And better lines, ere long shall honor thee.
The poem follows in about three hundred lines, and the manuscript ends
with a second sonnet addressed by Nash to his patron:
Thus hath my penne presum'd to please my friend.
Oh mightst thou lykewise please Apollo's eye.
No, Honor brookes no such impietie,
Yet Ovid's wanton muse did not offend.
He is the fountaine whence my streames do flowe--
Forgive me if I speak as I was taught;
Alike to women, utter all I knowe,
As longing to unlade so bad a fraught.
My mynde once purg'd of such lascivious witt,
With purified words and hallowed verse,
Thy praises in large volumes shall rehearse.
That better maie thy grauer view befitt.
Meanwhile ytt rests, you smile at what I write
Or for attempting banish me your sight.
THO. NASH.
{388a} Daniel's _Certaine Epistles_, 1603: see Daniel's _Works_, ed.
Grosart, i. 216 seq.
{388b} See Preface to Davies's _Microcosmos_, 1603 (Davies's _Works_,
ed. Grosart, i. 14). At the end of Davies's _Microcosmos_ there is also
a congratulatory sonnet addressed to Southampton on his liberation (_ib._
p. 96), beginning:
Welcome to shore, unhappy-happy Lord,
From the deep seas of danger and distress.
There like thou wast to be thrown overboard
In every storm of discontentedness.
{390} 'Amours of J. D.' were doubtless sonnets by Sir John Davies, of
which only a few have reached us. There is no ground for J. P. Collier's
suggestion that J. D. was a misprint for M. D., _i.e._ Michael Drayton,
who gave the first edition of his sonnets in 1594 the title of _Amours_.
That word was in France the common designation of collections of sonnets
(cf. Drayton's _Poems_, ed. Collier, Roxburghe Club, p. xxv).
{391} See note to p. 88 _supra_.
{393a} The details of his career are drawn from Mr. Arber's _Transcript
of the Registers of the Stationers' Company_.
{393b} Arber, ii. 124.
{393c} _Ib._ ii. 713.
{393d} A younger brother, Richard, was apprenticed to a stationer,
Martin Ensor, for seven years from August 24, 1596, but he disappeared
before gaining the freedom of the company, either dying young or seeking
another occupation (cf. Arber's _Transcript_, ii. 213).
{393e} Cf. _Bibliographica_, i. 474-98, where I have given an account of
Blount's professional career in a paper called 'An Elizabethan
Bookseller.'
{394a} Thorpe gives a sarcastic description of a typical patron, and
amply attests the purely commercial relations ordinarily subsisting
between dedicator and dedicatee. 'When I bring you the book,' he advises
Blount, 'take physic and keep state. Assign me a time by your man to
come again. . . . Censure scornfully enough and somewhat like a
traveller. Commend nothing lest you discredit your (that which you would
seem to have) judgment. . . . One special virtue in our patrons of these
days I have promised myself you shall fit excellently, which is to give
nothing.' Finally Thorpe, changing his tone, challenges his patron's
love 'both in this and, I hope, many more succeeding offices.'
{394b} One gave an account of the East India Company's fleet; the other
reported a speech delivered by Richard Martin, M.P., to James I at
Stamford Hill during the royal progress to London.
{395a} _Calendar of State Papers_, Domestic Series, 1635, p. 527.
{395b} Two bore his name on the title-page in 1603; one in 1604; two in
1605; two in 1606; two in 1607; three in 1608; one in 1609 (_i.e._ the
_Sonnets_); three in 1610 (_i.e._ _Histrio-mastix_, _or the Playwright_,
as well as Healey's translations); two in 1611; one in 1612; three in
1613; two in 1614; two in 1616; one in 1618; and finally one in 1624.
The last was a new edition of George Chapman's _Conspiracie and Tragedie
of Charles Duke of Byron_, which Thorpe first published in 1608.
{395c} They were _Wits A.B.C. or a centurie of Epigrams_ (anon.), by R.
West of Magdalen College, Oxford (a copy is in the Bodleian Library);
Chapman's _Byron_, and Jonson's _Masques of Blackness and Beauty_.
{395d} Chapman and Jonson were very voluminous authors, and their works
were sought after by almost all the publishers of London, many of whom
were successful in launching one or two with or without the author's
sanction. Thorpe seems to have taken particular care with Jonson's
books, but none of Jonson's works fell into Thorpe's hands before 1605 or
after 1608, a minute fraction of Jonson's literary life. It is
significant that the author's dedication--the one certain mark of
publication with the author's sanction--appears in only one of the three
plays by Chapman that Thorpe issued, viz. in _Byron_. One or two copies
of Thorpe's impression of _All Fools_ have a dedication by the author,
but it is absent from most of them. No known copy of Thorpe's edition of
Chapman's _Gentleman Usher_ has any dedication.
{397} Many other instances of initials figuring in dedications under
slightly different circumstances will occur to bibliographers, but all,
on examination, point to the existence of a close intimacy between
dedicator and dedicatee. R. S.'s [_i.e._ possibly Richard Stafford's]
'Epistle dedicatorie' before his _Heraclitus_ (Oxford, 1609) was
inscribed 'to his much honoured father S. F. S.' _An Apologie for
Women_, _or an Opposition to Mr. D. G. his assertion_ . . . _by W. H. of
Ex. in Ox._ (Oxford, 1609), was dedicated to 'the honourable and right
vertuous ladie, the Ladie M. H.' This volume, published in the same year
as Shakespeare's _Sonnets_, offers a pertinent example of the generous
freedom with which initials were scattered over the preliminary pages of
books of the day.
{398} In the volume of 1593 the words run: 'To the noble and valorous
gentleman Master Robert Dudley, enriched with all vertues of the minde
and worthy of all honorable desert. Your most affectionate and devoted
Michael Drayton.'
{399a} In 1610, in dedicating _St. Augustine_, _Of the Citie of God_ to
the Earl of Pembroke, Thorpe awkwardly describes the subject-matter as 'a
desired citie sure in heaven,' and assigns to 'St. Augustine and his
commentator Vives' a 'savour of the secular.' In the same year, in
dedicating _Epictetus his Manuall_ to Florio, he bombastically pronounces
the book to be 'the hand to philosophy; the instrument of instruments; as
Nature greatest in the least; as Homer's _Ilias_ in a nutshell; in lesse
compasse more cunning.' For other examples of Thorpe's pretentious,
half-educated and ungrammatical style, see p. 403, note 2.
{399b} The suggestion is often made that the only parallel to Thorpe's
salutation of happiness is met with in George Wither's _Abuses Whipt and
Stript_ (London, 1613). There the dedicatory epistle is prefaced by the
ironical salutation 'To himselfe G. W. wisheth all happinesse.' It is
further asserted that Wither had probably Thorpe's dedication to 'Mr. W.
H.' in view when he wrote that satirical sentence. It will now be
recognised that Wither aimed very gently at no identifiable book, but at
a feature common to scores of books. Since his _Abuses_ was printed by
George Eld and sold by Francis Burton--the printer and publisher
concerned in 1606 in the publication of 'W. H.'s' Southwell
manuscript--there is a bare chance that Wither had in mind 'W. H.'s'
greeting of Mathew Saunders, but fifty recently published volumes would
have supplied him with similar hints.
{400a} Thorpe dedicated to Florio _Epictetus his Manuall_, _and Cebes
his Table_, _out of Greek originall by Io. Healey_, 1610. He dedicated
to the Earl of Pembroke _St. Augustine_, _Of the Citie of God_ . . .
_Englished by I. H._, 1610, and a second edition of Healey's _Epictetus_,
1616.
{400b} Southwell's _Foure-fould Meditation_ of 1606 is a book of
excessive rarity, only one complete printed copy having been met with in
our time. A fragment of the only other printed copy known is now in the
British Museum. The work was reprinted in 1895, chiefly from an early
copy in manuscript, by Mr. Charles Edmonds, the accomplished
bibliographer, who in a letter to the _Athenaeum_, on November 1, 1873,
suggested for the first time the identity of 'W. H.,' the dedicator of
Southwell's poem, with Thorpe's 'Mr. W. H.'
{401} A manuscript volume at Oscott College contains a contemporary copy
of those poems by Southwell which 'unfained affectionate W.H.' first gave
to the printing press. The owner of the Oscott volume, Peter Mowle or
Moulde (as he indifferently spells his name), entered on the first page
of the manuscript in his own handwriting an 'epistel dedicatorie' which
he confined to the conventional greeting of happiness here and hereafter.
The words ran: 'To the right worshipfull Mr. Thomas Knevett Esquire,
Peter Mowle wisheth the perpetuytie of true felysitie, the health of
bodie and soule with continwance of worshipp in this worlde. And after
Death the participation of Heavenlie happiness dewringe all worldes for
ever.'
{403a} A bookseller (not a printer), William Holmes, who was in business
for himself between 1590 and 1615, was the only other member of the
Stationers' Company bearing at the required dates the initials of 'W. H.'
But he was ordinarily known by his full name, and there is no indication
that he had either professional or private relations with Thorpe.
{403b} Most of his dedications are penned in a loose diction of
pretentious bombast which it is difficult to interpret exactly. When
dedicating in 1610--the year after the issue of the _Sonnets_--Healey's
_Epictetus his Manuall_ 'to a true fauorer of forward spirits, Maister
John Florio,' Thorpe writes of Epictetus's work: 'In all languages, ages,
by all persons high prized, imbraced, yea inbosomed. It filles not the
hand with leaues, but fills ye head with lessons: nor would bee held in
hand but had by harte to boote. He is more senceless than a stocke that
hath no good sence of this stoick.' In the same year, when dedicating
Healey's translation of St. Augustine's _Citie of God_ to the Earl of
Pembroke, Thorpe clumsily refers to Pembroke's patronage of Healey's
earlier efforts in translation thus: 'He that against detraction beyond
expectation, then found your sweete patronage in a matter of small moment
without distrust or disturbance, in this work of more weight, as he
approoued his more abilitie, so would not but expect your Honours more
acceptance.'
{405} This is the sense allotted to the word in the great Variorum
edition of 1821 by Malone's disciple, James Boswell the younger, who,
like his master, was a bibliographical expert of the highest authority.
The fact that the eighteenth-century commentators--men like Malone and
Steevens--who were thoroughly well versed in the literary history of the
sixteenth century, should have failed to recognise any connection between
'Mr. W. H.' and Shakespeare's personal history is in itself a very strong
argument against the interpretation foisted on the dedication during the
present century by writers who have no pretensions to be reckoned the
equals of Malone and Steevens as literary archaeologists.
{406} James Boaden, a journalist and the biographer of Kemble and Mrs.
Siddons, was the first to suggest the Pembroke theory in a letter to the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ in 1832. A few months later Mr. James Heywood
Bright wrote to the magazine claiming to have reached the same conclusion
as early as 1819, although he had not published it. Boaden re-stated the
Pembroke theory in a volume on _Shakespeare's Sonnets_ which he published
in 1837. C. Armitage Brown adopted it in 1838 in his _Shakespeare's
Autobiographical Poems_. The Rev. Joseph Hunter, who accepted the theory
without qualification, significantly pointed out in his _New
Illustrations of Shakespeare_ in 1845 (ii. 346) that it had not occurred
to any of the writers in the great Variorum editions of Shakespeare, nor
to critics so acute in matters of literary history as Malone or George
Chalmers. The theory is treated as proved fact in many recent literary
manuals. Of its supporters at the date of writing the most ardent is Mr.
Thomas Tyler, who published an edition of the sonnets in 1890, and there
further advanced a claim to identify the 'dark lady' of the sonnets with
Mary Fitton, a lady of the Court and the Earl of Pembroke's mistress.
Mr. Tyler has endeavoured to substantiate both the Pembroke and the
Fitton theories, by merely repeating his original arguments, in a
pamphlet which appeared in April of this year under the title of _The
Herbert-Fitton Theory_: _a Reply_ [_i.e._ to criticisms of the theories
by Lady Newdegate and by myself]. The Pembroke theory, whose adherents
have dwindled of late, will henceforth be relegated, I trust, to the
category of popular delusions.
{407} Cf. _Sydney Papers_, ed. Collins, i. 353. 'My Lord (of Pembroke)
himself with _my Lord Harbert_ (is) come up to see the Queen' (Rowland
Whyte to Sir Robert Sydney, October 8, 1591), and again p. 361 (November
16, 1595); and p. 372 (December 5, 1595). John Chamberlain wrote to Sir
Dudley Carleton on August 1, 1599, '_Young Lord Harbert_, Sir Henrie
Carie, and Sir William Woodhouse, are all in election at Court, who shall
set the best legge foremost.' _Chamberlain's Letters_ (Camden Soc.), p.
57
{408} Thomas Sackville, the author of the _Induction_ to_ The Mirror for
Magistrates_ and other poetical pieces, and part author of _Gorboduc_,
was born plain 'Thomas Sackville,' and was ordinarily addressed in youth
as 'Mr. Sackville.' He wrote all his literary work while he bore that
and no other designation. He subsequently abandoned literature for
politics, and was knighted and created Lord Buckhurst. Very late in
life, in 1604--at the age of sixty-eight--he became Earl of Dorset. A
few of his youthful effusions, which bore his early signature, 'M.
[_i.e._ Mr.] Sackville,' were reprinted with that signature unaltered in
an encyclopaedic anthology, _England's Parnassus_, which was published,
wholly independently of him, in 1600, after he had become Baron
Buckhurst. About the same date he was similarly designated Thomas or Mr.
Sackville in a reprint, unauthorised by him, of his _Induction_ to _The
Mirror for Magistrates_, which was in the original text ascribed, with
perfect correctness, to Thomas or Mr. Sackville. There is clearly no
sort of parallel (as has been urged) between such an explicable, and not
unwarrantable, metachronism and the misnaming of the Earl of Pembroke
'Mr. W. H.' As might be anticipated, persistent research affords no
parallel for the latter irregularity.
{409} An examination of a copy of the book in the Bodleian--none is in
the British Museum--shows that the dedication is signed J. H., and not,
as Mr. Fleay infers, by Thorpe. Thorpe had no concern in this volume.
{410} On January 27, 1607-8, one Sir Henry Colte was indicted for
slander in the Star Chamber for addressing a peer, Lord Morley, as
'goodman Morley.' A technical defect--the omission of the precise date
of the alleged offence--in the bill of indictment led to a dismissal of
the cause. See _Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata_, 1593 to
1609, edited from the manuscript of Henry Hawarde by W. P. Baildon,
F.S.A. (privately printed for Alfred Morrison), p. 348.
{411} See pp. 23, 231-2. A tradition has lately sprung up at Wilton to
the effect that a letter once existed there in which the Countess of
Pembroke bade her son the earl while he was in attendance on James I at
Salisbury bring the King to Wilton to witness a performance of _As You
Like It_. The countess is said to have added, 'We have the man
Shakespeare with us.' No tangible evidence of the existence of the
letter is forthcoming, and its tenor stamps it, if it exists, as an
ignorant invention. The circumstances under which both King and players
visited Wilton in 1603 are completely misrepresented. The Court
temporarily occupied Wilton House, and Shakespeare and his comrades were
ordered by the officers of the royal household to give a performance
there in the same way as they would have been summoned to play before the
King had he been at Whitehall. It is hardly necessary to add that the
Countess of Pembroke's mode of referring to literary men is well known:
she treated them on terms of equality, and could not in any aberration of
mind or temper have referred to Shakespeare as 'the man Shakespeare.'
Similarly, the present Earl of Pembroke purchased of a London
picture-dealer last year what purported to be a portrait of the third
Earl of Pembroke, and on the back was pasted a paper, that was
represented to date from the seventeenth century, containing some lines
from Shakespeare's Sonnet lxxxi. (9-14), subscribed with the words
'Shakespeare unto the Earl of Pembroke, 1603' The ink and handwriting
are quite modern, and hardly make pretence to be of old date in the eyes
of any one accustomed to study manuscripts. On May 5 of this year some
persons interested in the matter, including myself, examined the portrait
and the inscription, on the kind invitation of the present Earl, and the
inscription was unanimously declared by palmographical experts to be a
clumsy forgery unworthy of serious notice.
{414} Cf. the engravings of Simon Pass, Stent, and Vandervoerst, after
the portrait by Mytens.
{415} It is unnecessary, after what has been said above (p. 123), to
consider seriously the suggestion that the 'dark lady' of the sonnets was
Mary Fitton, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth. This frolicsome lady,
who was at one time Pembroke's mistress and bore him a child, has been
introduced into a discussion of the sonnets only on the assumption that
her lover, Pembroke, was the youth to whom the sonnets were addressed.
Lady Newdegate's recently published _Gossip from a Muniment Room_, which
furnishes for the first time a connected biography of Pembroke's
mistress, adequately disposes of any lingering hope that Shakespeare may
have commemorated her in his black-complexioned heroine. Lady Newdegate
states that two well-preserved portraits of Mary Fitton remain at Arbury,
and that they reveal a lady of fair complexion with brown hair and grey
eyes. Family history places the authenticity of the portraits beyond
doubt, and the endeavour lately made by Mr. Tyler, the chief champion of
the hopeless Fitton theory, to dispute their authenticity is
satisfactorily met by Mr. C. O. Bridgeman in an appendix to the second
edition of Lady Newdegate's book. We also learn from Lady Newdegate's
volume that Miss Fitton, during her girlhood, was pestered by the
attentions of a middle-aged admirer, a married friend of the family, Sir
William Knollys. It has been lamely suggested by some of the supporters
of the Pembroke theory that Sir William Knollys was one of the persons
named Will who are alleged to be noticed as competitors with Shakespeare
and the supposititious 'Will Herbert' for 'the dark lady's' favours in
the sonnets (cxxxv., cxxxvi., and perhaps clxiii.) But that is a shot
wholly out of range. The wording of those sonnets, when it is thoroughly
tested, proves beyond reasonable doubt that the poet was the only lover
named Will who is represented as courting the disdainful lady of the
sonnets, and that no reference whatever is made there to any other person
of that Christian name.
{416} Professor Dowden (_Sonnets_, p. xxxv) writes: 'It appears from the
punning sonnets (cxxxv. and cxliii.) that the Christian name of
Shakspere's friend was the same as his own, _Will_,' and thence is
deduced the argument that the friend could only be identical with one
who, like William Earl of Pembroke, bore that Christian name.
{418a} Ed. Mayor, p. 35.
{418b} Manningham's _Diary_, p. 92; cf. Barnabe Barnes's _Odes Pastoral_
sestine 2:
'But women will have their own wills,
Alas, why then should I complain?'
{419} Besides punning words, printers of poetry in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries made an effort to italicise proper names,
unfamiliar words, and words deemed worthy of special emphasis. But they
did not strictly adhere to these rules, and, while they often failed to
italicise the words that deserved italicisation, they freely italicised
others that did not merit it. Capital initial letters were employed with
like irregularity. Mr. Wyndham in his careful note on the typography of
the quarto of 1609 (pp. 259 seq.) suggests that Elizabethan printers were
not erratic in their uses of italics or capital letters, but an
examination of a very large number of Elizabethan and Jacobean books has
brought me to an exactly opposite conclusion.
{420} Barnes's _Parthenophil_ in Arber's _Garner_, v. 440.
{421a} After quibbling in Sonnet lxxii. on the resemblance between the
_graces_ of his cruel mistress's face and the _Graces_ of classical
mythology, Barnes develops the topic in the next sonnet after this manner
(the italics are my own):
Why did rich Nature _graces_ grant to thee,
Since thou art such a niggard of thy _grace_?
O how can _graces_ in thy body be?
Where neither they nor pity find a place! . . .
Grant me some _grace_! For thou with _grace_ art wealthy
And kindly may'st afford some _gracious_ thing.
{421b} Cf. _Lear_, IV. vi. 279, 'O undistinguish'd space of woman's
will;' _i.e._ 'O boundless range of woman's lust.'
{421c} Professor Dowden says 'will to boot' is a reference to the
Christian name of Shakespeare's friend, 'William [? Mr. W. H.]'
(_Sonnets_, p. 236); but in my view the poet, in the second line of the
sonnet, only seeks emphasis by repetition in accordance with no uncommon
practice of his. The line 'And will to boot, and will in over-plus,' is
paralleled in its general form and intention in such lines of other
sonnets as
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind (cv. 5).
Beyond all date, even to eternity (cxxii. 4).
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night (cxlvii. 14).
In all these instances the second half of the line merely repeats the
first half with a slight intensification.
{422a} Cf. Barnes's Sonnet lxxiii.:
All her looks _gracious_, yet no _grace_ do bring
To me, poor wretch! Yet be the _Graces_ there.
{422b} Shakespeare refers to the blindness, the 'sightless view' of the
soul, in Sonnet xxvii., and apostrophises the soul as the 'centre of his
sinful earth' in Sonnet cxlvi.
{423a} The use of the word 'fulfil' in this and the next line should be
compared with Barnes's introduction of the word in a like context in the
passage given above:
Since what she lists her heart _fulfils_.
{423b} Mr. Tyler paraphrases these lines thus: 'You love your other
admirer named Will. Love the name alone, and then you love me, for my
name is Will,' p. 297. Professor Dowden, hardly more illuminating, says
the lines mean: 'Love only my name (something less than loving myself),
and then thou lovest me, for my name is Will, and I myself am all will,
_i.e._ all desire.'
{425} The word 'Will' is not here italicised in the original edition of
Shakespeare's sonnets, and there is no ground whatever for detecting in
it any sort of pun. The line resembles Barnes's line quoted above:
Mine heart bound martyr to thy wills.
{426} Because 'will' by what is almost certainly a typographical
accident is here printed _Will_ in the first edition of the sonnets,
Professor Dowden is inclined to accept a reference to the supposititious
friend Will, and to believe the poet to pray that the lady may have her
Will, _i.e._ the friend 'Will [? W. H.]' This interpretation seems to
introduce a needless complication.
{427a} See p. 83 _supra_.