sonnets of 'friendship' with Southampton is found in the likeness of
feature and complexion which characterises the poet's description of the
youth's outward appearance and the extant pictures of Southampton as a
young man. Shakespeare's many references to his youth's 'painted
counterfeit' (xvi., xxiv., xlvii., lxvii.) suggest that his hero often
sat for his portrait. Southampton's countenance survives in probably
more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries. At least fourteen
extant portraits have been identified on good authority--nine paintings,
three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by Isaac Oliver), and two
contemporary prints. {144} Most of these, it is true, portray their
subject in middle age, when the roses of youth had faded, and they
contribute nothing to the present argument. But the two portraits that
are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the
information that can be desired of Southampton's aspect 'in his youthful
morn.' {145} One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one,
and the other at twenty-five or twenty-six. The earlier portrait, which
is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a young man resplendently
attired. His doublet is of white satin; a broad collar, edged with lace,
half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver
thread; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced with gold; the
sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is decorated at intervals with
white silk bows; the hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold; purple
garters, embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings below
the knee. Light body armour, richly damascened, lies on the ground to
the right of the figure; and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on
a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in gold. Such
gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer bestowed much attention on his
personal equipment. But the head is more interesting than the body. The
eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and the expression
sedate; rings are in the ears; beard and moustache are at an incipient
stage, and are of the same, bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of
Southampton's mother that is also at Welbeck. {146a} But, however scanty
is the down on the youth's cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant. It
is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder. The colour is
now of walnut, but was originally of lighter tint.
[Picture: Henry Wriothesley]
The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in
prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598. A
cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand.
Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion,
and is distinctly blonde. The beard and thin upturned moustache are of
brighter auburn and fuller than before, although still slight. The blue
eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill-health, but differ
little from those features in the earlier portrait.
From either of the two Welbeck portraits of Southampton might Shakespeare
have drawn his picture of the youth in the Sonnets. Many times does he
tell us that the youth is fair in complexion, and that his eyes are fair.
In Sonnet lxviii., when he points to the youth's face as a map of what
beauty was 'without all ornament, itself and true'--before fashion
sanctioned the use of artificial 'golden tresses'--there can be little
doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about
Southampton's neck. {146b}
Sonnet cvii. the last of the series.
A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be
allotted to a date subsequent to 1594; only two bear on the surface signs
of a later composition. In Sonnet lxx. the poet no longer credits his
hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a 'pure, unstained prime,' which
has 'passed by the ambush of young days.' Sonnet cvii., apparently the
last of the series, was penned almost a decade after the mass of its
companions, for it makes references that cannot be mistaken to three
events that took place in 1603--to Queen Elizabeth's death, to the
accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who
had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the
rebellion of the Earl of Essex. The first two events are thus described:
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Allusion to Elizabeth's death.
It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was
felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which
Elizabeth's crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King,
and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable
consequence of Elizabeth's demise was happily averted. Cynthia (_i.e._
the moon) was the Queen's recognised poetic appellation. It is thus that
she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and
Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion. 'Fair
Cynthia's dead' sang one.
Luna's extinct; and now beholde the sunne
Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,
wrote Henry Petowe in his 'A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of
Dead Eliza,' 1603. There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss
that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body. One
poet asserted that death 'veiled her glory in a cloud of night.' Another
argued: 'Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in
darkest night.' A third varied the formula thus:
When winter had cast off her weed
Our sun eclipsed did set. Oh! light most fair. {148a}
At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his
inheritance 'not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole
forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this
kingdom alone' but to all Europe. {148b}
Allusions to Southampton's release from prison.
'The drops of this most balmy time,' in this same sonnet, cvii., is an
echo of another current strain of fancy. James came to England in a
springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the
happiest augury. 'All things look fresh,' one poet sang, 'to greet his
excellence.' 'The air, the seasons, and the earth' were represented as
in sympathy with the general joy in 'this sweetest of all sweet springs.'
One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a
prisoner in the Tower, 'supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.' All
men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen's
death, wished him at liberty. {149a} The wish was fulfilled quickly. On
April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by 'a warrant from the
king.' So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain
to Dudley Carleton two days later, 'raised all men's spirits . . . and
the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves' great
things. {149b} Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton's
release in buoyant verse. {149c} It is improbable that Shakespeare
remained silent. 'My love looks fresh,' he wrote in the concluding lines
of Sonnet cvii., and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so
often made before, that his friend should live in his 'poor rhyme,' 'when
tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.' It is impossible to
resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the
close of his days of tribulation. Shakespeare's genius had then won for
him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private
patron's favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the
patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years. But the
terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse
justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the
poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was
mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him
while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.
X--THE SUPPOSED STORY OF INTRIGUE IN THE SONNETS
It is hardly possible to doubt that had Shakespeare, who was more
prolific in invention than any other poet, poured out in his sonnets his
personal passions and emotions, he would have been carried by his
imagination, at every stage, far beyond the beaten tracks of the
conventional sonnetteers of his day. The imitative element in his
sonnets is large enough to refute the assertion that in them as a whole
he sought to 'unlock his heart.' It is likely enough that beneath all
the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on Southampton there
lay a genuine affection, but his sonnets to the Earl were no involuntary
ebullitions of a devoted and disinterested friendship; they were
celebrations of a patron's favour in the terminology--often raised by
Shakespeare's genius to the loftiest heights of poetry--that was
invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary
convention. Very few of Shakespeare's 'sugared sonnets' have a
substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul. It is
true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or
gives expression to a sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing
illusion of autobiographic confessions; and it is just possible that they
stand apart from the rest, and reveal the writer's inner consciousness,
in which case they are not to be matched in any other of Shakespeare's
literary compositions. But they may be, on the other hand, merely
literary meditations, conceived by the greatest of dramatists, on
infirmities incident to all human nature, and only attempted after the
cue had been given by rival sonnetteers. At any rate, their energetic
lines are often adapted from the less forcible and less coherent
utterances of contemporary poets, and the themes are common to almost all
Elizabethan collections of sonnets. {152} Shakespeare's noble sonnet on
the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force
and insight a stereotyped theme of sonnetteers, and it may have owed its
whole existence to Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet on 'Desire.' {153a}
The youth's relations with the poet's mistress.
Only in one group, composed of six sonnets scattered through the
collection, is there traceable a strand of wholly original sentiment, not
to be readily defined and boldly projecting from the web into which it is
wrought. This series of six sonnets deals with a love adventure of no
normal type. Sonnet cxliv. opens with the lines:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two angels do suggest (_i.e._ tempt) me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. {153b}
The woman, the sonnetteer continues, has corrupted the man and has drawn
him from his 'side.' Five other sonnets treat the same theme. In three
addressed to the man (xl., xli., and xlii.) the poet mildly reproaches
his youthful friend for having sought and won the favours of a woman whom
he himself loved 'dearly,' but the trespass is forgiven on account of the
friend's youth and beauty. In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare
addresses the woman (cxxxiii. and cxxxiv.), and he rebukes her for having
enslaved not only himself but 'his next self'--his friend. Shakespeare,
in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress's disdain of his advances,
assigns her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no
better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind. In
these six sonnets alone does he categorically assign his mistress's
alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause
for his mistress's infidelity. The definite element of intrigue that is
developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan
sonnet-literature. The character of the innovation and its treatment
seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection
of Shakespeare's personal experience. But how far he is sincere in his
accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to
retain the friendship of the latter must be decided by each reader for
himself. If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act
of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain. But it
remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals
of gallantry. The sonnetteer's complacent condonation of the young man's
offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the
maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and
self-indulgent patron. Southampton's sportive and lascivious temperament
might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an
attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated, and he was
unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his _protege_.
There is no clue to the lady's identity, and speculation on the topic is
useless. She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the
'dark lady,' but he treats that lady's obduracy conventionally, and his
vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the
mistress who left him for his friend.
'Willobie his Avisa.'
The emotions roused in Shakespeare by the episode, even if potent at the
moment, were not likely to be deep-seated or enduring. And it is
possible that a half-jesting reference, which would deprive Shakespeare's
amorous adventure of serious import, was made to it by a literary comrade
in a poem that was licensed for publication on September 3, 1594, and was
published immediately under the title of 'Willobie his Avisa, or the True
Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.' {155} In
this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying
numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds
converse--in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a
wife--with a series of passionate adorers. In every case she firmly
repulses their advances. Midway through the book its alleged
author--Henry Willobie--is introduced in his own person as an ardent
admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and
Avisa's obduracy. To this section there is prefixed an argument in prose
(canto xliv.) It is there stated that Willobie, 'being suddenly affected
with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa,
pineth a while in secret grief. At length, not able any longer to endure
the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of
his disease unto his familiar friend _W. S._, _who not long before had
tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recovered of the
like infection_. Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same
vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping
the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing
conceit,' encouraging Willobie to believe that Avisa would ultimately
yield 'with pains, diligence, and some cost in time.' 'The miserable
comforter' [W. S.], the passage continues, was moved to comfort his
friend 'with an impossibility,' for one of two reasons. Either 'he now
would secretly laugh at his friend's folly' because he 'had given
occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.' Or 'he would
see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in
viewing after the course of this loving comedy,' would 'see whether it
would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for _the old
player_. But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy
by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,' owing to
Avisa's unflinching rectitude. Happily, 'time and necessity' effected a
cure. In two succeeding cantos in verse W. S. is introduced in dialogue
with Willobie, and he gives him, in _oratio recta_, light-hearted and
mocking counsel which Willobie accepts with results disastrous to his
mental health.
Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shakespeare's identity with
H. W.'s unfeeling adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation, {157}
and doubt is justifiable as to whether the story of 'Avisa' and her
lovers is not fictitious. In a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the
writer, after mentioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead,
discusses somewhat enigmatically whether or no the work is 'a poetical
fiction.' In a new edition of 1596 the same editor decides the question
in the affirmative. But Dorell, while making this admission, leaves
untouched the curious episode of 'W. S.' The mention of 'W. S.' as 'the
old player,' and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing his
relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the fact that Shakespeare,
at a date when mentions of him in print were rare, was eulogised by name
as the author of 'Lucrece' in some prefatory verses to the volume. From
such considerations the theory of 'W. S.'s' identity with Willobie's
acquaintance acquires substance. If we assume that it was Shakespeare
who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the
disdain of 'chaste Avisa' because he had 'newly recovered' from the
effects of a like experience, it is clear that the theft of Shakespeare's
mistress by another friend did not cause him deep or lasting distress.
The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of
'Avisa' bring it, in fact, nearer the confines of comedy than of tragedy.
Summary of conclusions respecting the sonnets.
The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare's
sonnets are thus seen to be identical with those that are discernible in
the rest of his literary work. They present one more proof of his
punctilious regard for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous
genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the
labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his
attention. Most of Shakespeare's sonnets were produced in 1594 under the
incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise
in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for
some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy
than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of time here
or elsewhere before or since. The thousands of sonnets that were
circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary
quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and
topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity. Shakespeare's
collection, which was put together at haphazard and published
surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at
times reaching heights of literary excellence that none other scaled, but
as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue.
Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the
beauties of nature, adulation of a patron, idealisation of a _protege's_
regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion,
amiable compliments on a woman's hair or touch on the virginals, and
vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind--all
appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in
Shakespeare's. He borrows very many of his competitors' words and
thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure
them. Genuine emotion or the writer's personal experience very rarely
inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare's sonnets proved no
exception to the rule. A personal note may have escaped him
involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of
melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and
there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce
dramatically the illusion of a personal confession. Only in one
scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to
other sonnetteers, of a lover's supersession by his friend in a
mistress's graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and
draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion
is wanting in seriousness. The sole biographical inference deducible
from the sonnets is that at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained
no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful
patronage of a young man of rank. External evidence agrees with internal
evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton,
and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare's sonnets is the
corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of
Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave
Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and
encouragement, which entitles the Earl to a place in the poet's biography
resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d'Este in the biography of
Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, duchess of Savoy, in the
biography of Ronsard.
XI--THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER
'Midsummer Night's Dream.'
But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron
[How] to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,
his dramatic work was steadily advancing. To the winter season of 1595
probably belongs 'Midsummer Night's Dream.' {161} The comedy may well
have been written to celebrate a marriage--perhaps the marriage of the
universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third
earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl
of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5. The elaborate compliment
to the Queen, 'a fair vestal throned by the west' (II. i. 157 _seq._),
was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an
invitation for their extension to the future. Oberon's fanciful
description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western
flower called 'Love-in-idleness' that he bids Puck fetch for him, has
been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with
which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to
Kenilworth in 1575. {162} The whole play is in the airiest and most
graceful vein of comedy. Hints for the story can be traced to a variety
of sources--to Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale,' to Plutarch's 'Life of
Theseus,' to Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' (bk. iv.), and to the story of
Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediaeval romance of 'Huon of
Bordeaux,' of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first
printed in 1534. The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the
raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge. In the humorous
presentation of the play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' by the 'rude
mechanicals' of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had
already employed in 'Love's Labour's Lost.' But the final scheme of the
'Midsummer Night's Dream' is of the author's freshest invention, and by
endowing--practically for the first time in literature--the phantoms of
the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest,
Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art.
'All's Well.'