and dissipations of his fellow courtiers as into their literary and
artistic pursuits. At tennis, in jousts and tournaments, he achieved
distinction; nor was he a stranger to the delights of gambling at
primero. In 1592, when he was in his eighteenth year, he was recognised
as the most handsome and accomplished of all the young lords who
frequented the royal presence. In the autumn of that year Elizabeth paid
Oxford a visit in state. Southampton was in the throng of noblemen who
bore her company. In a Latin poem describing the brilliant ceremonial,
which was published at the time at the University Press, eulogy was
lavished without stint on all the Queen's attendants; but the academic
poet declared that Southampton's personal attractions exceeded those of
any other in the royal train. 'No other youth who was present,' he
wrote, 'was more beautiful than this prince of Hampshire (_quo non
formosior alter affuit_), nor more distinguished in the arts of learning,
although as yet tender down scarce bloomed on his cheek.' The last words
testify to Southampton's boyish appearance. {377a} Next year it was
rumoured, that his 'external grace' was to receive signal recognition by
his admission, despite his juvenility, to the Order of the Garter.
'There be no Knights of the Garter new chosen as yet,' wrote a
well-informed courtier on May 3, 1593, 'but there were four nominated.'
{377b} Three were eminent public servants, but first on the list stood
the name of young Southampton. The purpose did not take effect, but the
compliment of nomination was, at his age, without precedent outside the
circle of the Sovereign's kinsmen. On November 17, 1595, he appeared in
the lists set up in the Queen's presence in honour of the thirty-seventh
anniversary of her accession. The poet George Peele pictured in blank
verse the gorgeous scene, and likened the Earl of Southampton to that
ancient type of chivalry, Bevis of Southampton, so 'valiant in arms,' so
'gentle and debonair,' did he appear to all beholders. {378}
Reluctance to marry.
But clouds were rising on this sunlit horizon. Southampton, a wealthy
peer without brothers or uncles, was the only male representative of his
house. A lawful heir was essential to the entail of his great
possessions. Early marriages--child-marriages--were in vogue in all
ranks of society, and Southampton's mother and guardian regarded
matrimony at a tender age as especially incumbent on him in view of his
rich heritage. When he was seventeen Burghley accordingly offered him a
wife in the person of his granddaughter, Lady Elizabeth Vere, eldest
daughter of his daughter Anne and of the Earl of Oxford. The Countess of
Southampton approved the match, and told Burghley that her son was not
averse from it. Her wish was father to the thought. Southampton
declined to marry to order, and, to the confusion of his friends, was
still a bachelor when he came of age in 1594. Nor even then did there
seem much prospect of his changing his condition. He was in some ways as
young for his years in inward disposition as in outward appearance.
Although gentle and amiable in most relations of life, he could be
childishly self-willed and impulsive, and outbursts of anger involved
him, at Court and elsewhere, in many petty quarrels which were with
difficulty settled without bloodshed. Despite his rank and wealth, he
was consequently accounted by many ladies of far too uncertain a temper
to sustain marital responsibilities with credit. Lady Bridget Manners,
sister of his friend the Earl of Rutland, was in 1594 looking to
matrimony for means of release from the servitude of a lady-in-waiting to
the Queen. Her guardian suggested that Southampton or the Earl of
Bedford, who was intimate with Southampton and exactly of his age, would
be an eligible suitor. Lady Bridget dissented. Southampton and his
friend were, she objected, 'so young,' 'fantastical,' and volatile ('so
easily carried away'), that should ill fortune befall her mother, who was
'her only stay,' she 'doubted their carriage of themselves.' She spoke,
she said, from observation. {379}
Intrigue with Elizabeth Vernon.
In 1595, at two-and-twenty, Southampton justified Lady Bridget's censure
by a public proof of his fallibility. The fair Mistress Vernon (first
cousin of the Earl of Essex), a passionate beauty of the Court, cast her
spell on him. Her virtue was none too stable, and in September the
scandal spread that Southampton was courting her 'with too much
familiarity.'
Marriage in 1598.
The entanglement with 'his fair mistress' opened a new chapter in
Southampton's career, and life's tempests began in earnest. Either to
free himself from his mistress's toils, or to divert attention from his
intrigue, he in 1596 withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation.
Despite his mistress's lamentations, which the Court gossips duly
chronicled, he played a part with his friend Essex in the military and
naval expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. He
developed a martial ardour which brought him renown, and Mars (his
admirers said) vied with Mercury for his allegiance. He travelled on the
Continent, and finally, in 1598, he accepted a subordinate place in the
suite of the Queen's Secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, who was going on an
embassy to Paris. But Mistress Vernon was still fated to be his evil
genius, and Southampton learnt while in Paris that her condition rendered
marriage essential to her decaying reputation. He hurried to London and,
yielding his own scruples to her entreaties, secretly made her his wife
during the few days he stayed in this country. The step was full of
peril. To marry a lady of the Court without the Queen's consent
infringed a prerogative of the Crown by which Elizabeth set exaggerated
store.
Imprisonment, 1601-3.
The story of Southampton's marriage was soon public property. His wife
quickly became a mother, and when he crossed the Channel a few weeks
later to revisit her he was received by pursuivants, who had the Queen's
orders to carry him to the Fleet prison. For the time his career was
ruined. Although he was soon released from gaol, all avenues to the
Queen's favour were closed to him. He sought employment in the wars in
Ireland, but high command was denied him. Helpless and hopeless, he late
in 1600 joined Essex, another fallen favourite, in fomenting a rebellion
in London, in order to regain by force the positions each had forfeited.
The attempt at insurrection failed, and the conspirators stood their
trial on a capital charge of treason on February 19, 1600-1. Southampton
was condemned to die, but the Queen's Secretary pleaded with her that
'the poor young earl, merely for the love of Essex, had been drawn into
this action,' and his punishment was commuted to imprisonment for life.
Further mitigation was not to be looked for while the Queen lived. But
Essex, Southampton's friend, had been James's sworn ally. The first act
of James I as monarch of England was to set Southampton free (April 10,
1603). After a confinement of more than two years, Southampton resumed,
under happier auspices, his place at Court.
Later career. Death on Nov. 10, 1624.
Southampton's later career does not directly concern the student of
Shakespeare's biography. After Shakespeare had congratulated Southampton
on his liberty in his Sonnet cvii., there is no trace of further
relations between them, although there is no reason to doubt that they
remained friends to the end. Southampton on his release from prison was
immediately installed a Knight of the Garter, and was appointed governor
of the Isle of Wight, while an Act of Parliament relieved him of all the
disabilities incident to his conviction of treason. He was thenceforth a
prominent figure in Court festivities. He twice danced a correnta with
the Queen at the magnificent entertainment given at Whitehall on August
19, 1604, in honour of the Constable of Castile, the special ambassador
of Spain, who had come to sign a treaty of peace between his sovereign
and James I. {380} But home politics proved no congenial field for the
exercise of Southampton's energies. Quarrels with fellow-courtiers
continued to jeopardise his fortunes. With Sir Robert Cecil, with Philip
Herbert, Earl of Montgomery, and with the Duke of Buckingham he had
violent disputes. It was in the schemes for colonising the New World
that Southampton found an outlet for his impulsive activity. He helped
to equip expeditions to Virginia, and acted as treasurer of the Virginia
Company. The map of the country commemorates his labours as a colonial
pioneer. In his honour were named Southampton Hundred, Hampton River,
and Hampton Roads in Virginia. Finally, in the summer of 1624, at the
age of fifty-one, Southampton, with characteristic spirit, took command
of a troop of English volunteers which was raised to aid the Elector
Palatine, husband of James I's daughter Elizabeth, in his struggle with
the Emperor and the Catholics of Central Europe. With him went his
eldest son, Lord Wriothesley. Both on landing in the Low Countries were
attacked by fever. The younger man succumbed at once. The Earl regained
sufficient strength to accompany his son's body to Bergen-op-Zoom, but
there, on November 10, he himself died of a lethargy. Father and son
were both buried in the chancel of the church of Titchfield, Hampshire,
on December 28. Southampton thus outlived Shakespeare by more than eight
years.
IV.--THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON AS A LITERARY PATRON.
Southampton's collection of books.
Southampton's close relations with men of letters of his time give
powerful corroboration of the theory that he was the patron whom
Shakespeare commemorated in the sonnets. From earliest to latest
manhood--throughout the dissipations of Court life, amid the torments
that his intrigue cost him, in the distractions of war and travel--the
earl never ceased to cherish the passion for literature which was
implanted in him in boyhood. His devotion to his old college, St.
John's, is characteristic. When a new library was in course of
construction there during the closing years of his life, Southampton
collected books to the value of 360 pounds wherewith to furnish it. This
'monument of love,' as the College authorities described the benefaction,
may still be seen on the shelves of the College library. The gift
largely consisted of illuminated manuscripts--books of hours, legends of
the saints, and mediaeval chronicles. Southampton caused his son to be
educated at St. John's, and his wife expressed to the tutors the hope
that the boy would 'imitate' his father 'in his love to learning and to
them.'
References in his letters to poems and plays.
Even the State papers and business correspondence in which Southampton's
career is traced are enlivened by references to his literary interests.
Especially refreshing are the active signs vouchsafed there of his
sympathy with the great birth of English drama. It was with plays that
he joined other noblemen in 1598 in entertaining his chief, Sir Robert
Cecil, on the eve of the departure for Paris of that embassy in which
Southampton served Cecil as a secretary. In July following Southampton
contrived to enclose in an official despatch from Paris 'certain songs'
which he was anxious that Sir Robert Sidney, a friend of literary tastes,
should share his delight in reading. Twelve months later, while
Southampton was in Ireland, a letter to him from the Countess attested
that current literature was an everyday topic of their private talk.
'All the news I can send you,' she wrote to her husband, 'that I think
will make you merry, is that I read in a letter from London that Sir John
Falstaff is, by his mistress Dame Pintpot, made father of a goodly
miller's thumb--a boy that's all head and very little body; but this is a
secret.' {383a} This cryptic sentence proves on the part of both earl
and countess familiarity with Falstaff's adventures in Shakespeare's
'Henry IV,' where the fat knight apostrophised Mrs. Quickly as 'good pint
pot' (Pt. I. II. iv. 443). Who the acquaintances were about whom the
countess jested thus lightly does not appear, but that Sir John, the
father of 'the boy that was all head and very little body,' was a playful
allusion to Sir John's creator is by no means beyond the bounds of
possibility. In the letters of Sir Toby Matthew, many of which were
written very early in the seventeenth century (although first published
in 1660), the sobriquet of Sir John Falstaff seems to have been bestowed
on Shakespeare: 'As that excellent author Sir John Falstaff sayes, "what
for your businesse, news, device, foolerie, and libertie, I never dealt
better since I was a man."' {383b}
His love of the theatre.
When, after leaving Ireland, Southampton spent the autumn of 1599 in
London, it was recorded that he and his friend Lord Rutland 'come not to
Court' but 'pass away the time merely in going to plays every day.'
{383c} It seems that the fascination that the drama had for Southampton
and his friends led them to exaggerate the influence that it was capable
of exerting on the emotions of the multitude. Southampton and Essex in
February 1601 requisitioned and paid for the revival of Shakespeare's
'Richard II' at the Globe Theatre on the day preceding that fixed for
their insurrection, in the hope that the play-scene of the deposition of
a king might excite the citizens of London to countenance their
rebellious design. {383d} Imprisonment sharpened Southampton's zest for
the theatre. Within a year of his release from the Tower in 1603 he
entertained Queen Anne of Denmark at his house in the Strand, and Burbage
and his fellow players, one of whom was Shakespeare, were bidden to
present the 'old' play of 'Love's Labour's Lost,' whose 'wit and mirth'
were calculated 'to please her Majesty exceedingly.'
Poetic adulation. Barnabe Barnes's sonnet, 1593.
But these are merely accidental testimonies to Southampton's literary
predilections. It is in literature itself, not in the prosaic records of
his political or domestic life, that the amplest proofs survive of his
devotion to letters. From the hour that, as a handsome and accomplished
lad, he joined the Court and made London his chief home, authors
acknowledged his appreciation of literary effort of almost every quality
and form. He had in his Italian tutor Florio, whose circle of
acquaintance included all men of literary reputation, a mentor who
allowed no work of promise to escape his observation. Every note in the
scale of adulation was sounded in Southampton's honour in contemporary
prose and verse. Soon after the publication, in April 1593, of
Shakespeare's 'Venus and Adonis,' with its salutation of Southampton, a
more youthful apprentice to the poet's craft, Barnabe Barnes, confided to
a published sonnet of unrestrained fervour his conviction that
Southampton's eyes--'those heavenly lamps'--were the only sources of true
poetic inspiration. The sonnet, which is superscribed 'to the Right
Noble and Virtuous Lord, Henry, Earl of Southampton,' runs:
Receive, sweet Lord, with thy thrice sacred hand
(Which sacred Muses make their instrument)
These worthless leaves, which I to thee present,
(Sprung from a rude and unmanured land)
That with your countenance graced, they may withstand
Hundred-eyed Envy's rough encounterment,
Whose patronage can give encouragement
To scorn back-wounding Zoilus his band.
Vouchsafe, right virtuous Lord, with gracious eyes--
Those heavenly lamps which give the Muses light,
Which give and take in course that holy fire--
To view my Muse with your judicial sight:
Whom, when time shall have taught, by flight, to rise
Shall to thy virtues, of much worth, aspire.
Tom Nash's addresses.
Next year a writer of greater power, Tom Nash, betrayed little less
enthusiasm when dedicating to the earl his masterly essay in romance,
'The Life of Jack Wilton.' He describes Southampton, who was then
scarcely of age, as 'a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of
poets as of the poets themselves.' 'A new brain,' he exclaims, 'a new
wit, a new style, a new soul, will I get me, to canonise your name to
posterity, if in this my first attempt I am not taxed of presumption.'
{385a} Although 'Jack Wilton' was the first book Nash formally dedicated
to Southampton, it is probable that Nash had made an earlier bid for the
earl's patronage. In a digression at the close of his 'Pierce
Pennilesse' he grows eloquent in praise of one whom he entitles 'the
matchless image of honour and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Jove's
eagle-borne Ganimede, thrice noble Amintas.' In a sonnet addressed to
'this renowned lord,' who 'draws all hearts to his love,' Nash expresses
regret that the great poet, Edmund Spenser, had omitted to celebrate 'so
special a pillar of nobility' in the series of adulatory sonnets prefixed
to the 'Faerie Queene;' and in the last lines of his sonnet Nash suggests
that Spenser suppressed the nobleman's name
Because few words might not comprise thy fame. {385b}
Southampton was beyond doubt the nobleman in question. It is certain,
too, that the Earl of Southampton was among the young men for whom Nash,
in hope of gain, as he admitted, penned 'amorous villanellos and qui
passas.' One of the least reputable of these efforts of Nash survives in
an obscene love-poem entitled 'The Choosing of Valentines,' which may be
dated in 1595. Not only was this dedicated to Southampton in a prefatory
sonnet, but in an epilogue, again in the form of a sonnet, Nash addressed
his young patron as his 'friend.' {386}
Markham's sonnet, 1595. Florio's address, 1598.
Meanwhile, in 1595, the versatile Gervase Markham inscribed to
Southampton, in a sonnet, his patriotic poem on Sir Richard Grenville's
glorious fight off the Azores. Markham was not content to acknowledge
with Barnes the inspiriting force of his patron's eyes, but with
blasphemous temerity asserted that the sweetness of his lips, which
stilled the music of the spheres, delighted the ear of Almighty God.
Markham's sonnet runs somewhat haltingly thus:
Thou glorious laurel of the Muses' hill,
Whose eyes doth crown the most victorious pen,
Bright lamp of virtue, in whose sacred skill
Lives all the bliss of ear-enchanting men,
From graver subjects of thy grave assays,
Bend thy courageous thoughts unto these lines--
The grave from whence my humble Muse doth raise
True honour's spirit in her rough designs--
And when the stubborn stroke of my harsh song
Shall seasonless glide through Almighty ears
Vouchsafe to sweet it with thy blessed tongue
Whose well-tuned sound stills music in the spheres;
So shall my tragic lays be blest by thee
And from thy lips suck their eternity.
Subsequently Florio, in associating the earl's name with his great
Italian-English dictionary--the 'Worlde of Wordes'--more soberly defined
the earl's place in the republic of letters when he wrote: 'As to me and
many more the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused
light and life.'
The congratulations of the poets in 1603.
The most notable contribution to this chorus of praise is to be found, as
I have already shown, in Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' The same note of
eulogy was sounded by men of letters until Southampton's death. When he
was released from prison on James I's accession in April 1603, his
praises in poets' mouths were especially abundant. Not only was that
grateful incident celebrated by Shakespeare in what is probably the
latest of his sonnets (No. cvii.), but Samuel Daniel and John Davies of
Hereford offered the Earl congratulation in more prolonged strains.
Daniel addressed to Southampton many lines like these:
The world had never taken so full note
Of what thou art, hadst thou not been undone:
And only thy affliction hath begot
More fame than thy best fortunes could have won;
For ever by adversity are wrought
The greatest works of admiration;
And all the fair examples of renown
Out of distress and misery are grown . . .
Only the best-compos'd and worthiest hearts
God sets to act the hard'st and constanst'st parts. {388a}
Davies was more jubilant:
Now wisest men with mirth do seem stark mad,
And cannot choose--their hearts are all so glad.
Then let's be merry in our God and King,
That made us merry, being ill bestead.
Southampton, up thy cap to Heaven fling,
And on the viol there sweet praises sing,
For he is come that grace to all doth bring. {388b}
Many like praises, some of later date, by Henry Locke (or Lok), George
Chapman, Joshua Sylvester, Richard Brathwaite, George Wither, Sir John
Beaumont, and others could be quoted. Beaumont, on Southampton's death,
wrote an elegy which panegyrises him in the varied capacities of warrior,
councillor, courtier, father, and husband. But it is as a literary
patron that Beaumont insists that he chiefly deserves remembrance:
I keep that glory last which is the best,
The love of learning which he oft expressed
In conversation, and respect to those
Who had a name in arts, in verse or prose.
Elegies on Southampton.
To the same effect are some twenty poems which were published in 1624,
just after Southampton's death, in a volume entitled 'Teares of the Isle
of Wight, shed on the Tombe of their most noble valorous and loving
Captaine and Governour, the right honorable Henrie, Earl of Southampton.'
The keynote is struck in the opening stanza of the first poem by one
Francis Beale:
Ye famous poets of the southern isle,
Strain forth the raptures of your tragic muse,
And with your Laureate pens come and compile
The praises due to this great Lord: peruse
His globe of worth, and eke his virtues brave,
Like learned Maroes at Mecaenas' grave.
V.--THE TRUE HISTORY OF THOMAS THORPE AND 'MR. W. H.'
The publication of the sonnets in 1609.
In 1598 Francis Meres enumerated among Shakespeare's best known works his
'sugar'd sonnets among his private friends.' None of Shakespeare's
sonnets are known to have been in print when Meres wrote, but they were
doubtless in circulation in manuscript. In 1599 two of them were printed
for the first time by the piratical publisher, William Jaggard, in the
opening pages of the first edition of 'The Passionate Pilgrim.' On
January 3, 1599-1600, Eleazar Edgar, a publisher of small account,
obtained a license for the publication of a work bearing the title, 'A
Booke called Amours by J. D., with certein other Sonnetes by W. S.' No
book answering this description is extant. In any case it is doubtful if
Edgar's venture concerned Shakespeare's 'Sonnets.' It is more probable
that his 'W. S.' was William Smith, who had published a collection of
sonnets entitled 'Chloris' in 1596. {390} On May 20, 1609, a license for
the publication of Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' was granted by the Stationers'
Company to a publisher named Thomas Thorpe, and shortly afterwards the
complete collection as they have reached us was published by Thorpe for
the first time. To the volume Thorpe prefixed a dedication in the
following terms:
TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF
THESE INSUING SONNETS
MR. W. H., ALL HAPPINESSE
AND THAT ETERNITIE
PROMISED
BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET
WISHETH
THE WELL-WISHING
ADVENTURER IN
SETTING
FORTH
T. T.
The words are fantastically arranged. In ordinary grammatical order they
would run: 'The well-wishing adventurer in setting forth [_i.e._ the
publisher] T[homas] T[horpe] wisheth Mr. W. H., the only begetter of
these ensuing sonnets, all happiness and that eternity promised by our
ever-living poet.'
Publishers' dedication.
Few books of the sixteenth or seventeenth century were ushered into the
world without a dedication. In most cases it was the work of the author,
but numerous volumes, besides Shakespeare's 'Sonnets,' are extant in
which the publisher (and not the author) fills the role of dedicator.
The cause of the substitution is not far to seek. The signing of the
dedication was an assertion of full and responsible ownership in the
publication, and the publisher in Shakespeare's lifetime was the full and
responsible owner of a publication quite as often as the author. The
modern conception of copyright had not yet been evolved. Whoever in the
sixteenth or early seventeenth century was in actual possession of a
manuscript was for practical purposes its full and responsible owner.
Literary work largely circulated in manuscript. {391} Scriveners made a
precarious livelihood by multiplying written copies, and an enterprising
publisher had many opportunities of becoming the owner of a popular book
without the author's sanction or knowledge. When a volume in the reign
of Elizabeth or James I was published independently of the author, the
publisher exercised unchallenged all the owner's rights, not the least
valued of which was that of choosing the patron of the enterprise, and of
penning the dedicatory compliment above his signature. Occasionally
circumstances might speciously justify the publisher's appearance in the
guise of a dedicator. In the case of a posthumous book it sometimes
happened that the author's friends renounced ownership or neglected to
assert it. In other instances, the absence of an author from London
while his work was passing through the press might throw on the publisher
the task of supplying the dedication without exposing him to any charge
of sharp practice. But as a rule one of only two inferences is possible
when a publisher's name figured at the foot of a dedicatory epistle:
either the author was ignorant of the publisher's design, or he had
refused to countenance it, and was openly defied. In the case of
Shakespeare's 'Sonnets' it may safely be assumed that Shakespeare
received no notice of Thorpe's intention of publishing the work, and that
it was owing to the author's ignorance of the design that the dedication
was composed and signed by the 'well-wishing adventurer in setting
forth.'