The sonnet-cycle in the hands of Henry Constable seems to have been in
the first place rather a record of a succession of "moment's monuments"
than a single dramatic scheme, even an embryonic one. The quaint preface
found in the Harleian transcript of the _Diana_ shows this, and at the
same time tells what freedom was at that period allowed in the structure
and dove-tailing of a sonnet-cycle. It is as follows:
"The Sonnets following are divided into 3 parts, each parte
contayning 3 several arguments and every argument 7 sonets.
"The first parte is of variable affections of love: wherein the
first 7 be of the beginning and byrth of his love; the second 7, of
the prayse of his mistresse; the thyrd 7, of severall accidents
hapning in the tyme of his love.
"The second is the prayse of perticulars: wherein the first 7 be of
the generall honoure of this ile, through the prayses of the heads
thereof, the Q. of England and K. of Scots; the second 7 celebrate
the memory of perticular ladies whoe the author most honoureth: the
thyrd 7 be to the honoure of perticulars, presented upon severall
occasions.
"The thyrd parte is tragicall, conteyning only lamentations:
wherein the first 7 be complaynts onlye of misfortunes in love, the
second 7, funerall sonets of the death of perticulars; the last 7,
of the end and death of his love."
The four sonnets to that distinguished "perticular," the King of
Scotland, seem to have won for the author a great deal of fame, for
Bolton mentions one of them as a witness to his opinion that "noble
Henry Constable was a great master in English tongue, nor had any
gentleman of our nation a more pure, quick, or higher delivery of
conceit." The King himself the poet is said to have met personally when
on his propagandist tours in Scotland; for Constable was an ardent Roman
Catholic, and spent most of his life in plots for the re-establishment
of that faith in England. Among the other "perticulars" addressed, the
Queen is of course bounteously favoured, and a number of ladies of her
Court are honoured; the series therefore lacks all pretense of unity. In
fact, the title of the 1594 edition declares that the "excellent
conceitful sonnets of Henry Constable" are "augmented with divers
quartorzains of honourable and learned personages;" and Sidney has been
found to be one of the "honourable and learned personages" whose works
were laid under contribution to make the book; but since the whole first
and second decades are the same as in the earlier volume by "H.C." which
contained also the King James sonnets attributed by numerous
contemporaries to Henry Constable, and since as yet, beside the ten by
Sidney, no more of the sonnets have by antiquarian research been traced
to their sources in the mazes of Elizabethan common-place books, it
seems but fair to leave the _Diana_ of 1594 in the hands of Constable.
All three books, the '92 and '94 editions and the manuscript volume,
show a like taste for orderly arrangement not found in general in the
sonnet-cycles.
Constable was a Cambridge man and was thirty years old when the _Diana_
was first printed. He lived until 1613 and bore an excellent reputation
in his day. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, who speaks of his
"ambrosaic Muse," of Sidney, Harington, Tofte, and other literary men.
If toying with the sonnet in _Diana_ seems to indicate a light and
trifling spirit, we have to yield that with Constable as with Fletcher
the graver matters of state policy formed the chief interest in life to
the author. In Constable's case the interest was religious and the poet
was personally a man of devout feeling. Writing from the Tower, where
for a time he was detained, he says, "Whether I remain in prison or go
out, I have learned to live alone with God." At the conclusion of the
third part of the Harleian Miscellany transcript, the author says: "When
I had ended this last sonnet, and found that such vain poems as I had by
idle hours writ, did amount just to the diametrical number 63,
methought it was high time for my folly to die, and to employ the
remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts less sweet and less bitter."
It was probably in a mood like this that the poet turned from his
devotion to an earthly love and began to write his "Sonnets in honor of
God and his Saints." In this group, as in the other, he expresses that
passion for beauty characteristic of the renaissance, but here he shows
the lack of a clear conception as to where the line should be drawn
between earthly and heavenly beauty. In Constable we see the new
revelation barely emerging from the darkness, the human hand reaching
out in art toward the divine, but not knowing how to take and hold the
higher in its grasp. These sonnets are as "conceitful" as the others,
but the collection illustrates an early effort to turn the poetic energy
into a new field, to broaden the scope of subject-matter possible in
sonnet-form. The poet was evidently a close student of the
sonnet-structure. He used the Italian and the English form in about an
equal number of cases but he experiments on a large variety of
rime-arrangements besides.
As to the personality honoured under the name of Diana, there seems to
be much obscurity. From the sonnet _To his Mistress_, we learn that
though he addresses several he loves but one.
"Grace full of grace, though in these verses here
My love complains of others than of thee,
Yet thee alone I loved, and they by me,
Thou yet unknown, only mistaken were."
So he loved her, it seems, while she was "yet unknown," something quite
possible in the sonneteer's world: and her personality, though shadowed
under various names, is to the poet a distinct conception. To the honour
of being this poet's inspirer, there are two claimants; one the Lady
Rich, the Stella of Sidney, the other the ill-fated Arabella Stuart. It
is noteworthy that the only one of all the sonnets addressed personally
to particular ladies that is retained in the edition of 1594, is one to
Lady Rich. But this sonnet tells us little except that "wishèd fortune"
had once made it possible for him to see her in all her beauty of roses
and lilies, stars and waves of gold: but this might have happened if he
had once seen that beauteous lady pass along the street in the queen's
glittering train. Other sonnets to or about the Lady Rich are equally
uncommunicative; and if the ill-starred Penelope Devereux is the one
alone that Constable loved, Time has shut the secret tightly in his
heart and will not give it up.
The other guess is but little nearer to certainty. During the years that
Constable was pursuing his shadowy schemes, Arabella Stuart was an
object of admiration and of political jealousy; the house where she
lived was constantly spied upon, her very tutors were suspected, the
wildest schemes were formed upon her royal connections, and it would not
be strange if the heart of our poetical zealot turned toward this star
of his cause. We may be sure that he would not have been averse to a
clandestine meeting, for in writing to that arch-plotter, the Countess
of Shrewsbury, Arabella's doting grandmother, he says: "It is more
convenient to write unto your Ladyship, than to come unto you or to make
any other visits either by day or night till I have further liberty
granted me;" besides this, the Earl of Shrewsbury was distantly related
to Constable's family, and this fact of kinship may have opened the
way; while his sonnet to the Countess intimates that his heart had been
touched by some beauty in her Venus' camp. If not Arabella, who could
this be?
"To you then, you, the fairest of the wise,
And wisest of the fair I do appeal.
A warrior of your camp by force of eyes
Me prisoner took, and will with rigour deal,
Except you pity in your heart will place,
At whose white hands I only seek for grace."
As before, the sonnets addressed to Arabella give no definite
information. The first is in the usual strain of praise, and closes:
"My drift was this,
Some earthly shadow of thy worth to show
Whose heavenly self above world's reason is."
The second is as follows:
"Only hope of our age, that virtues dead
By your sweet breath should be revived again;
Learning discouraged long by rude disdain
By your white hands is only cherishèd.
Thus others' worth by you is honourèd.
But who shall honour yours? Poor wits, in vain
We seek to pay the debts which you pertain
Till from yourself some wealth be borrowèd.
Lend some your tongues, that every nation may
In his own hear your virtuous praises blaze;
Lend them your wit, your judgment, memory,
Lest they themselves should not know what to say;
And that thou mayst be loved as much as praised,
My heart thou mayst lend them which I gave thee."
The last of Constable's sonnets in the edition of 1592 is this
dedicatory address:
"My mistress' worth gave wings unto my muse
And my muse wings did give unto her name,
So, like twin birds, my muse bred with her fame
Together now do learn their wings to use.
And in this book, which here you may peruse,
Abroad they fly, resolved to try the same
Adventure in their flight; and thee, sweet dame,
Both she and I for our protection choose;
I by my vow, and she by farther right
Under your phoenix (wing) presume to fly;
That from all carrion beaks in safety might
By one same wing be shrouded, she and I.
O happy, if I might but flitter there
Where you and she and I should be so near."
The value of this author's praise, however, is somewhat impaired by the
extravagances in certain sonnets where, for instance, he honours a lady
whose soul, he says, was "endued in her lifetime with infinite
perfections as her divine poems do testify," when she on earth did sing
poet-wise angels in heaven prayed for her company, and when she died,
her "fair and glittering rays increased the light of heaven;" where
again he calls on the Countess of Essex to revenge the death of her
first husband, Sir Philip Sidney, upon the Spanish people by murdering
them _en masse_ with her eyes, and where he calls the Countess of
Shrewsbury "chieftain of Venus's host," and places her crowned in heaven
beside the Virgin Mary. Constable's zealous publisher was not far wrong
when he claimed that in this poet "conceit first claimed his birthright
to enjoy," and since we do not find either in the sonnets to Lady Rich
or in those to Lady Arabella any special tone of sincerity that leads us
to have confidence in our conjecture, we shall be compelled to leave
this puzzle unsolved.