been another than Southampton because the terms in
which he is often addressed imply extreme youth. In 1594, a date to
which I refer most of the sonnets Southampton was barely twenty-one, and
the young man had obviously reached manhood. In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare
notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three
years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken
literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of
Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. {143a} But
Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth
birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle
life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman almost ten years his
junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish
appearance and disposition. {143b} 'Young' was the epithet invariably
applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was
twenty-eight. In 1601 Sir Robert Cecil referred to him as the 'poor
young Earl.'
The evidence of portraits.